Category Archives: Websites

Mark Cuban to Google – you are crazy! JoeDuck to Google – just show me some money!

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Mark Cuban, no stranger to online video having made about a billion in that field, challenges Google’s sanity in the YouTube deal here.

It seems to me Cuban’s been the most insightful of those reviewing this deal and my first reaction is “brilliant stuff from an insider”, but I also respect how clever Google is and will continue to be at re-railing the online train.

Big producers will do big deals with Google as they are right now.   The growing community of small time content producers (e.g me) is a lot more willing to share and forget about copyright encumbrances *as long as you cut me in on the action*.

If Google can monetize my stuff better or close to as much as I can then more power to Google.   I’m rooting for Yahoo! winning the monetizing battle though because …. I like them better and have stock.   But there’s room for both, and I think we’ll see in the coming years that the rising tide of online ads will lift most of the ships.

I’m confident I’m speaking for 80%, and probably 98%, of the long tail when I say that the long tail, especially in video, is going to attach to the entity that can best monetize their work be it professional full length movies or stupid cat trick clips.

Can the other 2% of content people sue them?  Sure, but not painfully enough to stop the online video train o’ progress, a train that’s sure to bring us the most garish, irrelevant, superficial, and poorly produced video yet seen on earth and then find a way to turn a few bucks on showing it off to people.    God bless America!

Google to buy Youtube for 1.6 billion

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It’s now almost official that Google will buy Youtube for a whopping 1.6 billion. They’ll announce it after the close today.    Here’s the NYT take on things. I’d have listened to Mark Cuban because it seems to me he’s in a very unique position to analyze the prospects here, but they didn’t and soon Google will have a huge video footprint. Google Video has about 1/4 the traffic of Youtube. Combined I think they’ll dwarf the competition – at least initially, though this market, which should really be called “American’s stupidist and most mundane home videos” is still in it’s infancy.

It’s not clear to me that people will continue to spend hours and hours surfing and watching for the few gems in an ocean of crappy short clips but Google seems to think so, and it’s also true that there is an enormous amount of advertising money now spent on network TV that may flow to this venue. Google’s recent talk about NOT producing their own content and moving into offline advertising venues may relate to this decision – they want to become a key source to soak up as much of the dumb money now spent on extravagant, low ROI offline campaigns.

Carnival of Marketing … the 7 Weekly Wisps of WWW Wisdom are …

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Here are my choices of the seven best of eleven entries in this week’s Blog Carnival of Marketing. Please give your feedback here and/or to the authors. If YOU have an article to submit for NEXT week’s carnival send it on in via the form or to jhunkins@gmail.com. This site is hosting the Carnival of Marketing again on October 15.

* Tam Hanna presents BenqSiemens pushes the nationalism button
posted at TamsPalm-the Palm OS Blog.

* Jim Cronin presents No Time To Blog? Bloggers’ Block? 6 Strategies To Developing Quick and Beneficial Blog Content
posted at The Real Estate Tomato.

* David Maister presents davidmaister.com > Passion, People and Principles > What Would the Client Say?
posted at Passion, People and Principles.

*Eliot presents Rise of the Niche: Survivor, Web 2.0, Feminist Blogs
posted at Red Inked.

* David Lorenzo presents Five Keys to Sales Leadership
posted at Sales Intensity.

* Adnan presents Pay Per Product – Make Your Own or Affiliatise
posted at Blogtrepreneur | Entrepreneur Blog.

* Todd presents Have you ever considered that you are not good enough?
posted at Aridni.

All posts are here 

Google about to kill traditional advertising agencies. Good riddance!

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Over at Battelle’s House ‘o Search info he’s summarized Google Zeitgeist conference, where Google’s big news appears to be “We will NOT do content” and “We WILL do offline media advertising”.

I don’t agree with John that this means the YouTube purchase is a good idea. In fact I think Google will see the light of the dimly flickering videos and realize that monetizing this type of content won’t be worth the trouble of publishing it. But I wouldn’t bet much on my prediction they’ll pass on the deal since the cost of publishing video is dropping very fast, and Google probably has a great idea of the bottom point in terms of these costs, they may see something I can’t. Also, so much is currently wasted on traditional TV campaigns that there is a lot of “dumb money” floating around. If even a fraction of this flows to YouTube it might make that company worth it to Google.

