Google appear to be working on a fresh new AdWords interface. In short it is very impressive.  For now, not everyone is able to see the new look, as it appears that Google are rolling it out in stages. In fact out of all the clients whose accounts we manage, only one had access to the new interface.

Some highlights:

1) It appears to be more of a java applet than an actual web page.

2) If you are already familiar with the account snapshot graph, which displays data for the entire account, you’ll really like the new functionality! You can now see graphs that operate down to an ad group level as you work throughout the account. Also, you can compare two sets of metrics at the same time on the same graph, which is extremely useful.

3) Google are using some new terms in the status column such as “eligible” and “low search volume”.

4) There’s a very cool new feature where you can view search query reporting data right from the keyword view. You basically select keywords and choose “show query report”. Hopefully this spells the end of ” other unique queries”.

5) The order of the columns has been slightly altered. Conversions have been swapped with cost per conversion, however this is not a problem, as you now have more control over the display of the columns. Just click edit columns, and you can configure them to your liking. Very nice.

6) CPM campaigns do not seem to display average CPM. They basically ignore that value. Not sure what this means, or for that matter if is this a bug, or they are not going to display this value? They do show average CPC which is interesting since you are looking at a CPM campaign.

This is definitely a very cool improvement.

All of us are most likely familiar with product reviews, as debatable as it is whether or not they are useful. However, most of us agree that we dislike reviews that rip our product to shreds, and like the ones which praise them.

I would not, however, recommend the approach apparently taken by one software company. Based on an article by David Pogue in the technology section of the New York Times, a disgruntled customer of Carbonite has uncovered a conspiracy of product review fraud. It would appear that Carbonite employees have posted a number of glowing reviews about their product on Amazon. And do you think that they mentioned the fact that they are employees of Carbonite?

What surprised me most is that the “reviewers” actually used their own names. Why would they do that?

Personally, I like the negative reviews. In my opinion, they are more informative.

You know you want to try it:

IE8 Release Candidate 1

Note that this is for the Windows XP version, but there are links for the Vista and Windows Server versions further down the page.

I won’t tell you to be careful with what will certainly be an unstable version. You’re far too smart to need telling.

Answer: The audience want to concentrate on the music, and sometimes on the instruments. But rarely on the musicians themselves.

So why have the orchestra visible at all? Why not have them hidden out of sight behind curtains, in a different room, or even in a different location altogether?

Because watching a group of skilled individuals work in harmony to produce great music is extremely enjoyable.

Some, however, will stand out.

The conductor usually wears different coloured clothes, and is always visible to the audience as well as the orchestra.

Soloists are also often dressed differently, and can usually be identified long before their solo performance by their clothing.

So what do you want to be? Do you want to be the vital but faceless conductor, or the soloist who not only stands out from the crowd, but has their few minutes of glory when they are the sole focus of the entire audience, orchestra and conductor.

The soloist isn’t picked randomly. They have unique skills and individual talents that make them stand out from the crowd, and consequently have more to offer the audience.

Yet having the right skills (features) and talents (benefits) means nothing if no-one knows. Can you see where this is going? Let me know if not!

So, let’s see a show of hands – who’s been browsing around Google Knol recently? No? Me neither. It’s been six months since they launched, and I can’t say they’ve made a tremendous impact on my life. But now may be the time to reconsider.

To refresh your memories, a Knol is “a unit of knowledge”, and the idea was that Google Knol would be a newer, better and less anonymous Wikipedia. The authors of each article are named, and sometimes include a photo and a biography on their Knol pages.

Knol has been criticised for being “awash in poor content” and “not the kind of site designed for browsing”. While I agree, I think it’s too early to write it off completely.

Matt Cutts suggests that Knol is a great place “when you want to write a quick article or put some information on the web”, and this is where I think everyone should pay attention. Anyone who’s ever tried to put information up on Wikipedia knows how hard it is – your material will be edited to death and suffer attacks from various competitors who don’t want to see any links to your site. Wikipedia is like the European Union of websites, full of strict rules and petty bureaucrats and legislators.

Knol, on the other hand, is still the Wild West, ready and waiting for any brave pioneers. So go ahead and post some articles. Will it pay off? Will you see any traffic? Probably not for a long while. But if you get in now, you could be in a good position to reap the benefits in the future.

Microsoft has announced that due to decreased earnings, it will cut up to 5,000 jobs, 5.5% of its total workforce, over the next 18 months. This round of job cuts will be the largest and most sweeping in Microsoft’s history.

The software giant’s net profit fell by 11 percent in the second quarter of its fiscal year when compared with the same quarter from a year ago.

Regarding the job cuts, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated, “While we are not immune to the effects of the economy, I am confident in the strength of our product portfolio and soundness of our approach. We will continue to manage expenses and invest in long-term opportunities to deliver value to customers and shareholders, and we will emerge an even stronger industry leader than we are today.”

Most of the job cuts are expected to come in Microsoft’s research & development, marketing, sales, finance, legal, human resources and IT departments.

Google announced this week that they will be terminating their fledgling print ad initiative and will stop accepting print ads at the end of February.

Spencer Spinnell, Director of Google Print Ads, explained the move in a post on Google’s official blog, “While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we — or our partners — wanted.  As a result, we will stop offering Print Ads on February 28.“

For advertisers who have already scheduled print ad campaigns, Google will continue placing those ads until March 31.

Begun in 2006 with only 50 participating newspapers, Google’s Print Ads program has grown to include a network of over 800 newspapers. In spite of this growth, the Print Ads initiative never really caught on with Internet users.

In his blog post, Spinnnell went on to say, “Some advertisers have seen good results and our partners have dedicated time and resources to help get it off the ground. But as we grow, it is important that we focus on products that can benefit the most people and solve the most important problems. By moving resources away from projects that aren’t having the impact we want, we can refocus our efforts on those that will delight millions of users.“

Although Spinnell seems to selflessly have users’ best interests in mind, it is more than safe to say that the real reason Google is doing away Print Ads is because it has never gave them much in the way of ROI.

“Turbulent times” is an understatement.

A quick browse of the BBC’s business pages reveal the following:

Apple posts best quarterly profit

eBay sees profit and revenue drop

IBM bucks gloom with rosy outlook

Sony sees first loss in 14 years

Predictions anyone?

It appears that Google are moving in the direction of some of the social networking web sites, with two new features that it has recently introduced: SearchWiki and Preferred sites.

SearchWiki allows the user to raise a particular listing’s rank just by clicking on an arrow when they are signed into their Google account. According to the official Google blog, these changes only affect local searches. These changes will not affect other results.

The Preferred sites feature was not visible within my account. I assume it’s either too new of a feature or Google are only testing it on a select number of accounts. The new feature appears to be a method of letting Google know which web sites you “prefer” to receive information from. These results will in theory show up more often.

If these two new features become popular, is it possible that Google might start using some of this data when it comes to indexing or displaying results? If a lot of people perform the same search each day, and they all raise the position of the 11th listing, why would Google not factor that in?

Ouch.

“Allegedly Michael Bayard, a Belkin Business Development representative was hiring people off Mechanical Turk to post excellent, 5 out of 5 reviews for Belkin products listed on Amazon and other sites. The result is higher user review ratings and therefore, more sales. And all at the cost of just $0.65 cents a review.”

Asking customers for a review is one thing. But this is a classic case of going far enough to turn good marketing into very, very bad marketing.

Who says no publicity is bad publicity? Don’t do it!

Belkin Apologises For Fake Customer Product Reviews