Category Archives: Google

Blog readers and blog writers redux. Cicarelli still rules

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Gee, the top blog search is still Cicarelli.

 

My earlier post with these technorati search terms seems to be getting a some attention for the term “Assparade” rather than the post I thought entitled “Cicarelli“, but I don’t have good stats yet.

 

I shall say with great pride and elitism that at Technorati this morning I was the top search result for “Assparade”, apparently simply because I put up the technorati list on my blog.

 

Today’s technorati terms are different but still indicative of the chasm of diversity between blog readers and blog writers.

 

 

Top Technorati Blog Searches September 23 (or maybe Sept 22?) – what are blog readers trying to find?

  1. Cicarelli
  2. Jonny
  3. Xing
  4. Pinky
  5. Openbc
  6. Bin Laden
  7. Bitacle
  8. Hugo Chavez
  9. Assparade
  10. Asian
  11. Axis of Sketchy…
  12. Grey’s Anatomy
  13. Richard Hammond
  14. Daniela Cicarel…
  15. Google

Top Technorati tags – what people are writing about.

  1. Bush
  2. Islam
  3. Pensieri
  4. Comedy
  5. Microsoft
  6. youtube
  7. Amore
  8. iPod
  9. sexy
  10. fashion
  11. foto
  12. Politica
  13. wordpress
  14. Politik
  15. torture

 

Although I do understand the diversity to some extent, particularly interesting is that “real” news like “Hugo Chavez” is not getting written up as much as it’s getting searched for.   I’m guessing that the blog writer demographic is still very narrowly “tech focused” but I wonder how it is politically?    Probably polarized, such that people with “strong” political views are far more likely to blog in that space.

If you are in it only for the money you won’t get as much … money.

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When he’s not coming up with self serving pseudo communities like Squidoo, (am I too harsh? maybe…) , Seth Godin has lots of excellent marketing insights such as this one that suggests the big innovations come from passion about the topic and not from the quest for the holy big buck, which Seth suggests forces people to *stop innovating* too early.  He cites Apple Computer, Google, and others that really do support the hypothesis.

I don’t think this is the *main* story of success however.  I still prefer to view success as an evolution of ideas where 99.9% become “extinct” and .01%  survive due to forces outside of the control of the company – forces like global economics, weather, personalities, lucky timing, zeitgeists, etc, etc.

We tend to look only at “survivors” and forget that an analysis of corporate success would take a large number of company starts and follow them to their demise or success and then look at the factors that led to their fate.

Flickr  even suggests an evolutionary model both as idea and within the company.   Flickr started as a game maker rather than a photography sharing community.   Flickr’s evolution seemed to be a combination of luck, serendipity, brilliance, and (Caterina Fake might say most importantly) her realization of the potential of the “little idea” that became a huge online community.   Also important is that from Yahoo’s perspective Flickr probably needs to generate a LOT more cash before it’ll be considered worth the $20-30 million they paid for it.      Hmmm – I wonder if founders Caterina and Stewart are eyeing Yahoo’s possible 1 billion dollar offer for Facebook with any envy?

“Dear, we should have held out for a hundred million more!”

But as Seth suggested these innovators are not in it for the money so no worries there I’m sure…. hmmmmmm……

The death, and rebirth, of user generated content is coming to a home theater near you

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I think it’ll take a few years for regular folks to figure out ways to measure the value of their content and for many to even understand the value of what they give away to many sites for free.

User content contributions to  Facebook,  travel sites, myspace, Google, Yahoo, and many many more make up what I think is an increasing share of the total value of all web info.   When people understand this it may – it certainly should – change the internet landscape and hopefully shift more control from big companies to regular users.    It also may increasingly commercialize the landscape, which is probably not a good thing though the world has never seen a very democratic and global commercialized landscape controlled by any old mom or pop who sticks up a site.   It’ll be interesting to say the least.

To one extent this has already begun with Google adsense allowing publishers to share in revenues, but note that Google itself is built on the backbone of billions of web pages they didn’t have to create.
Most of their money comes from people using Google to search *other peoples stuff*.    When will Yahoo or Microsoft wake up to the fact that people will abandon Google search quickly for a variety of reasons including inferior quality, change in habit, inconvenience (Vista Search!?), or payment to use alternatives (cha-ching!).   Seems to me that Ask is doing a better job of changing habits than Yahoo or MSN though I haven’t checked the market share numbers to see if ASK’s massive ad campaign is working.

