And since Google is an advertising company, everything it does will sooner or later be integrated into its advertising business. I think Chrome is not supposed to be any exception here and so I wanted to highlight a few facts about Chrome and how it relates to ads so that we could better understand what we should expect the browser to do to influence the advertising industry as it is today.

First of all, it has become absolutely obvious that people got too accustomed to browsing the internet with various plug-ins to block out ads from web pages you browse (and sorry, I’m not linking to any of them - I’m a web publisher myself, after all). And when mentioning why they would not want to migrate to Chrome, the most popular reason I’ve seen people citing is inability to block ads. The reason is simple: many internet users have simply forgotten how many ads they can be exposed to online now and they are not ready to consume any of that sine they are perfectly fine with a plug-in to block each and every page from the sites they browse. So no matter how fast and powerful any new browser can be they won’t even consider migrating until they can turn the ads off the pages.

I myself don’t get this type of mentality at all as a publisher since my own revenue is heavily damaged by availability of these plugins. In fact, I think it could be a good idea to create a group of bloggers to fight with ad blockers to have them completely forbidden by each and every web browser - even if I know it is a goal impossible to achieve. I don’t understand how people want to enjoy all the content others work long hours to create and fail to see that these publishers also have bills to pay and need food to eat. But that’s a topic for another post - here I just wanted to mention that people enjoy the ad-free web world too much to migrate to any new browser that does not provide this experience.

But here comes the problem: as an advertising company Google will never make life easy for people that want to browse internet without bumping into Google’s ads everywhere. Such an approach is just plain obvious and that’s actually something I myself will support 100%. So when Google has an official repository for all the Chrome add-ons or extensions, if there is one plug-in that will hardly ever make it there - it is any ad blocker developed by any third party.

I am quite sure we will very soon see this need addressed somehow but I know equally well that no such plug-in will ever be distributed with Google’s help - after all, why would Google want to make a browser where people could avoid seeing ads same as they now do on Firefox?

Second thing about Chrome and advertising may sound like a conspiracy theory a little (or a lot) but I think it is obvious that owning a tool that allows you to track a user’s behavior to the highest degree possible and failing to use this information for your full advantage could be just unreasonable. And I am pretty sure that this is exactly where Chrome is supposed to do its job - to help Google serve better-targeted ads to web users and, thus, charge advertisers higher.

One of the related discussions is about Chrome’s Omnibox and the privacy invasion it can potentially be for any user keeping browser settings at defaults. The thing is that when a user has Google as a default search engine (and I think many of our readers do) and keep auto-suggestion for URLs and search terms enabled, Chrome will start talking to Google servers by sending every single character you type even before you hit ‘Enter’. But while this may not sound particularly dangerous, Google actually intends to keep 2% of this collected information along with the IP of the computer used to type those characters. And this is where the big game begins because the opportunities for advertisers to reach you better and make you buy their products once they know you need them are immense.

Imagine, for example, you are planning a Christmas vacation on some tropical island. Say, the first idea you have in mind is Bali Island in Indonesia so you start typing “Christmas Vacation Bali” but then you change your mind and decide to see what the most popular options are first before making your decision. So you delete Bali and instead type “Christmas Vacation tropical island”. This is where you hit the ‘Enter’ key on your keyboard but this is not when Google first receives any information from you - it already knows you had Bali in mind so probably the easiest thing to sell to you would be some nice vacation package on Bali. And right there along the results of your second search phrase you get a few paid links from Google Adwords publishers pushing vacations on Bali at you. Will you resist clicking them? Honestly, I would have clicked immediately myself and I don’t think I am the only one like that. It is obvious that this simple new addition can add a lot of power to advertising targeting and the way advertisers will face less difficulties in reaching us, the potential customers, with what we are willing to pay for anyway.

Another advertising-related thing about Chrome is advertisers’ complains about Google’s privacy mode “Incognito”. The problem as advertisers see it is Incognito mode removing all the evidence a user visited this or that site and - more importantly - viewed this or that ad. This is done by deleting all the cookies of private browsing sessions once the sessions end.

