This is worth a look.  Take a look at this new computer in Israel.

The Facebook boom continues.

In December, 2009, Facebook had 112 million visitors.  That’s more than double what it had the year before.  73% of all adults that use social networking sites have a Facebook account.

Twitter finished the year with 20 million users–a 9 times increase from the year before.  Twitter’s growth occurred mostly from February to April when it grew from 4 million users to 17 million.  37% of adults 18-29 use Twitter as opposed to just 9% of those 50-64.  Only 4% of those 65+ use Facebook.  Among all adults, 19% use Twitter.

Some more interesting statistics from the Pew Study show that 80% of all US internet users visited a social networking site in 2009.  Social networking now occupies 11% of the total time spent on the internet.

Searching on a mobile phone means Google, although it doesn’t have the same lead that it has on computer searches.  In total, 13.5% of all mobile web page views are spent using search engines.

• Google — 9.0%
• Yahoo — 4.3%
• Bing — 0.03%

(Source — Opera Software)

No, we haven’t reached the point where we are buying fortune cookies to help solve the economic problems of the country.

But, the United States census bureau has a $340 million budget to promote the census this year.  Included in the advertising buy is $3000 earmarked by the census to purchase…fortune cookie messages.  The fortune cookies, with the special message from the census bureau, will be distributed in Washington state, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.

I hear the next thing the government is planning on trying to rev up the economy is calling a psychic 900 number.

In October, the FTC announced its final revisions on the rules that will affect bloggers that give endorsements

She was not paid for this post.

to products.

The FTC has indicated that bloggers that make an endorsement of a product must convey if there is compensation involved for that endorsement.

I think it’s a good rule, but it’s one of those rules that is going to be very difficult to enforce and probably not worth the effort to do so.

In many cases, however, bloggers write about products with the aim of the advertiser being primarily to obtain a link for SEO purposes.  Such articles don’t really have to be endorsements of the product.  It isn’t clear to be how these non-endorsement blog posts occur.

That being said, this blog, and all of the blogs published under the Olympic Internet banner, categorize all paid advertisement posts as “Promotional Considerations.”

You can tell we like sports.

by Bob Bentz

I admit it.

Come on.  Admit it.  We all do it.

So, how often do you do it?

3% admit to doing it regularly and 74% admit to doing it “once or twice.”  Yeah, right.

I admit.  I do it…a lot.

According to a study by Microsoft, 42% of Americans google themselves.  Or, should I say “bing themselves?”

That’s slightly less than a 2008 Pew study which showed that 47% of Americans google themselves.  That was more than double the 22% that googled themselves in 2003.  I guess we are all getting more vain.

But, we don’t google ourselves as much as some foreigners.  While the Pew study showed 42% of Americans do a self ego search, 56% of the French do and 59% of Germans do.  Only 36% of Brits google themselves.

If you are going on a date this weekend with a new potential beau, chances are that she’s already googled you.  Googling a new date, known as “doogling,” is common.  In fact, 43% of Americans admit to googling an upcoming new date.

Googling yourself is going to happen so you may as well accept it.  There have been plays written about it.  There have been poems written about it.  You can even buy a t-shirt that admits it to the world.

I’ve already admitted that I do it a lot.  It makes sense that I do it a lot.  Of the 10% of Americans that market themselves online, a whopping 68% admit to a self guided ego search.

Googling Self Study of My Name

For the past seven days, I’ve googled myself exactly at midnight.  (Hey that’s when the Olympic figure skating or curling seems to come on.)

In the seven days that I’ve googled myself, it was amazing how many different web sites turned up in the search engine results.  In fact, five different sites occupied the number one spot in the google myself search.

*  Fantasy Baseball Dugout interview

*  SMS Text News personal profile

*  All Affiliate Programs touting my mobile marketing site

*  Advanced Telecom Services selling my book

*  World Telemedia promoting my speaking

The first day, when the interview concerning the baseball blog appeared, that story from a German web site was just five days old.  Interestingly, it never appeared again over the rest of the week.  The second and third web sites above held that primary position for two days each.

