Author Archives: JoeDuck

Unknown's avatar

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.

Real Estate Heat Maps from Zillow

Posted on by
5

Zillow is really a helpful application for real estate.  Check out this heat map of Silicon Valley Real Estate prices, giving you an idea of the most expensive areas here.   Zillow’s got them for several metro regions.

I’ve been looking at some houses to buy as investments in Ashland Oregon and Zillow’s been helpful, though I think it’s a mistake to put too much stock in their Zestimates.    For example Zillow estimates the value at a place offered at 429k to be 541k and another at 300k to be valued at 379k.   As much as I’d like to turn an instant profit of 100k and 79k I think the estimate is simply way out of whack with the prevailing Ashland Real Estate conditions which suggest that…. things are not selling well and prices are going to go down.

Death to Brands! Death to Brands?

Posted on by
Reply

Although it’s early in the process, I think, and hope, that the concept of “brand” is going away in favor of the concept of utility/efficiency/pragmatism/reason.     As mass marketing, and the masses, move to online venues I think the notion of advertising as “branding” is suffering.     Online advertising such as pay per click and the increasing importance of marketing to highly targeted niches will make branding more difficult and expensive.   Online venues allow you to select a service or product provider far more objectively than before and with the benefit of tons of input from other people.    Real commentary is trumping advertising as the information source of choice, and this is a very good thing.

Yet many 2.0 companies don’t seem to get the message yet.    I think the Silicon Valley echo chamber makes it hard for many new online efforts to see how they have little chance of becoming more than an online footnote once the angel funding dries up.  In fact I think the new “life cycle” for 2.0 companies takes advantage of this ignorance about the death of brands which is why you see so many new companies with great logos, cool schwag, good business plans, attractive booth salespeople, and bright technical teams, and a killer plan to “brand” themselves as the next best thing …..but they have NO REAL BUSINESS.

I haven’t done much research, but I think it’s notable how many of the huge success stories did not seem to start out with big notions of branding their efforts.     Google, Yahoo, Myspace, etc etc are not products of clever marketing, rather great ideas that came at the right time.

Blog, Humbug!

Posted on by
4

Over at Adam’s he forced me to think a bit more about my concern that blogs, forums, and wikis all fall short of the ideal environment for information exchange / communication / enlightenment. He basically asked what was needed to create a better environment and I answered:

I don’t have a good solution in mind but it seems to me the analog offline is something like a party or informal conference space (e.g. the Meet the Engineers session at Google Dance though it ended too early for me to introduce myself to … you!).

In that environment there are “conversation leaders” who are the center of attention and gather people interested in a specific topic, but you can also break off to talk with somebody you just met there. Blogs seem to suffer from too much focus on the blog author and forums from too much focus on worthless or off topic comments. Wikis …. just don’t usually work well due to lack of participation.

I have a feeling the “solution” may come from virtual spaces like SL or game environments which can leverage available technology (e.g. web search, messaging, threaded conversations) with the social component we all seek as primates.

…..hmmmm … I’m also thinking that the dialogs at Myspace, though often painfully superficial or bizarre, are more “real” and interactive than many in the tech or political blog space. There, the comments have a higher profile than in conventional blogs and incline users to bounce from one member to another based on the comment streams.

Kiko.com sells for $258,100 on Ebay today. No champagne glasses came with this deal.

Posted on by
1

I feel bad for the Kiko folks even though they are but a handful of the millions of workers who live in the shadow of the search giants, hoping they’ll toss a golden bone or two out now and then. Kiko’s calendar application was probably the victim of Google’s free calendar, as some of the analytics programs are victims of Google’s brilliant plan to distribute Urchin (now google analytics) free to all. Brilliant because it lets you track PPC campaigns and will likely serve to increase Google’s PPC revenues even as people become more savvy about their traffic and PPC spend.

Of course at 258k somebody may be able to turn this around into something profitable. As with Real Estate “fiascos” that go broke sometimes it’s the second team of managers who can come in and, with a much lower capitalization cost, turn the biz around. I doubt it in this case though.

Me? Sue Yahoo!? Sure, what the heck.