And this really sounds like a potential threat to advertisers because they will face chances of paying much more simply because they will be showing the same ads to the same users where otherwise frequency caps could prevent this from happening. And without cookies advertiser will have to pay for what he or she would have never paid for otherwise - the same user watching a banner for CPM ads or the same user clicking a link for CPC ads. It is obvious that those additional advertising expenditures won’t be particularly efficient as the user has already seen this ad and will hardly want to click it if he is not interested anyway or make the second purchase if interested.

Yet while this sounds like a bad idea for advertisers, it is a very good one for Google because Google itself serves as a middleman between advertisers and publishers - thus the more advertisers pay, the higher commissions the advertising giant will receive. But on the other hand, Google will lose its own targeting power without cookies so it is a double edged sword that has both advantages and disadvantages for Google.

Honestly, I actually don’t think this one is a particularly serious problem because I doubt privacy mode will be used a lot for anything other than watching porn. I’m not sure if people browsing porn sites click ads a lot but I don’t think this is exactly the target market to many advertisers concerned here.

Private browsing mode could be a problem if it was a default setting but this is not 100% beneficial for Google so we’ll hardly see this happening. Besides, I don’t understand advertisers grudging about Chrome’s incognito without paying attention to a very similar functionality - inPrivate - available in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 beta. I really think that since there is demand in the market for private browsing, developers will offer their solutions promptly, no matter what advertisers may want.

Finally, there is also a question if a browser itself can be used as an advertising platform without relying on serving them on the pages you visit using the browser. Google Chrome EULA reads in the advertising-related section:

17. Advertisements

17.1 Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the Services, queries made through the Services or other information.

17.2 The manner, mode and extent of advertising by Google on the Services are subject to change without specific notice to you.

17.3 In consideration for Google granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Google may place such advertising on the Services.

From the language in the EULA you can easily draw a conclusion that Google can actually push ads at you right in your browser - the way you can now see with some IM desktop clients, like ICQ, for example. And while I do think it is fairly possible to do just that, I somehow doubt it will actually happen on Chrome. I believe for Google it is perfectly enough to have a browser that never prevents a user from seeing an ad - no matter what. And if a browser can do just that Google will be fine with it - given the huge number of websites monetized with Google AdSense.

I hope it is now clear that this is what Chrome is intended for in reality: to allow the company serve you better targeted and more personalized ads, at the same time preventing you from blocking them. And if they do manage to make your internet experience shinier and more flexible at the same time, it will be a nice side effect and a means to bring more people into the platform via which Google will serve its ads.

Unfortunately, to my heavy disappointment I soon found out Yahoo! did not draw any prizes at all and the email was nothing but a phishing scam. Since then I have received hundreds of such emails claiming I won this or that impressive amount from some new entity but Yahoo! Mail has remained the one that was supposed to pay me the most - simply for being their user.

I know that you have explained already that your users should not expect to win anything - no matter how trustworthy those emails may seem to be. And my open letter is intended to let you know that as a user I am not happy about your approach. What’s more, I believe it may damage your brand once a user that instantly falls in love with Yahoo! after getting a winning notification discovers that it is nothing but a huge scam and Yahoo! is not sending any check in the near future to him or her.

So I strongly suggest that you finally make the decision and pioneer a new approach to encouraging and retaining users by drawing huge prizes occasionally. Let’s consider such a lottery to be one of the most remarkable promotion opportunities for Yahoo! Believe me, no one will even expect you to actually draw huge million-dollar prizes - amounts in the range from $1,000 to $100,000 will be perfectly enough - and you will only have to invest, say, $400 thousand to make a total of 118 users happy (with 1 winning $100K, two winners of $50K, 5 users to get $10K, 10 people to receive $5k and, finally, a whole one hundred users to get one thousand dollars each). And not only those 118 users will be happy - you will infuse hope in hearts of hundreds of thousands of your other users that are not lucky enough (this time, at least). And I don’t even expect to win anything myself for the idea, I just want to help you make the internet a little happier.

