Category Archives: Web 2.0

Google’s knol project

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Google’s about to launch yet another clever idea.  Called knol, it will feature authoritative articles about any topic which will use community rating and input.   

It will be interesting to see how this project compares to the excellent community produced content at Wikipedia, and also how Google handles the legitimate as well as scammy SEO tactics that always follow good content.     Disallowing links to commercial sites would seem to inhibit an author’s ability to feature things, but allowing them opens up the chance of abuses of the type that made Wikipedia choose to use NOFOLLOW tag on all external Wikipedia links.

The good news – more quality information online – yippee! 

Lessing’s “curmudgeonly missteps” should be forgiven. Close the book and open the internet.

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Jeff Gomez over at the Print is Dead blog has the best piece I’ve read so far about Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing’s mild attack on the internet.    Lessing’s comments were buried in an otherwise inspiring story about the power of reading, knowledge, and education – a story about how some women in Africa were more concerned about having books to read than food to eat.

Lessing’s suggestion that youth is in the process of abandoning quality book reading in favor of the ‘inaninties” of the internet brought the very predictable blogOspheric response of derision heaped on an old litererary lady who deserves a lot more respect than she’s been getting.

Like Jeff, I can quickly forgive the increasingly irrelevant attacks on the internet.    In fact I agree with Lessing that we’ve lost something as people flock to the internet while abandonining books and newspapers, carrying with them little more than a keyboard and a short attention span.    But we gain something as well.   Something very profound.   The internet is not only far more engaging than books and newspapers, and the internet is not only far more accessible than books and newspapers.   The internet is interactive.  

VERY interactive.   

For the first time in all of human history, people from almost anywhere can communicate night and day, every day, with other people from almost anywhere else.    This tidal wave of human socializing has only just begun and the implications are staggering.   Complaining that books aren’t getting their due respect, while true, is a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.   The ship of knowledge known as the internet sailed long ago and is now a huge fleet carrying billions of people.     

As a Nobel prize winner for literature Doris Lessing will be remembered forever.    And rightly so.   But those memories, and photos, and videos, and copies of what she said will live forever in *digital form*.  They’ll live on the internet, long after all the paper representations have been relegated to a handful of dusty old museum archives and rich book collector’s shelves.

And that, dear Doris, is a very good thing.

Trickles of web content to become floods, sweeping away the cable industry? Maybe.

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Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has a good insight about the threat to cable from online feeds, which are now a trickle but could become a flood.    Blodget notes about the agreement between Yahoo and CNET:

… cable companies, meanwhile, depend on monopoly access to networks like CNBC and cannot afford to be circumvented by, say, a live CNBC web feed (lest a web trickle become a flood)…

I think Cable still has a viable future for at least the next 5 years because convergence of media is going to take a lot longer than most think, and if Cable is smart they’ll find ways to be the key broadband conduit into the home as they already are for millions of American homes.    It seems to me that the internet is more threatening to information driven media like newspapers than it is to entertainment driven media.   The is partly just a bandwidth issue – currently it’s not realistic to expect people to buy, configure, and use the fledgling broadband movie services.     How soon will this change?    5+ years in my estimation.   Of course eventually super high bandwidth streaming into most homes will be the likely main paradigm for home entertainment, but this won’t happen for some time.   We are too stubborn to innovate nearly as fast as technology allows.

ATT – what are you flinging again?

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Techdirt notes that the USA Today title “ATT Flings cellphone network wide open” is quite a bit of hype given that it’s been open for 3 years.     Although the article itself notes that this is really nothing big and new, it is an indication that many of the wars are now faught on the marketing battlefields and not the technological ones. 

Also yet another sign that titles to grab attention are becoming increasingly misleading, especially in the blog world.   Even the title of this post is – frankly – somewhat misleading, as was my recent suggestion about Andrew Seybold’s competence during a recent PBS interview, for which he just took me to task in his newsletter.  

But hey I’m in elite company – he’s also pissed at Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt for suggesting that physical limitations on the wireless spectrum won’t post insurmountable challenges to the coming internet convergence.  

Facebook Beacon already forgotten by all but the blogOspheric chattering nonsense.

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Om Malik and Matt Ingram are asking why Facebook doesn’t simply ask their 40+ million users to determine what the users would want in terms of advertising on a social network.

