Matt should have been a reporter. Here's a great roundup from Google's Press Day which happened….this morning.
Google Breaking News …. from our man at the Plex
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Author Archives: JoeDuck
Microsoft and Yahoo? What would you call THAT search?
Reports are swirling of a possible Microsoft Yahoo deal that would fight Google with new search cleverness and strategies. What would we call a hybrid MS/Live/Yahoo search engine?
MooCroHa!
MYooHaHa!
YaLive!
LiveYoo!
None of those work for me, but I think I like: YaMoo!
Especially good when OEMd on Gateway Computers.
Let’s have more OPEN conferences – a LOT more.
I've been to all or portions of about 7 internet conferences in the past year, and without a doubt Mashup Camp was my favorite in terms of the quality of the information and the way it was delivered.
Unlike the highly structured MIX06, WebmasterWorld, AD TECH, and Search Engine Strategies, MashupCamp lets attendees decide the topics, interact via wiki and other features, and in my favorite session had developers present their stuff to small roving groups in 5 minute "speed geeking" sessions.
Rather than take a nap because the topics were rehashes of what I knew, I had to take a walk outside to cool my brain from the firehose of Web 2.0 information overloading me in Mountain View during the 2 day conference.
I think and hope that events like Foo Camp, Bar Camps, and Mashup Camps are the future of power networking, because this type of conference builds a much stronger type of relationship between attendees and powers more effective idea building than the traditional "lecture/session/track" model. It's a wild west out there and the conferences should reflect that.
Conspicuous is the fact that this conference charged nothing to attend, cleverly getting corporates to sponsor the meals and other needed items. I did chip in a few hundred because that was helpful but I don't think it'll be needed at the upcoming conferences, which now have even more active support of Yahoo, Google, MSN, ASK, and many more key industry players.
Huge KUDOS to David Berlind, Doug Gold, Mary Hodder and Doc Searles who not only put on a great event but are doing it again in July and expaning the camp to include "Mashup University".
Mission Impossible III – the secret of the rabbit’s foot NOT REVEALED HERE!
Though NOT to be confused with the superb TV series which had a sophistication and charm notoriously lacking in all 3 Mission films, MI III is fun and fairly clever with one excellent plot twist I won't reveal here.
Calling it "action packed" would be an understatement. It's a (PG 13!) orgy of torture, murders, extrajudicial killings, bombings, explosions, implanted head detonators, defibrillators, and ….. Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise marriage references.
I could certainly believe Seymour Hoffman as an evil international bad guy, and Lawrence Fishburn as IMF spymaster, and even Tom Cruise as super spy, but what was HARD TO BELIEVE was how close Tom's real life beau Katie Holmes looks to his movie beau Michelle Monaghan.
Scary, right?
Which brings me back to the film. Outtakes have revealed that the China made "Rabbits Foot" which was the subject of great interest to bad and good guys alike is a super sensitive biometric identification device that can help Tom determine if the girl he's with is actually Katie or Michelle. Without it Tom's pending marriage would be at risk. Given the multi billion success of the Cruise film empire palimony is incredibly expensive, helping to set the Rabbit's Foot's price tag, which WAS mentioned in the film, at $680 million.
Money well spent I'd say.
Mission III: MoneyMaking II
Off to see Mission Impossible III this afternoon, but first let's check the economics of the franchise at www.boxofficemojo.com
The first two have made very close to a billion so far on production and marketing costs of only about 240 million, which I think helps explain why we see more lackluster blockbusters than thoughful, clever films. Films at this level are much more an economic enterprise than a creative one.
I'm not saying there are no good blockbusters – many are and I for one really enjoy "big" movies. But I'm often surprised at how superficial/silly/nasty/foolish/weak/ridiculous/etc the big films can be given their huge production budgets and top level direction writing, and acting. This may best be explained by the fact they are addressing a mass entertainment appetite and looking to capture the maximum number of viewers (economic concerns) rather than making the most creative film they can.
So, I'll keep feeding the blockbusters my ticket while hoping for more great independent films to make it into wider distribution – perhaps through the exploding online video venues like youtube.com
| MISSION Impossible: Release Date: May 22, 1996 |
| Domestic: | $180,981,856 | 39.6% |
| + Foreign: | $275,512,947 | 60.4% |
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| = Worldwide: | $456,494,803 | |
| DOMESTIC SUMMARY | ||||||
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Mission Impossible II: Release Date: May 24, 2000
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| Domestic: | $215,409,889 | 39.5% |
| + Foreign: | $330,492,673 | 60.5% |
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| = Worldwide: | $545,902,562 | |
| DOMESTIC SUMMARY | ||||||
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Another one bites the dust.com?
It’s spring and people in the travel sector are all buzzing about revamping their websites. In many cases this will happen with little regard to quality information or navigation and will wind up with the site losing traffic thanks to deep sixing pages that have been indexed for years. Even with 301 redirection it’s not clear you can recapture old page ranks easily after revamping sites. The best advice for travel sites? CHANGE little with your old indexed pages unless you are having problems within search indexes. Add NEW PAGES to the existing site with information in mind rather than “improving the look”.