Besides, such a lottery is not only a chance for a great promotion, you can also use it to improve usage of Yahoo! Mail. Yes, I know that Yahoo! still has the largest number of email accounts (last time any information on this was revealed) - no matter how fast Gmail is growing. I know it is good to be huge - you must even feel secure already. But does that mean you should not try to make people continue using your service instead of migrating to Gmail? I think some incentives will not hurt in your case, really.

So to encourage people to use Yahoo! Mail you could only include those people that actually use the service in the prizes drawing - say, only users active every week should have a chance of winning the prizes from you. And, after all, believe me, you will make all the internet users at least a little happier once we have a hope that when we get a winning notification we can actually win something.

People also import their bookmarks from browsers to social bookmarking sites to keep them as a backup which can be useful if something unexpected happens to your browser. But there are some pages bookmarked that are simply beyond my understanding. Like when you want to do a search on Google for something normally you either type the word right into the search bar of your browser or go directly to google.com. But people actually save the URL for Google’s main page on social bookmarking sites.

A couple of weeks ago I published a post about why people google the word “internet” and one of the commentators on FriendFeed mentioned that not only people search for such strange terms, they also bookmark some pages that we all seem to know by heart anyway and he also mentioned that google.com has actually been saved on Delicious by 26,113 people (today the number increased to 26,785 so it also demonstrates some steady growth of a few hundred new saves each week).

In addition to that, Google.com has received 1,385 reviews on StumbleUpon and since I can only estimate how many times people clicked “thumbs up” in their StumbleUpon toolbars without adding any review, I believe the number of people “liking” Google on StumbleUpon is somewhere in the range from 10,000 to 15,000 people. I think it is an evidence of the fact that Google must have a lot of supporters among audience of social bookmarking sites - enough to make it one of the heavily-bookmarked websites.

I am a firm believer that people who have accounts on services such as Delicious are supposed to have URLs of such incredibly popular web pages right there in their memory and should not really need to save them on social bookmarking sites. Probably these people save these pages to demonstrate their appreciation of the work by Google and other giants but it nevertheless is impressive to see how many people actually bother to show their appreciation in such a manner so I have decided to do a quick research on Delicious (as still the most popular social bookmarking service) and see how some of the best-known websites do with social bookmarking communities. Here are the results of my small survey:

Some of the results that are worth some highlight:

• Among all the search engines compared here, the leading position of Google (26,786) is evident here same as anywhere else but the separation between the leader and Yahoo! (20,558) is not as huge as we would think. I doubt it could be because of Yahoo! owning Delicious but it is still interesting that Yahoo! may have a rather loyal audience willing to bookmark it heavily.
• Out of the three free blogging platforms here the least popular one is strangely Google’s Blogger.com with 2,013 saves (even less popular than the declining LiveJournal with its 5,990 saves).
• In the “software” group Skype seems to be more popular than Firefox while Google Chrome in less than a week received the number of saves that is less than 2 times lower than that of Mozilla.com.

One thing is no doubt interesting: the trend here is evident - all the popular websites get their fair share of saves from Delicious users and demonstrate that no matter how memorable the site name is and how hyped the name of the company behind the site is, they will still receive a decent number of attention from users of social bookmarking sites.

But social bookmarking is clearly a very recent trend that people started to use to demonstrate their attention - not only to keep track of the useful sites for themselves. I believe an evidence of this is that the sites launched after Delicious itself seem to get more attention than the sites that seem to have been here forever because people now seem to bookmark useful or interesting discoveries like Flickr or YouTube to help make sites more popular, not to memorize the names.

While the majority of these sites have become household brands already and do not really require a person to bookmark one of them to access later - simply because the names are repeated a dozen of times a day everywhere. Besides, in some cases (like for CNET’s download.com) they are easy to remember because you know what exactly you want to do - and this is exactly what you type in your browser’s address bar.