Posted on by
2

The “Checkmate Strategic Group, Inc.” of Florida has been sending me notices about why I should jump on the click fraud bandwagon and help them sue Yahoo! as part of their class action Yahoo! lawsuit because I have bought Pay Per Click ads over the years, and as everybody knows some of that money went to pay fraudsters.

With a name like “Checkmate Strategy Group” they must be good – or at least be good marketers, since I think the main goal on these suits is to pay out some pittance to the class masses and land several million for the firm.   Hey, you can trust those “Checkmate Strategy Group” guys in a way you would not trust “Vegas Craig’s $2 legal opinions dot com”.    Sorry, no offense to Vegas Craig.

Ha – it’s sort of like PPC in reverse where Yahoo will lose or settle and “return”, say,  five hundred million nickels and dimes and quarters to hundreds of thousands of advertisers in the form of $100 here and $1000 there, while the CheckMate Group gets to keep 100 million nickels and dimes and quarters which is a LOT of  cold, hard cash.  100 million dimes is ten million dollars – I bet that sure beats ambulance chasing.

As much as I like retribution for the shameful lack of oversight on the part of Search Engines since PPC ads took off,  I think Google rather than Yahoo’s been the overwhelming beneficiary of all those ill gotten fraudulent PPC gains in the form of a clicked nickel here and a dime there.   They got off easy with a recent $90 million settlement.

So, on second thought maybe I won’t sue Yahoo! cuz I like those guys.  They are doing great 2.0 stuff  all over the place and opening up data and maps and cool stuff.

On the other hand I sure could use a few of those shiny nickels back ….

Little Miss Sunshine * * * *

Posted on by
Reply

This excellent film reflects on the ironies and quirks of the American middle class experience as it follows a family on their roadtrip to a California beauty pageant for little girls. Alan Arkin is the explosive grandpa, Greg Kinnear his son the wannabe motivational speaker, Toni Collette the strugging wife with a teen who refuses to speak and a bright and enthusiastic daughter. The cast is simply superb both individually and together. Little Miss Sunshine succeeds where hollywood typically fails miserably by bringing complex, funny, and tragic characters together and making us care about them all.

Todd Davidson of Oregon is the State Tourism Director of the Year

Posted on by
1

Congratulations to my pal Todd Davidson who was just named State Tourism Director of the Year by the Travel Industry Association of America.    This is one of the top awards in travel and it’s great to see him win it.   I worked with Todd back in the day when I was doing a lot of regional and state tourism work for Oregon and I’m so glad to see him honored in this way.   Congratulations Todd!

… Do I have a valuable PO Box or what?

Posted on by
Reply

Funny – just after writing about Talent real estate in my post this morning I got a spam email from So. California lending place today that said:

There is a new lending program for homes such as yours on Po Box 141 that have become available based on the dramatic value increase in the Talent area …

Sure, I’ll borrow based on the new, huge value of my PO Box in Talent Oregon. Let’s be conservative and say $250,000. I need the money to remodel my PO Box so my kids don’t have to share a room.

Talent, Oregon Real Estate

Posted on by
3

Here in lovely Talent, Oregon the real estate prices have been going up in spectacular fashion. Until now. As a favor to my pal Jack Latvala I’m helping him set up a PPC campaign over at Star Properties, the closest thing to an official real estate office for Talent we have here. They also cover Ashland Oregon and have a lot of Ashland Oregon Real Estate listings as well as Talent Oregon Real Estate. Jack and Lynn are great to work with and are one of those rare brokerages that are more interested in helping people and the community than in landing the sales commission.

We’ll start with the $50 in free clicks from Google from SES and see if they can get any action from that bidding on terms like Talent Oregon, Talent Real Estate, Ashland Real Estate, etc. I’m very interested in this from a Search optimization perspective as well. Star would very reasonably be considered the most relevant site for Talent Real Estate, but probably not for Ashland Real Estate. However, the listing at the top for Ashland has a PR of only 2 and is not one of the big players there. I’m thinking he may be the cleverest one though as that’s a choice spot. In these “longer tail” areas we see that Google often fails to deliver the type of result you’d get if you asked a very knowlegeable local from Ashland about Real Estate, and I think this bodes well for Yahoo’s more humanized social search approaches.