Monthly Archives: December 2007

Web 2.0 Conference and Expo

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WebGuild will be presenting the second annual Web 2.0 Conference and Expo on January 29, 2008.   The location is the Santa Clara Marriot.  I missed this event last year but will be there this time and I’m really looking forward to it.   Last year Marissa Mayer was the keynote and I’m hoping she’ll be speaking again.  She’s one of the best thinking technologists anywhere, and a major reason Google continues to dominate the online landscape.

Note that this event is not to be confused with the Web 2.0 Expo series put on by O’Reilly Media or the Web 2.0 Summit also by O’Reilly.

Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and Search Engine Strategies in Xiamen, China

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OK, it’s time to start getting excited about several events I’ll attend in 2008 – China SES in Xiamen, The Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and the Web 2.0 Conference from WebGuild in Silicon Valley. More about China later as I start to plan that trip with my two table tennis pals, one of whom was born in Beijing. Here’s a great recap of Rand Fishkin‘s experiences last year at this conference.

CES Las Vegas is the world’s most super gigantic humongous computer show. Bill Gates is the keynote this year.

There will be amazing new product launches and thousands of exhibitors hawking the latest and greatest electronic gadgetry. I expect at least a few new amazing Google phones based on Android SDK and literally thousands of neat new gadgets for hands on investigation. Hopefully Scoble and Podtech will host another Bloghaus at the Bellagio. I’d read about CES Bloghaus 2007 last year and it really sounded like the happening place to hang out during the conference as a gathering point and 24/7 watering hole for bloggers.

I’m already getting a lot of emails and some phone calls about setting up press appointments with the CES Exhibitors. For many this is the key place to build the buzz for new product launches. I’ll hope to report on the neatest things I see in travel and tourism as well as anything amazing that really stands out.

SES China 2008 in Xiamen

CES Las Vegas 2008

Scoble to Zuckerberg “Say Something!”

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Robert’s got a post wondering what a lot of people are wondering right now.  Why is Facebook handling the beacon advertising fiasco so quietly, poorly, and stupidly?   However, I think they are right to lay low and wait for this to die down, then suck up with their advertisers and be back at the bank within a week.

1)  Sure, overall there is arrogance here, though Facebook has some reason to puff out their chest given the number of takers at their recent 15 billion valuation (well, it was only 2 takers, but …) 

2) Mark Z is a young buck, and Facebook is a young company.    They went from handling the claims they were the next big thing and would beat out Google to claims they are the antichrist company, stealing users souls.   They are neither, they know this, and it’s hard to react to all that crap so they are not reacting much.

3) BlogOsphere exaggerates problems to a degree that is absurd, and this will mostly go away soon unless users leave Facebook in droves.    Users leaving is unlikely.   Bloggers forgetting about the beacon fiasco is … less than 10 days away.

4) Advertisers don’t really care much about this.  Credibility is an issue but that will be addressed privately.   Probably Zuckerberg will need to step down as commander given this, and that may be a significant development.     If Facebook wants an IPO they’ll want to pull a Google and hire an old guard CEO to manage the kids in the office.    If they don’t – sell that puppy short.

OMG – Facebook scandals are totally boring already.    Can’t we talk about interesting things in Technology?

Universal Voice Translators are almost here

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One of the neat futuristic gadgets in Star Trek was the universal translator, a device that would take in any language and output English.

Engadget reports that NEC says they are close to having one of these.

the firm has developed a system that can understand around 50,000 Japanese words and translate them to English text on the mobile’s display in just a second or two.

Now this is not quite Star Trek because you’d need to convert the text to voice, but that technology is here already.   This is close, and it’s just another in the long line of technological improvements we all call … home.

I see this as very fertile ground for the open handset alliance.  Just think how positively travel would be affected if the language barrier was stripped away!    Perhaps even less conflict as people would find it harder to keep from communicating during crises.

Who is clicking at your online business door?