So while some people do bookmark those sites that every single web user knows anyway (like the notorious Google.com), the recently launched websites definitely receive more attention from people with strong social bookmarking habits. For example, Twitter has been bookmarked on Delicious 11,249 times but that hardly could mean that the popular micro-blogging service is almost as popular as very mainstream eBay (13,206 saves) or Amazon (13,812). I really don’t think so, I believe it simply demonstrates the fact that we have learned to bookmark websites to help them grow more popular.

But why do people still bookmark sites like Google or Amazon? I can imagine that to a certain extent these saves are because of people importing their browser bookmarks where they may have all the most often needed pages saved for quick access. And while it does not make sense to bookmark Google since it is easier to access any search results for a query using a search bar conveniently located in browser, I believe it still can be a partial explanation for the number of bookmarks for Google. Otherwise, maybe they actually also show their affection to the almighty Google. Have you ever saved Google.com on a social bookmarking site? If so, what were your reasons?

Below is the spreadsheet with the detailed results of my survey:

popular-social-bookmarks - Get more Business Documents

As soon as bloggers have received access to information on Google Chrome usage among their readers from Google Analytics, they started to report data on Chrome’s market share:

TechCrunch - 6.23%

Search Engine Land - 10.10%

Inquisitr - 8.05%

And I have to admit we have the highest figure of all here but I am not actually too excited about it because the only thing this shows is the immense interest in Chrome among tech-savvy audience and the content on Profy about Chrome. I myself tried to be moderate and avoided publishing dozens of posts about Chrome here but it did not change the situation: people arrived here over the previous few days fiercely searching for Chrome. Out of the top 10 search keywords 7 were related to Google Chrome and included “Google Chrome”, “Google Chrome Crash”, “java for Google Chrome”, and “plugins for Google Chrome”, for example.

My understanding is that people installed Chrome after all the buzz around it was initiated, started using it and soon realized they needed JAVA to work and some plugins as well (or maybe some additional information about how Google’s browser should be used). So they started to search for information trying to figure out where to get plugins, for example, - hence they arrive to us using Chrome itself.

I believe the situation must be very similar for other tech blogs as well simply because the majority of us enjoy attention from early adopters mostly. So I believe everyone received some nice traffic from early adopters looking for more Chrome information everywhere - thus you will hardly find any technology blog that has only published, say, one review of Chrome: all the blogs published a few opinions on Chrome and Chrome-related news. Thus I believe searching for Chrome on Chrome itself seems to be the main reason for the splash of Google Chrome usage among tech blogs readers - and listening to what people wanted bloggers have done everything to provide as much content about Chrome as possible.

At the same time some of the mainstream internet users will have a chance of actually avoiding any mentions of Chrome and not many of them will actually download something simply because it is advertised right on Google’s main search page. Here is some stats to prove that: Net Applications has been tracking market share for Chrome since its launch and it shows that the situation is much less rosy than some tech bloggers want us to believe since usage of Chrome fluctuates around 1% of the entire internet population:

My idea is that it is not difficult to get a lot of people on Chrome if you have a lot of content about Chrome. If you don’t and you are focused on more mainstream content, you will probably see the results that will resemble the Net Applications more than the huge figures we report here. I have actually mentioned that Chrome would be the browser for early adopters mostly in my initial review and it looks like I was right with that point. And while Google has all the power needed to promote its browser to one of the top positions, I don’t think the corporation will actually apply serious efforts until the browser is ready - after all, I don’t think Google wants to scare more mainstream users away.

So the discovery is named PPLjuice where “PPL” obviously stands for “people”. This is actually a simple Pligg-powered social voting website where users are supposed to vote for people and determine who is the most popular. Right now the site looks like the default Pligg installation has only received minor changes so it is obvious that the site is in the works still. But since everything seems to work as it is supposed to be, it is already possible to add some content to the currently not very lively site.

I am sure everyone here knows perfectly well how Pligg works so I don’t think it is worth discussing how stories are submitted and voted up and down here. The only major distinction is that on PPLjuice users are supposed to talk about people only and determine how important (worth the buzz) they are. And I can already imagine the site will be full of internet personalities pretty fast if anyone bothers noticing the site’s existence.

