Monthly Archives: December 2007

Lessing’s “curmudgeonly missteps” should be forgiven. Close the book and open the internet.

Posted on by
3

Jeff Gomez over at the Print is Dead blog has the best piece I’ve read so far about Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing’s mild attack on the internet.    Lessing’s comments were buried in an otherwise inspiring story about the power of reading, knowledge, and education – a story about how some women in Africa were more concerned about having books to read than food to eat.

Lessing’s suggestion that youth is in the process of abandoning quality book reading in favor of the ‘inaninties” of the internet brought the very predictable blogOspheric response of derision heaped on an old litererary lady who deserves a lot more respect than she’s been getting.

Like Jeff, I can quickly forgive the increasingly irrelevant attacks on the internet.    In fact I agree with Lessing that we’ve lost something as people flock to the internet while abandonining books and newspapers, carrying with them little more than a keyboard and a short attention span.    But we gain something as well.   Something very profound.   The internet is not only far more engaging than books and newspapers, and the internet is not only far more accessible than books and newspapers.   The internet is interactive.  

VERY interactive.   

For the first time in all of human history, people from almost anywhere can communicate night and day, every day, with other people from almost anywhere else.    This tidal wave of human socializing has only just begun and the implications are staggering.   Complaining that books aren’t getting their due respect, while true, is a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.   The ship of knowledge known as the internet sailed long ago and is now a huge fleet carrying billions of people.     

As a Nobel prize winner for literature Doris Lessing will be remembered forever.    And rightly so.   But those memories, and photos, and videos, and copies of what she said will live forever in *digital form*.  They’ll live on the internet, long after all the paper representations have been relegated to a handful of dusty old museum archives and rich book collector’s shelves.

And that, dear Doris, is a very good thing.

Trickles of web content to become floods, sweeping away the cable industry? Maybe.

Posted on by
2

Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has a good insight about the threat to cable from online feeds, which are now a trickle but could become a flood.    Blodget notes about the agreement between Yahoo and CNET:

… cable companies, meanwhile, depend on monopoly access to networks like CNBC and cannot afford to be circumvented by, say, a live CNBC web feed (lest a web trickle become a flood)…

I think Cable still has a viable future for at least the next 5 years because convergence of media is going to take a lot longer than most think, and if Cable is smart they’ll find ways to be the key broadband conduit into the home as they already are for millions of American homes.    It seems to me that the internet is more threatening to information driven media like newspapers than it is to entertainment driven media.   The is partly just a bandwidth issue – currently it’s not realistic to expect people to buy, configure, and use the fledgling broadband movie services.     How soon will this change?    5+ years in my estimation.   Of course eventually super high bandwidth streaming into most homes will be the likely main paradigm for home entertainment, but this won’t happen for some time.   We are too stubborn to innovate nearly as fast as technology allows.

YouTube + You = cash? Not much!

Posted on by
1

YouTube’s starting to experiment with revenue sharing for video producers, though it is not clear yet how the details of the program will shake out.   Marshall at ReadWriteWeb   suggests this action might “put to rest” the notion that YouTube cannot monetize content, but I think it will actually show how difficult it is to monetize even popular content.     Unlike targeted pay per click advertising it’s hard to “hit” a customer with a relevant ad when they are simply surfing aimlessly for clips or watching a funny clip.    True, you get some vague targeting information such as a possible few interest areas, but this is nothing like running a per click ad during a search for “Buy a sony digital camera”.   The latter is a golden opportunity to strike at the point of purchasing decision, and it’s why PPC, especially at the brilliantly matched Google PPC adwords environment, works so very well.

About a month back, when YouTube started allowing you to embed videos in a web page and use adsense to monetize them I tried a small experiment setting up a new website called “Funniest Online Videos“, fovideos.com.     There are adsense ads embedded around the funny clips that Google pulls from their YouTube comedy section.    

