Author Archives: JoeDuck

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About JoeDuck

Internet Travel Guy, Father of 2, small town Oregon life. BS Botany from UW Madison Wisconsin, MS Social Sciences from Southern Oregon. Top interests outside of my family's well being are: Internet Technology, Online Travel, Globalization, China, Table Tennis, Real Estate, The Singularity.

Zune song sharing can be summed up in two words. Brilliant, and Finally!

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Rumor has it that Zune will encourage song sharing with revenue share to the “user song promoter” who sends a song to friends to listen to free and then gets some money if they buy it. MS certainly would be wise to cut the users in on the profits.

As I recently noted it’s surprising how users still don’t demand more of a piece of the action, though not surprising how Google, YouTube, Myspace, Yahoo, MSN, and other user content collection points, the key beneficiaries of this arrangement, have not done much to innovate in that direction.

Good for MS to break that ice. Users, collectively, hold all the *future* revenue streams in their wallets. Therefore they could hold most of the power. It’s about time they used it.

More at CrunchGear

Google launches customized search

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Wow, Matt notes that unlike offerings by Yahoo and LIVE, Google’s going to allow you to include thousands of URLs in a customized search specialized for your own websites.

This is exactly what I was looking for in travel as it allows you toa create a great regionally targeted search engine using “known and trusted” URLs combined with Google’s monster search power. They’ll also be sharing revenues from the searches though historically that’s been too small amount with the generic customized search (which they’ve had for some time).

Good going Google! Yahoo and MSN – copy this approach NOW!

Yahoo really should have come up with this “including many URLs” approach because it’ll encourage the community to pick trusted URLs to include in their searches, and Yahoo, unlike Google, would be comfortable using that human feedback. It’s spammable, sure, but a great spam fighting tool in that the power of the whole community is unleashed in the selection process.

Hey!  I built one for Oregon Travel and will upgrade California Travel with  more good sites soon.    This has a lot of potential if Google uses the community input to help weed out crappy sites and upgrade unknown sites, though they tend to avoid this type of human (and therefore spammable) input.    Yahoo is more comfortable with that approach so I hope they are taking advantage of it via the Rollyo and Yahoo custom search user inputs.

MORE about this:

Google

TechCrunch

CNET

Blogoscoped

Billion dollar Video Conferencing Market? Maybe, but you’d have to charge a jaw dropping $299,000 per fancy station. Wait, Cisco IS charging $299,000 per station!

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This NYT Article (requires login) has Cisco seriously suggesting that companies are going to buy $299,000 video conferencing stations.   Wait…here’s the cheap version:  The basic TelePresence 1000 model, designed for one-on-one meetings, is priced at $79,000 per station.

Oh, OK then I’ll take TWO of those please.

Talk about out of touch and over technologized?  I suppose it’s possible that a brilliant sales effort will convince upper management of the big companies that this is worth it and that Cisco’s fancy pants model is the only way to go.  It’s certainly also true that even this exhorbitant cost for the units pales in comparison to sending people around in airplanes and putting them up in hotels (well, actually you can buy a lot of plane tix for $299,000 but true that if everybody actually used this approach, which has been around for many years now, it would save money over travel).

My point?  This totally misses the boat on how to get work done.   Efficient people use email and, if really needed and they like it they call on phones.  If they like to see people they can use existing, virtually free computer cam conferencing.

Efficient people also meet each other in real time and real space to have a beer or dinner and connect.  That’s a primate thing and it’s condusive to good biz, but can’t be replicated via even a high definition TV environment.   Nope, not even a $299,000 one.

Danny I was hoping for more – how about a Search UNconference?

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I don’t know Danny Sullivan personally aside from comments at his blog and forums, but all reports say he’s a fine guy and easily one of the top search specialists in the world.

When it looked like Danny would be leaving Search Engine Strategies earlier in the year I was optimistic that he might break those of us in the publishing and search marketing fields out of the ‘same old speakers’ and ‘same old pitches’ one tends to hear at the two main search conferences: SES and WebmasterWorld’s “PubCon”.   However he’s not leaving yet, so I’m happy for him I guess but disappointed he won’t come up with something new.

I think many would agree that Danny’s the guy who could bring something really new and powerful to the growing, global, search marketing human (and information) network. Something that would capture the spirit of “Web 2.0” which is far more collaborative, information rich, virtual, and unstructured than the internet of the 1990s.   Also, there are a HUGE number of case studies now that reflect all the common problems websites have.  Simply examining all these in a conference environment would be far more helpful than listening to yet another SEO guy talk about how he gamed Google’s Algo five years ago.

