WordPress to Blogger

Posted on December 1, 2007 by JoeDuck

It seems like it should be easy to move a WordPress blog over to blogger given how easy it is to move a Google blogger blog to WordPress via the WordPress import scripts (which I think are based on Google blogger APIs).

But I’m concluding it will be easier to just cut and paste the content over on the 20 or so posts I have to move rather than try to unearth, configure, and hope things work out by using the small number of routines people have cobbled together for this task.

I suppose it’s to Google’s credit that they have helped make it easy to move *away* from Google but have not made it easy to move *to* Google in this case.

Generally I’d say WordPress is a superior blogging platform but Blogger has gotten much better with lack of ability to easily use categories the only major defect.

I’ll be taking our Travel blog now at blog.ohwy.com and moving it to blog.u-s-history.com where we are slowly setting up a very rich history and travel site.

Google tells me I’m going to win the spectrum auction! w00t! ?

Posted on November 30, 2007 by JoeDuck

Screw Ed McMahon and Publishers Clearinghouse, Google has assured me that you and I are going to win the multi billion dollar spectrum auction coming up at the FCC. I just hope I can resell it to Google after we win because I have yet to build my new amazing Google phone.

Actually I really am rooting for Google, and they really do have a point that the mobile marketplace has become far too stuffy from the stench of expensive cologne and Brooks Brothers suits.

I want to see the clever T-shirt and sandals crowd at Google take a bite out of this market, and my mobile bill, and I want the Open Handset Alliance to bring all the great innovation they have promised in this space.

Google, don’t let us down.

Spamming down?

Posted on November 29, 2007 by JoeDuck

Wired is reporting that according to Google the total amount of email spam is going down. (Thanks to Metroknow for the tip) .

This should be great news for many but it doesn’t really jive with my personal experience. My Google gmail spam box now gets on the order of a spam email every *minute*, 24/7 -(I need to check but I think I’m in the neighborhood of a thousand per day or close to it). I get another several hundred per day that pass the filter, though I thin, this is partly the challenge of having some old email addresses that I don’t want to close down. Generally, the older the address the more spam lists it winds up on. I’m even having some issues at my Godaddy server with SMTP relays of the swirl of daily spam messages.

Update thought inspired by FG’s comment below:

I is possible that filtering has reached a point of diminishing return because at the level of tens of millions of emails the cost to send them is no longer trivial.

I’m guessing at these numbers: Let’s assume Google and other filters can kill off 9990 out of 10000 spams initially sent, and users then ignore 9 out of the remaining 10. Thus the spammer must send 10,000 to get one read. If the action on that one is 1 in 100 then it is going to take 100 x 10,000 = a million spam notes to get a single sale. At that level the bandwidth and time are no longer trivial costs, though they are still small.

Brightcove darkens. More companies to follow.

Posted on November 27, 2007 by JoeDuck

Update: Here’s the word from Brightcove

Brightcove, a formerly “promising” video distribution startup has given up it’s lackluster battle to compete with YouTube in consumer video, though *it will remain open as a distribution point for high quality video. (High quality video? Isn’t that an oxymoron in modern media parlance?).

ReadWriteWeb has an unsatisfactory summary of this event, failing to note that the key challenge for anything related to online video is this: Video-related advertising doesn’t work. More importantly it’s not clear it will *ever* work. I’ve always been skeptical of how video would monetize, and still think YouTube may never justify it’s capitalization except as one more brick in Google’s massive wall of online dominance.

In fact it’s time to consider this interesting possibility – pay per click advertising may be a “one hit wonder”. I’m not prepared to make this case yet but it’s not really clear that online advertising techniques outside of PPC are working well for advertisers, and even PPC is showing signs of reaching some cost limits in term of advertiser ROI. Success for advertising agencies (Google is number one, with half the online ad take) should not be confused with success of the advertising itself. Clearly PPC is working for many, but part of what is happening is that offline advertising is finally recognized for what it is, which is an “emperor without any clothes”. I’d argue that as a general rule (ie more than 50% of the time) offline advertising campaigns have negative ROI. Watching in the Travel industry how negative ROI is spun by ad salesfolks as positive ROI and how failure is analyzed as “success” has been a real eye opener, and I think these mathematical misperceptions are pervasive in the industry.

