Monthly Archives: August 2007

Public Speaking Tips from Brett

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Brett Tabke is the excellent owner and “last stop” moderator of WebmasterWorld, the largest forum in the world dealing with Search Strategies and SEO. “PubCon” is the WMW conference and is held annually in Las Vegas and at other cities during the year.

The PubCon blog has Brett’s excellent article that is suggesting detailed tips on Public Speaking and preparing a good presentation.

Unfortunately for all of us even good advice goes largely unheeded by speakers for reasons I’ve never understood. Part of the problem is that self-confident, smart folks often are poorly prepared, thinking they can “wing it” because they’ve seen other self-confident smart folks *look like* they wing presentations when in fact really good talks are usually canned and focused more on entertainment than education. I often want to gag when I hear people rave about an entertaining talk as if they learned something, only to 1) note that the talk probably was not really about anything of much substance and 2) watch the raver’s future behaviors change NOT A WIT.

I’ve given several travel technology presentations and I’ve sat through *a lot* of conference presentations over the past ten years or so and it’s pretty clear to me that speakers are more born than made, and they are entertainers not educators. Real learning can be fun but it takes brain work most conference folks simply don’t want to do. This is why the unconference is so effective.  I noted that my “popular” talks tended to deal very simply with complex topics and not go very deep, which just confused people.  Also I’d throw in fun or intriguing items to keep people interested.  Unfortunately this made it tough to really “dig in” and talk about the intricacies of the topic.

For every Guy Kawasaki there are a hundred regular folks and another hundred lousy speakers. Guy is a superb speaker with – I think – a lot of canned presentations that “feel” spontaneous. He injects some anecdotes to shake it up a little, but the one time I heard him talk it was just too polished to be “real”, and I was told after that somebody had seen the same talk before – I think more than once!

The Mind of the Machine … is you?

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I think I like Kurzweil’s optimistic AI scenarios more than this version of reality
that posits we are all computer simulations run by a more advanced intellect which itself may be a computer simulation.

This sounds fanciful, but I’d suggest that this type of philosophical speculation is a lot more pragmatic and reasonable than the Jean Paul Sartre silliness I studied in Philosophy classes back in the 1980’s.

Kurzweil’s very reasonable suggestion is that we’ll soon have conscious, very intelligent computers. He also suggests that these machines will quickly lead to a sort of cosmic explosion of intellect that would easily be capable of massive “simulations” of intelligent life. What if this already has happened? One thing that bugs me about Kurzweil’s ideas is that it seems totally unreasonable to suggest that our feeble earth / human technologies will be the first to make this jump to massive cosmic intelligence. The idea that we’d be the first to do this seems very unreasonable to me given the age of the universe. Our universe has been around for about 15 billion years and we are not all that amazing. I’d think many intelligent creatures would have come around by now. If Kurzweil is right it seems at least a few of these would have made the leap to the singularity-style intellects.

How to reconcile these things? My gut feeling is that we really are physical, evolutionarily designed, meat and potato biological beings who have a capacity to think and reflect that is a product of the massive processing power of the bunches of neocortical columns and synaptic firing that goes on in our brains. Kurzweil is right about the rise of intelligent machines – coming soon to a virtual theater near all of us – but he’s wrong about the exploding cosmic intellect. There will be limitations – probably based on physical laws of our universe relating to speed of light and other constraints – that will prevent us from becoming “too big”. This explains why we’ve (probably) had no contact with other intelligent beings – we are just too far away and unfortunately we live at the edge of our galaxy where presumably a lot fewer intelligences exist than nearer the center.

Pligg for sale, Searchmob, and Arabian Horse Breeding

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TechCrunch reports that Pligg is up for sale.   The clone of the Digg project was a great way to easily and effectively set up a user community where people could submit, review, and rank articles.    John Battelle used it nicely over at SearchMob  in an attempt to enhance his excellent search news coverage at Search Blog.

Unfortunately at SearchMob it seemed to me that the reviews became more of a breeding ground for SEO tactics than a clearinghouse for quality search news.    Several participants would primarily list stories at their own sites that were referencing *other* source stories.   This is not necessarily bad but I found at SearchMob that only a fraction of the stories were “high quality”.    That said I’m not a big fan of Digg either because my interests still don’t seem to match the normal onliner demographic very well.

Pligg may not be the best example of how to make money on Web 2.0 because it was an open project and an advanced concept used by tech-savvy folks more than mainstream people.   Mainstream is where the numbers are and therefore, usually, where the money is.   Still, Pligg had buzz, traffic, and a community.   This should be enough to do well enough to keep building the project.   It’s possible the owners really *could* keep running the site and quit their jobs but want to try for a big payoff now while VC money is still flowing briskly into startups.   In fact this makes a lot of sense and if true it means my analysis here is probably flawed – ie they are selling at opportune time rather than for the stated reasons of “too busy to run it”.