I don’t want to be too critical of SES and WMW because these are good conferences all things considered. However after attending some UNconferences such as MashupCamp I’m convinced that the UNconference format (or things like Yahoo’s Hack Day) are vastly superior to the old standard where speakers, often with less experience than many in the audience, struggle to speak clearly and make with their weak powerpoint presentations relevant.

UNconferences, like Startup Camp in a few weeks, tend to unleash the power of the audience and ironically the lack of structure creates far more cohesive sessions. I think this is because your brain goes into active vs passive mode.

So Danny after you make your deserved big bucks back at SES over the next year, how about shaking things up for 2007?

Information explosion keeps filling the bomb craters with more info!

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The infinite storage capacity of the internet combined with the searchability of that growing information resource makes the current information revolution unprecedented and perhaps even mind-altering.

In the past knowledge (and stupidity) had significant confines in the form of printed pages which would eventually be relegated to dusty old stacks in university libraries, used book stores, computer hard disks, etc.

Now, infinite storage combines with social networking and search to pour billions of items online every day and make them searchable and accessible to anybody.

It’s hard – in fact impossible – to know how this will shake out.   Is it too optimistic to hope  that as the online encyclopedia becomes almost totally comprehensive and accessible we’ll find new ways to merge people and information, and this will bring a sort of new age intellectual Renaissance where we dispense with many of the human limitations that make sweeping human progress so elusive?

List of SEO blogs

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Aaron Wall’s got one of the best lists of SEO related blogs I’ve run across. Although I think most of the people here know what they are doing I think SEO as a general concept is overrated. There are risks with even moderately aggressive SEO so it’s not clear to me that a business should invest in specialists. Rather in most cases the best approach is to follow the generally accepted good practices and create as large a content footprint as possible.

Hey, here’s another list of SEO blogs 

Aaron’s reply is such a good point I’m going to change my advice and suggest that sites should either get some SEO advice or assign people in-house to review the wealth of *mostly* accurate SEO advice online.

  1. Until you really dig into them it is hard to appreciate how bad off the SEO is even on some of the leading authoritative sites on the web. For many companies SEO isn’t just about taking chances, but is also about minimizing risks and using the assets you have. Sometimes an external consultant is necessary to get a frame of thought to be able to move through a large corporation.Obviously given my brand and market position I have to state that I think SEO is good stuff, but I think there are lots of way to bake SEO into your marketing plan that cost little extra in terms of time or effort, but can deliver large returns. Comment by aaron wall | October 22, 2006

    Aaron that is such a good point I’ll change my advice. It is clear that many companies, even some huge ones, are ignoring even the most basic aspects of optimizing websites. I agree the money they lose due to this is perhaps even hundreds of times what they would pay to have *you* review their site and suggest changes, and thousands of times what they’d pay to buy your excellent SEO Book.

    Part of the challenge I’m talking about however are the growing number of bogus “SEO Specialists”, online SEO scams, and even folks working at the big SEO companies who suck. I ran an interesting experiment last year with a very prominent SEO firm. They did “good” work but it did not boost my traffic and I realized I would likely do better myself simply adding, for example, a blog and more content.

Henry on Google

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Henry Blodget, in my opinion, is writing some of the most thoughtful stuff about Google’s share price and prospects. Ironically he’s precluded from working in securities or offering personal stock advice – I think forever – due to his and other irrational exhuberances of the internet bubble days. Bubble ONE, that is. Bubble two is not a bubble, it’s a YouTubleGoogle Zeitgeisty thing.

The Gadget Revolution. Gadgets of the world, UNITE!

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A nice ZDnet interview with Google’s Adam Sah suggests the increasing importance gadgets will play in the online landscape. I met a brilliantly enthusiastic Adam at Mashup Camp back in February when all this was just starting to take off and it’s great to see Google is now allowing the gadgets to be used on any website.

In March, at Microsoft’s MIX06, the innovative LIVE team was also very bullish on their LIVE Gadgets which clearly are destined to become a major focus over there as well.

Gadgets create some very interesting complications in terms of website stats and monetization. Google has not focused on monetizing this environment yet and it will be interesting to see how they approach that, though it’s easy to predict they’ll create some revenue share with the gadget publisher to keep everybody happy.

The legal fun may come from compatibility issues with IE7 and Vista. Microsoft would have some incentive to prefer their own sidebar gadgets, which will run on the Vista Desktop, to whatever Google gadgets are developed for that same niche. Yet Google as always is ahead of the marketing curve. Pushing gadgets to be compatible with websites, and not just those with Google desktop installed, may diminish what would have been a big MS advantage with Vista.

Hey – that’s a bit too cynical on my part – I think as they often have done Google is just expanding on a great concept that happens to be a good marketing route as well.