A study conducted by Google and KellerFay Group to understand the impact internet has on the word of mouth effect. Top finding: Google is the #1 spark of word of mouth conversations and directly informs 146 million brand conversations a day.

Download the study as PDF.

Unbelievable, wouldn’t you say? Kudos to Gary.

“Google Ventures seeks to discover and grow great companies – we believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. We’re studying a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care. We invest anywhere from seed to mezzanine stage and embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance.”

As my iPhone is a 2G (I know) I spent an hour or so yesterday Googling away to find a solution. I finally found it through Rovivor.com, in an old blog post from 04/2008, which makes it even more pathetic to still be on a 2G!

Here’s the ‘tutorial’, I’ve modified it a bit for 2.0* as the previous one was for 1.X, using installer etc. MobileFinder is now available through Cydia.

Here is a 8 step easy to follow solution for your iPhone Safari to save your passwords (remember your login info) as it should be:

1. First, go to Cydia on your iPhone, search for “MobileFinder” and install it.

2. When these are OK, start Mobile Finder, click on the “~” button from upper left.

3. You will see “Library” folder there, click twice and open it.

4. There you will see “Cookies” folder, click once, and when it is selected, click “Modify” button from the center of the bottom menu.

5. You will see a screen LIKE THIS (not exactly this one, this is just another screen shot from Mobile Finder):

Here you should click on all “Read, Write, Exec” buttons until all 9 be blue.

6. Click “Done” and return back the previous screen. Now click on Cookies again to see inside of the folder.

7. In Cookies folder, modify all the files (normally there should be only one named “Cookies.plist”) like step 6, however only making all “Read, Write” blue. It means that there will be 6 blues, not “Exec” buttons.

8. Click “Done” and after restarting Safari, it is now remembering your passwords.

From Rovivor.com. I realize that 99.9% of the population might have solved this already, or that it’s probably working by default on 3G, but whatever – sharing the love anyway!

Originally aired in February, 2001 – via the Google Operating System blog.

I digged into the Analytics data today for the first time in months. The past couple of weeks, traffic to Oscar and Friends has skyrocketed and convenient enough – I got the answer to why really easy. It seems as if my post on Avril Lavigne passing 100 millions views on YouTube, and more precisely the picture in it, has caught the attention of Google Image Search. There are now people from all over the world watching the picture, Googling pictures of Avril in every possible combination; avril lavigne, avril, girlfriend avril lavigne, girlfriend, avril lavinge, avril lavigne girlfriend, avril lavgine, avril lavigne girl friend, and so on.

Funnily enough, more than 200 visitors found the post (or the picture) by Googling only “girlfriend” on Image Search, that’s how important Google think Avril is. Or is it perhaps just the fact that Google consider her to be girlfriend material? I guess we’ll never know. But sorry Google, denied.

Currently in beta, the TV Website offers a dynamic, lean-back, 10-foot television viewing experience through a streamlined interface that enables you to discover, watch and share YouTube videos on any TV screen with just a few quick clicks of your remote control.

“Hi, I’m a moron. I’ll admit it. I bought the new G1 Google phone from a store just off Times Square (Cellular Stop, 566 Seventh Ave between 40th and 41st Sts, 212-730-4470) and paid nearly twice the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Fine. Selling a product above market value may be unethical but it’s not illegal. Where I really got bent over was the promise of a phony rebate and $209.94 in bogus charges, e.g., the clerks sold me features the phone already comes with (Internet access, texting capabilities, a protective case, etc.).”

This is a really funny read, ripped off as few!

There are already a couple of classics, these would include the couple who got married on street view, or just a bunch of weird people doing weird things. Gotta love street view!

One of the most frequently used and most powerful Content Management Systems out there today is WordPress, this might be bias as I’m a true believer both of the idea of WordPress and also a big fan of its community base. As I’m tracking all of my WordPress sites with Google Analytics just for fun, I thought it was about time that I looked into the idea of using conversion goals and funnels for the biggest one of them.

The actual Analytics integration on your WordPress site is made super simple thanks to Joost de Valk who is the creator of the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. What you need to do is install this little nifty plugin and then activate it for your WordPress site as you would with any other plugin. This enables the Analytics snippet on all relevant pages, cutting out tedious work in getting the snippet in all relevant files. Thanks!

After you’ve installed the plugin, you need to go to your Analytics account to set up the actual goal. This is done by going into your sites specific profile (edit profile) and then setting up a goal for G1 (Goal 1 logically). Step by step, you need to:

• Activate the goal
• Select the Match Type. This needs to be set to “Head Match” as WP-websites has dynamically generated content.
• Set the Goal URL to “/wp-login.php?checkemail=registered”, this is the URL that users reach once they’ve submitted their Username and E-mail on the Register page.
• Set the Goal name
• Assign a Goal value. “Google Analytics uses an assigned goal value to calculate ROI, Average Score, and other metrics. If, for example, your sales team can close 10% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your “Contact Me” goal. In contrast, if only 1% of mailing list signups result in a sale, you might only assign $5 to your “email sign-up” goal.” A good idea is to start with setting your Goal value to 1.0.

After this is done, you have tracking of the actual signup, but a good idea is to set up a funnel also. “A funnel is a series of pages leading up to to the Goal URL. For example, the funnel may include steps in your checkout process that lead to the thank you page (goal).” It’s made quite easy with WordPress as users needs to go through the register URL (clicking ‘Register’). This is how you set up a funnel for your goal:

• Define the first step as /wp-login.php?action=register and tick the box that this is a required step.
• Make sure it’s assigned to the same goal that you’ve just set up.

That’s it, enjoy!