Of the sites in the top ten, one that appeared every day was not about me.  I don’t have a very common name, but this guy is a professor at East Carolina University so I’m sure he’s a lot smarter than I am.

Five of the sites that appeared were in the top ten all seven days.  This included my corporate web site and my Linked In and Twitter accounts.  Two sites that appeared each day were article marketing sites, Ezine Articles and Adotas, where I have had some of my articles published.

Three days out of the seven, my Google profile appeared at the bottom of the page, but surprisingly not every day.

You would expect that my profile on SEO Moz would be popular.  It appeared in five of the seven days.

I guess those guys know a thing or two about getting listed on the first page of Google.

We all have a lot of ways to be contacted today.  We have our cell phones which are with us 24/7.  We have our office phones which we often prefer to be called on since it doesn’t use up our anytime minutes and is still more convenient to speak on when we are in the office.  And, if you are older than 30, you probably are not living in a cell phone only household and have a landline phone also.

Whenever Google introduces a new product, it’s something that I want to know about.   Google Voice is one such product.  My only complaint is that I applied several weeks ago and still have not been contacted since it’s still in beta stage. 

Google Voice is free so there’s no harm in signing up.  If you’re like me, you know that “if it’s free, it’s me.”

No Follow links may not be of value in terms of search engine optimization at Google, but that’s only half the battle as Matt Cutts explains.

Google’s Matt Cutts talks about the importance, or lack of importance, in putting tags on your blog posts. Is it really worth the time?

I might have just saved you some time on your blogging.

Now, excuse me, I have to add some tags to this post.

See the demos on your followers with this tool.

The Geico commercial shows the money with the eyes and plays the song: “I always feel like somebody’s watching you.”

Find out who is following you on Twitter.

This tool will take your followers on Twitter and give you demographic statistics on the followers.  It’s really cool to see the breakdown of males versus females and states and countries where your followers live.

73% of my followers @bobbentz were male.

Story of my life.

The New York Times is making a bold move to paid content for its online edition beginning next year.  Many media watchers have questioned whether this would mean to the most famous traditional newspaper in the United States.

NYTimes.com has now revealed its details of the payment plan.  The entire web site will be free to subscribers of the newspaper.  Its new approach, however, will enable visitors to use a metered approach to the Times.  Meaning, that visitors will be entitled to receive some news content for free, but once a certain level is reached, the user will have to pay.

The idea seems to be a move back from its original position and will allow it to sell a unique visitor cume to its newspaper internet advertisers.

If you are still employed in the newspaper industry, the future simply doesn’t look bright for you.

According to Outsell, US newspaper print circulation will decline by 3.5% per year over the next three years.  By 2012, only 43 million Sunday newspapers will be sold compared with more than 62 million in the early 1990’s.

For breaking news, 57% of Americans now turn to the internet.  Google News reports that, although it sends searchers to newspaper web sites, 44% get their breaking news solely from non-newspaper sites.

If you are looking for links, and who in the business of promoting a web site isn’t, then a good place to look is site of the day web sites.  There are numerous such sites on the web, but there’s only one real site of the day.

That’s Mike Corso’s Cool Site of the Day.  It’s a page rank 6 site.  It’s not easy to get listed on Cool Site, but it’s a link that you should be trying to obtain.  Let’s put it this way: it is, however, easier than getting into DMOZ.

We were fortunate enough to get our short code marketing site listed on the site and it is one of the best links that we’ve ever received for the site.

Cool Site of the Day will bring you some serious link juice.

Pretty girl, boring post.

Google continues to dominate the landscape of search in the USA.

According to ComScore’s December ‘09 study, search engine market share in the USA is as follows:

1. Google - 65.7%
2. Yahoo - 17.3%
3. MSN - 10.3%
4. Ask - 3.7%
5. AOL - 2.6%

The interesting part of the search engine market share is that the combined share of Yahoo and Bing (MSN) is 27.6%, making it a viable force against the giant of Google.  The pending Yahoo and MSN merger is still pending approval.