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Back in July I missed this great post by Dave Morgan at AOL but thanks to Danah Boyd’s post it has surfaced again.    The findings are very surprising and very relevant to anybody running click or online advertising campaigns.   Dave summarizes the findings very concisely as follows:

We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

What does all of this mean? It means that while clickers may be valuable audiences, they are by no means representative of the Web at large

Indeed, this means that many online marketing campaigns may need to dig a lot deeper to obtain a positive ROI, and for some campaigns positive ROI is not attainable.    If, for example, irrelevant clickers (not to be confused with click abuse) mean you’ll have to spend a few dollars to reach a single prospect, and your margin on your product is only a few dollars, you may be fighting a losing PPC battle for online hearts, minds, and pocketbooks.    On the other hand if your target audience is, say, midwestern stay at home soccer moms, you may want to up your PPC spend dramatically because your nickel or dime per click could be worth many times that in prospective sales.

Obviously Dave’s post is only the beginning of the big story which has yet to be written,  and I’m not clear how representative this sample was of all PPC activity (I think it was broadly representative though – they looked at billions of data items).  However this helps me understand why some of my PPC experiments have failed to yield much of a return.     A good travel experiment given these findings would be to look at midwestern travel patterns and try to advertise popular packages to Mexico  or other commonly travelled points south in the winter.   Since women are the main travel planners this match could work well to increase the normally very low conversion I have seen on travel related PPC spends.

Oban Scotch for Christmas

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I owed a friend a pretty good bottle of Scotch for a favor, and knew he liked Oban Scotch.   Unfortunately I had not checked the local price which is consistently $69.95.   Not bad, but I was shooting for a $50 “thank you” gift.   Enter the internet shopping thingie at Google which offered up Turnpike spirits way out east as having the best price by far on Oban – $42 plus shipping.    Unfortunately the website showed “not available” so I called them and got excellent help.  He had some bottles and I managed to order 4 of them.   With shipping I’m going to be under $50, and have a few more nice gifts to give.   Hey Dad – don’t read this post!

Shopping for scotch shows that the internet has not stabilized pricing at all – at least for Oban Scotch.   This single product has dozens of different online prices, which is especially interesting given that locally the price seems almost “fixed”.    I’m guessing few people buy liquor online – perhaps it is an impulse or very-close-to-Christmas purchase usually and therefore people go local?  However it would seem this price inefficiency could be monetized somehow by matching  low online pricing to high priced areas.    I’m guessing that our local liquore store paid more for the bottle they are selling at $69.95 than I just paid Turnpike, so somewhere in here there is a business.

Amazon unearths some great startups

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The Amazon startup contest here has a video profile of the seven finalists in their contest which I think was to showcase users of Amazon Web Services (AWS).   I think  Jeff Barr  will have more about this on his blog or on Amazon’s blog.

These look like some really interesting companies.    One is measuring brain networking, another is providing 19 usability testing (this is brilliant for the small website market!)  One is optimizing PPC campaigns (hmmm – but won’t Google analytics do that extremely well?.)

Paid Links and SEO – game over dudes

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It has now been over two years since Google started their crusade against paid links.  I first understood this crusade back in 2005.  It was the first time I’d met Matt Cutts, and we were sitting at the hotel bar during the New Orleans WebmasterWorld PubCon with a handful of SEO folks. I asked about the practice of paid links.  “Don’t buy links”, he said.  Matt was a bit vague about the consequences and other details, and the the Google guidelines back then were not very clear on this point.   In fact a substantial paid link economy had developed and continues today.  However over time Google has become very clear about paid linking.

In my opinion this this recent post from Matt Cutts, Google’s uberMeister of spam tricks and SEO, should sound the death knell for this strategy even for those willing to take the risks that have been associated with paid linking strategies for some time.   Clearly Google is dedicated about this, and will continue to crack down severely enough that the risk outweighs any likely gains.  Certainly any of the sites and folks I’m familiar with in Travel and Tourism should *not* use this practice to raise their pagerank.     I’ve been advising this for some time, but I knew the practice was still fairly common among some elites in the SEO community which meant it was still working.   I’m sure there are some exceptional cases but the basic advice here is easy – don’t buy links.

Like Graywolf, one of the most vocal critics of the Google anti-paid-link jihad, I have a lot of concerns about fairness, best practices, and how much pleasing Google has come to distort the production of good content.   But jousting at Google’s windmill has probably become a waste of time, especially given that many of their concerns about buying and selling links are legitimate.  That practice certainly did distort the relevancy of rankings in a significant way.   In fact Google’s core brilliancy – the pagerank algorithm – put in motion a variety of online linking practices that have reshaped  web content in dramatic, mostly negative ways.    People used to link freely and often as a matter of course because links are the heart of the web and commercial concerns were not in play.  Now, free links are doled out by many very sparingly in an effort to preserve pagerank at their own websites and to deny others a competitive advantage.    I hope Google is considering this factor as they revise the algorithm.  e.g.  linking out to other sites should tend to *boost* ranks for a given term more than it lowers the rank due to leaked pagerank.

