Putting my money where my Yahoo is?

Posted on February 5, 2007 by JoeDuck

My post of about an hour ago, “Yahoo’s big day” convinced me I should put more money where my mouth is on Yahoo’s prospects so using the justifications below I just bought about $1000 in Yahoo March 30.00 calls. (in options “bought” is functionally equivalent to “bet”).

My kilobuck effectively gives me the right to sell 2000 shares of Yahoo anytime between now and March 17. For example if Yahoo falls after today it’s likely I’ll lose *all* of my bet. However if Yahoo rises to, say, $35.00 per share by March 16 I could “exersize” the options for a cool $10,000. Unlikely, but I think the market does not incorporate online advertising revenue and profit information very efficiently. In theory this means … opportunity!Today Yahoo fully launches the new ad matching routine, an artistic program formerly known by the name of “Panama”. My understanding is that if they can even come close to Google’s quality matching ads to searches Yahoo will make quite a bit more.

Yahoo’s a much higher traffic site than Google though Google still has the big search share.

Thus my bet is simple here – that people will realize this week that Yahoo has the *potential* for much higher revenues and profit, and his will bump them up 10+% by next week which would put these options in the money.

Options have “time value” which reflects the chance the stock will go up or down in value and they have “intrinsic”value which is the difference between the stock price and the option price. I paid .52 per share in the hopes the stock price will increase soon. Somewhat counter intuitive is the fact that even a modest increase, if it happens this week as I predict, could double my money without the stock ever reaching the strike price.

YHQCF
CALL YAHOO INC MAR 30
Quantity 20 Contracts $1054

Disclaimer: I also have Yahoo Stock. I could have bought about 40 more shares vs betting on these 2000 shares worth of options to rise quickly. But this’ll be more fun to watch for the next month.

Instant Update:
Wh00t Yah00000t! I’m up $120 after 15 minutes. So far this is fun.
Last Trade [tick] 0.58

Yahoo’s Big Day?

Posted on February 5, 2007 by JoeDuck

The NYT reports that today is of great interest at Yahoo as Yahoo fully launches their new contextual advertising matching routines. If successful, Yahoo’s profits could soar this year. Ironically it was Yahoo that aquired the company that effectively invented the pay per click ad model (GOTO renamed Overture now renamed Yahoo Publisher Network). This happened many years ago, but Yahoo failed to capitalize on the head start and it was Google that created a brilliant ad matching algorithm. This ad matching routine allows Google to make a lot more money per visitor than Yahoo and other search engines. Since Google also has a lot more search visitors, their profits have been skyrocketing while Yahoo and Microsoft search profits have languished.It’s interesting to think how little tweaks can quickly impact the amount of money flowing through these systems. Google makes over ten million per *day* from online ads, Yahoo much less but still millions per day. Thus if, for example, the matching routine screws up for a *few hours* and shows irrelevant ads Google can lose millions of dollars in revenue. Conversely if Yahoo can match Google’s ad matching prowess with the new system there’s a lot of money they’ve been effectively leaving on the table that’ll flow into Yahoo’s revenue stream and profits.

Disclaimer: I have some Yahoo Stock.

Pay Per Post Prejudice Pointedly Pokes PodTech’s Scoble

Posted on February 3, 2007 by JoeDuck

Robert Scoble is a fine fellow, as almost every blogger knows. Perhaps it is partly for this reason he’s under an unreasonable attack by many bloggers for accepting an invite to Keynote the upcoming Pay Per Post Conference in Florida. I’m not a fan of the Pay Per Post concept because it’s probably going to create too much abuse, but it should be discussed and debated rather than thrown out without discussion as many prominent bloggers, many of whom *make a lot of money blogging* want to do.

I commented over at Scobleizer:

Wow, I’m really disappointed in how hostile people are to you about giving a simple keynote. If Bill Gates keynotes CES does it mean he supports all the violence in GTA and Resident Evil? Of course not.

I’m not currently a PPP enthusiast and don’t plan to blog for them, and perhaps Shel’s even right to call this approach the sidewalk hookers of the blogosphere (clever and catchy!). However if disclosures are prominent and clear PPP people can note that they are doing a similar sort of thing that a *paid* journalist does when they review gadgets or movies or Techcrunch does when they review companies.

I smell a lot of hypocrisy here. Prominent folks who are directly paid very big money to blog in various forms are insisting that stay at home moms can’t pick up a few bucks for reviewing something. And if Shel is right those evil hookers, blogging between tricks, will be denied the money that could get them off the street!

The critics worry about credibility and that’s good, but it’s hypocritical to get paid indirectly by blogging (e.g. TechCrunch, Engaget, O’Reilly, Battelle, Shel, etc, etc, etc) and then suggest without more elaboration that other payment routines are inherently flawed and dishonest. Are you just protecting your turf?

