It appears that the Overture Keyword Selector Tool is back up and running according to reports from WebmasterWorld and Search Engine RoundTable. I ran a few searches myself and it’s still showing results from January 2007 but thats a lot better than what we’ve been getting the few week or so. Even though this tool hasn’t been updated for a while its still the best I’ve used in terms of solid numbers.

• Google for example gives you a Search Volume which doesn’t help me. It tells you whether it’s high, average, low or if there isn’t enough search volume according to them to even warrant a little green bar.

• Wordtracker uses metacrawler/dogpile to give you its numbers. According to the latest Hitwise data, Dogpile is one of many in the “other” category which in total only equals 1.4% of searches. How solid of data do you think you can get from this? (I do like features that Wordtracker has such as thesaurus, competitive analysis and lateral search)

Until there’s another way to get solid keyword estimates, I’ll be sticking with the Yahoo tool and utilizing the ones mentioned above along with it.

In our office building here we have quite a few people so there’s always something interesting to talk about. One thing in particular really gets a few of us talking. In the men’s restroom’s here there is a person who has very strong feelings about people flushing the urinals and what looks to be a lot of pent up aggression towards those who don’t do so after handling their business. How do we know that there is a person who feels this way? Well every few weeks this person gets out their magic marker and decides to leaves messages written on the porcelain for those who are using the urinal in an attempt to make sure they flush. I’ve attached 2 images below that were written today by this person. Have a laugh!

The Wall Street Journal reports that Zillow.com the real-estate Web site, announced that it has raised an additional $30 Million. Rich Barton who is Zillow’s Chief Executive says the company is trying a a localized advertising program where plumbers and real-estate agents use their program to target ads to people searching within a specific zip code. Read more »

Today Google officially launched gadget ads. As I sat through the What’s New with AdSense Webinar I remembered them talking about this but hadn’t really seen many test examples. Basically with this new ad format it takes your typical banner and turns it into a miniature version of your site if you choose. You have the ablility to incorporate feeds into ads which I think is really cool. The first things that pops into my head is Real Estate ads. Our newspapers had tons of classifieds listings so why not build out an ad that pulls our Real Estate classifieds through an ad where people can search without even having to click through to a landing page. Google is also allowing you to incorporate: Read more »

Another change in terms of how newspapers are evolving come with an announcement from the New York Times and their “Times Select.” Just after 2 years of running their premium service the NYTimes is shutting this part of their site down and opening access to all of their news and editorial columnists.

This comes to me as a big duh! When I think of the internet I think of the word FREE. Read more »