For reasons I simply can’t understand people in travel cannot get beyond “image” and therefore almost completely misperceive the value of designing websites not for “looks”, but for info richness. Although nice looks are not totally incompatible with nice info, one sees few sites that blend them in ways that will optimize the intended result (more travel related business in the area).
Errors like flash introductions and splash pages are simply too dang common in the travel sector which ironically still has simply staggering potential for sites that are built to help users find usable information.
PPC campaigns are far more common at the mom and pop business level than at the higher level destination management level where they’d have ROIs of ten to ONE HUNDRED times that of TV and print campaigns where the travel ad spend is largely wasted. There is still a very common notion that you can drive people to a URL using print advertising as effectively as with online ads. In fact the cost to drive people online with print is about 10-100x the online cost (I know this from extensive experiments I did in my past life as webmaster for Southern Oregon Visitors Association).
I’m finally coming to understand that as human primates we have a tendency to be stubborn and hold old ideas dear until the consequences become so severe and negataive or the evidence so overwhelming we simply MUST change course. Combine this with most people’s mathematical illiteracy and you’ve got what we’ve got – a LOT of wasted advertising buys in the travel sector, not to mention waste, waste, and more waste in all areas where human stubborness prevails over reason.
Squidoo’s gonna make me a cool million ….in only 1,666,667 years
A few months ago I'd tested Squidoo and concluded that their revenue sharing publishing model was unfavorable and along the lines of "You build it and manage it and do all the work and we'll *share* some of the cash". Based on my March statement I think I was right to be skeptical of playing that game:
JOSEPH'S STATEMENT (From 03/01/2006 to 03/31/2006)
You have earned $0.05 total.
Internet Report Card Gives Google A, Yahoo B+, MSN C-
I think CNN's grades are realistic. However grades are a *trailing* measure of performance and the real question is what's in the future for these companies. This much is clear: All have really sharp folks working for them. All face challenges from their growth which can inhibit innovation and flexibility.
I think Google's done the best overcoming that challenge but I also think it's because the initial crowd is still pretty much in place and still excited about work. When kids start coming into the Google families, and mundane concerns start piling up, and the early GooglePeeps are sitting on millions in stock, the 9am to midnight work routine is going to get old…fast. I think Google's ability to keep their best and brightest may be the biggest challenge they face. Working in their favor though is that Brin and Page are both young and brilliant. They won't burn out anytime soon and certainly have an edge on the MSN folks who have made their mark already. MSN's older leaders simply *cannot* understand the internet the way younger people do, and even bringing brilliant but "first generation" internet people like Ray Ozzie on board is unlikely to solve this. What would solve this? Buying all/part of Yahoo as appears to be in the works right now.
Yahoo and MSN have already been through the "losing some of your best people" problems and I think have a more mature and somewhat stable workforce. This is good for maintaining status quo but also is clearly a factor in Yahoo and MSN's ability to overtake Google in most online endeavors.
The search market share numbers can be misleading in my opinion. People no longer move to Google due to superior search, they do it because as the average user becomes less sophisticated they are simply responding to the collective habit of most users which is to use Google. I predict this effect will wear off as search quality converges, people move more to vertical and user-generated search routines, and Microsoft exploits it's browser and OS advantages.
These grades are from the second quarter of a course that's lasting a lifetime. Anything can happen as this all heats up. The only certainty is …. change.
Leviathan
Wow, what a bad movie. This blockbuster finds the crew of a deep sea mining operation battling – usually unsuccessfully – with a mutating gut sucking deep sea monster. Is Richard Crenna ever in good movies?
This one mangles the story enough that even excellent actors Richard Crenna, Hector Alizondo, Peter Weller, and Amanda Pays would best be put out of their misery by the Leviathan monster. But you'll have to settle for only TWO of those four getting their just reward for appearing in a pitiful blood and guts sillyness.
Hey Leviathan, do you eat bad movie CDs?
NMohwy.com Experiment update
For the story so far click HERE
Interesting…site:nmohwy.com shows only 142 out of about 3000 pages, but NONE appear to be supplemental anymore. So after time and/or a few sitemap submissions the supps plus most pages seemed to be deleted from the Google index in favor of the 142 pages now showing. This happened over the past few days though it seemed that the supps were slowly disappearing over the last month or so.
This activity seems to have had NO effect on the low Google referrers which total only about 25 for the first few days of May vs 252 from Yahoo.
So…Experiment has so far failed to resurrect Google’s faith in these pages which used to get great traffic with pretty much identical content (though inferior link structure and they looked better organized before – these are just thrown together with the old data).
This leads me to think that perhaps OHWY’s good fortune in the past came in part from the many interlinked state domains. Although this practice would seem legitimate and normal, many have noted problems from this and/or sharing C block IPs as these state sites did.
Joe Duck 