Excuse me but are you guys naive or just starting your holiday drinking a bit early in the season? 

The answer is that actually using social networking as a springboard for advertising ideas, although it would be totally consistent with the claimed model of what a great social network will be, would be totally inconsistent with maximizing profit.     I am *so tired* of hearing people talk about how what is best for us user gooses is best for those advertising ganders.   It just ain’t so!

Advertising – even good ads people think they really like – are all pretty much rooted in the old saw “There’s a sucker born every minute”.    Sure there are good products, and sure most companies are honest, and I even think many ads are reasonably “true”.    But the point is that good ads must inspire buying behavior before they inspire wise behavior, and any marketing effort worth it’s even it’s weight in online ads will work to make buyers, not work to make wise people.

Most wise people don’t buy a lot of stuff unless they stumble upon great wealth, and even then most do not become rampant “consumers”.  They reflect, they travel, they exchange ideas, they learn and they love.    Shopping?  It’s  not on the list of activities that spawn great human enlightenment, and it never will be.    Fun?  yes.   Popular?   Sure.   Profitable for companies?    YES!    Shopping, and more generally commerce online is the only sizeable revenue source, making it the key to internet innovation and the driver of internet changes.    User centricism is generally going to be trumped by this force with some notable exceptions like Wikipedia and perhaps Open Social.

The very best marketing ties real human factors to products, but in the same way “conversational marketing” is an oxymoron it is not reasonable to expect “social network advertising” to be glowing extension of the social networking experience.   Maybe in Mark Z’s dreams, but not in his increasingly profit-centric reality.

I’m strongly behind the idea that online community needs should trump profits.   Also, I agree that following this mantra can lead to some successes.    Google initially frowned on advertising while they built a fantastic search system, but note how it took advertising to make them the key online player they are today.   Not a little advertising either – billions and billions and the prospect of billions more.

Can social networkers design ads they like?   I doubt it.   However this could come about indirectly. Google Open Social is the most likely source of social networking advertising innovation for the very reason that Google *makes their big profits elsewhere*.  Google can sweep in with a truly user-centric social model, monetize it to a limited extent using adsense, but from their perspective leave their core cash dow – PPC search – intact.   Also, Google then conveniently puts a huge, perhaps even deadly crimp in Facebook’s potential to become a dominant online environment.    As I’ve noted before Google is brilliant at managing to do the right thing and in doing the right thing reap big benefits for … Google!    (How DO they do that so often !?)

Oh, speaking of NOT doing the user centric thing because it might threaten the cash cow we need look no farther than … Google.   Note their ad standards have relaxed quite a bit over the years while keeping  “user friendly enough” to avoid the sharp criticisms that should have been levied at Google when they slapped ads on the left side of the home page, conveniently blurring the distinction between organic and paid listings, then stopped prominently shading the advertising.  Oh, they also allowed bogus sites to run adsense, didn’t crack down early enough on the spiral of massive click fraud, and have even embedded travel advertising in organic listings while still claiming they don’t do it  (example: try this search: “SFO to JFK”).

So, the moral of Beacon is not that profit sites should stop acting like profit sites, rather that since there is a sucker born every minute, we suckers need to stick together, and every so often we need to stick it to the man to keep him on track.   Maybe that’s all Om Malik is saying today, and if so I’m with ya!

Facebook to everybody: “We’re sorry”

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Mark Zuckerberg is profusely apologizing for Beacon’s shortcomings.  

I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better …

It sure looks sincere to me and I don’t think sincerity even matters all that much in this case.  They srewed up, they are fixing things fast, time to move on.

Like many I’ve been cynical of Facebook valuations and some of the ridiculous hyperbole, but this whole fiasco was a great study in now quickly you go from being tauted as “the next big thing” to tauted as being “dead”.    Also an example of how major media still does not quite get the web thing – just yesterday we read “Facebook RIP” which foolishly suggested this could be a major event for them.    

Google social is a major stumbling block for Facebook, but Beacon is just a tiny bump in the road to more riches.    That said I still think 15 billion dollar valuation is absurd.   But, I thought Google was overvalued too and I was sure wrong about that…. so far at least.