After sending a few thousand people to the site using some untargeted advertising I think I made something like 35 cents from a handful of clicks.     Sure, I could work hard and target better and get some organic (free) traffic to that site, but as they are starting to find in many other venues video clip advertising does not pay well at all.    I’m very skeptical of this model for ads, and given the deluge of clips I think advertisers will soon see this type of advertising as a waste of money, even at the low end of the scale.

Setup Flickr to Blog in 30 seconds or less

Posted on by
Reply

Flickr remains my favorite “Web 2.0” thingie and I think it is one of the best applications ever done for a computer.   I’m always thrilled with the simplicity of making simple changes to bring dramatic results.  

For example you can post your flickr pictures to your blog, which is great.    Also great is that the setup routine for doing this is as simple as you can get.    I just added photo capabilities to the new blog I’m writing for the big Travel and History site we are creating from two previous efforts at Online Highways and US History:     blog.u-s-history.com 

This took me about 30 seconds as follows:

1) Log in to Flickr Account

2) Go to “Extend Flickr” section on your Flickr Accounts page
3) Add blog
4) Pick from the list they’ll have of your blogger blogs if you’ve already signed one up.   

done

If you are signing up a blog for the first time you’ll need to give some access permission, but that is not very complicated.

The cool think is that then you can go to flickr and click “blog this” and post pictures at the blog quickly and easily.

And, just like the song says:   If a picture paints a thousand words, then why bother writing 1000 words, which takes a lot more time!

Yachats, Oregon

Posted on by
1

Back from a great trip over to lovely Yachats, Oregon where we stayed at the beautiful Adobe Resort for two nights. 

The big Oregon storm is well over and the weather was cold but clear, with beautiful surf.   On Saturday night we headed north to Lincoln City for a a spectacular dinner at the Bay House, a new fine dining restaurant overlooking the sea.   It’s one of Oregon’s finest restaurants for good reason.   My dinner?   Seared scallops with a rabbit confite accompanied by a light pinot gris wine.

The Namesake * * * *

Posted on by
Reply

This excellent film chronicles the life and cultural journey of an American Indian family from their roots in Calcutta to the American “dream” with its quirky and affluent complications.  Kal Penn and Tabu are marvelous as Indian mother in America and American son of India.

The film does a fantastic job of transitioning almost seamlessly between two very different cultures, and offers insights into the deep history of Indian tradition and family values.   A great movie for anybody with an interest in other cultures.

ATT – what are you flinging again?

Posted on by
Reply

Techdirt notes that the USA Today title “ATT Flings cellphone network wide open” is quite a bit of hype given that it’s been open for 3 years.     Although the article itself notes that this is really nothing big and new, it is an indication that many of the wars are now faught on the marketing battlefields and not the technological ones. 

Also yet another sign that titles to grab attention are becoming increasingly misleading, especially in the blog world.   Even the title of this post is – frankly – somewhat misleading, as was my recent suggestion about Andrew Seybold’s competence during a recent PBS interview, for which he just took me to task in his newsletter.  

But hey I’m in elite company – he’s also pissed at Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt for suggesting that physical limitations on the wireless spectrum won’t post insurmountable challenges to the coming internet convergence.  

Silicon Nanophotonics = speedy chips

Posted on by
Reply

Hat’s off to IBM for what could be a milestone in building faster computers.  They are making great progress with Silicon Nanophotonics – moving data using light pulses.   This technology could speed up current wired chips by a factor of 100, bringing supercomputer power to your … desktop computer.

Kurzweil is smiling about this, and this is yet another indication we are likely to have conscious computers by about 2020.   Then, everything is going to change in ways we cannot even imagine.

Facebook Beacon already forgotten by all but the blogOspheric chattering nonsense.

Posted on by
5

Om Malik and Matt Ingram are asking why Facebook doesn’t simply ask their 40+ million users to determine what the users would want in terms of advertising on a social network.

Excuse me but are you guys naive or just starting your holiday drinking a bit early in the season? 