Make Ads, Not War

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As I’ve noted many times here I believe that our massive US defense spend is unwise, returning a fraction of the return we’d get by putting most of the annual approximately $500.000.000.000 spend into high ROI global and national development projects, pro USA marketing campaigns, and other infrastructure improvements.

Interesting to me was the number just cited for the 2008 global advertising spend –
486 billion, just shy of what we’ll probably spend on US military.   Global military is about 2x the US number, or approximately one … trillion … annually.   

For you  bogus-fiscal-conservatives-who-call-themselves-conservatives-but-believe-in-huge-military-spending you owe the world at least a 250 billion per year apology, because this military spend is so ineffective at obtaining the desired objectives that no business would ever tolerate it going into the future.  It’s tolerated out of ignorance and mathematical stupidity – the same foolishness that drives huge social spending.  I think the flawed logic generally spawns from the assumption that projects that *might* work to bring stability (e.g. war) actually will work.    Since many such projects often bring a negative or low return rather than the desired one, the ROI on our military spend is spectacularly low.   Vietnam, for example, was left in worse shape than if we had spent zero on that war, and it now appears that Iraq may wind up suffering the same fate.

So, I propose this:   Let’s try to corner the advertising market for a year with out half-trillion.   Instead of weapons, lets see how effectively a global advertising campaign  would sway global public opinion in our favor.    Think about it.   Every TV, every billboard, every radio, and all online ads are featuring themes favorable to the USA.   For every propaganda piece against us, our almost Orwellian media dominance would counter with wine and roses and happiness in the USA.   Maybe we could just corner half the global ad market but reserve a hundred billion to include lots of giveaways and promotions to butter folks up.   Free turkies, cheeseburgers, and flat screen TVs …

Oh, and then that last hundred billion would come close to solving all the major pressing infrastructure problems on earth.

A disclaimer –  I guess I’m only partly serious here.  We need to maintain an adequate defense, but current pork barrelling, inefficiency, and bad strategy have bloated the defense budget out of proportion with its return on the huge investment.   I’d guess we could cut it by at least 60% with no appreciable dilution of our US security, and we could *certainly* do this for a limited time with very little dilution in security but a huge benefit to infrastructure projects all over the world, which would create incalculable good will.   No, this would not solve all our problems.   My point is that it would solve more problems than our current use of the funds.  

Singularity – the Movie – is near

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Ray Kurzweil is one of the most exciting thinkers anywhere, and unlike some “futurist advocates” of the past he’s distinguished himself in several fields relevant to those he speaks about.    He’s producing a film based on his book “The Singularity is Near” that will take the form of a narrative storyline featuring cyberterror, nanotechnology, and virtual beings and also a documentary with interviews featuring many leading thinkers about the future of technology.    See the Singularity website for more.

Ironically the early misguided optimism about AI has led even some early AI pioneers to scoff at the notion we are near the brink of conscious computing.  Yet a lot of evidence now suggests we are near reaching the capability of creating consciousness in machines. 

First, the IBM Blue Brain project is within about 8 years of a good working model of the brain.  They are not claiming to seek “consciousness” with the model  – rather they are focusing on brain and disease research – but I see no reason to think they won’t soon attain a conscious computer as the machine approaches the number of connections we have in our own brains.  

Second, the computational power of computers is approaching that of a human brain.   Kurzweil discusses this at great length in “The Singularity is Near”, noting that exponentially improving processing and memory capacity will soon lead to plenty of power in computers to replicate human thinking patterns.

Third, the explosion in profitability for massively parallel computing power – such as that used by Google and Microsoft – will fuel innovation for many years to come.

The question of “Do you believe in a technological singularity” needs to be replaced with “what are we going to do when the singularity happens?”

Hey, I’ve written a lot more about the Singularity , because I think it’s the biggest thing to hit humanity since….ummmm…. the advent of humanity?