This is especially valuable for media-rich sites, in which a users engagement and value on a site is not necessarily most accurately measured by clicks, but more by engagement length and habits.

This move by Google is yet another show of search and tracking support for flash. Earlier this year Google announced that they were going to be indexing content in flash objects – this indexing has already begun, however the quality of the index is largely dependent on the flash development community implementing best practices for ensuring semantic relevancy and organization of data contained in a flash object.

The combination of flash content indexing – and thus giving flash objects SEO-relevancy, along with flash object analytics tracking – enhancing a flash object’s potential for monetization are two huge factors in ensuring flash has a place in the future, and that the technology continues to grow and be a viable commercial medium on the web.

Now that flash sites are becoming increasingly monetizable assets, I believe support and development will continue to grow. Based on my experience working with clients who are focused heavily on their brand image and website, I know that maintaining the flashy aesthetic of a flash site is important. Sure, a similar feel can be attained with a hybridized XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and Flash site, but for those companies who choose to remain purely flash based, this is great news.

Industry support for these new tracking and indexing initiatives for flash has been strong. Shenan Reed, owner of Morpheus Media (full disclosure: I currently work there as SEO & Emerging Technologies Manager) commented:

“This is very exciting news for some of the luxury brands out there that are very concerned about the image their sites project and maintaining the same smooth, glamorous aesthetic they have in their stores. The previous challenge was that they were building beautiful sites that were un-findable – it would be like building a gorgeous retail location in a dark alley of a major city and not putting a name on the door. Finally they can have their cake and eat it too!” – Shenan Reed

I agree, and look forward to the future of the semantic, trackable, indexable and usable web. In addition to the Morpheus Media Mlog, I also write my own emerging technologies blog, Jeffzilla.com and have posted a summary of this post on it. Here’s Google’s video explaining the basics of the tracking, as well as a real world demonstration, hosted by Brett Crosby, Group Manager Google Analytics, and Matthew McNeely, VP of Engineering at Sprout.

Before the official release I had tried a few of their Beta platforms, I think Betas 2 and 3. I didn’t use them too often because many of my add-ons weren’t yet compatible with them so I just reverted back to the latest 2.0 build. After installing version 3.0 yesterday I noticed that it ported my entire tool bar set and plug-ins from the previous versions. I thought this was a nice touch being that I really didn’t want to go through and re-download all of them again from the Mozilla add-on site. Thankfully this time all the add-ons that I use were ready for build 3.0.

One problem of note was that one of my heavily frequented pages www.msn.com would crash the browser when I tried to view it. After trolling the discussion boards I got the impression that a certain
plug-in was the culprit but I wasn’t too sure exactly which one it was. After some trial and error of turning one off at a time a reloading I caught the little bugger red handed. Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in apparently isn’t compatible yet with Firefox 3. I don’t think this is a really big deal as not too many websites are utilizing MS’s Silverlight tech, a competitor to Flash.

So, if you find that your new browsing sessions with Firefox 3 are abruptly ended with a crash and burn, check that maybe you have the Silverlight plug-in installed and disable it.

I don’t believe there is  better compliment to Macs than Firefox, and I am not only referring to the SEO work we do here.  Sure Firebug is fun and provides a utility, but Firefox’s multiple tab organization and ease of use allows for even the most novice of users to effectively navigate the web.  The Industry Standard has a nice piece covering the details today.

Enough of a sales pitch though, since I still get charged full price at the Apple Store downtown.  Mozilla is looking at breaking a record on number of downloads in a day.  The fun and games start today at 1pm (est).  Love to hear your feed back once you make the jump.

maybe even an Apple TV? Well, it looks like there are too many “boxes” taking up your TV stand space and I ha ve to say Panasonic is coming out with a solution that might help your situation. Panasonic’s new Plasma TV series, TH-PZ850U, features their latest technology called, Viera Cast, which is an interface that includes a live access to YouTube and Picasa as well as widgets such as stock ticker (courtesy of Bloomberg) and a weather widget (provided by The Weather Channel).

For the YouTube feature, the user can actually search by keyword, sort videos by popularity, or access your own list of “favorites.” According to Panasonic, although the entire collection of YouTube videos are available through Viera Cast, it may take a day or two to view the new videos.  Secondly, this TV can access Google’s photo sharing site, Picasa and view digital photos stored at your Picasa account directly on the TV screen.  At this time, Panasonic did not confirm any additional features or partners on Viera Cast but the main menu interface does show “coming soon” sections for additional cool features!

