First reports prior to Thanksgiving had online spending up 14% over last year:

U.S. Online Holiday Shopping Already Up 14 Percent

Now reports have Black Friday sales up more than 1/4 over last year:

Black Friday online sales jump 26 percent

This is good.

The market research firm Nielsen asked 6-12 year old kids what they wanted for Christmas.

Their number 1, 2 and 3 choices?

An iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone.

You think maybe Apple has this marketing thing down?

Read the article here: U.S. Kids Looking Forward to “iHoliday” 2011

Are printed Yellow Pages books dead?

Not quite.

What we are seeing is similar to what we've seen with other media when new media came along. Their role becomes more limited.

Where it once was essential for ANY business to be in the Yellow Pages - and for any local consumer business to advertise - that is no longer the case.

Nevertheless, there are types of business where it remains not only highly important, but very profitable.

Here's a great article for guidance on when to consider Yellow Pages vital to your marketing. A couple sample factoids from Confessions Of A Yellow Pages User:

75% of YP advertisers are service businesses or installed product (think floor covering) businesses. The more service-heavy, the more valuable the directory.

Businesses that have large, infrequent sales (roofer, divorce attorney, windshield repair) are very likely to receive a big return.

Read it.

I'm sometimes asked if you can do something about a domain that uses your name, your company or product name or something similar. The answer is usually no, but there are exceptions.

Here's the basic rules - with a classic violation (source: Google Goes After YouTube Domain Typo Squatter):

the three primary criterion are “identical or confusingly similar to a trademark” (check), “owner has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name” (check), and “domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith”

This by the way, is not handled in court, but through the procedures of ICANN, the international organization that controls domain name registrations.

Recent flooding in Thailand have caused a global shortage and price increases in hard drives. Shortages may last more than six months.

Why? Most of the world's makers of hard drives do a significant portion of their manufacturing in Thailand. I don't know why that is but it's a fact.

There were shortages of some Apple products following the Japan earthquake / tsunami. One critical part is only manufactured at one facility in Japan.

Increasingly it's not just a small world. but a connected world.

There's no disputing that reviews have become tremendously important. They build credibility, give you exposure and help improve search engine rankings - all in one go.

But how do you get reviews?

You have to have a system and that system has to be based on one key fact: Reviews is a numbers game.

It has been reported that 90% of all reviews are done by only 6% of customers.

How are you going to find those 6%? There's nothing that makes them noticeably different. They aren't more enthusiastic.

No, if you want to get 10 reviews, that just means you need to ask 125 people. So you have to have a system that makes it easy for you to ask lots of people to do reviews for you. THEN you can win the reviews game.

The amount of money spent purchasing online has been increasing at a double-digit rate, year after year, even during the recession.

That is still a small percentage of all retail purchasing.

But the other part of the equation - online to offline - also has continued to increase. These are the instances where someone researches online before going in-store to make a purchase.

Now Forrester Research- certainly one of the most reputable research firms out there - is estimating that by 2014, over half of all purchases will be influenced by online research.

That's just two years from now.

Still think your website and search rankings aren't important?

I've written previously about this.

Here's a great article on Mashable, making the same points, backed up with statistics:

If you need proof that data is king at Google, look no further than In the Plex [the new book about Google]. The word “data” appears in Levy’s book approximately 319 times. “Design,” on the other hand, appears fewer than 60 times.

The word “design” and its variations appears in the Steve Jobs biography 432 times. The word “data” appears just 26 times in the book.

I love it.

Google has just rolled out their biggest algorithm change in years.

Maybe their biggest change ever.

The change per Google affects 35% of all searches. While they make hundreds of changes every year, most of them affect a tiny percentage of searches. The Panda update early this year was huge, and it affected something like 12% of searches.

The change is a major upgrade in how Google handles freshness as a ranking factor.

There is a big difference between one search and another, in how important newness of information is.

Reports on breaking news, freshness is key. General content, it could be a minor issue - information years old could be just as good as something from yesterday.

This algorithm update recognizes these differences to a much greater degree than ever previously.

One way Google will recognize freshness is simply how recently a site has been updated in its index. Of course, Google will re-index a page when it crawls it and finds it has changed. But Google crawls some sites more often than others.

A major factor in how often Google crawls a site is how much traffic it gets. Heavily trafficked sites that change regularly are going to be crawled more often. The average site may get fully crawled every three weeks. Some sites get updated in Google's index minutes after a change.

So this is the first time that Google has acknowledged that traffic volume can affect rankings.

We'll have to see how much difference this makes in rankings. But anyone with a website needs to pay attention to this. It is huge. Big. Important.

Humongous.

Matt Cutts, Google's web spam spokesperson, has recorded a new, 8 minute video:

Google's Definitive Cloaking Video

Cloaking is ANYTHING done to show Google a different view of a website, than it shows a visitor.

There are many ways of doing this. They are all "black hat" violations of Google's guidelines. This is high-risk behavior that will get a site penalized or even banned.

Don't do them. If someone promises you great rankings fast, and it involves cloaking, Just Say No.

Once upon a time, Internet Explorer so dominated the world of browsers as to sprout lawsuits and government intervention, world-wide.

No more.

IE (all versions) is now used in less than 50% of all website traffic in the world:

Internet Explorer's Share of Web Traffic

Other fascinating information in this article: Mobile (smartphone) and tablet (iPad) traffic is now at 6%. Rising, but still a small fraction of traffic to most websites and in most industries.

And Safari (the browser on IPhones and iPads) is responsible for almost 2/3 of that.

One of the big trends of recent years is personalization of search.

Google especially has been working intensively on this.

What you see in a search result may be different than someone else doing the same search from right next door.

There has been a lot of talk about that meaning "the end of search as we know it."

That kind of thing comes up all the time, every time Google makes an important change, but it is always greatly exaggerated.

A new interview with a Google staff member makes this very clear in regards to personalization:

"In fact only small changes are made to a results page based on personalization."

There is also new information in this interview about exactly what Google does and doesn't do, and also making a clear distinction between personalization and what Google calls "context."

How Google Does Personalization

Read it!

Just how big is Google in the Internet world?

Possibly the best measure is digital ad revenues.

Google controls 46% - almost HALF of all online spending for ads.

Yahoo is number two, at less than a quarter of that.

(Credit: BusinessInsider.com)