Pemaquid Communications

The other day I had a problem - a big problem. My Photoshop locked up and wouldn’t run. It’s an old copy that runs on the Windows side of my Mac through Parallels.

Why am I running my Photoshop on Windows?? That’s a long story in and of itself and for another day.

I tried reinstalling. No luck. I figured maybe it was finally time to invest in CS3.

Before I pulled the trigger our Creative Services Coordinator, Sarah Hines, and I tried one last thing, something we occassionally do when we run into a programming conundrum: we Googled the arcane error message.

After sampling three suggested solutions Photoshop was back up and running. Amazing! On the other hand, I shouldn’t be too surprised.

The moral of the story? If you’re hamstrung by a problem, whether it’s a design issue or even a home repair issue, you might do well to at least give Google a shot.

Reading through the tea leaves here is not that tough. Microsoft is offering a 60% premium over Yahoo’s recent stock price b/c it realizes that apps (email, spreadsheets, document-creation, etc.) is migrating from the desktop to a new home on the ‘Net.

Case in point: I work w/several young guns who:

• Use Google Talk for IM
• Use Google spreadsheets
• Use Gmail

They think “Why should I fork over my hard-earned moola for MS Office when I can get it online for free?”

Then there’s Google AdWords, Google Analytics; oh, and Google also has this really cool search engine thingy.

Google here, Google there, Google, Google everywhere…

It’s definitely a threat to Microsoft’s facetime w/computer users.

What does a combined Microshoo mean for business marketing online? Probably a new ad network, combined MSN-Yahoo! search engine. Something that looks a lot like… Google.

Stay tuned…

On the search engine marketing front, Google has announced the newest, fastest-growing search terms for 2007. So, up on the chart, with a bullet….

• iphone
• webkinz
• tmz
• transformers
• youtube
• club penguin
• myspace
• heroes
• facebook
• anna nicole smith

OK, class, what I’d really like to see is someone using all those new vocabulary words in a sentence.

Is it just me or did the Internet (not) seem a little sluggish today from all the excess traffic?

Today is Cyber Monday, the Monday immediately following Black Friday and supposedly the day when e-tailers’ online sales surge like the rush for a Blue Light Special.

Only trouble is, The Legend of Cyber Monday is just that - a myth, concocted by marketing consultants to spur their Clients into Web site upgrades to prepare for a virtual tsunami.

Cyber Monday historically has not been the most popular online shopping day. In fact, according to Business Week, it’s only the 12th biggest sales day online.

That’s not to say your Maine Web site shouldn’t be ready for business today. It’s just important to remember that your site should be ready for business every day.

Naturally, good Web design should be the most important part of your Web strategy, this Monday and every Monday. That’s right, even more important than your search engine marketing plan. Because today - or any day - it’s not going to matter if you’re the #1 result in Google if people click on over and find that your site is hard to use.

See you on Cyber Tuesday….

This just in from Techcrunch: MySpace is apparently saying “me too” to the Facebook Platform. According to Techcrunch, the MySpace Platform will launch in about a week’s time.


Since the Facebook Platform launched in May, more than 5,000 third party developers have created “Facebook Apps” that Facebook users can add to their profile (Pemaquid has built one called Portland Diner - a restaurant guide for southern Maine). Some apps have well north of a million installed users, and the implications for marketers (er, and other social netoworking sites) are obvious.

Google is also preparing to get in the game.

If your want to position your brand to a young, smart, tech-savvy crowd, figuring out these open platforms - the Next Big Thing - should be on your agenda. Pemaquid is the first developer in Maine to have created apps for these open platforms, so contact us if you’re looking to make them a part of your Web strategy.

I keep hearing about Facebook (maybe that’s partly due to the fact that I’ve just signed up and am now in tune).

Here’s a post from Paul Allen about Facebook- which he claims will become the largest social network in the world.

There’s no reason to doubt it. I’ve watched as Facebook’s Portland network has ballooned to over 15,000 members, w/several hundred added since I joined up about a week ago.

Facebook is already a more popular online destination than eBay and is gaining on - are you ready? - Google. And I’ll bet people stick around longer on FB than they would on the Big G.

And with the new Facebook Platform and the ability for developers to create Facebook apps people can add to their profiles, like…. (shameless self-promotion) the Portland Diner app created by Pemaquid, it’ll only get stickier.

To top it off, Facebook’s people demographic is better and it’s interface is much cleaner than MySpace. If I were Uncle Rupert, I’d be concerned.

The Eagle Has Landed (sorry, I always wanted to say that…)

If you haven’t already, you might want to join the rapidly-growing group of people who are making the EagleCam, managed by the BioDiversity Research Institute of Gorham, Maine, one of the most popular sites on the Web. So far, viewers have seen romance (eagle-style), battles-against-the-elements (the birds have braved four storms, including an unusually heavy snowfall), suspense (had their eggs survived those storms?) and a surprise plot twist (a chick was born April 11 after biologists had concluded that the birds had failed to keep the eggs warm enough to make it through the cold, harsh spring).

The EagleCam is proving to be Must-See TV. When the eagles returned to their nest about a month ago, the folks at BRI said traffic to the site exploded to 8 million hits in a single day as a result of an Associate Press story on the topic. Traffic died down a bit afterwards, but now that there’s a chick to watch, you can bet there will be another, even bigger spike.

There are a handful of eagle cams out there, but apparently at least Google seems to think BRI’s is important: It’s the #1 search result for “EagleCam”.

In late February BRI asked Pemaquid Communications to redesign the site. The challenge was to get the new look in place before the new addition to the family arrived. How it got done is a case study that could be the subject of a separate post, and the site is still a work in progress, but we got the major features/pages in place.

Future work may include working with National Geographic (provides the live feed) to upgrade the presentation of the live cam object code to bring it in line with Web Standards, placing the rest of the low-traffic back pages into the new look and feel and possibly putting together a photo gallery (BRI has tons of great wildlife photography). And don’t forget the EagleCam Blog (updated by wildlife biologists) and… the LoonCam (inactive right now).

Stay tuned…..

If you spend enough time reading Web pages recently, you may have come across the term “mashup”. You were probably not even reading your favorite news site’s description of the latest rush hour mishap. Instead, it probably accompanied a description of the newest “Web 2.0″ site.

For the uninitiated, a mashup is when you take an app from one or more Web sites and “mash” it all up w/content on another, usually to create a uniquely interesting - and hopefully, useful - interactive feature. The most famously popular example of a mashup is probably the Google Map API, which all kinds of people have incorporated into all kinds of sites to provide geographic information in creative ways.

We’re excited to say that at Pemaquid we’re working on our own Google Map mashup for a Client in the tourism industry to provide an interactive mapping feature to show Maine points of interest to the folks from away. Can’t tell you too much more right now - it’s Top Secret - but we’ll be launching it soon. Stay tuned….