Coffee Calendar

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Coffee Calendar

Click here for more about the 2008 Coffee Calendar

Hey, it’s Coffee Calendar Google ranking excitement!  As I mentioned in some earlier posts my wife’s Brother-in-law Ricardo has a great Coffee Calendar, a project he has worked on for some time that features some great art and history.

Helping him attain a proper Google rank for his site TheCoffeeCalendar.com offers up some neat lessons in how Google ranks websites – perhaps most importantly how blogs have come to be a very critical factor in some rankings.  

Artist Mike Rohde also has a neat “Sketchtoon” Coffee Calendar he has done for 2008.    Where Ricardo’s Coffee Calendar focuses more on history, Mike’s focuses on the actual coffee drinks.   Both would make a neat gift for any coffee lover in your life so check them both out!

Mike’s Calendar has the top Google spot now and I think this is a good example of Google favoring blog content over an actual website devoted to the Coffee Calendar.    Ricardo’s site was recently launched and thus I’m guessing Mike’s blog is given higher authority at Google when “Coffee Calendars” are getting discussed.    Since this blog appears to have more authority than Mike’s it’ll be interesting to see if this post has any affect on the rankings.

In the meantime, pick a Coffee Calendar and a fresh picked pound of coffee beans as a neat gift for the coffee lover in your life. 

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! 

Oink

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Nick Carr over at Rough Type has one of the cleverest techno posts written in some time as he addresses the  little brouhaha over enterprise vs consumer software.    In fact I’d give him the tech blogging Pulitzer Prize simply for this turn of phrase:

Rubberneckers leaping gleefully onto the Techmeme pig pile

More to the point he’s talking about the silliness of the technobabbling echo chamber as well as the silliness of enterprise software folks making mostly foolish distinctions between types of software.   

There is an alarming trend among mostly “old school” developers and programmers and analysts to make a variety of questionable assumptions about technology that are based on failing to recognize how different things have become.  Even new school folks routinely overbuild websites and application environments simply becausae they’ve been taught that is the way you do technology. Worst is the idea that complex software is needed to run complex companies.   WRONG!    It is true that complex software is almost always used by big companies, but this is primarily a function of legacy issues (ie they started their systems back in the day when there were NO simple solutions) and IT turf issues (e.g pretend you are the head of Exxon’s IT division and you are asking for a BIG raise and more options.   Are you more likely to get the promotion by proposing a shift to Google documents across much of the corporate enterprise, or by proposing a highly customized SAP solution only you understand?   Also, it takes a kind of innovative thinking that I think is sometimes missing from the school of old timers.

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.

YouTube + You = cash? Not much!

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YouTube’s starting to experiment with revenue sharing for video producers, though it is not clear yet how the details of the program will shake out.   Marshall at ReadWriteWeb   suggests this action might “put to rest” the notion that YouTube cannot monetize content, but I think it will actually show how difficult it is to monetize even popular content.     Unlike targeted pay per click advertising it’s hard to “hit” a customer with a relevant ad when they are simply surfing aimlessly for clips or watching a funny clip.    True, you get some vague targeting information such as a possible few interest areas, but this is nothing like running a per click ad during a search for “Buy a sony digital camera”.   The latter is a golden opportunity to strike at the point of purchasing decision, and it’s why PPC, especially at the brilliantly matched Google PPC adwords environment, works so very well.

About a month back, when YouTube started allowing you to embed videos in a web page and use adsense to monetize them I tried a small experiment setting up a new website called “Funniest Online Videos“, fovideos.com.     There are adsense ads embedded around the funny clips that Google pulls from their YouTube comedy section.    

After sending a few thousand people to the site using some untargeted advertising I think I made something like 35 cents from a handful of clicks.     Sure, I could work hard and target better and get some organic (free) traffic to that site, but as they are starting to find in many other venues video clip advertising does not pay well at all.    I’m very skeptical of this model for ads, and given the deluge of clips I think advertisers will soon see this type of advertising as a waste of money, even at the low end of the scale.

Setup Flickr to Blog in 30 seconds or less

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Flickr remains my favorite “Web 2.0” thingie and I think it is one of the best applications ever done for a computer.   I’m always thrilled with the simplicity of making simple changes to bring dramatic results.  

For example you can post your flickr pictures to your blog, which is great.    Also great is that the setup routine for doing this is as simple as you can get.    I just added photo capabilities to the new blog I’m writing for the big Travel and History site we are creating from two previous efforts at Online Highways and US History:     blog.u-s-history.com 

This took me about 30 seconds as follows:

1) Log in to Flickr Account

2) Go to “Extend Flickr” section on your Flickr Accounts page
3) Add blog
4) Pick from the list they’ll have of your blogger blogs if you’ve already signed one up.   

done

If you are signing up a blog for the first time you’ll need to give some access permission, but that is not very complicated.

The cool think is that then you can go to flickr and click “blog this” and post pictures at the blog quickly and easily.

And, just like the song says:   If a picture paints a thousand words, then why bother writing 1000 words, which takes a lot more time!

Yachats, Oregon

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Back from a great trip over to lovely Yachats, Oregon where we stayed at the beautiful Adobe Resort for two nights. 

The big Oregon storm is well over and the weather was cold but clear, with beautiful surf.   On Saturday night we headed north to Lincoln City for a a spectacular dinner at the Bay House, a new fine dining restaurant overlooking the sea.   It’s one of Oregon’s finest restaurants for good reason.   My dinner?   Seared scallops with a rabbit confite accompanied by a light pinot gris wine.

The Namesake * * * *

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This excellent film chronicles the life and cultural journey of an American Indian family from their roots in Calcutta to the American “dream” with its quirky and affluent complications.  Kal Penn and Tabu are marvelous as Indian mother in America and American son of India.

The film does a fantastic job of transitioning almost seamlessly between two very different cultures, and offers insights into the deep history of Indian tradition and family values.   A great movie for anybody with an interest in other cultures.

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.