"So i'm getting Scroogled?!" Er, probably not...

I think it's fair to say that i'm very happy using my Google products (Mail, Calendar, Docs, Blogger, etc) and they all work rather well. But, I also realise that Google specialise in paid for advertising and that the compromise for having free tools to use is that some may carry some ads, which are usually discrete and I always ignore. So, it was quite amusing to see that Microsoft has started a fairly low level smear campaign to bolster the take up of outlook.com... 

Only problem is, the below video really just looks like something a bored student has put together, or is that the point?

Negative marketing may be the new approach for Microsoft, but as Marketing Land point out this may not be having the effect they were hoping for:

"To date, the Microsoft-backed petition against Gmail’s practices has gained about over 6,000 signatures — equal to about 0.002% of Gmail’s user base."

 Could this be a case of Microsoft telling us what we already know? "Hey, Google does advertising..."

AlertRank is no more...

The rather nice bolt-on for Google Alerts is sadly no more, I had a short email message in my inbox this morning stating:

"Our investors have decided that Alertrank has not generated enough of a following to justify maintaining it as a free site. As a result, we will be terminating the site on July 15th."

We've been using the service as an addition to the paid for monitoring that we use on a daily basis as it can sometimes pick things that get overlooked.

http://www.alertrank.com

It'll be a sadly missed service...