Thanks to Radio Nigeria for the posting of my radio text messaging video on its site.  There’s a wealth of radio information on the site for anybody in the radio business.

Advertising may lead the way to economic recovery in 2010.

If you think the overall economy had a bad year in 2009, advertising and media took a major hit in 2009.

But, perhaps a recovery is in progress in 2010 for the advertising world as finally there are some encouraging words regarding the economy.

Barclays Capital is bullish on media again.  It believes US advertising will increase by 3.5% to $167 billion in 2010.  Some benefits in 2010 are the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, the soccer World Cup, and political advertising.

The report shows the following media showing advertising gains in 2010:

• Network TV — + 7.8%
• Cable TV — +6.0%
• Local TV — +5.0%
• Internet — +8.9%
• Radio — +2.2%

Ever since I became interested in search engine optimization, one of the basic things that I’ve learned is that links from .gov and .edu links are inherently more valuable than traditional links.  That seems to make sense as its certainly more difficult to obtain these links than it is to obtain a link from a .com site.

I’ve been taught the same thing when it comes to .org sites.  Accordingly, .org sites are perceived as being more worthwhile than traditional .com sites, although that never made as much sense to me since anybody can obtain a .org site.

In one of Matt Cutts’ recent videos, however, is he saying that .gov and .edu sites are not as valuable as we might have thought?  I don’t think he is saying that actually.  I think what he is saying is that usually .edu site links are more valuable, but not always.  It all depends on the link page itself. 

One of my friends actually has a link on an Ohio State web page.  When I search for that keyword in his list of backlinks, however, it is surprisingly not anywhere in the first few pages based on importance by Google.  I would have thought it would be one of the top 10.

So, watch the video for yourself and leave us a comment as to what you think.  Is the glimmer off of .edu and .gov links?

How much would it be worth if you could increase the productivity of all of your employees by 15% with an

Advanced Telecom Services found that giving employees two monitors has increased its productivity.

investment of a few hundred dollars per employee?

That’s just what Advanced Telecom Services did by providing all of its employees with two computer monitors.  CEO Bret Dunlap said it would increase productivity by 30%.  I’m not sure that I buy that it’s 30%, but I’ll go with 15%.

My friend Jill works at a Philadelphia mortgage company and she has three monitors on her desk.  When I first saw it, I must admit that I thought it looked cool, but I didn’t really see the value of it at the time.  She said it had greatly improved productivity where she works, except for the occasional Facebook time waster that some employees were doing.

If you spend time using tools like Word or Excel and email, then toggle back and forth to the internet, you know it gets confusing with so many applications opened on one monitor.  Consider that when you need information from the internet for a report.  You need to open the browser and bring up the tab, then minimize the tab to put the information in your article.  Now, you need more information.  Same thing all over again. 

By having two monitors, you don’t need to mess with the tabs at all.  Just drag the information from one monitor to the other. 

Besides, the internet can really suck you in.  There’s so much information on it that you can spend literally hours on it, doing productive work, but forgetting why you went there in the first place.  Having two monitors eliminates that.

If you are looking to make an investment in the productivity of your company, then having multiple monitors is one you’ll want to make.  And, it looks cool and your employees will love you for it.

Just don’t let the young employees have Facebook on one screen all day.

Real-time search is dramatically changing search results at Google.  If the soon-to-be implemented Caffeine program is Google on speed, then the rankings are going to be changing constantly on premium keyword terms.

Get Clickz’ publisher Bob Bentz was quoted in a January 12, 2010 article in Digital Media Buzz.

The Chief Marketer survey also asked why brands and companies are using social networks.  The responses were varied, but show the folowing results.

• Drive traffic to web site - 69%
• Speak to fans - 59%
• Generate leads - 46%
• Generate sales - 40%
• Generate opt-ins - 28%
• Keep up with competition - 20%
• Handle customer problems - 16%

(Source - Chief Marketer)