Pligg’s founders suggest that they are selling because they have real jobs and don’t have time to manage the growing and thriving Pligg community.    I find this very interesting because they clearly have done Web 2.0 “right” – they created a useful service, got lots of people actively involved and developing for it, and have a powerful community of users.   So why can’t they quit their jobs and just work on Pligg and rake in lots of money?    Don Dodge’s mini-analysis of some time ago has part of the answer.   Even most VC funded startups don’t appear to return enough for the average VC to break even on the investment.    If true this is a really provocative notion – rich people are funding companies and losing money.   Like Arabian Horse breeding or Casino gambling it may be that playing the startup game is so enjoyable – and the potential deceptive enough for many wealthy folks that they continue to fund companies that, on average, will only return a portion of their investment over time.   Are Startups , on average, a bad investment?

Viva Las Vegas for Casino Profits

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This Hotel Interactive article offers some great data about the Las Vegas Casino scene in terms of economic impact. As you’d think it’s a staggering cash flow – some 2.1 billion profit on 24 billion in revenues from the 274 properties in Nevada reporting more than a million in profit for the year.

Here are some notable items from this report:

Gaming accounts for 49% percent of total revenue = $11.8 billion.
Rooms = 20% = $5 billion
Food = 14%
Average revenue per casino hotel resort was $88 million (!).
Casinos paid $928 million in state gambling tax and license fees (!).

Slot machines accounted for 67% of gaming revenue.
Poker accounts for only 1.4 percent of gaming revenue.

The Las Vegas Strip: $14.9 billion revenues and profits of $1.25 billion.
Downtown Las Vegas: $1.2 billion in revenue and a profit of $140.6 million.

Hey, here’s my brief Las Vegas History based on the PBS show about Las Vegas.

Las Vegas Blog

Blog SEO from Matt Cutts

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Matt Cutts, of Google fame, recently spoke at WordCamp gathering for WordPress blog enthusiasts (like Matt himself, who blogs with WordPress rather than Google’s excellent blogging product “Blogger”).

This blog post points to Matt’s PowerPoint and several other sources for summaries of this presentation.

Matt’s view on SEO is important because most experts would suggest that he’s probably the most knowlegeable search expert *in the world* and is one of the few search engineers who is privy to basically all of Google’s Algorithmic secrets. Also, in my opinion Matt is honest and straightforward with advice, and therefore if he’s suggesting an SEO approach you are well advised to take it. I should note though that this view is not shared by some of the elite SEO people who seem to think Matt will sometimes “misdirect” people to protect the precious Google Algorithm.

My comment over there was:

Excellent post and links here Matt.
However I have a “beef” with the emphasis on linkbaiting and basic SEO as good ways to rise in the ranks (they ARE, but should not be).   I’d argue that in an ideal search environment SEO would have effectively *zero* effect on ranks (because it’s communicating with the bot not the user), and linkbaiting things would have only a minor effect unless they were highly relevant to the query.
We now see a lot of SERPS where you see a bunch of sites, all similar, ranked more according to how their SEO, history, links, structure match Google’s expectations rather than how a user would view them. Google generally argues that these are essentially the same but they are probably only roughly correlated.
The fix for this would be greater transparency in the ranking process combined with greater penalties for being deceptive.  If Google is going to aggressively defend the integrity of the algorithm the ranking process should be more accessible, especially to mom and pops who will increasingly flirt with disaster as they try to find ranking advantages.

Take two Resveratrols and call me in the morning ?

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Noting the number of scams and bogus claims in the nutritional supplement biz I’m always reluctant to accept claims of new “wonder supplements”. However Resveratrol as a “life extension” really looks promising and seems to hold up to scrutiny the more it is tested. 2006 tests on mice prolonged their life significantly, and although human and mice biology differ it’s reasonable to assume we fellow vertebrates have a lot in common. The resveratrol appears to offer benefits related to caloric restriction which is well documented as a way to extend the life of mice. Unfortunately we humans, especially meat and potato guys like me, don’t like caloric restriction.

I’m going to break my normal rule of thinking supplements are not worth the cost and trouble and start taking this supplement.     I’m also going to hope Ray Kurzweil is right that if you can make it to 2040 ….. you’ve made it to eternity due to the coming explosion of AI merging with our biological selves.

Got AI?

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If you are not familiar with the ideas of futurist Ray Kurzweil you should read some of his rather remarkable but reasonable notions of how artificial intelligence will pan out over the next few decades.   In short Kurzweil sees an explosion of artificial intellectual capability changing our culture in ways we can’t even imagine yet.

We were pondering the intersection of humans and technology during our 5 days of camping with friends on the Oregon Coast at Honeyman State Park.    It’s a simply beautiful park with huge dunes, 2 pretty lakes, and nice campsites.