Web 2.0 Conference and Expo

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WebGuild will be presenting the second annual Web 2.0 Conference and Expo on January 29, 2008.   The location is the Santa Clara Marriot.  I missed this event last year but will be there this time and I’m really looking forward to it.   Last year Marissa Mayer was the keynote and I’m hoping she’ll be speaking again.  She’s one of the best thinking technologists anywhere, and a major reason Google continues to dominate the online landscape.

Note that this event is not to be confused with the Web 2.0 Expo series put on by O’Reilly Media or the Web 2.0 Summit also by O’Reilly.

Who is clicking at your online business door?

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Back in July I missed this great post by Dave Morgan at AOL but thanks to Danah Boyd’s post it has surfaced again.    The findings are very surprising and very relevant to anybody running click or online advertising campaigns.   Dave summarizes the findings very concisely as follows:

We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

What does all of this mean? It means that while clickers may be valuable audiences, they are by no means representative of the Web at large

Indeed, this means that many online marketing campaigns may need to dig a lot deeper to obtain a positive ROI, and for some campaigns positive ROI is not attainable.    If, for example, irrelevant clickers (not to be confused with click abuse) mean you’ll have to spend a few dollars to reach a single prospect, and your margin on your product is only a few dollars, you may be fighting a losing PPC battle for online hearts, minds, and pocketbooks.    On the other hand if your target audience is, say, midwestern stay at home soccer moms, you may want to up your PPC spend dramatically because your nickel or dime per click could be worth many times that in prospective sales.

Obviously Dave’s post is only the beginning of the big story which has yet to be written,  and I’m not clear how representative this sample was of all PPC activity (I think it was broadly representative though – they looked at billions of data items).  However this helps me understand why some of my PPC experiments have failed to yield much of a return.     A good travel experiment given these findings would be to look at midwestern travel patterns and try to advertise popular packages to Mexico  or other commonly travelled points south in the winter.   Since women are the main travel planners this match could work well to increase the normally very low conversion I have seen on travel related PPC spends.

Amazon unearths some great startups

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The Amazon startup contest here has a video profile of the seven finalists in their contest which I think was to showcase users of Amazon Web Services (AWS).   I think  Jeff Barr  will have more about this on his blog or on Amazon’s blog.

These look like some really interesting companies.    One is measuring brain networking, another is providing 19 usability testing (this is brilliant for the small website market!)  One is optimizing PPC campaigns (hmmm – but won’t Google analytics do that extremely well?.)

Paid Links and SEO – game over dudes

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It has now been over two years since Google started their crusade against paid links.  I first understood this crusade back in 2005.  It was the first time I’d met Matt Cutts, and we were sitting at the hotel bar during the New Orleans WebmasterWorld PubCon with a handful of SEO folks. I asked about the practice of paid links.  “Don’t buy links”, he said.  Matt was a bit vague about the consequences and other details, and the the Google guidelines back then were not very clear on this point.   In fact a substantial paid link economy had developed and continues today.  However over time Google has become very clear about paid linking.

In my opinion this this recent post from Matt Cutts, Google’s uberMeister of spam tricks and SEO, should sound the death knell for this strategy even for those willing to take the risks that have been associated with paid linking strategies for some time.   Clearly Google is dedicated about this, and will continue to crack down severely enough that the risk outweighs any likely gains.  Certainly any of the sites and folks I’m familiar with in Travel and Tourism should *not* use this practice to raise their pagerank.     I’ve been advising this for some time, but I knew the practice was still fairly common among some elites in the SEO community which meant it was still working.   I’m sure there are some exceptional cases but the basic advice here is easy – don’t buy links.

Like Graywolf, one of the most vocal critics of the Google anti-paid-link jihad, I have a lot of concerns about fairness, best practices, and how much pleasing Google has come to distort the production of good content.   But jousting at Google’s windmill has probably become a waste of time, especially given that many of their concerns about buying and selling links are legitimate.  That practice certainly did distort the relevancy of rankings in a significant way.   In fact Google’s core brilliancy – the pagerank algorithm – put in motion a variety of online linking practices that have reshaped  web content in dramatic, mostly negative ways.    People used to link freely and often as a matter of course because links are the heart of the web and commercial concerns were not in play.  Now, free links are doled out by many very sparingly in an effort to preserve pagerank at their own websites and to deny others a competitive advantage.    I hope Google is considering this factor as they revise the algorithm.  e.g.  linking out to other sites should tend to *boost* ranks for a given term more than it lowers the rank due to leaked pagerank.