Category Archives: blogs

Microsoft ads will monetize Facebook Faces

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Nice play by Microsoft to capture future users, though I’m still very intrigued that all these models can thrive by giving users a very modest number of tools to put themselves online, providing common space for people, and then keeping all the money.    I don’t mind *sharing* some revenue with big players but I think it’s remarkable how people simply let the big players nab all the bucks that are the result of their collective …. efforts.

Even *current* Myspacers, most of whom are young teens, envy Facebook accounts which are more restrictive and targeted. I’d guess Facebook eyeballs will be worth 2+ times Myspace Eyeballs in terms of advertising value – maybe much more.

Why is everybody writing off MS and bearish on Yahoo? Once they stop being idiotic they’ll realize they have the same sized audience as Google and will monetize that viewership.

With Vista’s launch, MS will control viewers in ways only their lawyers know for sure.

Google’s at 60% of the search market.   That’s probably about as high as it will ever go.

WordPress noindex / nofollow problem solved

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Last week I noticed my precious little blog posts, which have been nicely indexed by Google, were dropping out of the index like flies. Of course I should have checked the source code but it took Aaron’s note today to make me realize the blog was placing a noindex/nofollow everywhere, making it impossible to get indexed.

Appears this also happened to the illustrious Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame, and there I learned to flip the “privacy” feature back to allow searches in.

To fix the WordPress NOINDEX NOFOLLOW problem click DASHBOARD > OPTIONS > PRIVACY and select to allow search engines.

I’m still a bit concerned that somebody may have done this maliciously, but never attribute to malice that which can be reasonably attributed to stupidity (or some bug in the system).

Anyway, who would stoop so low? Duck hunters?

CEO blogging brings CEO sympathy, so why not do it?

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New York Times notes that only ONE of the Fortune 500 CEOs is a blogger. That would be Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, who’s also a very cool guy for supporting MashupCamps in Silicon Valley and sporting very long hair.

Should the other 499 CEOs be blogging? Even if we leave aside the challenges they’d face from SEC and shareholder scrutiny of every post, leaving them and the company open to liabilities, I’m not at all convinced that blogging is suitable to old style business models.

However, it’s VERY suitable to new style business models and I think the early Corporate CEO adopters like Parsons at GoDaddy and blog Maverick Mark Cuban are going to see a lot of long term value from the practice, especially if they are ever challenged by the very forces that keep other company leaders from blogging. If, for example, ICANN or the SEC challenged Bob Parsons or Mark Cuban on some aspect of their business I’d be a lot more sympathetic to their side of things because I’ve read these guys and know they are straight shooters who often wear their business decisions on their sleeve. Without blogs they’d just be big shadowy Corporate insiders, with them comes a sort of friendly transparency that Robert Scoble and Shel Israel note in their excellent book about this topic, Naked Conversations.

Mike Arrington – Selling eggs and serving beer to the Web 2.0 miners

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In the California of 1850 the Gold miners rarely struck it rich, but many of the saloons, shops, and others who offered the miners a supporting infrastructure did very, very well.

156 years later things have not changed all that much.   Tens of thousands of people flock to Silicon Valley to make their fortunes.   They mine for electrons rather than gold, but only a handful strike it rich.

Enter Mike Arrington, the charming and very sharp fellow who runs TechCrunch, arguably the top Web 2.0 information watering hole in the blogosphere.

CNN Money has a great article about how Mike and a handful of other bloggers have launched publishing empires, rising from obscurity to international prominence over just the last few years.

Although Arrington has his hand and money invested in several Web 2.0 startups, I predict that, like the saloon keepers of 1850, his key contribution will be as a facilitator and information provider.

Cheers 2.0 Mr. Mike!

First Scoble, then Battelle! Web 2.0, are you bubbling?

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John Battelle, always insightful, is worried about Web 2.0 as a bubble.    Given that he’s one of the great 2.0 enthusiasts this comes as a bit of a surprise.    John writes:

… one of the really cool things about Web 2 is that you can keep making new companies, see if they work, then disassemble them and try again. Only, that won’t happen if the companies are kept falsely alive by a preponderance of venture capital and VC-related spending …

It’s a very provocative point, and I can see this happening during trips to Silicon Valley where some of the efforts simply … suck … yet they have enough funding to keep on trying.   I’m not even convinced some of these folks believe in their companies – they just show up at the trade shows and go through the motions until the money runs out, then head to a new gig.

That said I’m not as worried as Scoble or Battelle about a bubble, because I think this is what is going on right now and I think it’s a healthy and natural, though “new”, model for business development.

* The internet business ecosystem is inherently unstable and ripe with uncertain outcomes.