Xianglu Grand Hotel

Posted on January 17, 2007 by JoeDuck

The Xianglu Grand Hotel will be the venue for SES China, to be held in Xiamen China in May of 2007. The English website for the Xianglu Grand is here.

Major website SEO problems notwithstanding, the Xianglu Grand looks like an amazing hotel. One of china’s largest and finest this huge hotel in Xiamen is a five-star hotel project by Xianglu China, a business consortium for petrochemical, synthetic fiber, and real estate. This appears to be the first Xianglu group’s venture into the hospitality industry.

The Xianglu Grand is located in the Huli District and overlooks Hubin, a scenic part of Xiamen. The hotel is minutes from the Xiamen Gaoqi Airport and very close to Xiamen shopping and attractions.

There are several restaurants including a steakhouse and buffet and a 24 hour lounge.

I’m tentatively planning to go this year having missed last year’s Nanjing event which was the first of it’s kind in China. There’s a great search marketing tour that surrounds this event and it looks like a lot of fun and perhaps good structure to bring to a first trip over.

Chico the Wonder Dog, part deux

Posted on January 17, 2007 by JoeDuck

The Chico the Wonder Dog project is part SEO experiment, part long tail search query, part dog tail search query, and part waste of time. What’s been very interesting is that my Chico the Wonder Dog keeps trading places as Google’s top Chico the Wonder Dog with the Chicohuahua “Chico the Wonder Dog”. I don’t understand this because THAT Chico does not seem to be getting talked about very much after an initial flurry of activity.

What insights into the mind of Google does this experiment give us?

Darned if I know. I’m asking Chico the Wonder Dog. Again.

Editing this Chico the wonder dog listing to include the first Chico the Wonder Dog post to see what happens.

Who, what, which Wiki?

Posted on January 16, 2007 by JoeDuck

There’s a new search in Internet Town called WikiSeek that is creating a search within Wikipedia and sites linked to by Wikipedia. It’s an excellent idea though I’m not clear it’ll lead to better results than a normal search engine query. Wikipedia is generally better than the snail paced DMOZ at reflecting “related sites”, but like DMOZ the politics and anti-commercial concerns of Wikipedia often get in the way of good articles. Wikipedia is notoriously sparse when listing “related” sites. Like many open source driven projects there is a “NO COMMERCIALIZATION WHATSOEVER” bias that gets in the way of providing the best available information which is increasingly found on commercial sites and blogs, which are not treated favorably enough by DMOZ or Wikipedia.

As TechCrunch noted today WikiSeek is going to get confused big-time with Jimmy Wales Wikimedia Search project which is destined to become a huge addition to the search landscape. Formerly known (well – sort of formerly known?) as the Wikiasari project and still called that by most, it’ll be a robust, community driven search that used human editing to keep out the junk and bring in the jewels rather than the algorithmic approaches taken by Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and most other major players. Confusing things further is the fact that projects like WikiSeek above are not primarily a Wiki, they are, wishfully, a way to work with Wikis.

What?

I think somebody might want to clue in the Wiki crowd to the following challenge:

Few people, even total immersion code crazed onliners, are really comfortable with Wikis. Most pretend to be but when it’s time to collectively participate in a wiki I’ve *never* seen it work nearly as well as the collective results from blogs, which reward individuals with attention rather than reward the collective with information. MashupCamp1 and 2 were filled with very capable internet programmers. In fact even the *inventor* of the Wiki, Ward Cunningham, was there (he’s a great Oregonian fellow who invented the Wiki as a collaboration tool for on computer projects). Yet even in this potentially Wiki-rich environment the lack of updating of the Mashup Camp Wiki was conspicuous. Rather it was blogs, Flickr, and huge sheets of paper that kept people well informed during these intense and infoManiacal extravaganzas.

So, I think big Wiki projects like Wikipedia and the upcoming Wikimedia search have huge potential, largely because they constrain the organization of things such that the big project benefits from huge community participation.

Little bitty Wikis? Let’s just scrap them and have everybody crosslink the blogs, OK?

Hey, nice lookin’ website there! Too bad for you.

Posted on January 7, 2007 by JoeDuck

Most marketing and advertising agencies are *terrible* at understanding how the internet works – they think that flash elements and print-like approaches are what should drive the projects when the exact opposite is the case.

For online effectiveness in terms of search and usually also for users you want easy navigation, few graphic elements, and most importantly a well-optimized site. The more the biz is online focused the more you want optimization over good looks.

Most SEO sophisticated places are poor at design, and many SEO whiz kids can’t be convincing enough to steer people away from the good looking sites designers tend to do. Yet those good looking sites that sacrifice searchability for beauty should be avoided.

In my opinion the people who say “hey, we can make it look super good and glitzy AND be very well optimized” should be listed online in an “Americas least wanted” list of web people.

Of course you can make sites look “OK” and have great optimization, but it’s impossible to have the classy high falutin’ feel you get from rich, large images and flashy elements and do a great optimization. Disney-like sites can afford this mistake (I think it’s still stupid of them), but most businesses count on good optimization if they are in a competitive field where many companies are trying for many related terms.

