Monday, April 16, 2007

Tooling Around the Web

One of the most fundamental things found in any home, apartment or car is a toolkit.
Well, after buying a cheapo tool kit at Sears, Charles Knight was inspired to create a tool-kit for another place people spend loads of time — on their phone. In his piece article on Read/Write Web, MobileAnswers is one component he recommends in his 85 piece mobile search tool kit. He says about his creation: “If Mobile is going to be ‘the Next Big Thing,’ you're going to need all the tools you can get in order to be prepared for every eventuality.”

Presearch is a term coined by Answers.com, but has caught on in the general public. Jay Bailey, Director of Marketing, says presearch, along with Encyclodictionalmanacapedia, are “catchy,
descriptive
and don’t sound too much like the words of a Marketroid . They tell a story.” That must be why, there was a recent article about presearch on The Librarian Edge blog.

My father is a great bowler. This is not something that I brag about. In fact, I used to be somewhat embarrassed that this was his sport of choice (you wouldn’t call him the athletic type), but recently bowling has become much more popular. In fact, the Answers.com Israel office had a recent company outing to a local bowling alley, and the New York office is eagerly following suit, with plans in the making. As planning continues, I ran across this article “Bowling deserves recognition as true sport.” The author makes a case for overhauling the reputation of bowling. Stats and figures in the article were provided by Answers.com.

Some other tidbits that Answers.com helped journalist with over the past couple of weeks:

The Easter Bunny: Did you know that in Australia
a campaign was launched to replace the Easter Bunny with the Easter Bilby?

Proxy Weddings: In Montana, neither you nor your spouse need be present at your own wedding: it can be done by proxy. This is popular for foreigners and service men stationed away. Know when else a proxy wedding is popular? When your spouse is incarcerated.

Rush Limbaugh: Bono, Larry and The Edge were first, but now Rush Limbaugh has his own signed iPod, too. What makes Rush rank with Apple marketers? The fact that he has 13.5 million listeners!

1 comment:

Mark Martin said...

Gina,
You mentioned AnswerTips as a new release. I wonder how is that feature promoted or marketed in a view that there are 120 million web sites? I have not seen any promotion or any effort to market subject faeture. Do you keep the track of how many AnswerTips have been downloaded so far? What am I missing?
I just got new Vista and my favorite AnswerBar shows up when I load the Vista but some web sites would delete the AnswerBar. Yahoo and IE would do it sporadically without any clue why? Can you provide me with ABC of how to start my own blog? TIA