* This instability and uncertainty leads to an experimental, rather than “sweat equity” approach to  building businesses.

* For the Venture Capital community the best approach is to fund many Web 2.0 startups at modest levels, hoping that perhaps one in ten will become a solid business OR an aquisiton target and yield 10-100x the VC investment.

* For the big players like Google, MSN, Yahoo, the best model is to let the new 2.0 companies shake out on their own and aquire the successful ones as Google did with Keyhole maps, Picasa, etc, etc and Yahoo with Flickr, del.icio.us, etc, etc.

Ummmmm …. but what is the best model for aspiring 2.0 companies?    I think it’s to stay away from the VC fray and build lots of *inexpensive* experiments.     One of the best examples of this approach is the brilliant site PlentyofFish.com by Markus Frind, which started almost as a lark and has become a top tier site in a short time.

Google v. Kinderstart ing over again in September

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The Google vs Kinderstart Lawsuit was dismissed though judge Fogel suggested that if Kinderstart can show  a case of “manual intervention” by Google the outcome might be different and it’s now clear they’ll refile in September, probably as a class action.   If the judge means they only need to show that Google’s done manual intervention *in any case* then this is going to get interesting, because everybody in SEO knows that Matt’s spam team routinely zaps sites that violate guidelines from the index.   I doubt this was Kinderstart’s problem though – rather a severe algorithmic downranking that many sites have suffered over the past few years.     However the Google lawyers may have failed to understand the nuances of the algorithm vs violations and how humans interface with this at Google (I think no single person knows everything over there).  Thus if the judge felt Google claimed “no manual intervention whatsoever” then I think he might get pissed to know how often violating sites get killed off.

If this is any indication of the thinking that could guide the decisions I have no idea what’s going to happen here.

Blogging is great even if you don’t get indexed…

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It’s hard for many people to understand why bloggers who only have a few readers enjoy blogging so much, but I suspect that most writers would understand that it’s fun to just jot things down regardless of the audience.   In fact I think I’m a better writer when I’m NOT writing for others, rather to clarify my own thinking or ideas or muddling confusions.

However, I’m noticing my usual readership of 75-150 appears WAY down, probably because Google is not indexing snippets of my posts as of a few days ago.  My first guess was some temporary confusion over WordPress blog indexing.  However, (and this is a cool thing about blogging) I’ve already got word from Robert Scoble over at his blog – the top wordpress blog – that he’s not seen this before.

Reason Rules! Not.

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Over at the House of J there’s some discussion about the irrationality of some security measures and about the AOL search results privacy scandal (which I also think is a questionably rational concern).

I’ll put up my comments from over there:

IMHO people are missing the key point about privacy — that cat is out of the bag. We need rules about how to penalize for abuses of information, not the pretense that AOL/Yahoo/Google/MSN will do a great job of keeping information away from Govt or commercialization. People worry about abstract Government abuses even as their search stream is processed to invoke better manipulation of their behavior.

RE screening pilots … sounds logical, but the FAA’s record of identifying flight school terrorists is not … impressive. I think the “answer” is for us all to realize that we can’t lower the risk threshold to zero so we should optimize the costs and benefits, allocating resources to the “low hanging fruit” problems in all sectors that are cheap to solve. Solving terror problems in the current fashion is so expensive it’s breaking the bank which will lead to more vulnerability.

Steven says I’m insane. OK, but I’m still right.

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Steven Berlin Johnson, the clever fellow who suggested that TV and video games often make kids smarter and we should stop fretting so much over screen time, is now defending the indefensible – mainstream journalism.

Here Steven suggests that all sane people would agree that Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should. [emphasis added ].

Well, it should NOT play that role because mainstream journalism’s commercial focus, though natural, is NOT healthy. In fact it’s tragic because the interpretations are so misguided and narrow. Blogs can help fix this, and they will.
I replied:

I think, therefore I’m insane?

Your first point – that professional journalism “should” play something like the powerful role it currently plays is as misguided as a Fox News analysis and simply absurd. Mainstream journalism stinks, and is getting worse. Blogs will help fix this deficiency, and hopefully will replace mainstream superficiality with in depth, smart coverage of complex events.

Although blogs are only beginning to challenge the absurd commercial sensibilities of mainstream journalism I have much higher hopes than you that blogger journalists will prevail over mainstream celebrity journalism which reaches new lows every year. (cf many great mainstream journalists who are impressive but stifled by forced brevity).

Mainstream journalism has fallen very far from reasoned analysis of current events. It no longer pays more than superficial attention to critical news events (e.g. “Oral rehydration therapy saves millions”, “Congo War”, “Global Child Welfare”, etc, etc.