It may be a good idea to have a site to vote for people only since we already seem to have a Digg analogue for quite a number of different niches. Besides, it may be interesting as a tool to make some decisions like which employer to choose or who of your two colleagues to date: simply submit both options to PPLjuice and see who gets more juice from users.

But what I find a little offending is the catchphrase they chose for the site: “Are You Worth Writing About?” I am quite sure that absolutely any person on Earth is worth writing about because each and every one of us has some story to tell and some unique experience to share. But letting the crowd decide how “writeworthy” I am may very well turn everything into a painful experience heavily damaging self-esteem.

And while I was not disappointed after I have not found any single mention of my name (and that makes it even more of a mystery since I have no idea how people could arrive to Profy from this site without mentions of either me, any of our ex-bloggers or Profy itself) because blogging really makes people more thick-skinned than I could ever imagine, I believe other people may be slightly (or severely) offended when they find that they are not “worth writing about”. So maybe we should give the site a few hours of glory and start submitting our friends in there for these friends to be able to find their names once they decide to check it out?

This is not the first investment in Quintura for Mangrove - it was also the one behind Quintura’s seed funding in November 2006 as well as behind the series A round in June 2007.

The funding arrives as a part of the next funding round. Unfortunately, the exact amount is not disclosed by Quintura but I believe any investment over 1 million is definitely worth mentioning anyway. Last summer the amount was not disclosed either and was also quoted as “several million”.

This round is intended to help Quintura scale its search platform as well as promote its search widget along with affiliate program for web publishers: Quintura plans include growth of monthly audience for Quintura Site Search service from its current 8 million to 50 million people over the next year.

The site search is basically a widget that provides visitors with a more aesthetically appealing way to search a site’s content and produces the results as a tag cloud while publishers are offered an additional opportunity to monetize those search queries performed on their sites and increase the number of page views generated by visitors. The widget is currently used by a number of large sites both in Russia (for example, cosmo.ru - a web property for the hugely popular here Cosmopolitan magazine) and internationally with ReadWriteWeb as the best known example in the technology community.

While I am a little biased since Quintura is a Russian startup, I still think that the achievement announced today is a well-deserved one and hopefully will help enhance Quintura search platform even further as well as bring new important publishers to their network.

Myth 1: Separate processes for each tab

This seems to be the most hyped feature of Google Chrome - the one everyone seems to be very excited about after having Firefox crashes caused by a process running in one of the tabs. Unfortunately, there is some disappointment here as this approach is far from new and it is even used in Internet Explorer 8 beta - the browser everyone thinks Chrome is intended to compete with. Microsoft named this “tab isolation” and the feature description reads: “If a website or add-on causes a tab to crash in Internet Explorer 8, only that tab is affected. The browser itself remains stable and other tabs remain unaffected, thereby minimizing any disruption to your browsing experience.” Does not it sound familiar after all those reviews of Chrome everyone must have read already?

Myth 2: New V8 JavaScript virtual machine

Sure, everyone knows we rely on various JavaScript-powered applications quite a lot these days. And everyone seems to be aware that the way existing browsers handle JavaScript code is far from perfect and needs to be improved. And everyone is not only Google - guys from Firefox are smart enough as well and they’ve been in web browsing business long enough to realize what the market needs now. So they have also promised to add a virtual JavaScript machine to Firefox - as soon as in version 3.1 actually.

Myth 3: Private browsing

Ah, Google is a smart company, smart enough that people visit porn sites more frequently than they claim. And private browsing that does not leave any traces of browsing on a user’s computer is sure something that could be appealing to a huge portion of web population. And Google, the smart Google, is here with a solution: Incognito for browsing. And while this sounds cool, it is nothing new with the same feature already available in Internet Explorer 8 - but under another name: InPrivate.

