Monthly Archives: June 2008

Microsoft Yahoo misquoting, stock quoting, and blog quotas

Posted on by
Reply

Silicon Valley Insider appears to be manufacturing some news with their misquote of Microsoft Johnson as stating that if Yahoo fires Yang, Microsoft may bid again. It appears that Johnson did not say that or even anything approaching that in the interview, not to mention that Microsoft has stated that nothing has changed.   Of *course* Microsoft will consider bidding again for Yahoo if circumstances change, but there is a big difference between that state of affairs and Microsoft openly starting to talk about that,  which would be a sort of shot over Yahoo’s bow.   That does not appear to have happened at all, though now Silicon Valley Insider has nabbed another few thousand in advertising impressions for promoting the bogus story.

I assume what’s going on here is the blogOsphere’s normal nonsense where even major blogs write attention grabbing, inaccurate headlines to get the advertising eyeballs, and then mold the facts to support the headline, usually with some miinor disclaimer that, if read between the lines, explains that the story is near -meaningless.

This trend in blogging is pretty interesting and one of the many reasons blogging is only slowly gaining the journalistic credibility it probably already deserves.

Google Trends: More Website Metrics Confusion

Posted on by
Reply

Fred Wilson has a fantastic post today discussing the critical subject of Website metrics, which remains one of the murkiest of online topics.    He compares reports from several services and concludes that Google Trends may be a lot like Alexa, which means not very helpful except in the most general of senses.

He also notes that Comscore has big challenges if the traffic is below 500k (visits per month I think), which I think would exclude about 99% of all websites from getting accurately measured since that is a large traffic level.

His advice?   Use lots of services and use caution when interpreting the numbers. 

AP Retreats from the North Bridge, but the shots were read around the world

Posted on by
Reply

The AP’s tiny battle with Rogers Cadenhead over copyright issues appears to have ended with a whimper and no bang as the AP met with Cadenhead and has issued a vague statement about upcoming standards.

Rogers noted today:

I think AP and other media organizations should focus on how to encourage bloggers to link their stories in the manner they like, rather than hoping their lawyers can rebottle the genie of social news.

He’s right regardless of how the courts will be interpreting upcoming cases of copyright infringement.   Unlike the music industry where a case can be made that bootlegging leads to lost revenue, blogging AP stories arguably *improves* APs distribution and presence in journalism.   AP is shooting itself in the foot, if not the head, when it fights bloggers with copyright lawsuits and takedowns.

Obviously blogging has a long way to go before it will have the mainstream respect typically reserved for mainstream journalism.    Part of gaining that respect will be bloggers taking on more responsibility and accountability with respect to attribution and quoting.  Meanwhile the legacy news industry must come to grips with the fact that blogging isn’t just news and analysis, it is a dynamic and powerful global conversation that will throw off any chains as fast as they can be applied.

Yahoo Needs Mark Cuban

Posted on by
Reply

Most of the commentary about Yahoo’s short term troubles has focused far too much on Yahoo’s short term troubles.

Danny Sullivan offered a little more insight today suggesting correctly that Yahoo has got a lot more going for it than most, including the market at large, seem to suggest. Yet Danny may still be barking up the wrong tree to suggest that modest changes and a better Google deal will resurrect Yahoo’s market prospects. That might have worked some time ago, but I think a much better plan is very simple: Hire Mark Cuban and Donny Deutsch as morale building maniacs and cutthroat competitors. These guys are flamboyant and will put the big buzz and the fear back into the correct side of this equation: the underperforming part.

Yahoo is still a fantastic *company*, but I think the morale and innovation is so low at all levels that the best approach is major shakeup (rather than just talking about a major shakeup) . This would include large success incentives for old and new blood, and probably include a pretty sharp axe for the heads of those who are not enthusiastic about powerfully resurrecting the prospects of what is still a great company.

Given the mass exodus of executives right now it should be crystal clear to everyone that there is a leadership crisis at Yahoo. Jerry Yang is a brilliant guy and appears to retain a lot of loyalty even as people abandon the ship. Yet for reasons that nobody seems to understand he clearly has been unable to rally the troops to the degree needed at Yahoo. Part of the problem – I’m beginning to think a huge part – is the failure of the troops. Although most critics focus almost entirely on Yahoo’s top level management, I think one of the problem dynamics that came about as Yahoo grew was that despite a core group of dedicated engineers a large number of workers and middle managers simply put in their time, lived lavishly in the gravy days, and watched as their options lost value while Google and successful startup employees became rich. Very rich. It is more than a little demoralizing knowing that thousands of people no brighter or more capable than you are sitting on millions in GOOG value while your YHOO stock and options are decreasing in value.

I remember first seeing this “morale differential” between Yahoo and Google in person at a search conference in Las Vegas in 2005. Where the Google engineers and staff were almost giddy with excitement the Yahoo folks were often uninspired, and I remember clearly how one of the higher level managers was a lot more interested in the parties than evangelizing on behalf of Yahoo’s budding publisher network. There were some really clear exceptions to this such as the incomparable Jeremy Zawodny who gave a brilliant presentation about his extensive blogging experiences as Yahoo’s informal and unofficial blogger laureate. Until his departure last week Jeremy has been one of the reasons to think Yahoo could turn around. Although I’m happy to see the management folks leave I worry that Yahoo’s engineering teams remain a key asset as Yahoo’s traffic is still close to the world’s largest online footprint depending on what metric you use to count people and pageviews.

So Yahoo the answer is simple: Mark Cuban and Donny Deutsch, morale building maniacs. You may have blown the chance to let Microsoft bail you out of the troubles though Carl “I’ll be back” Icahn will certainly come back into the picture as he should. Oh, and he will put in Mark Cuban.

