When Google announces new news, you can’t avoid it. There’s nothing you can do about it. When they’ve got a new product it’s always the lead story. Well, no exception with the announcement of Gmail’s “Priority Inbox” which is supposed to handle the much complained about problem of email/information overload.

Related: Why did Google get into the realtime search game? Register for a free copy of the report “Real-Time Search and Discovery of the Social Web” (20-page PDF). Read a summary of the report.

On the onset the product sounds fantastic. Just give me the good stuff first and you can put all my other email in a secondary pile. But wasn’t that what the spam folder was? It was a mixture of true spam, and also every now and then a valid email would get tossed in there. The problem is you’d check your spam folder at most once every couple of weeks. And “giving a glance” is the most attention you would give to it.
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For years, the primary measure of success was the number of “hits” one got to their website. That definition was often incorrectly used to describe pageviews, or so people thought. In actuality, a site “hit” refers to a server call and every element called up on a web page denotes a “hit.” So if you had ten images on a page and a user called up that page, it would register as eleven “hits” (ten server calls for the ten photos and one server call for the HTML page). As you might expect, “hits” became grossly inflated numbers to describe pageviews.

Today, most users have smartened up about “hits” and they use far more accurate statistics such as users and actual pageviews. But we’re also concerned with social media statistics such as Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and YouTube subscribers.

But for most online businesses, revenue comes from drawing people to your site. Either you make money directly from your website, or people see your site and contact you to hire you.

If that’s the case with your business, the goal is to get your audience to your website. The question is how much is it costing you in time and money to bring people to your website?
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Early warning signs your company’s media network will fail

August 30, 2010
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The most common failure for companies building and communicating a content network is to not put in the effort, or simply ignore one of the three development stages: production, distribution, or conversation. Here are some classic tell-tale warning signs (that I’ve actually heard from clients) said at development stage that often don’t get the attention [...]

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The cool and not-so-cool from Gnomedex

August 24, 2010
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I just got back from a geek conclave in Seattle, Washington called Gnomedex where I was shooting videos and reporting for Dice and Dice News. If you’re not familiar with Dice, it’s the career hub for anything that’s tech.
On its tenth year, Gnomedex has been at the forefront at spotting industry trends. As an example, [...]

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Gnomedex’s Chris Pirillo on Our Individual Power to Create

August 23, 2010
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Gnomedex Master of Ceremonies and founder Chris Pirillo discusses the theme of this year’s Gnomedex. It’s all about the power of the individual to create, without someone else telling them that they can or can’t do it. Technology is simply the enabler.

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How to make sure journalists get your story correct

August 16, 2010
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There’s always a tension between interviewees/PR reps and journalists. We need each other, but sometimes the experience doesn’t go as well as we’d hope. Here are some tips to make sure your interview experience goes over as well as possible.

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On KQED talking Google, Verizon and Net Neutrality

August 15, 2010
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Watch my appearance Friday night on KQED’s “This Week in Northern California” discussing the open letter Google and Verizon cowrote to the FCC proposing new broadband requirements for mobile and some type of second Internet. Google has severely compromised given the past three years of trying to undermine the mobile carriers.

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Did HP’s Mark Hurd sexually harass an iPhone user?

August 12, 2010
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Who knows? The mystery around Mark Hurd’s leaving of HP and the absurd study by OKCupid about iPhone users having more sex than Android phone users became the fodder for this week’s episode of John C. Dvorak’s Cranky Geeks.

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Interview: Steps to getting started with your media presence

August 10, 2010
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Want to learn how to get up and rolling with social media? Even if you’ve been hesitant about getting involved, listen to this short 26 minute interview with Conrad Hall of “Social Media: Cheap and Easy” as we discuss four steps to get you a media presence online.

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Digging deep into company knowledge to improve productivity

August 9, 2010
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(Here’s an article I wrote last week at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, California. For more coverage, check out the Techonomy blog.)
So often when I attend conferences there’s this driving desire to define the subject of the talk before we begin discussing. Objectively, it’s a good idea, but it rarely allows you [...]

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