Myth 4: Privacy

We’ve heard authoritative opinions that Chrome is not sending any information from a user’s computer to Google’s servers but this myth was also debunked pretty soon. The thing is that Chrome’s address and search bar “Omnibox” with auto-suggestion enabled actually sends all the characters typed by a user to Google servers (even before the user hits enter) if Google is set as a default search engine. And even after Google provides suggestions based on those keystrokes, Google will keep about 2% of this information along with the IP addresses that send those characters to Google. This is certainly supposed to raise concerns in those users already worried about the volume of information Google already has for almost every internet user.

Myth 5: Malware and phishing protection

Google Chrome is very proud of constantly downloading information on websites that are known to be insecure for a web user to visit and warning the users of potential malware and phishing threats. This sounds innovative and useful enough but actually Internet Explorer seems to already offer something very similar as a SmartScreen Filter for the very same purpose of protecting a user from malware and phishing attacks.

Myth 6: Domain Highlighting

While many of liked how Chrome highlights domain names to help us easier understand exactly what site we are browsing. But I guess those surprised are simply those web users that have not seen Internet Explorer 8 yet as Microsoft’s beta browser offers exactly the same highlighting functionality:

Internet Explorer 8 beta:

Google Chrome:

Myth 7: Groups for tabs

It is no doubt a great idea for Chrome to introduce groups for tabs. Groups mean that when you open a link from one of your tabs, it will be opened in a tab located right next to the current one instead of as the last rightmost tab. This is intended to keep all the tabs connected to each other grouped in bundles together. Very cool and definitely a needed enhancement for tabbed browsing but unfortunately not introduced by Google - take a look at Internet Explorer 8 again, will you?

Myth 8: Improved find on page

Same here - an exact copy of Internet Explorer functionality. The idea is that when you click Ctrl+F to find some text on the page you are currently browsing, the browser will start searching immediately instead of waiting for you to type in the entire search term and hit ‘Enter’. Besides, all the matches will be highlighted immediately instead of making you go from the current to the next one. And this is not pioneered by Chrome either - Internet Explorer 8 has exactly the same functionality. The only difference between the two browsers is that Chrome highlights the first match in orange and the rest of them in yellow while IE highlights the first one in blue with the rest of them in… yellow as well.

Google Chrome:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8:

Myth 9: Resizing input text boxes

It must look like a cool functionality that you can resize the input box when you type a comment somewhere on Reddit or FriendFeed. But Google is not the first to the game with this enhancement either: Safari has been doing it for a while now and I believe it has something to do with Chrome and Safari using the same WebKit rendering engine.

Myth 10: Standards compatibility

Sure, when Google launches something we expect immediately that it will be the most advanced something meeting all the industry standards. Unfortunately there’s an unpleasant surprise for us here: Chrome does not show perfect results in ACID2 and ACID3 standards compatibility tests. And while it performs better than stable versions of other popular browsers, it is still outperformed by development releases of Firefox, Opera, and Safari. So no matter how advanced this one may be, we should not expect it to be 100% compliant and actually the best browser of those currently in development.

So after demystifying some of the latest and greatest approaches to browsing in Chrome I can say that it is absolutely not visible that Google is so much of an innovator in this particular case: they simply took the best features and ideas from existing browsers (or just listened to what users wanted browsers to do) and wrapped them into a very pompous launch of Chrome.

Besides, it must mean that we as web users simply tend to love everything about Google much more than anything about Microsoft so we have barely noticed very similar features in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 beta but now that Google introduces them we have overhyped them as much as we could. Now tell me why our affection towards the company behind a product is more important than the product itself?

Now that MySpace has been working in Russia for a few months the local MySpace team in Moscow explains that they are very happy with the growth rate of the Russian-speaking audience of the social network. I have just read an interview with the MySpace Russia CEO Alexander Turkot published by one of the major Russian technology blogs and there are some things worth noting about MySpace growth in Russia.

First of all, the potential users in Russia have not been exposed to any overwhelming promotional campaign that was supposed to be needed for growth. In fact, I have never seen a single ad for the social network myself here - neither online, nor on TV or anywhere else at that. In fact, the head of the Russian office mentioned that their promotional budget is lower than the one initially recommended by experts by an order of magnitude. But it did not prevent the network from growth of the Russian-speaking audience anyway: right now MySpace has 350 thousand Russian users registered with the plans to increase the number of active users in 2009 to 1.3-1.5 million. Besides, revenue forecast is also positive enough: the Russian part of the network is supposed to earn from $5 million to $6 million in 2009.

