Category Archives: Websites

Blog readers and blog writers redux II.1 The downfall of Cicarelli?

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This blog readers vs writers thing remains intriguing. Now, “Jonny” is the top blog search and I’m having trouble figuring out exactly why since the name refers to several pop icons. In fact that may be why it’s up top – it’s a term that overlaps several popular searches for people named Jonny. My own “cicarelli” post is getting some traction but the top referrer for me by far is a reference to my first post about this readers vs writers issue and it’s coming from people over at Technorati searching for “Assparade”.

 

From an SEO perspective it appears we may be seeing signs that writing about the top term is less likely to get a lot of traffic than writing about highly searched but secondary term that is getting much less press. Still way too early to come to this conclusion though.

 

The Technorati search list is changing more day to day than I would expect, perhaps an indication of the fleeting nature of human interest and big media focus. The tag list seems more stable and that would make sense if we assume the following about writers vs readers:

 

Blog writers are a smaller, more focused group

Blog writers tend to stick to same general topics

(?) Blog writers tend to address richer, more stable, deeper subjects and therefore these don’t change at the whim of masses and mass media.

 

 

Top Searches

  1. Jonny
  2. Cicarelli
  3. Pinky
  4. Xing
  5. Bitacle
  6. Openbc
  7. Stuff Happens a…
  8. Bin Laden
  9. Lindsay Lohan
  10. Video
  11. Asian
  12. Paginas Da Vida
  13. Ubuntu
  14. Mandingo
  15. Axis of Sketchy…

 

Top Tags

  1. Islam
  2. Bush
  3. youtube
  4. Iraq
  5. Microsoft
  6. Politica
  7. Terrorism
  8. ebay
  9. sexy
  10. War
  11. web2.0
  12. foto
  13. bin Laden
  14. web-20
  15. Poesie

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……

Top Ten Fall Destinations?

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TripAdvisor’s top ten fall destinations are:

1.Munich, Germany
2. Napa Valley, Calif.
3. Montreal, Quebec
4. Asheville, N.C.
5. Woodstock, Vt.
6. Vancouver, Canada
7. Lake Placid, N.Y.
8. Camden, Maine
9. Mystic, Conn.
10. Aberdeen, Scotland

It seems like a funny list to me.   The Fall color of USA is well represented at Woodstock, Lake Placid, and Camden and a trip to the Northeast USA in fall is impossible to beat for spectacular foliage IF your timing is lucky.   Mystic and Napa are charming and Montreal and Vancouver are very cool places.   Haven’t been to Asheville but I’m sure it’s nice.    Munich an obvious choice for Octoberfest.  Not sure about Aberdeen.

But as long as they’ve decided to include the entire world it seems like a reasonable person is going to pick London, Paris, Rome, Prague, a city in China or Japan, etc, etc over, say Asheville or Mystic or Lake Placid.

I think these silly lists tell you more about the person composing them than travel.

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!”

Facebook to open to everybody soon

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Hey, just a few days after I took the time to set up a UW Madison Alumni email and forward it to my Google mail and I’m feeling all special and elite because I have a Facebook Account,  Forbes reports that Facebook will open up to anybody very soon.

This will be really interesting to watch.   Facebook is much, much smaller than Myspace but has a far more “elite” reputation among the college crowd.   Will Myspace users move to Facebook?  Run multiple accounts?   Which service will new users choose?

Facebook turned down huge money recently, wanting a lot more for what they think is the most valuable social network environment.   If I had to predict things I’d say they made a mistake turning down that money and opening up to all.  They’llsee slower growth than they are expecting, reducing the perceived value of Facebook to less than what was offered.

Talent, Oregon Real Estate

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Here in lovely Talent, Oregon the real estate prices have been going up in spectacular fashion. Until now. As a favor to my pal Jack Latvala I’m helping him set up a PPC campaign over at Star Properties, the closest thing to an official real estate office for Talent we have here. They also cover Ashland Oregon and have a lot of Ashland Oregon Real Estate listings as well as Talent Oregon Real Estate. Jack and Lynn are great to work with and are one of those rare brokerages that are more interested in helping people and the community than in landing the sales commission.

We’ll start with the $50 in free clicks from Google from SES and see if they can get any action from that bidding on terms like Talent Oregon, Talent Real Estate, Ashland Real Estate, etc. I’m very interested in this from a Search optimization perspective as well. Star would very reasonably be considered the most relevant site for Talent Real Estate, but probably not for Ashland Real Estate. However, the listing at the top for Ashland has a PR of only 2 and is not one of the big players there. I’m thinking he may be the cleverest one though as that’s a choice spot. In these “longer tail” areas we see that Google often fails to deliver the type of result you’d get if you asked a very knowlegeable local from Ashland about Real Estate, and I think this bodes well for Yahoo’s more humanized social search approaches.

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.

Microsoft ads will monetize Facebook Faces

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Nice play by Microsoft to capture future users, though I’m still very intrigued that all these models can thrive by giving users a very modest number of tools to put themselves online, providing common space for people, and then keeping all the money.    I don’t mind *sharing* some revenue with big players but I think it’s remarkable how people simply let the big players nab all the bucks that are the result of their collective …. efforts.

Even *current* Myspacers, most of whom are young teens, envy Facebook accounts which are more restrictive and targeted. I’d guess Facebook eyeballs will be worth 2+ times Myspace Eyeballs in terms of advertising value – maybe much more.

Why is everybody writing off MS and bearish on Yahoo? Once they stop being idiotic they’ll realize they have the same sized audience as Google and will monetize that viewership.

With Vista’s launch, MS will control viewers in ways only their lawyers know for sure.

Google’s at 60% of the search market.   That’s probably about as high as it will ever go.

WordPress noindex / nofollow problem solved

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Last week I noticed my precious little blog posts, which have been nicely indexed by Google, were dropping out of the index like flies. Of course I should have checked the source code but it took Aaron’s note today to make me realize the blog was placing a noindex/nofollow everywhere, making it impossible to get indexed.

Appears this also happened to the illustrious Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame, and there I learned to flip the “privacy” feature back to allow searches in.

To fix the WordPress NOINDEX NOFOLLOW problem click DASHBOARD > OPTIONS > PRIVACY and select to allow search engines.

I’m still a bit concerned that somebody may have done this maliciously, but never attribute to malice that which can be reasonably attributed to stupidity (or some bug in the system).

Anyway, who would stoop so low? Duck hunters?

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.