The concept and the idea of Panasonic’s Viera Cast mirrors the idea of Apple TV but keep in mind that this is all within the TV!  The fact that this TV doesn’t need a PC but directly connects to Internet with an Ethernet jack, it is simply convenient and user-friendly.  Although, there are few things that compare to Apple TV, such as a hard-drive where you can store your own music or movies, I still believe Panasonic took a huge step to incorporate such technology in a TV.  This is only the beginning of the exciting new adventure that is Viera Cast. We’ll see whether this technology will blast off and start a new trend in  TV business, OR just a small bump and a failure…

Brian brought up some amazing points in this session:
• Companies on Twitter should be using it to monitor and communicate with their clients.
• It is important to approach people as people, individually and personally while conducting outreach in social spaces.
• Using Social Media tools to search for brands is much more helpful than searching on search engines.
• Always consider the long term. The sky is the limit for how brands reputation online can be damaged or improved in the long term of social media success or failure. The content spread around the internet will never disappear.

In an article yesterday for the New York Times, Noam Cohen brings up a great point in his article “Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?” He asks whether Democratic candidates Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton can be viewed through the design and layout of their respective websites?

While Barrackobama.com is compared to the popular Apple site, HillaryClinton.com is scolded for not following appropriate design protocol. In my opinion the use of space, alignment of information architecture and overall branding do a good job supporting each candidates’ unique propositions.

While Mr. Obama has positioned himself as an agent of change in this election that is reflected in his progressively designed site. I believe that Ms. Clinton sees herself as the most capable of providing continuity and leadership through experience which is put forth in a rather traditionally designed website. Both of these sites do a good job of representing themselves to the constituencies being sought.

Since today is Super Tuesday we might get a little insight to what a large swath of the nation really feels. As for me, I just bought a Macbook last month and love my new Nano.

I wont say whom I’m voting for, but the long shots had a good weekend.

For more information on what makes a Mac user unique Advertising Age did a great job in deconstructing the psyche of Apple owners here.

So if you can, go out and let your voice be heard today.

Tumblr is another way to blog essentially, however in their help section they say, “to make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.” They actually are listed in wikipedia and they describe this as, “a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts.”

What is great about tumblr and the reason I wanted to share it with everyone is the ease in which you can blog, and the amount of functions available to you!

You can click any of the following options and it customizes how you can effectively execute your post,:
Text
Photo
Quote
Link
Chat
Audio
Video

The coolest thing that I found on Tumblr is under Account Extras.
You obviously have the option to bookmarklet this, so you can easily access this.
You can also add them to your address book as:
w8sac3me@tumblr.com
After you do this you are then able to post text, pictures, MP3’s or videos from your cell phone. You can only send videos though if your phone is Vimeo enabled. The subject line in your phone can act as a place for you to write a caption for anything you upload.

You can also browse your blog from your phone by adding /mobile to your blog URL.

MY FAVORITE part of this is that you can download a widget for this so that you can write in your widget and just hit post to Tumblr!

And for all of us Instant Messenger fans you can also add TumblrBot to your buddy list and this allows you to post straight from your instant messenger

Tumblr also allows you to add “Followers” to your blog, which essentially means the people who have added you their friend list and are following the updates of your blog .

The mobile internet? Maybe. Perhaps…

I believe that the opportunity to create a “mobile internet” that functions effectively and is able to adequately meet the needs of endusers is possible, but difficult. My greatest reservation is that the minimum bid costs are so high that the only players in the game are the same old names, Verizon and AT&T. In my opinion this limits the true ability to foster innovation and will only further contribute to the monopoly of information aggregation. But I digress.

I look forward to seeing who will reign supreme in this battle for the next frontier, and I can’t wait to create stimulating content to be presented on new platforms. Because the new mobile net user will be looking for a totally different experience then what is currently being offered.

Although this process of information harvesting has been in affect for some time, the level of sophistication and depth is increasing at an accelerated pace. With the recent backlash Facebook has received for its Beacon advertising, every good marketer should be keeping a watchful eye on this trend.

We here at Morpheus Media are lucky enough to have our very own all-knowing eye, Adam Broitman. Mr. Broitman who is Morpheus Media’s Director of Emerging and Creative Strategies was recently involved in the before mentioned Associated Press piece found here on USA Today.com. As always Adam’s insight and knowledge place him as a true industry authority.

As organizations such as Yahoo continue to demonstrate that data mining can be a useful tool for marketers new and innovative approaches can be taken to alert the world of the benefits of your brand. So as the digital marketplace is successfully taking all of the guessing out of the guesswork we here at Morpheus are thankful we have Adam Broitman to keep us well informed.