Another powerful force is the impact of “free” social network marketing. Word of mouth has always trumped paid advertising, and social networking is ushering in a new era where consumers not only control what they buy, they are working to control the ads they are exposed to and are talking a lot about products independently and without advertising intervention. Facebook’s recent “beacon” fiasco tried to spin this backwards and has had very questionable results.

Pay per click has brought much better ROI measurement to mom and pops as well as large companies whose agencies are having increasing difficulty spinning failed “branding” campaigns as a big success.

Brightcove is not an exception: look for more failures in the video space and elsewhere as the 2.0 bubble slowly deflates into a balance with rational business practices.

Bhatia’s battle to give you free software … Game ON!?

Posted on November 23, 2007 by JoeDuck

Over at Webguild I noted a really interesting quote from Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of HotMail, who suggested very recently that shrinkwrapped software is dead and everybody is going to go online for their office and other applications by 2010. Consistent with this hypothesis and blustering claim, Bhatia has just launched a new online suite of MS office-like tools.

Sridhar over at Zoho blogs is really taking Bhatia to task for suggesting that the new product, Instacoll, might capture 1% of the market. Of course Zoho is not exactly a fan of Instacoll which is a very direct competitor to their offerings, but Sridhar’s point is that venture capital people don’t want companies to shoot for 1% of a market – they want it all.

Frankly, I’m not convinced by any of these points. People are stubborn with changes. So first, I think Microsoft will keep plugging along and shrinkwrap will die a slow, not quick, death. Microsoft’s version of online office tools will be in the best position to win in this game because if they do it cleverly they will slowly transition a huge customer base from Word and Excel and Access over to the online environments and find ways to make money during and after the transition.

Second, only Microsoft and Google with maybe Yahoo as a distant runner up shot, are likely to capture the online document market. Why will people choose Instacall or Zoho when they can go with the big guys? Assume you have three free parties and you are invited to all of them. They all have a nice dinner for you with similar food, and all are just around the block. One is at my house, the other at your friend’s house, and the other at Bratt Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s place. You are going to Brangelinas, just like you are going to use Google docs. 1% of the office market? Maybe, but what are you having for dinner again?

Seybold on wireless = early senility?

Posted on November 21, 2007 by JoeDuck

Update: Andrew Seybold’s reply: http://www.andrewseybold.com/blog.asp?ID=132

Tonight PBS covered the smart phone market, and asked for input from Andrew Seybold. He should have been a great choice and clearly has an insider view, so how could he say something this transparently absurd?

ANDREW SEYBOLD: As much as I respect Google, the wireless industry can’t be an extension of the Internet because wireless bandwidth is finite. It’s a fixed resource, and it is shared bandwidth. The more people who use it in a given area, the less data speed they have.

Andrew, with all due respect – and considerable respect is due, I think you’ve missed something profound here. Sure, wireless capacity must increase to accommodate all the data, and it certainly will. There are already technologies like WIMAX and EVDO that will scale up to meet demand, and it’s likely that improvements and new technologies will emerge very fast in response to this cash rich, market. In any case, it is now *crystal clear* that all players in this space are moving to converge the phone experience with the internet experience. It is not clear exactly how that will shake out and eventually become seamless, but you are suggesting this is not even the *direction* in which things are moving.

ERIC SCHMIDT: I completely disagree with the characterization that somehow the wireless network is going to be any different than the wired network, because there’s enormous spectrum becoming available through licensing programs, better radio design, faster computers, and so forth.

Thank you Eric, you are absolutely right. In fact I expect you already have several plans in place to make the higher speed and broader bands available to prospective gPhones and Google Phones and Android equipped phones.

