I read about Rising Temperatures, Rising Food Prices in TreeHugger – wondering how rising tempetures are going to affect the price of food ongoing.  According to the post ….

…. During the two month span between June 9th and August 9th, the world price of wheat jumped by 66 percent. The USDA’s August estimate will show the world harvest shrinking further. But by how much? And how will it affect world grain prices?

… That intense heat waves shrink harvests is not surprising. The rule of thumb used by crop ecologists is that for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum we can expect a reduction in grain yields of 10 percent. With global temperature projected to rise by up to 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) during this century, this effect on yields is an obvious matter of concern.

Now, A Confidential Report Outlines Google’s Plans for Your Data, which I noticed on MarketingPilgrim about how far should it go in profiting from its crown jewels-the vast trove of data it possesses about people’s activities took place recently at Google – the story was covered in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.   I expected Google to have such discussions for some time and had wondered if they have …. well, they have.

….. The founders believe they are improving the Internet user’s experience, said Alma Whitten, who leads Google’s privacy engineering, in a June interview. “What’s good for the consumer is good for the advertiser.”

….. The changes at Google reflect a power realignment online. For years, the strongest companies on the Internet were the ones with the most visitor traffic. Today, the power resides with those that have the richest data and are the savviest about using it.

So, it’s all about the data, isn’t it – it’s not traffic anymore – but how you use what you have.  And how will Google use that information?

….. But Google’s revenue growth has slowed dramatically. And social-networking powerhouse Facebook is a widening threat with its ability to sell highly targeted ads to its more than 500 million users.

Facebook fears run deep at Google, which is designing its own social-networking service. In a sign of how quickly things change, the 2008 vision statement scarcely mentioned social networks.

Now we know why Google wants to take on Facebook with GoogleMe …. they’re afraid in a few years … well, the growth in their sales won’t be what has been, and they’d be right.

Also read about Mobile SEO Tip: Transcoding Services Can Dilute Link Popularity and what can happen when a website has multiple copies of the same pages, some built for mobile access -that technology solutions might solve one problem (mobile access) yet create others …. like mixing up your own content with some one else’s ……..

…. Case in point, travel site Expedia.com, who was nominated for a Webby for their Usablenet site, currently has about 4,800 results in Google using the site: search. However, only 3-4 of these pages are the transcoded Expedia site. The rest of the content is other Usablenet clients that appear to be hosted on the Expedia.com domain.

…. Apart from the potential legal nightmare of hosting content on your domain that you haven’t created and have no disclaimers for, there are other reasons why brands who are interested in being competitive in mobile search should care about having other brands’ content indexed on their domain. These duplicate content issues are well known to SEOs who optimize standard web content.

308 of these pages have the title tag Best Western for example.

So, your worst nightmare – you host a site for mobile access and it’s mixed up with listings of your competitors – ha! I love it – your best technology solution turns out to be not what you thought it would be … at least, not in this case.

And then we heard about Webtrends Buys Transpond, Rebrands it Webtrends Apps from Web Analytics World

…According to sources Webtrends has purchased Transpond, an application publishing tool for Facebook, iPhone and Android Apps, as well as mobile-friendly web pages. They have re branded Transpond as Webtrends Apps, a suite of products which includes Analytics, Visitor Profiling, Social Media Monitoring, and Landing Page Optimization.

… I actually think this might be smart move on the part of Webtrendsbecause their latest services such as Facebook Analytics, fit quite nicely into Transpond’s services. Webtrends is essentially going to be able to offer their entire ecosystem of online products to their Webtrends Apps customers – thus making new business for themselves.

Funny thing – but most of the new bells and whistles that WebTrends has – I haven’t tried, or had the opportunity to try.  My last real contact with WebTrends was when I worked at Monster.com and while I was hearing about all the neat new stuff WebTrends came out with – I was painfully aware that many of the WebTrends customer base had not used many or any of them – these were the toys that few got to play with.

I wonder if that’s changing now?  For example, wouldn’t be nice if WebTrends just offered Facebook Analytics as product of it’s own – something anyone who owned a Facebook page could install – for free …. wouldn’t that be interesting?  Oh, well,  I guess I can always dream….. about …. the  Vending Machine Detects One’s Sex And Age To Recommend Appropriate Drinks !?

…. The new system is larger than the Yahoo Japan model and can detect one’s sex and age, too. All that customers need to do is to stand in front of the system, wait for it to work its magic through a camera, and then choose the drink that the system recommends by pushing the drink’s icon on a 47-inch touch panel.

The recommended drinks are highlighted with a red star (see above). Customers can pay in cash, with their cell phones, or with one of three common IC cards.

Yeah, I suppose if we wed up WebTrends with the new age/sex vending machine will get interesting customer data – ha!

Finally … Does Microblogging Lead to Better Employee Retention? According to a post on Read Write Web Enterprise …

On a panel on the future of communication in the workplace, Nicky Wakefield, Human Capital Partner at Deloitte Australia, said “We have found a strong correlation between use of Yammer and staff retention.” Can we add employee retention to the ways to make the case for microblogging in the enterprise?

Wakefield went on to say:

Deloitte Australia is world’s largest user of Yammer, with over half of 4,600 employees using it, having sent over 24,000 messages. Use quickly shifted from social use to business applications. People are looking to communicate with each other and the organization. Workplace communications is a key part of the answer.

She also said that Yammer had been successful in that oft-cited goal of enterprise 2.0 technologies: transcending silos. She cites the fact that Deloitte Australia’s CEO is one of Yammer’s most active users as evidence.

So, maybe the key to keeping good employees is communication.  Ha!