Category Archives: Google

Fortune Magazine: Is Slashdot the Future?

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Back in February David Kirkpatrick, Fortune Magazine's senior editor, raved about Slashdot and SourceForge as the future of media.   He focuses on the power of content and communities generated by users and notes how effectively and powerfully Slashdot manages content and community with minimal staff. 

Kirkpatrick ponders the implications of open source "revolution" noting that open source is:

… Creating something of tremendous widespread utility for the ego value …

How powerful will ego be in shaping the media landscape of the future?   I've been noting at events like Mashup Camp as well as chats with people from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, etc that large numbers of extremely bright people are motivated to a very large extent by pride and virtuosity rather than a narrow focus on money.    It's not just coincidence that corporate giants Yahoo and Google began in academia as non-commercial projects.   Both were inspired more by the interests of their creators than by a quest for dollars, yet rose to become two of the most successful companies in the history of commerce.
Of course profits and selfishness will play significant roles in the future of almost all companies, but perhaps the ability of the internet to leverage time, skills, and social connections so effectively is also generating more ego-based economic activity than ever before.

Online vs Offline Advertising – an epidemic of irrationality.

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Matt McAlister is unimpressed with online advertising.

OK, but take a look at OFFLINE dude! I replied to him over at his blog:

I think you may be overestimating the abysmal stats behind conventional advertising. Online, the 1% of people clicking into an advertiser's site at a cost of perhaps .15-.25 is very good. For example if you advertise a website prominently in a print publication you should expect perhaps 1/10th to 1/100th that level of performance (1 in 1000 to 1 in 10,000 readers) clicking to the site. I've tested this result using unique URLs and large print ads and the results were…underwhelming. I've seen no study to contradict my own results though I've noted many ad buyers tend to evaluate ad effectiveness in very questionable ways, such as when a $20,000 print campaign results in a few thousand leads and the conclusion is that it was a huge success.

Context ads have redefined the relationship between content and advertising in a positive way for both advertisers and publishers, and until a LOT more money flows from absurdly overpriced offline media to online, and thus starts to close the ROI gap, I think it is unreasonable to expect online ad models to change much, although do see them moving away from PPC and towards pay per action models which make performance measures somewhat more straightforward and PPC fraud almost impossible.
I think many online folks simply have no idea about the incredibly poor performance of offline advertising. My working hypothesis is that most advertising buys have negative ROI but that media companies and sales reps have done a very good job of convincing ad buyers that their advertising is working.

This article suggets that Google's failure to get high bids for print ads was an anomoly.  On the contrary I think this is a glimpse of the future of advertising, which will continue to move online until relative ROIs balance out.

Google selling print failed because print advertising is *dramatically* inferior to online and Google customers know this. Even online campaigns generally have negative ROI, but I suggest that most large, image driven print campaigns have negative ROI unless flimsy methodologies are used to measure ROI.

Few clients measure print effects well if at all, allowing advertising reps and companies to BS their way to keeping TV and print in play which is the main funding source for large media companies.

Based on my observations and experiments with print and online advertising in the travel sector It's an epidemic of irrationality, where few bother to measure ad effectiveness and those few who do measure it, and find print generally fails to deliver positive ROI, simply turn to subjective justifications for continuing failed campaigns.

Yahoo Maps “Go ahead, commercialize me”

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Jeremy via the Yahoo Developer Blog clues us in that Yahoo has "lifted many of the restrictions associated with the Yahoo! Maps APIs. Until today, the APIs were available only for non-commercial use unless you applied for an exception. The concept of commercial and non-commercial has gone away and exceptions are no longer necessary in most cases".   [bolding and italics added by bold Italian Renaissance Artists]

Although I'm not surprised about this (Yahoo and Google reps at Mashup Camp in February were indicating that the future for API use was going to move  along these lines) I think it's superb and cool and a huge hat tip to Yahoo for, as usual, getting the big Web 2.0 picture right and right on.
The concept is echoed by Eric Schmidt at Google in his recent LA Times interview:
We don't do our own content. We get you to someone else's content faster. 

As a publisher I'm loving this.  Give me simple but robust tools and an advertising network and I'm happy to find content and work to create sites and share the revenues with those who manage the network and the APIs.

