Filed under: 2008 Elections, Google, Google Applications, Google Apps, Google Reader, Political Blogs, Political Strategy, presidential election

Google’s come up with a great idea.  They’ve apparently reached out to several leading political journalists and bloggers to include their shared Google reader feeds on political stories for “Power Readers in Politics”, a service that people can catch what some of their favorite political prognosticators are following.

The service includes the Readers from the McCain and the Obama campaigns.  But what I like about it best is that they don’t go after the same standard DC media crowd (that’s if they even know what Google Reader is).  Instead, they’ve turned to guys like Patrick Ruffini, one of the founders of The Next Right.

After a while, I’ve gotten sick of the same old go to folks that are nothing more than fallback personalities because assignment editors or producers haven’t bothered to take the time to learn about anyone new.  This changes that.

Check it out.

No Comments » Posted on August 19th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn

Filed under: Abraham Harrison LLC, Ad Budgets, Ad Buys, Ad Sales, Google, Google AdSense, Google AdWords, Google Applications, Google Apps, Google Apps Premier, Google Gears, Google Juice, Google PageRank, Measurements, Open Kimono

So Google launched Ad Planner yesterday at an Advertising Research Foundation event in New York City. Ad Planner is an online analytical tool that gives advertisers deep information on which sites their targeted audience is visiting. Designed to make media buying more efficient, it puts Google in direct competition with comScore and Nielsen Online. A key difference here is that Ad Planner is free.

Ad Planner allows users to enter demographics of target audiences along with potential sites on which to advertise into its system.  The system then, presumably through data gleaned from web servers, will then spit out sites that an advertiser should consider for a media plan.  It would seem that it is an easy to use, inexpensive system to use.

Subscription fees from survey based services such as comScore and Nielsen can be exorbitant.  This further democratizes the web.

But free can come with a cost and that’s what others are worried about.

Google, in this capacity, may not be acting as an independently-owned third party delivering unbiased information.  There’s always a chance that the system may be tweaked to produce results that favor Google-owned property.  And, and the launch yesterday, Google product manager told a questioner that Google will get its data from a “fusion” of different data sources.  A follow up question as to whether or not Google will accept external audits was left unanswered.

That’s not a great sign.  But Google is now powerful enough that they can get away with not answering that while it brings in users.  Users like, quite frankly, me.

Thus is the nature of the web.

No Comments » Posted on June 26th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn

Filed under: Advertising, Advertising Networks, DoubleClick, Google, Google AdSense, Google AdWords, Google Applications, Google Search, Google-DoubleClick, Googleverse

Google is one step closer to turning on a virtual network for “CCTVs” the likes of which London has never seen. Instead of cameras, however, Google will merge with DoubleClick to create the most pervasive panopticon on our personal browsing, clicking, and buying habits. Via News.com

European antitrust regulators on Tuesday approved Google’s $3.1 billion merger with DoubleClick, paving the way for a blockbuster deal in Internet search and publisher-based advertising tools.

Approval by the European Commission, which came without conditions, had largely been expected to occur this week. The Commission’s announcement comes three weeks before its April 2 deadline, in which it had to determine whether to nix the deal.

Privacy groups and many of Google’s rivals, such as Microsoft, were hoping the Commission, as well as U.S. antitrust regulators, would kill the deal. But the Commission’s passage clears the last large regulatory hurdle Google faced in getting the deal done.

No Comments » Posted on March 11th, 2008 by Chris Abraham

Filed under: Abraham Harrison, Abraham Harrison LLC, Abraham Harrison Staff, Google Applications, Google Apps, Google Apps Premier, Mark Harrison

Last week, Mark was contacted by a reporter from IDG who wanted to know about how Abraham Harrison LLC uses Google Apps Premier, and Mark Harrison, our CEO, obliged. The article was published online today, For Web Apps, Get a Service Guarantee, in PC World:

For example, the Google Apps Premier Edition suite contains an availability guarantee only for its Gmail portion (for 99.9 percent uptime) and offers no commitment for the other components, which include word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software.

“It would be comforting to have an SLA that covered the entire suite,” says Mark Harrison, founding partner of Abraham Harrison LLC, provider of online marketing services.

Abraham Harrison, founded in 2007, has been using Google Apps Premier Edition for about one year, and the uptime of its hosted applications and services, though not 100 percent, has been excellent, according to Harrison. Downtime incidents have been rare and brief, and have never proven disruptive to the company’s operations, he says. “We’ve never been crippled by an outage,” Harrison says.

Still, should a significant Google Apps outage occur, it certainly would impact the company, which is highly dependent on the suite. The company chose Google Apps in order to give its geographically-dispersed staff an array of software to use for communication and collaboration. In addition to the suite’s productivity applications, the company also uses Google Talk instant messenger and Gmail for e-mail. The company’s 22 employees, located in six countries and four continents, operate in 14 different time zones, and since most of their work is collaborative, Google Apps–which lets users jointly edit documents located on a central server–was a better alternative than e-mailing Microsoft Office documents back and forth.

Harrison would also like to see Google Apps provide an offline component that would allow users to work on their local PCs when disconnected from the Internet, a capability he knows Google is pursuing with its Gears technology.

That Harrison would feel more at ease with an SLA is telling. His company isn’t an ordinary Google Apps customer. Although the relationship between Google and Abraham Harrison is purely of the vendor-client type, meaning that the company receives no compensation from Google, the Google Apps team has singled it out as a model small business whose feedback it regularly seeks. As a result, Harrison is in close contact with the Google Apps team.

No Comments » Posted on February 28th, 2008 by Chris Abraham

Filed under: Google, Google Applications, Google Apps, Google Apps Premier, Google Docs

We here at Abraham Harrison, LLC, use Google Apps every day.  We’re always aching to keep on top of the cool new tools Google introduces on the DL, and here’s one via Mashable and  Google Operating System.

Google today released a simple Windows compatible utility to simplify the sometimes annoying task of importing multiple documents into Google Docs. Google released it to demonstrate some of the functionality within the Google Docs API (download the app here).

No Comments » Posted on January 25th, 2008 by Chris Abraham

Next Page »

  • blog advertising is good for you