Interesting research out of Forrester Research by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff entitled “Social Technographics” in which they assert some interesting observations.

Not the least of these is that the customer base should define the approach, and not vice versus as tends to be the case and to which I’m inclined to agree. Too often, the shiny stuff is the stuff we put forward because it is, well shiny. And it may well be enduring in the end, but we let the tool define the strategy versus the customer.

As reported last week in the ComputerWorldUK article, Major corporations post sensitive data on Google calendar it appears that you can tell two friends and they can tell two friends, and so on and so on.

Or, you can just make the entry public in your Google Calendar and the whole world can know.

Again I wonder how much information we’re giving Google, exactly.

Or how much information we’re giving our competitor’s via Google.

And Google’s defense is “well, just don’t make it public”. Except the default setting makes it public, the settings being Default, Public and Private.

If that’s true for you, new respected client, then you’ll want to make sure to appear in the default Google search for Canadian users: Google Canada.

You know of the benefits of being recognized as a Canadian site by Google. And you know that you can achieve that by getting a .CA domain name and/or hosting your site on a Canadian IP.

Well, that was easy, wasn’t it? You’re now targeting the #12 Internet use country.

But it gets better. With the right steps you can gain access to a market seldom targeted by e-commerce and SEO: French speaking Canadians. People who, like you and I, feel most comfortable spending their money on sites they can understand with ease.

All hail Allan Dick.

And that, by the way, is said with a whole lot of respect.

Allan is the GM for Vintage Tub & Bath and believe me, the man knows tubs and baths, but more importantly, he knows a plug when he sees one.

He is both a speaker and a moderator for the various and sundry SES conferences and can frequently be seen and heard at other industry functions, panels, seminars, tradeshows, etc.

The Big Buzz is that eBay might or probably will acquire StumbleUpon.

Part of the big buzz is of course that Google lost out and is starting their own version instead.

Sure.

But isn’t it amazing that MySpace is going social content by adding headlines from around the web which can then be voted up or down by its users?

As the Times Online puts it:

This approach blends elements of Google News and sites such as Digg and Netscape, which rely on readers to submit stories and determine their prominence. It also marks the site’s ambitions to become a web portal like Yahoo!, providing its users with a front door to the Internet.

The hallmark of Web 2.0 is supposed to be user generated content, wherein users contribute their own text, pictures and video content.

But according to Bill Tancer of Hitwise and the Red Herring article, Web 2.0: More Voyeurs than Creators.

According to Tancer, only .16% of visits to Google’s YouTube are by users with the goal of uploading material. .16%. One has to wonder, as well, how much of that is truly original material.

Tancer further details that the numbers for Flickr are similar, with .2% of visitors destined to the site are there with the intention of uploading photos.

I’m already tired. Here we go again: Google has announced that it will, this Summer, release an presentation tool a la simplified PowerPoint.

Now the obligatory “we’re not aiming this at Microsoft” statements and what not; and this is just the announcement that somewhere this Summer they will release it.

Hands up everybody who’s waiting for an online presentation tool. I see one in the back, yes… ah, and there’s another one. Oh wait, that’s my dog.

Last year, Matt Cutts reported Google supports the NOODP tag.

It’s a simple but convenient little tag the prevents Google from importing your directory listing as the decription used in organic results.

Now comes word that Yahoo! has introduced the NOYDIR tag. Functioning much like the NOODP tag, it excludes titles and abstracts from the Yahoo! Directory.

The goal is to allow webmasters the flexibility to have the content titled and described as they want it, not as an editor prescribes it.

Well that’s interesting… Lifehacker reports that the manager of Google’s enterprise products, Rajen Sheth, has done an 18 minute video showing how a company can increase productivity by using Google Apps.

The video appears on the Official Google Channel and was added this Monday.

It’s on YouTube

Why does Google prefer to use YouTube over Google Video?

• YouTube draws 4 times as much visits as Google Video (HitWise)
• YouTube visitors stay twice as long as visitors at Google Video (HitWise)
• YouTube reaches 20.5% of the US Internet population against Google Video’s 6.7% (comScore)

Google Adwords is in the process of introducing a new bidding option. The bidding option will be called “Preferred Cost Bidding” and will act in pretty much the same way that “Position Preference” does except with bids.

Basically, instead of setting only a final “Maximum” bid you can set a “Preferred” bid and let Google auto-optimize for you. The system will try various positions and try to deliver an average CPC (or CPM) as your preferred bid. Both of these bid options (Max & Preferred Bids) should help SEM managers to fine-tune their accounts even more.