The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Yahoo! Visited Results is On

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Maybe I’m late to this, but I’ve been experimenting with the My Yahoo! Search functionality and noticed they’ve turned on visited results — a history of the search results you click on. It’s actually not “on” by default — you have to enable it — but it’s there. Previously it said something like “coming soon.”

PRSA Blogging Event

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Thanks to all who joined us for the free Public Relations Society of America Webinar today. Many thanks, also, to the organizers, sponsors and to Steve Rubel, who spoke, also.

If you’re looking for a copy of my presentation, you can find it here.

Am working from home recovering (hopefully) from cold, flu or something like it. Hopefully it wasn’t too obvious for those in the audience today. Technology is certainly a wonderful thing when I can talk to more than 200 people without worry of infecting anyone with the germs plaguing me!

UPDATE: Coverage of the discussion from PRWeek and iMediaConnection.

The Zip Code Comes First

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Tony Gentile at buzzhit! discovers that the ZIP code’s gotta be first for local search to work on Yahoo! because:

We have historically not supported users entering the ZIP after the query term, because the level of false positives for Query followed by ZIP is actually very high.

Interesting stuff. One side of me says they need to start training end users to put the ZIP code first, but the other side thinks they need to start working on their search technology so it can handle queries either way. I’m dying to see statistics on how much local search queries have increased (and what form they take) since Yahoo! and Google have introduced their specialized offerings.

George Soros: Web Marketer, blogger

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I’m fascinated by George Soros’ one-man Web marketing effort to spread the word about his views on President Bush. Besides the ad at left — seen on the Wall Street Journal Online — (and the accompanying Web site), the guy’s even launched a blog. (Ok, so there’s only one entry so far. At least it’s dated yesterday.)

In another online effort, Soros kept pumping money into Bluefly until it finally (technically) turned a profit in February. Wonder what he’ll achieve in this situation.