Discloure: long on YHOO

Social Learning 2.0

Posted on by
1

Here is a great website about the intersection of education and the internet. One of the concerns of the main author is that educational institutions are ill-prepared to cope with the hurricane of new media information as well as potential new online approaches to teaching.

This is a really fascinating topic partly because for hundreds thousands of years formal education has languished under the province of a priestly class of educators operating pretty much in the same fashion since the Greeks introduced the professor to student lecture model of teaching.   Although it’s not a *bad* model, I’d strongly suggest we could do a lot better, especially given the plethora of new online tools readily on hand at no cost to almost everybody.

Where an old, legacy class about global markets would dredge up boring examples from dated textbooks, a new class could use real time stock information such as the Archipelago bidding environment, currency quotes, breaking news, and so much more.   In science students should be actively participating in blogs specializing in topics like Global Warming, artificial intelligence, and biology as well as interacting with other students around the globe.

A professor friend of mine who taught an online accounting class said there were challenges with the lack of personal contact, but benefits from student interaction and the fact he could answer the same predictable questions with an FAQ rather than having to deal with them over and over, basically freeing up more time for individualized instruction on the complicated topics.

As with so many online topics education is evolving rapidly within the rapidly evolving overall environment, so it is very hard to predict where things will wind up.   However I think it’s easy to say there is a lot of potential for improvements on the current outmoded lecture models, and the internet kitchen is cooking up new solutions every day.

Links and SEO

Posted on by
Reply

From a search ranking perspective links are one of a website’s top concerns- probably the most important concern as linking often trumps content in terms of where a site will place for search queries.

As always, a great source for SEO information is Matt Cutts blog over at Google where a careful read of his SEO posts will bring you a lot of enlightenment about Google do’s and don’ts. His post of a few days ago was particularly interesting as it deals with Google’s crackdown on paid links that try to pass pagerank. This is one of the most contentious topics in SEO and an area where I wish Google would be more transparent since there are so many linking approaches that are not paid but may be questionable in the eyes of Google. The fact that they depend so much on reporting of paid links is also a problem as it allows aggressive SEOs to “game the system” by selectively reporting competitors while creating complex and undetectable linking for their own sites.

However my biggest concern about linking is not something Google can fix, and that is the fact that even in the world of what Google views as legitimate, authority passing links, strategic linking to “friend and associate” websites has largely replaced the early approaches to linking where people work to simply link to a great resource for the reader.   As blogging has exploded into prominence and linking importance this problem has become critical, and we now see that early and well established blogs will outrank far better resources that have few incoming links because they are new.   Ideally, the older resources would be better stewards and link out to the good new resources but generally the stakes have become too high as links are now correctly seen as more valuable than advertising and bloggers have become too reluctant to link to other resources unless there is some reciprocal benefit.

Media Bloggers Association – Who ARE those guys?

Posted on by
1

As a blogger of important, exciting, and provocative *breaking, real time tech news* as well as broken and static personal rants, as well as (formerly) AP material with my own brand of questionable commentary, I’m really interested in the firestorm of controversy surrounding AP’s odd decision to crack down on a single, relatively obscure blog Drudgeretort.com ( not to be confused with the the much larger Drudge Report.). Their crime? Users had posted small parts of AP stories without permission or using AP’s new online payment system at 12.50 for five words.

Major blogs jumped to action, calling for an AP Boycott, while another heretofore obscure group calling itself the “Media Bloggers Association” has agreed to meet with AP.   Based on some of the coverage I assumed this group had considerable standing in the blog community, and I was just ignorant about their existence.   I’m still checking, but based on their own website information it’s not clear to me exactly what role the MBA plays with respect to the media, let alone blogging.

I’ll reserve judgement on them until I know more, but I do object to the idea that “news bloggers” like me are going to be represented by a group I don’t even know about.   Rather than the “corporate meeting” format  maybe the AP should meet with … everybody via an online environment where we can get widespread participation across the board, especially from … bloggers.

Philadelphia Wireless Resurrection and the Philly Cheesesteak Connection

Posted on by
Reply

The largest city wireless project in the USA (and the world?) is in Philly, and was just revived by an investment consortium after being nearly abandoned by Earthlink due to poor signal quality and only 6000 subscriber signups (despite the zero cost where profits will come from advertising).    Google’s Mountain View project never took off the way people thought it might.  

Attribution for story idea goes to Reuters.   Hey, wait, I don’t have to give attribution for a story *idea*, but I’m trying to provide extra attribution in line with my concerns that the AP boycott is distracting bloggers from their responsibility to stop doing so much leeching of stories from AP, Reuters, and other mainstream legacy media outlets not to mention other bloggers. 

So, I’m linking AGAIN to Reuters and AGAIN!  BAM!     BAM!   
HA!    AP – NO LINKS FOR YOU! 

My gut take on citywide WIFI is that a good quality signal with good bandwidth is the key, along with a *single* really good advertising salesperson who is also an internet evangelist.   Once local businesses wake up to how much most of them are missing the boat on the internet marketing (preferrring to squander too much on yellow page and other print ads), city WIFI ads should practically sell themselves. 

 People don’t mind advertising all that much – look for example at pretty much all internet, all broadcast TV, and much of Cable TV right now.    PBS doesn’t have advertising?   Nonsense!   Those interminable and lame pledge breaks and increasingly aggressive “not advertising” sponsor bits are the equivalent of advertising to anybody but the most nitpicking PBS volunteer.     Not to mention that the specials shown during the pledge sessions are often specifically designed to get more pledges. 

Citywide WIFI?   Free.   Advertising Philly Cheesesteaks on Philadelphia’s Citywide WIFI?    Priceless.