Watch out for the … Amazon!

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Over at Webmasterworld someone was noting Amazon's new free commercial website service and wondering if they were watering down their brand with all the new online services Amazon is offering. 

To the contrary I think the Amazon strategy is brilliant and the idea is to water down the OTHER brands by commoditizing things like commercial sites and search. The relationships they are establishing will pay modest but very long lasting dividends.

The global search niche, by comparison, is hugely profitable but is always threatened by "the next best thing" since users will tend to jump to the best search having little stake in the brand itself.

Amazon has nothing to lose in the areas of free website, storage, web services, etc. I think they are very clever to provide complex, data intensive services.

They are also lucky to have one of the best tech evangelists in the form of Jeff Barr who is spreading the word about some of the new services in his excellent presentations such as the one he gave at MIX06. 

Google v Kinderstart Lawsuit over downranking

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Eric Goldman offers his summary of the Google v. Kinderstart lawsuit, and I think he speaks for many online people in his aversion to government regulation of search. However, I'm not as persuaded as he by the Google arguments, which ring increasingly hollow given the complexities of the ranking process and the onslaught of spam, which seriously inhibits the ability of search engines to rank sites optimally for users.

Our Online Highways site suffered a similar fate to Kinderstart in February 2005 when Google traffic dried up almost overnight. As one of the most comprehensive travel sites online it is still not clear why the site was downranked. Google has assured us we have "no penalties" and only have changed from algorithmic ranking issues. Our pages are still in the Google index yet Google users are unlikely to find us despite the fact we have arguably the best treatment of several travel topics. Note ohwy.com/uz/ which was developed by the Silk Road region's top travel guide publisher.

Frankly I'm surprised how sympathetic Goldman is to the notion that the cornerstone issue here is Google's right to do pretty much whatever they please regardless of the consequences. I'm guessing he was hardly this generous with Microsoft's attempts to monopolize search using the browser.

The "hands off of search" is a slippery slope, especially when granted to companies that make 97% of their revenues from advertising. I strongly contend that there are solutions that help users and enhance Google's long term prospects which some feel are in great jeopardy due to ranking capriciousness.

The solution is to create MUCH better feedback mechanisms for webmasters and companies that suffer from ranking irregularities. Google's actually started such a process though I think it's only addressing a small percentage of the growing number of legitimate concerns about ranking changes.

Google Analytics

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Wow, I've got to hand it to Google – again – for offering an extraordinary application at no charge.  Google Analytics was formerly "Urchin", and cost about $500 monthly.  It's an extremely robust log analysis tool that allows detailed "drill down" examination of things like referrer logs, page views, and much more.  A very clever user friendly tool called "site overlay" allows you to explore the click through rates of a home page's (any page's?) internal links.   Very helpful in designing navigation for the site.

Another one bites the dust.com?

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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.

Internet Report Card Gives Google A, Yahoo B+, MSN C-

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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.

Web comes full circle, developers doing better stuff but making less money?

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Pardon my somewhate randomized ramblings……

Significant changes keep swirling online as the internet becomes the key mainstream content vehicle, oceans of content continue to flow online, and mashups empower developers to flesh out even the most extravagant ideas with powerful tools reaching far into the rich data stores all over the web. Even market makers like Google, Yahoo, MSN don’t know how it’ll all shake out, and they are supporting many excellent mashups and APIs and developers to make sure bases are covered as the “real” battles for all that online spending heat up.

Where content was king it’s now just a pawn, and creating (large) communities in addition to a large content collection seems the best way to keep a web based company afloat in the stormy and rising online sea of sea changes.

*Unlike the gravy days of soaking up adsense revenues with auto-generated content, it appears online content providers need something “extra” es that will distinguish them from the other sites doing similar things.

The Internet in many ways, has done a partial circle back to quality stuff.

In early days it was non-competitive and fun and info focused.

Then came powerful commercial focus and info bias and heavy SEO for profitable terms.

I think the “new” transition is focusing on people/information, and rewarding those who create communities and bring *people* into contact with *people*. (e.g. Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, etc, etc). Increasingly, NON commerical sites like Wikipedia and DMOZ are taking on the roles that for a few years were provided by a plethora of auto generated, information poor – category rich sites that provided obscure topic details in a bland format.