There are probably exceptions to this rule of great looks vs great optimization but I think they are *extremely* uncommon. The best simple way to describe it simply is that flash and images almost alway look better than text and almost always lead to inferior optimization than text and hyperlinked text elements.

GoogleGuy and upcoming Google Rival WikiaSari

Posted on December 23, 2006 by JoeDuck

A couple interesting TechMemes for today:

Matt’s got a great post noting how page view metrics are breaking down with AJAX implementations. Notable from his mini-rant is this:

* If you’re doing a start-up and want impressive page view metrics, stay the hell away from AJAX.
*If you would even *for one second* consider staying away from AJAX for the sake of impressive metrics, you’re running your start-up ass-backwards.

Next, in the “Could be Good as Google” department we have Jimmy Wales of Wikimedia and founder of the superbly excellent Wikipedia project announcing today that WikiaSaria WikiSaria Article from UK will be a community based search engine to rival Google’s search. This is really provocative news as Google appears comitted to the mechanistic, machine driven approach to search, believing it’s the best and most scalable way to deal with spam and the growing complexity of organizing the world’s info. An alternative vision is Yahoo’s approach which includes more human interaction and editing than Yahoo but still relies heavily on the algorithm. It appears the new search will focus mostly on human input from the exploding community of onliners.

Wales: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” he said.

Spammers and commercial ventures are also learning how to manipulate Google’s computer-based search, he added.

Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans.

Also note the many misquotes about Amazon as a participant.

Wales: Reporters and bloggers note: Amazon has nothing to do with this project. They are a valued investor in Wikia, but people are realllllly speculating beyond the facts. This has nothing to do with A9, Amazon, etc. Help me out, spread the word. I am looking for a community of people to continue the development of wikiasari and so on. Discuss here. Join the mailing list. —-Jimbo Wales 23:24, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

More on this huge story from these blogs:

Niall Kennedy: Wikiasari: Wikipedia success applied to social search?
Michael Arrington: Wikipedia to Launch Search Engine: Exclusive Screenshot

Adam Turner : Wikipedia founder plans search engine to rival Google

Pete Cashmore: Wikiasari – Wikipedia Founder Launching a Google Rival

Missing at sea in Oregon

Posted on December 17, 2006 by JoeDuck

Today (Sunday) a fishing boat has sunk off the Oregon Coast and a few days ago a Catamaran washed ashore with nobody aboard. I’m looking for more detail now and I’m getting a bit paranoid as it seems Oregon is rapidly becoming the US capital of missing people.

The Coast Guard is asking that anyone who may have seen the Catamaran in transit from San Francisco please contact Coast Guard District 13 Command Center at (800) 982-8813.From Oregonlive:

On Rogue River, rescuers find boat owner’s survival suit
A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter and rescue boat renewed their search today for three crew members from a 43-foot fishing vessel that sank Saturday at the entrance of the Rogue River.

The commercial vessel’s crew, which included owner Robert James Ashdown, 44, of Port Orford sent a distress message about 3:40 p.m. Coast Guard Air Station North Bend picked up the signal and initiated an air and sea search.

A life raft, spotted near the river’s entrance by a crew member who apparently did not go out with the others Saturday, contained no members of the crew, said Shawn Eggert, a public affairs specialist with the Coast Guard’s District 13 public affairs office in Seattle. The life raft is in the custody of the Curry County Sheriff’s office, he said.

Debris from the boat, including some survival suits identified by Ashdown’s family as belonging to him, also were found.

The vessel capsized as it attempted to cross the Rogue River bar in Gold Beach, where it encountered extremely high waves and a strong surf, according to the Curry County sheriff’s office. Witnesses said the boat had just crossed the bar when it was slammed first by a wave that knocked it sideways and then by another, which turned the craft over.

The sheriff’s office said it was not yet releasing the names of the other two crew members.

[Note that about 70 miles upriver from the mouth of the Rogue River lies Big Windy Creek Canyon where James Kim died last week, only about a half mile from this same Rogue River.]

Bill Gates and the Bloggers

Posted on December 14, 2006 by JoeDuck

James Kim Search Discussion – Click here | Mount Hood Climber Search

Some very high profile and clever folks in the blogging community got to head up to Microsoft HQ and meet with Bill Gates yesterday to discuss the future of the internet, especially ways to make the upcoming MIX07 conference relevant to the needs of those attending.

I missed meeting Gates at MIX06 earlier this year but I know several of the bloggers that were invited so I’ll have to settle for one degree of separation. I’m a huge fan of Bill Gates’ superb global health initiatives though not at all a fan of many of his “old style” ideas about computing and the internet. I think he, and MS at large, continues to view the internet as primarily a technological rather than a sociological development (clue: it’s 80% sociological, 19% technical and 1% electrical)

The reports are starting to come in: