Back in January I wrote about How Not To Write Email Confirmations and how so many companies get the subject line so badly wrong.
I just got the above subject line in a marketing email from Agent Provocateur!
Buxomly Brilliant!
July, 2008
Dark Knight – Batman – MSN Advertising Special
Not seen the film yet? Let this Microsoft Advertising feature help you decide!
Find videos, downloads, a photo gallery and a competition…
Microsoft Advertising Staff In Children’s Charity Project
Staff here at Microsoft Advertising have got together to take some time out from the rigours of daily life in online advertising and decided to put a bit back into society.
Over the next few months, groups of us will be going down to the Sunrise Children’s Centre in Kent (part of Barnardo’s )to help revamp their facilities including their sensory garden, games room and outside play area.
No XBox? We might have to do something about that!
In order for us to complete the work we need about £10k!
I’ve kicked off the donations with £150 on behalf of Dave Naylor who I did a deal with to revamp this blog, and what a great job he and his guys did!
If you can spare some cash, the children at Sunrise could do with all the help you can give.
For more information, please check out our Microsoft Advertising Community Project Site!
New Live Search Home Page For The US
The Live Search guys have announced a new homepage design on the Live Search Blog!
The above design is just the first in a number they’ll be rolling out. I’ve seen a couple and I can only describe them as gorgeous.
What makes them better is the inclusion of “hotspots” that pop up on hover with different facts, or possible searches that can take the user to services on Live Search that they may not know about.
This hotspot clicks through to:
And this one:
Leads to:
It’s only being released in the US right now with other countries to follow.
If you want to see, just change your Live Search country setting to United States here:
Like it? I do 
Too Cruel To Cuil?
So it’s been a few days and we’ve had reaction here, here, here, here and here.
Oh and here, here, here, here and here, and my favourite being here!
Most, if not all the feedback and comments have been less than positive and I’m sure the management team have not been sleeping easy, nor have the investors.
I said on Monday we needed some time to assess the relevancy, and was reserving judgement as I’ve been involved in launching big profile products and it’s not for the faint-hearted!
So when is a good time to launch a new service with such huge press fanfare? How ready does it have to be?
I would suggest that it should be able to cope with a huge tug on servers, and that “about” & “feature” pages should return information and not 404 errors.
But what of the rest? What is the baseline for pushing the button? What are the “go/no go criteria”?
And how long will you give it before you try Cuil again?
Mojave Experiment – Microsoft Windows Vista Re-Vamp?
Actually no! It isn’t a re-brand or anything, but a little test to see what people would think of Windows Vista if it wasn’t called Windows Vista.
A couple of weeks ago I posted a letter from Bill Veghte with the official word on the OS.
I often get asked about Vista by family and friends who’ve “heard” it’s bad news or that it “crashes all the time”. It’s funny how these myths carry on well past the point when any issues there may have been have been fixed.
The Mojave Experiment is quite well done. Their faces are a picture when they realise the truth of what they’ve been seeing!
Cuil.com – First Impressions (Where’s Matt Cutts?)
I’m in the middle of the adCenter Analytics Beta refresh fever at the moment so have only had a brief look at Cuil.com
I notice some folks have said they do or don’t like the layout of the results. It does give you a bit more info to go on plus some universal search-type images. But whether it’s to your taste or not it’s not that new as Tafiti.com was experimenting with a similar kind of layout when it when that launched last year.
Categories are an interesting one as I thought they went out with the LookSmart directories many moons ago. Guess they supposed to be like Related Searches on Live Search?
A search for Google throws up some employees but alas no Matt Cutts 
As Danny says it’s difficult to measure relevancy on just a few searches so I think they should be given some time to tweak before diving in properly.
DigiTales on Media Week – Happy 1st Birthday!
![j0422317[1]](http://melcarson.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/j04223171-thumb.jpg)
It’s one year since I started blogging for Media Week – check out my thoughts here!
PS: Note my favourite post being about Liz Jones….
Facebook US Chooses Microsoft Live Search
The long anticipated deal with Facebook to provide its users with Live Search functionality has happened.
In an announcement this morning Satya Nadella has announced the extension to the deal in the US to provide search tools powered by Live Search and Ads powered by Microsoft adCenter.
No news on them looking to evolve the deal internationally, but with 45% of the UK market it’ll do very nicely over here thankyou very much!
This is great, great news!!!
My Blog Re-Design – What Do You Think?
After 10 months and 226 posts I decided I needed to move away from the rather RED theme I’d been using and get a bit more funky with its design.
So with the help of Dave and the guys from Bronco plus some priceless advice from the fabulous Shari, we came up with what you see today! Thanks to them and everyone else I’ve bothered by asking for their opinion.
The first stab was a bit greener than I’d have liked so we evolved it to be bluer with green elements, like the heading for instance.
The pictures are supposed to show a British/London flavour…..
….and the Twitter widget is simply fabulous – http://twitter.com/melcarson
It’s been an fascinating experience as there are so many elements and thought processes that go into designing a blog. From SEO to accessibility and design, colouring and mood creation etc….
I’ll now be pouring over Jen’s blog advice and ticking off her check list!
Would love to get your feedback – so let me know what you think….