The current thinking by most Web 2.0 sites is that if you create a high traffic community site you’ve got it made, and that has certainly been true with Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, and many more.   However users may soon start to realize that the content is more valuable than the  consolidation of that content.

You might suggest that Adsense recognizes this since it a pays publishers about 70% of the ad click revenue from their sites.   However this does not factor in that the collective site content around the world, indexed by Google et al, is the big money ticket.   Google shares none of the revenue they get when somebody clicks on ads presented after a search at Google even though they’d have nothing to show if, say, the collective internet world did what the news agencies are starting to do – challenge Google’s right to present their content.

John Battelle’s Federated Media understands this and is providing mechanisms to better monetize high value content.

However it’s the low brow stuff that brings the big money and I wonder how long before banners above sites will read “Webbers of the World Unite!”

Google and the little guy

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I noted before that Google is mostly ignoring the enterprise market in favor of maintaining their huge share of regular user traffic and targeting small content producers with Adsense and small advertisers with Adwords. In fact I think FAST, rather than Google, is the top contender in enterprise search. As the internet itself becomes the network, I can see Google grinning in meeting rooms as they chart out the competition with Microsoft which is still heavily chained both economically and philosophically to Microsoft Office, big enterprise applications, and big companies in general.

Incredibly, Microsoft seems to ignore (or perhaps they just can’t cope with) forces that Google correctly sees now and on the horizon. These forces include:

* Company sizes will tend to shrink as internet efficiencies allow “mom and pops” to compete globally.

* Small companies, blogs, local companies, and other small “long tail” online entities market share will continue to grow, and may even become the largest share of total online advertising activity. (though I think this could take many years).

* Many USA, and (most?) Indian and Chinese companies often use bootlegged software. No problem for Google who gives it away anyway. MS office at perhaps $479 per lost license? OUCH!

It’s a tough spot for MS because their online revenues are trivial now, so even with the major allocations to the LIVE project it’s not clear that changing course can ever replace the enterprise and office suite revenues for a company built around “old style” computing.

Death to Brands! Death to Brands?

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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.

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

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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.

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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 ….

Shhhhh! Don’t tell all those Web 2.0 companies that there really is no Web 2.0!

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Over at Matt’s Place he noted some of his favorite 2.0 companies and asked for suggestions. What really surprised me was the number of people over there (a very tech savvy crowd) who, like Bill Gates, oddly question the significance of “Web 2.0” which is a significant development in the evolution of the internet.

As Tim OReilly, John Battelle, Mike Arrington and many others point out frequently, Web 2.0 is qualitatively different in terms of the way people use and process the growing body of internet info. Also, and perhaps most importantly, Web 2.0 is the begginning of how online communities are in the process of trumping online technologies. Myspace could hardly be described as a design or technological masterpiece, but it’s certainly a *community masterpiece* both literally and figuratively. Web 2.0 is “everybody’s” web, and that’s going to change the game. We just can’t know how.

I really like http://www.eventful.com – nice API and open approach.
Also liked several of the contenders at the recent MashupCamps in Mountain View.
http://weatherbonk.com (The Mashup 2 Winner)
http://frucall.com
http://realestatefu.mashfu.com/
http://podbop.org (Winner of Mashup 1)

Jeremy just pointed to a great Web 2.0 post by Dion that details seven ways to “embrace” the network and also has a nice summary of why Web 2.0 really is different.

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 Stock Value? Ask the insider traders?

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Bloomberg reports something very interesting a few days ago:

  Nevertheless, it is remarkable that not a single Google insider has bought a single share of the company in the 18 months since the IPO lock-ups expired, according to data compiled by Bloomberg …

At first glance this seemed more conspicuous than it really is.   Although I think Google is overvalued, insiders like Brin or Page who have tens of millions of shares generally should NOT buy shares regardless of how bullish they are on the company.   This is simple diversification of one’s worth.  For these guys their worth was almost entirely tied up in Google stock and they were right to diversify.  Thus this is simply good fiscal management, not a statement about what they think the prospects are for Google in the long term.