Sad news from The Washington Post this week regarding the death earlier this month of Valerie Gregg.  Ms. Gregg was a technologist who drove the Census Bureau‘s first Internet site, FedStats.

As I spoke with a client last night about a hyperlocal campaign, we were discussing the pros and cons of various California towns.    FedStats, one of the earliest and still one of the best portals, had information at our fingers in moments.

The client loved having information immediately available to discuss pros and cons of different demographics.  I loved the fact that anything I could possibly want was available at a click.

As online marketers we often speak about the vagaries of Google, Yahoo! and other search engines.  What Gregg’s team did in the early 1990s — before many understood how much the Internet would shape their daily lives — was make huge datasets available to the world. Those datasets assuredly allowed pinpoint marketing efforts at a level even smaller than zip codes.

But with that kind of efficiency comes lower costs and more appropriate marketing efforts from legitimate small businesses.  FedStats and later the National Science Foundation‘s Digital Government Research Program, owe an incalculable debt to Gregg’s leadership.

The Washington Post reports that she was 56 years old when she passed away on February 12, 2009 as a reult of metastatic breast cancer.   You can help fight breast cancer by donating online to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure charity.

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What Your Online Marketer Should Be Telling You About Today

We told you about canonical tags back on February 13.    You know how it seems that many pages on a web site are often duplicates?  That kind of structure makes getting around the site difficult for any visitor.  Now Ask.com has joined Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in embracing this new standard.    Anything the four search engines agree on is worthy of your attention so raise the subject with your marketer if the subject isn’t first raised with you.