I have only realized that the skiing industry has really been on ball with emerging web technologies and has gone all out on web design, podcasts, blogs, and even wikis. I think that it is great for skiers to take advantage of information technology and spread the joy of the sport. Ultitizing these kinds of information services makes the sharing of information very fast and concentrated. Every month I wait for all of the skiing podcasts that I subscribe too come out, so I can find out what the Pros are up too, how the season is going in various places, how big the parks are out west, and how much pow was dumped out in AK in the most recent snow storm. This makes it really easy for skiers like me who can’t get out all the time to know what is going on in the skiing world.

And now some good stuff…if you skip over this entire blog at least watch this video. This is a twelve-year old kid out in Mt. Hood Washington last summer:

I have learned more about Adwords over the past few weeks in preparation for the competition next semester. I am finding it to be a very good tool to get publicity and drive web traffic to websites. An Adword campaign usually takes place over a set period of time. A campaign manager chooses certain keywords, and sets bid prices for each these words. A bid price is the amount of money the manager is willing to pay Google when someone clicks on their ad after a search using those keywords. The goal for the Adword campaign manager is to get his or organization to appear at the top of the sponsored list on the search result page. There are a couple factors that determine the position of each ad. The quality of the landing site (the web page the ad takes the user to), clickthrough rate (how many times do users click on the ad), and also the amount of money (bid) that is placed on certain keywords. These variables are ultimately used to determine the position of the ad on the search results and also how much money that it costs to the Adword campaign when a user clicks on the ad. Sometime campaigns with ads in higher positions pay less money than those in lower positions depending on their quality.

Next semester I will participating in the Google Online Marketing Challenge in an independent study with Dr. Jim Jansen. This is the first year that Google will be running this challenge. The challenge is targeted at university students in online marketing related fields (such as IST). Students must first find a business to do a campaign for. They must has less than 100 employees. Over a period of three weeks students will run a marketing campaign on Google Adword to drive potential customers to their clients website. Google limits each teams budget to $200. Teams of students throughout the world at different universities will be competing against each other for regional and global prizes. There are still a few spots left in this independent study. If anyone is interested, get in contact in Jim Jansen. Here is a link to Gomcha, a social networking site for students involved in the challenge.