I think my wife came to say hi to me when I was sleeping a week or so ago and I started singing "you are my sunshine" in a rather annoying voice (not sure where I first heard the song, but think it was maybe school chorus class). She started laughing and wanted to know where I got that annoying voice from (I wasn't sure but maybe it was my way of being annoying in chorus).

Few thoughts are original...so if I thought it, I figured someone else did too. So I went to YouTube and searched for "you are my sunshine." A couple normal versions and then there at #6 was something that looked like it could be annoying. Perfect!


After seeing the flower I had to buy it, and that took me back through Google and eventually to eBay, where it cost $20 after shipping. My wife loved the flower and was totally surprised by it.

What if YouTube not only listed related media, but also pulled related products/services/offers from Google Base (or other structured sources) and could charge merchants on a CPC basis or a percentage of the transaction?

Most of the people on YouTube are looking to be entertained and waste time, but if media wants to be free on YouTube then maybe they should try to sell media in other formats and sell physical stuff. YouTube has huge distribution...so even if only 1 in 100 or 1 in 1,000 have interest in commercial offers they should be able to make the market fairly efficient pretty quick.

Recently we lightened the background color and increased spacing between keyword results in our keyword tool...making the results look more aesthetically appealing.

While playing with it I wondered how hard it would be to change the captcha questions to make them relevant and SEO oriented rather than having them ask generic questions. The big issue I had with it was the need for structured answers (as the PHP coding was not yet set up for fuzzy matches)...which sorta forced me to ask really generic questions or give away the answer. An example captcha is below

The links in the various captcha questions lead to various sections of the training subdomain, which should cause a few people to click through and consider joining. At the very least it should help some people new to SEO get some of the basics, and is a reminder "hey, this is over here." :)

It seems like a pretty cool marketing idea...it is relevant and free, much like advertising on your own search results. I am not sure how well it will work, but this is yet another one of those 1 hour conversion improvement hacks that can pay for itself for many years.

The good news is that captchas can be a legitimate part of any interactive website...so this idea could apply to blogs, forums, web based software tools, etc...anything where people comment and/or interact. But will users find it useful or annoying? What do you think of the idea?

Update: Some people have considered using brand images as captchas, but I sorta like the trivia angle more. :)