Everybody is getting on board with social media and SEO and email marketing these days and often the strategy is one of spray and pray.

The good people of Forrester know better of course and have put together a tasty little tool that allows you to get a closer feel for where to target your efforts.

First off though make sure you read this short presentation http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/ladder.html

The tool itself is very neat and easy to understand. Give it a spin.

Yet another mind blowing application from Google’s international super geek team. This time the two friendly engineers show us how they have somehow managed to create a search that is powered by photographs taken from your phone.

It is easy to see how photos with text can be searched as text recognition software has been around for some time however the ability to recognise and return results related to just plain old pictures is quite baffling to me.

So the question now is, what is this useful for? The obvious examples are presented in the video and include recognising artwork and grabbing data from business cards but how does this impact privacy?

Let’s assume that to return results Google has to have a similar picture to reference and we expect that all the photography that has been going on for the maps application will be the source for searches on building or urban areas in general.

So how about people searches? If you are active on social media there’s a good chance you have added one or two photographs of yourself that are tagged or have Alt text in the HTML. Google can search it’s index, match your image and return your name, employer and whatever public data you have to anyone that takes a photo of you.

If you ask me the implications of that sort of power are pretty scary.

I’m not sure about this. Google is putting a window of live results on it’s SERPs. The thing is the results scroll through pretty fast for broad keyword searches so the quality and relevance of the results depends on at what point you perform a search – you could miss some juicy links easily by turning up at the wrong point.

I’ve personally got alerts set up in Tweet deck that cover Facebook and Linked in status updates and also a Netvibes page with a ton of feeds on it too so I suppose this new feature will only get a glance when I do my searches just in case I might see something handy pop up.

I do think this could get much more interesting when you perform a narrower search on a long tail keyword. The results are not going to be pouring through like they are on the Tiger Woods demo on Trends and the results could be quite interesting, especially for monitoring brands.

For internet marketers this means that getting your listing in the latest news window is going to be like a game of musical chairs with people posting an update, checking to see if it has appeared and then posting again if someone has displaced them. I just wonder how Google will deal with this type of real time spamming which is inevitable?

This is a very interesting development and raises a ton of questions. The first thing that comes to mind as an SEO practitioner is that newspapers do very well in the search engine results pages. This is clearly due to the massive authority they have because of the mountains of unique content they produce and the number of other sites linking to them (among other factors).

If newspapers are going to restrict free access to their news then I’d expect that Google would severely restrict their access to page one listings for keywords that are relevant to any newspaper articles that have to be paid for. Most users expect free news and there is plenty of it around, so if Google clutters up page one with subscriptions pages any search engine that bucks this approach will pinch their share.

The truth is that if I have paid for a subscription I’d have my RSS feed reader pull in the news or have a bookmark on my toolbar,  so if I was actually searching for news I’d want to be served up free options not subscription pages.

If Google does penalize news sites for offering up subscription pages (which it should as a subscription page isn’t relevant to a keyword search for ‘Lancashire hot cakes murder trial’), then this could open the field for smaller free news services to get some extra traffic.

It seems to me that the news providers are getting around this potential for a penalty by allowing visitors to view the first few articles free, but for any heavy news searcher it won’t be long before their search results are bunged up with subscription pages.

I understand that print media has taken a big hit but they have enough money and resources to come up with creative advertising related models. Trying to stem the flow of news will just open the field for smaller web sites and word of mouth reporting via social media, which if you think about it could be better than some of the garbage that comes out of the major press!