As those of us making a living online know well the money comes from optimal monetization of content rather than the creation of the content. Google, as usual and brilliantly, is working to keep themselves in the driver’s seat as the premier way to monetize content online and moving to offline optimization.

They have the technology to optimize ROI on offline spends that (hopefully and probably) will blow many agencies out of the water. Traditional media campaigns and traditional ad agencies are a garbage dump of bad decisions and no research fueled by the ignorance of math-illiterate clients. Google has the power to change that and I’m glad they are looking in that direction.

When too much is not enough and a little is just right. Google > Yahoo

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Today a very sharp friend said that even though he uses Yahoo mail and some of their default screen navigation, he always uses Google to search. Why? Because Google is not cluttered and makes it very easy to leave Google to visit external sites. Yahoo, especially Yahoo News, he felt, tries to keep the user at Yahoo too aggressively.

A similar point about the ease of navigating to external sites was recently made by Mike Arrington when talking about Web 2.0, noting that it’s important to let folks feel they can easily leave the site for other web locations if you want return visits and credibility.

Relevancy, conspicuously, was not the concern of my friend. He just didn’t like the Yahoo search user experience. I agree and realize that for me it’s the fact that with Google I can get and visually scan *a lot more results* much faster than with normal Yahoo search. Like my friend it’s not the relevancy as much as the navigation that keeps me at Google despite the fact I own Yahoo (well, actually I own about one two-millionth of Yahoo). I don’t trust either engine to give me great results, but I know that I’ll usually find what I need somewhere in the first few pages of sites. Google makes it easier to preview a lot of sites fast.

I have stronger negative feelings about most of the travel sites. Online Travel 1.0 is a nightmarish blend of booking screens, pitches for Hawaii and cruise packages, and tourism sites all trying to convince you they are the only destination both offline and online.

It’s particulary frustrating when sites expect me to learn their navigation and nomenclature just to use their damn site, especially if I’m trying to preview dozens of websites for a trip! Most of the worst offenders are overproduced by expensive print media firms using the pretense they know about “online marketing”. In fact most big firms have about as much web savvy as an inebriated, obnoxious, and arrogant tourist and appear to be designing the sites for …..themselves.

Like most users I’d prefer a Craigslist format so I can easily jump to the information I need rather than wading through popups, pictures, video, and other nonsense when I’m trying to plan a trip. With some exceptions the mantra “just the facts please” would serve online travel promotion better than the foolish extravagances that confuse users and also search engines which struggle to find meaning in garrish flash and pages filled with 100k high resolution photos.

What will Travel sites look like as Web 2.0 shakes out? I’m optimistic that they’ll be much, much better, and hoping to figure out how before it’s obvious to everybody.

SearchMob, like DIGG, is struggling to avoid mob rule.

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One of my favorite blogs is John Battelle’s Searchblog. John provides the best and the most intelligent analysis and discussion focusing on the search industry.

So, when John (and his readers) started experimenting with a digg-like reader-controlled “SearchMob” run using the very clever Pligg community software to provide reviews and links to search related news and articles I was very optimistic. In fact I quickly became one of the top submitters and voters at SearchMob.

Although I write a lot about search issues I have avoided posting my own articles there. I don’t think there’s a problem posting a few of your own pieces, but the system becomes fairly useless if the bulk of activity is self-promotional. This appears to be a problem at SearchMob now.

Of the “top stories” listed this afternoon it appears that every single one was posted by the author. It also appears that some of these authors have several SearchMob accounts so they can vote for their own stories which pushes them to the top.

There are some easy spoofs of the current system, which does not require a log in to vote, that make it easy to push your own articles to the top of the heap, and I fear this is driving the top stories rather than reader interest. This also keeps “legitimate” stories from appearing where they can get more votes, further undermining the integrity of the system.

Solutions need to be largely spoof proof, especially in a reader community filled with SEO specialists. I think requiring complete contact information for anybody posting articles might help to make abuses easier to track. Also it may be necessary for the community to start hassling those who are using this too opportunistically via the discussion feature, though this does not seem to be the intended use of “discussion”.