The niche that MySpace has chosen in Russia is building a universal content platform combining various types of user-generated content with professional content. And the key to success is in free use of any content that is hosted by MySpace on any profile or blog within the network - as stipulated by MySpace ToS. A very strong selling point that MySpace has here is in the number of content agreements with various record labels, TV networks and other media outlets - and this is supposed to ensure that users and visitors will be happy to visit MySpace at least to consume this content legally and for free.

I know perfectly well that Russian users rarely care about copyright and various forms of copyright violation by stealing music and videos wherever possible is something of a national hobby here. But the local Russian team of MySpace seems to be very positive about the demand for such legal content consumption and distribution in Russia and I can only hope they will succeed and will teach Russian users that it can be equally fun to consume content legally.

Docstoc MyDocs is basically a place to store all your documents in any format supported by Docstoc and easily access them from any computer online. The powerful preview functionality allows you to quickly view your documents even when you are not on your computer. A very intriguing part is that Docstoc actually provides free unlimited storage space for all your documents so even if you rarely need to access your documents from a different computer, I think it won’t hurt to use it at least for backup of your documents in case anything unexpected happens to them. Besides, you can synchronize absolutely any other folders from your desktop with Docstoc, thus making it a good option for backup that will perform sync without you paying attention to it.

Docstoc Sync is a small desktop application both for PC and Mac that allows you to easily synchronize all the documents uploaded to MyDocs with the current versions of the documents on your hard drive and upload newly-created documents without even thinking of it. Besides, this same application can be used to upload those documents you want to send to public sections of the website and share them with the community.

So in addition to using Docstoc as a free backup for all your documents and other folders for easy online access or retrieval should you need one, I also see good potential for the service as a collaboration tool because any document stored on Docstoc can be shared or emailed to a friend or colleague - which makes the sync functionality even more useful.

The only problem I see for Docstoc is that it is still a relatively young startup. And while I know they have a great team and tons of excellent features, I believe they will first need to persuade anyone interested that the service can actually be trusted. And once people do trust the service, it is absolutely possible that they will introduce some paid-for services as well. For now unlimited free backup of documents certainly is appealing enough for people to try out, especially with no fees attached. So if the service is stable and does not raise any privacy concerns, they must have a very bright future ahead.

Here is the video demonstrating the new features:

The result is predictable: Obama seems to be doing better than McCain in almost all the spheres. But the reason is not all that complicated actually: Obama’s camp simply spends way much more on ads they display across the WWW. While I have no idea what exactly the amounts paid are here, the figures for total ad impressions are very illustrative anyway:

Obama also leads in the number of searches people perform for the candidate’s name: search phrases containing the word “Obama” were performed 4 times more frequently than searches for “McCain” (5.4 million vs. 1.3 million). But I actually can not be sure this one is a positive thing for Obama because oftentimes when people search for something, it means they don’t understand this “something” so when people are so heavily engaged in researching the information related to the candidate, it may be a bad sign instead. But at least it clearly indicates that people will be more likely to visit more sites appearing in the search results for “Obama”.

And this brings us to success of Barack Obama’s official website. While Obama’s site is clearly much more popular since it is visited monthly by 4 times as many people as McCain’s one (2.2 million vs. 583 thousand), here we also see one thing where McCain performs better than Obama - and this factor is video. On McCain’s website videos related to the candidate and his plans receive a very prominent position right on the homepage - hence the result: despite of the much lower number of visitors, McCain’s site seems to be way more efficient in making people consume content there - the number of video views on McCain’s site is almost 3 times higher than that on Obama’s site:

These are obviously very interesting figures that can partly explain how the two candidates approach world wide web and it is just another evidence of the assumption that Obama pays much more attention to online audience. It is also this attention that can partly explain why Obama is so much more popular with various social media sites as well.