With the recent launch of Google’s Airship Advertising, famous tire makers “Goodyear” are scrambling to close sponsorship negotiations with existing contracts, terrified of being locked out in favor of what may be a more profitable money maker from Google.

“We tend to take our time signing deals with stadiums as there just isn’t really any competition in the blimp messaging business,” says Bill Pmilb, Director of Dirigible Marketing at Goodyear, “We just never saw this coming – especially from an internet-focused firm like Google. They really caught us with our pants down on this one.”

Yesterday Google announced the release of Chrome 11 beta.  As usual Google Chrome team continues to push the limits of the web.  With this release they made public their use of a little known Web API for decoding speech into text.  The new API from google is not documented and has probably been in existence since early 2009 when they opened up more of Google Voice and made know their use of transcription for voice mail.   These features are all very interesting.  Thanks to the good work from “don’t panic”, it was very easy to put together a ruby library that helps make it even easier to use the speech API.  Check out the source a github.com.

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Rand Fishkin, the CEO & Founder of SEOmoz.org, managed to stuff an inspiring presentation on “Advanced Tactics to Maximize SEO Opportunity” into a too-short 25 minutes presentation at the What’s Next DC 2011 Conference on Monday, January 24th. With organic search results becoming increasingly competitive, Rand’s specific tactics supplemented with examples and case studies had me eager to try some new techniques to pimp out our website. You can view his slidedeck here. (All photos by Nakeva Corothers). Some key takeaways included:

Last week, Google launched the Beta version of “In-Page Analytics” – a visual aid that sits on top of your website to give context to the data that regular Google Analytics provides. Google Analytics is a great tool for webmasters to track traffic to their website, what users are doing on the site, and what people are clicking on.

While researching the new updates to Twitter’s third party app authorization process, something interesting caught my eye in the Google search results for “twitter”… Twitter itself came up as number one return, but Lance Arrmstrong’s Twitter account came up as number two- above the wikipedia entry for twitter, news, the twitter search engine, Twitter’s facebook page, reviews, and videos.

The Captico KML compressor uses the Douglas-Peucker Algorithm to reduce the number of vectors in your KML file. Adjust the tolerance to see how the polygon count is effected. Try this sample KML file. It’s open source and mostly Javascript requiring your browser have Web Workers.

While BP battles the ever increasingly disastrous oil spill in the Gulf, their PR department is trying to conduct a brand cleanup through traditional and online media. You may have seen the TV ads featuring Darryl Willis, the VP of Resources at BP America, featuring him as a Louisiana-born “volunteer” eager to help citizens file their claims. (Apparently CEO Tony Hayward wasn’t quite cutting it, and so a new “face” for the company was chosen.) But BP is also embracing new media methods such as Search Engine Marketing and Twitter. In this article, we take a look at how BP and its detractors are using Twitter to connect with the world.

Clients often ask us, “What simple task can I do myself to improve my search engine results’ ranking and start appearing ahead of my competitors?” This Do-It-Yourself trick will get you moving in the right direction.

Blog Series featuring summaries of articles and tutorials I read during the week. If you don’t have the time to scour the web for blog posts about web related news, technology, and techniques, then check in with us! This week’s installment includes:
• The Small Print: Writing User Interface Instructions
• How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

Businesses, schools, organizations, and individuals are using Google web applications at little to no cost. This includes gmail, analytics, webmaster tools, Google Calendar, Trends, and a myriad of other extremely useful tools. It’s great that these applications are free, but what’s happening to all the other companies that can’t afford to give their products away at zero cost?