Here are the top 4 stories now, all appear to have been submitted by the … author and most have questionable vote totals:

An Investment Approach to Marketing
http://googlejet.blogspot.com

Mobile Sites for Information
http://www.resourceshelf.com

A social news service for free advertising
http://targetyournews.com

Google Checkout Now Working with Froogle
http://www.oneparkavenuereality.com

Is that blog tag spam in your “Rochesters Big and Tall” pants or are you just happy to see me?

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Technorat’s top tags today are very conspicuous.    Look at all the references to Rochester’s Big and Tall”, a retailer serving…..big and tall guys.   Looks like some form of blog spamming or odd tag SEO going on.   

I’m still getting a lot of milage from my test Cicarelli post of last week even though she’s dropped to 12th place. 

And will somebody PLEASE blog about the winners of the Yahoo Hack Day?!   Wait…here it is at Techcrunch That event was so great…..nobody had time to blog it thoroughly except to link to the very clever Beck Video.     Beck and his band – themselves mashup mavens and sometime hackers – gave a killer concert at the Yahoo event that will probably go down as one of the best gatherings of the year.  

Top Searches

  1. Jonny
  2. Pinky
  3. Foley
  4. Mark Foley
  5. Google
  6. So You Call Thi…
  7. Hack Day
  8. Hackday
  9. Teacher
  10. Netvibes
  11. Cicarelli
  12. Video
  13. Yahoo Hack Day
  14. Naomi
  15. Podcast Expo

Top Tags

  1. Bush
  2. rochester big and tall
  3. Republicans
  4. office chair big and tall
  5. rochesters big and tall
  6. web-20
  7. Iraq
  8. youtube
  9. wordpress
  10. Terrorism
  11. man belt big and tall
  12. big and tall merino wool sweater
  13. big and tall clothes for men
  14. War
  15. Comedy

AOL lawsuit over data release and, more importantly, storage of search database of intentions

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Over at TechCrunch there’s a discussion about the lawsuit against AOL for releasing search data and also challenging their right to store the search histories of AOL users. I’m surprised this took so long because Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc have been storing all of our searches for some time and probably are using that data to adjust the search experience including refinement to advertising and organic results.

It frustrates me (or I should really say it pisses the heck out of me) that 1) Search engines think they should have rights to my search info with no obligation to tell me what they do with my info and 2) there is a lack of concern in the online community about this. John Battelle has been one of the few voices pointing out that this issue is big and getting much bigger, that these privacy issues need a lot more clarification, and that search companies are sneakily dodging many key issues with search and privacy.

Contrary to many comments I read from other onliners, the Government viewing my data is low on my list of privacy concerns because I doubt they’ll choose to or be able to effectively process the information in sinister ways. However it bothers me a LOT that my search “fingerprint” is getting used without my consent, understanding, or permission in an effort by Google, Yahoo, et al to sell me things and adjust my search and internet experiences.

If they want to do that they need to let me know the process they use to do it. If they think sharing that process violates their need for commercial secrecy then…do NOT use my stuff. I never gave you permission, and you should not assume you have my permission. In fact few people even know that Google and Yahoo and MSN store every single one of their searches – Google, Yahoo, MSN cannot reasonably claim they have implied permission for the search storage identified to individual computer level when very few people are even aware they are doing it!

John Battelle’s Search Mob. Mob Rules. Rules for the Mob. Search Mobsters?

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John has launched “SearchMob”, a Digg-like story submission and review community thing where users send stories they find which are reviewed by others to attain popularily. He asked for feedback and I suggested this:

I’m somewhat confused by the voting both in terms of low numbers but also because the articles with many votes usually show only 2 or 3 names under the discussion list.

Without trying to be too provocative here I’ve wondered if the articles with high votes are simply folks who are voting for their own articles – or asking others to vote – from different machines. In this environment it’s easy to spoof interest and attain the top spot.

Based on limited data I’m now thinking that most of the people come here for John Battelle insights (ie the JB filter) and simply getting articles by other users (ie the JB Search community filter) is not stirring much interest.

Therefore instead of Searchmob, John, you need to become a Search Cult leader and hole up in a heavily armed Palo Alto Coffee Shop with your search apostles while the FBI files motions to get YOUR database of intentions.