Google Phone coming in 2008

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Computer World says that Google may market an iPhonesque mobile device next year.  I bet it’ll be great.    I wrote an article over at the TechDirt Insight Community about this a few months ago (before the news from Computerworld – I didn’t realize Google had a phone project in the hopper already).

Here’s what I wrote over there in response to an insight community issue:

Google is in a spectacular position to launch a mobile device for many reasons, here are three:

1) Branding power.   Google is already verb “to search online” and could become a noun with the “Google” handheld broadband/phone/pda.

2) Speed of development due to corporate structure.

3) Existing prototype.
Apple’s iPhone already exists as a new standard for this type of device, effectively saving years of prototyping.   The Google device will have all this functionality PLUS better web integration (thanks to Google’s greater familiarity with online systems and also will have a LARGER touchscreen, which will ultimately determine the winner in this category because browsing ease is the greatest appeal of these devices.

Apple has hyped and branded this type of device already.   However, it will have poor initial adoption due to cost and competition from inferior but similar devices.     Google can subsidize the devices in part by letting this device Google’s mobile advertising platforms, undercutting Apple’s cost by hundreds of dollars per device.

Features and functionality:  Much like the Apple iPhone, the device would have a relatively large touchscreen interface (but larger than iPhone –  a key marketing point for the Google).  Flexible web browsing without mobile programming required for sites.   The device will provide a quality phone, high quality camera, and have PDA functionality.   Pictures, voice, and PDA functions will automatically integrate with an online control panel the user can access from the device or from any computer.   Google mail and Calendar online entries would synch with the device to allow offline mailing and calendar access.   This feature would also serve to enhance Google’s existing Calendar and mail which suffer from “only available online” challenges.

What would you do to make it a valuable addition to the Google product portfolio?

Mobile advertising is an explosive market, and without hardware control Google may lose market share to companies that have hardware advantages.   Also, for reasons stated above Google could create a superior device, thus winning both as a hardware and as an advertising provider.

Good luck Google.   As a stockholder in Yahoo I sure wish they would create this type of thing but I fear … they won’t or can’t.   Google can.

 

 

David Berlind’s dumb and dumber hypothesis is right on

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David Berlind is a very insightful writer over at ZDNET and I loved yesterday’s post. David observes that those who think we should not complain about computer problems are *dumb*. He also notes that even dumber are those that think their ability to solve computer problems means that others are idiots.

I’ve fixed my share of problems and as any regular computer user *must* note, many times the fixes are counter intuitive or lucky. Generally the problems that are easiest are those you spent many hours suffering with at some previous time. There’s nothing more annoying than wannabe pseudo-expert PC-hardware-hack jerks who make others feel bad after they stumble on a solution rather than noting that computers still suck in many respects. They’ve come a long way and it’s not reasonable to suggest it’s easy to redesign things to work seamlessly, but it’s downright ridiculous to suggest we should not try. Things are improving but they have a long way to go, so I agree with David and say:

Keep on complaining!

(just keep it polite – that will work better anyway)

Dvorak – 2.0 bubble to burst for sure. ?

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The normally perceptive John Dvorak may be showing signs of his “old computer” and “old media” roots by predicting that Web 2.0 will be collapsing for sure. He’s certainly correct that things *might* collapse but everybody knows this. New massive economies – be they the online economy or China’s exploding economy – are inherently somewhat unstable as they rapidly change and flex to meet new demands and bring in new ideas.

However I think John’s missing the fact that the online economy is now well established enough that although players – even big ones like Google – may fall or stumble it is very unlikely we’ll see the widespread systemic meltdown of the late 1990’s. The most important reason is that online advertising is more effective than offline advertising. Ads are the mother’s milk of online business. Google revenues, for example, are about 99% advertising. Can this market collapse? Unlikely unless because it’s delivering superior ROI to advertisers even as those advertisers continue to spend on less effective offline media, which is still the lion’s share of total ad spending.

In the 1990’s the PE ratios for companies were often off the charts, where now we see Yahoo, MS, and Google all well within the historic ranges for technology companies. The names may change but it’s very unlikely that the revenue base – advertising – will dry up anytime soon. Ergo, the web will continue to grow and evolve and continue to replace traditional media with …. better stuff.

Sorry John – time to write that screenplay?

Don Dodge has this right – Old media influence, not Web 2.0 media, is what John should be fretting about.

Caveat:   As I’ve noted before many times the new paradigm for Web 2.0 companies is an evolutionary model.   As with species we are going to see that most of the Web 2.0 companies will fail and die.  But this is NOT at all a ‘collapse’ because the system as a whole will continue to expand and thrive.    We are seeing high numbers of low capitalized companies  with VC funders of those few that get money simply hoping for a few winners.  This is, in some ways, analogous to the way nature kills off most gene mutations, leaving the most successful animals to thrive and be copied (aka reproduce).   This is not an old business model but it’s a perfectly reasonable one … unless you get killed by it in which case it’s still perfectly reasonable, you just won’t like it.