A few months ago I'd tested Squidoo and concluded that their revenue sharing publishing model was unfavorable and along the lines of "You build it and manage it and do all the work and we'll *share* some of the cash". Based on my March statement I think I was right to be skeptical of playing that game:
JOSEPH'S STATEMENT (From 03/01/2006 to 03/31/2006)
You have earned $0.05 total.
I think CNN's grades are realistic. However grades are a *trailing* measure of performance and the real question is what's in the future for these companies. This much is clear: All have really sharp folks working for them. All face challenges from their growth which can inhibit innovation and flexibility.
I think Google's done the best overcoming that challenge but I also think it's because the initial crowd is still pretty much in place and still excited about work. When kids start coming into the Google families, and mundane concerns start piling up, and the early GooglePeeps are sitting on millions in stock, the 9am to midnight work routine is going to get old…fast. I think Google's ability to keep their best and brightest may be the biggest challenge they face. Working in their favor though is that Brin and Page are both young and brilliant. They won't burn out anytime soon and certainly have an edge on the MSN folks who have made their mark already. MSN's older leaders simply *cannot* understand the internet the way younger people do, and even bringing brilliant but "first generation" internet people like Ray Ozzie on board is unlikely to solve this. What would solve this? Buying all/part of Yahoo as appears to be in the works right now.
Yahoo and MSN have already been through the "losing some of your best people" problems and I think have a more mature and somewhat stable workforce. This is good for maintaining status quo but also is clearly a factor in Yahoo and MSN's ability to overtake Google in most online endeavors.
The search market share numbers can be misleading in my opinion. People no longer move to Google due to superior search, they do it because as the average user becomes less sophisticated they are simply responding to the collective habit of most users which is to use Google. I predict this effect will wear off as search quality converges, people move more to vertical and user-generated search routines, and Microsoft exploits it's browser and OS advantages.
These grades are from the second quarter of a course that's lasting a lifetime. Anything can happen as this all heats up. The only certainty is …. change.
Wow, what a bad movie. This blockbuster finds the crew of a deep sea mining operation battling – usually unsuccessfully – with a mutating gut sucking deep sea monster. Is Richard Crenna ever in good movies?
This one mangles the story enough that even excellent actors Richard Crenna, Hector Alizondo, Peter Weller, and Amanda Pays would best be put out of their misery by the Leviathan monster. But you'll have to settle for only TWO of those four getting their just reward for appearing in a pitiful blood and guts sillyness.
Hey Leviathan, do you eat bad movie CDs?
For the story so far click HERE
Interesting…site:nmohwy.com shows only 142 out of about 3000 pages, but NONE appear to be supplemental anymore. So after time and/or a few sitemap submissions the supps plus most pages seemed to be deleted from the Google index in favor of the 142 pages now showing. This happened over the past few days though it seemed that the supps were slowly disappearing over the last month or so.
This activity seems to have had NO effect on the low Google referrers which total only about 25 for the first few days of May vs 252 from Yahoo.
So…Experiment has so far failed to resurrect Google’s faith in these pages which used to get great traffic with pretty much identical content (though inferior link structure and they looked better organized before – these are just thrown together with the old data).
This leads me to think that perhaps OHWY’s good fortune in the past came in part from the many interlinked state domains. Although this practice would seem legitimate and normal, many have noted problems from this and/or sharing C block IPs as these state sites did.
Pardon my somewhate randomized ramblings……
Significant changes keep swirling online as the internet becomes the key mainstream content vehicle, oceans of content continue to flow online, and mashups empower developers to flesh out even the most extravagant ideas with powerful tools reaching far into the rich data stores all over the web. Even market makers like Google, Yahoo, MSN don’t know how it’ll all shake out, and they are supporting many excellent mashups and APIs and developers to make sure bases are covered as the “real” battles for all that online spending heat up.
Where content was king it’s now just a pawn, and creating (large) communities in addition to a large content collection seems the best way to keep a web based company afloat in the stormy and rising online sea of sea changes.
*Unlike the gravy days of soaking up adsense revenues with auto-generated content, it appears online content providers need something “extra” es that will distinguish them from the other sites doing similar things.
The Internet in many ways, has done a partial circle back to quality stuff.
In early days it was non-competitive and fun and info focused.
Then came powerful commercial focus and info bias and heavy SEO for profitable terms.
I think the “new” transition is focusing on people/information, and rewarding those who create communities and bring *people* into contact with *people*. (e.g. Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, etc, etc). Increasingly, NON commerical sites like Wikipedia and DMOZ are taking on the roles that for a few years were provided by a plethora of auto generated, information poor – category rich sites that provided obscure topic details in a bland format.
Joe Duck 