The answer is that actually using social networking as a springboard for advertising ideas, although it would be totally consistent with the claimed model of what a great social network will be, would be totally inconsistent with maximizing profit.     I am *so tired* of hearing people talk about how what is best for us user gooses is best for those advertising ganders.   It just ain’t so!

Advertising – even good ads people think they really like – are all pretty much rooted in the old saw “There’s a sucker born every minute”.    Sure there are good products, and sure most companies are honest, and I even think many ads are reasonably “true”.    But the point is that good ads must inspire buying behavior before they inspire wise behavior, and any marketing effort worth it’s even it’s weight in online ads will work to make buyers, not work to make wise people.

Most wise people don’t buy a lot of stuff unless they stumble upon great wealth, and even then most do not become rampant “consumers”.  They reflect, they travel, they exchange ideas, they learn and they love.    Shopping?  It’s  not on the list of activities that spawn great human enlightenment, and it never will be.    Fun?  yes.   Popular?   Sure.   Profitable for companies?    YES!    Shopping, and more generally commerce online is the only sizeable revenue source, making it the key to internet innovation and the driver of internet changes.    User centricism is generally going to be trumped by this force with some notable exceptions like Wikipedia and perhaps Open Social.

The very best marketing ties real human factors to products, but in the same way “conversational marketing” is an oxymoron it is not reasonable to expect “social network advertising” to be glowing extension of the social networking experience.   Maybe in Mark Z’s dreams, but not in his increasingly profit-centric reality.

I’m strongly behind the idea that online community needs should trump profits.   Also, I agree that following this mantra can lead to some successes.    Google initially frowned on advertising while they built a fantastic search system, but note how it took advertising to make them the key online player they are today.   Not a little advertising either – billions and billions and the prospect of billions more.

Can social networkers design ads they like?   I doubt it.   However this could come about indirectly. Google Open Social is the most likely source of social networking advertising innovation for the very reason that Google *makes their big profits elsewhere*.  Google can sweep in with a truly user-centric social model, monetize it to a limited extent using adsense, but from their perspective leave their core cash dow – PPC search – intact.   Also, Google then conveniently puts a huge, perhaps even deadly crimp in Facebook’s potential to become a dominant online environment.    As I’ve noted before Google is brilliant at managing to do the right thing and in doing the right thing reap big benefits for … Google!    (How DO they do that so often !?)

Oh, speaking of NOT doing the user centric thing because it might threaten the cash cow we need look no farther than … Google.   Note their ad standards have relaxed quite a bit over the years while keeping  “user friendly enough” to avoid the sharp criticisms that should have been levied at Google when they slapped ads on the left side of the home page, conveniently blurring the distinction between organic and paid listings, then stopped prominently shading the advertising.  Oh, they also allowed bogus sites to run adsense, didn’t crack down early enough on the spiral of massive click fraud, and have even embedded travel advertising in organic listings while still claiming they don’t do it  (example: try this search: “SFO to JFK”).

So, the moral of Beacon is not that profit sites should stop acting like profit sites, rather that since there is a sucker born every minute, we suckers need to stick together, and every so often we need to stick it to the man to keep him on track.   Maybe that’s all Om Malik is saying today, and if so I’m with ya!

Facebook to everybody: “We’re sorry”

Posted on by
1

Mark Zuckerberg is profusely apologizing for Beacon’s shortcomings.  

I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better …

It sure looks sincere to me and I don’t think sincerity even matters all that much in this case.  They srewed up, they are fixing things fast, time to move on.

Like many I’ve been cynical of Facebook valuations and some of the ridiculous hyperbole, but this whole fiasco was a great study in now quickly you go from being tauted as “the next big thing” to tauted as being “dead”.    Also an example of how major media still does not quite get the web thing – just yesterday we read “Facebook RIP” which foolishly suggested this could be a major event for them.    

Google social is a major stumbling block for Facebook, but Beacon is just a tiny bump in the road to more riches.    That said I still think 15 billion dollar valuation is absurd.   But, I thought Google was overvalued too and I was sure wrong about that…. so far at least.