Google “like” Phone Pictures. Bug labs modular phone to run Android SDK

Posted on November 20, 2007 by JoeDuck

Update: The headlines are misleading. This phone is not by Google, but will be able to run “Android”, the Googley operating sytem from the Open Handset Alliance. This is an important development but different from a true phone from Google.

There are reports that a Google Phone or gPhone will be out shortly. Here are some pictures. There is not much buzz about this yet so I’m not clear about the source of these rumors, but it makes sense to me that Google will put something out much earlier than the “middle of 2008” we’ve seen in a lot of reports.

Based on the early pix I’m not sure this device is going to win any design awards – looks more like a geek design than the stylish iPhone design that has helped make Apple the clear “smartphone to beat” and brought them such success in this market. However on balance I think that *cost* will be the key. If the gPhone can come in under $100 and do all the neat things promised by Android and the Open Handset Alliance, I think it’ll be so broadly adopted as to be an unstoppable mobile force.

Genomes, Genomes! Step right up and get yaarrrr Genomes! Only $999

Posted on November 17, 2007 by JoeDuck

It is *so cool* to be around to see some of the most sweeping changes in human history unfold right before our eyes. www.23andme.com, the new service that will provide you with your complete genetic blueprint, brings the potential for a sea change in the way humans will view our relationship to each other and to our own biology and chemistry.

This company is brought to us thanks to the amazing work of the Genome Project, which fully documented a complete human DNA record. 23andme allows all of us to get a copy of our own genome – at a fraction of the cost for the first set of DNA.

Hopefully this will also help us along the path to a better philosophical and emotional relationship to the world that spawned all of us from physical and evolutionary processes that we continue to grasp in more fascinating detail.

www.23andMe is also intriguing as it’s the brainchild of Google founder Sergy Brin’s wife and early Google employee Anne. One of the exciting things about Google is that the founders and early employees are not only brilliant – they are also young and enthusiastic technological visionaries who, unlike some of their predecessors like Tesla, have *tons* of money to invest in these visionary technological dreams.

Will I be signing up for a copy? Maybe, but even though $999 is an amazing deal it’s a lot of pizzas, so I’m going to wait for the first …. ummm … “Genome sale”.

Google Phone is coming, the gPhone is coming!

Posted on November 16, 2007 by JoeDuck

The Wall Street Journal has (ummm – just figured out?) that Google’s phone ambitions are substantial. It’s not yet clear if they’ll become their own huge phone company, but I’m guessing they will and that they will do a good job solving some of the nagging problems that have been experienced by .. lets see now … 99.9% of all cell users? I do not think this necessarily bodes well for Google financially though, and release of hardware and a national cellular network may be part of their “jumping the shark” moment. Google has thrived as a company that could ramp up as profits rolled in. Not so with mobile, where they will have to anticipate a lot of profit and incur huge capitalization costs in a “bet” that they can capture enough of this market to turn a big buck. Clearly Google is already going to influence this market quite a bit by spearheading the open handset alliance and other open architecture initiatives, but it’s not clear their bottom line would have a huge positive impact even when you anticipate the revenue from advertising (currently small but sure to grow) and revenue from subscribers (currently huge but capital and labor intensive).

I’m torn between thinking Google clearly will fix many technical challenges with the hardware (I see even cheap phones as iPhone clones with great mapping and data and more), but Google has done a simpy *terrible* job of basic customer service over the years, feeling that if a problem solving thing can’t scale up then they won’t put much energy into that problem. Typically this has related to advertiser problems with adwords and webmaster problems with websites. Google has made some improvements as they hired legions of people to deal with customer service, but I cannot see Google handling millions of calls along the lines of “now, which button do I press to dial my sister in Toledo?”. Google culture is not compatible and will become impatient with the slow, labor and capital intensive mobile landscape. Maybe they’ll change it into something better. Maybe they won’t.

In any case they’ll bring some great phone online and as I’ve noted before I’m very excited about that.

Joe Duck

Have Blog. Will Travel. Vaccinate!

Category Archives: Google