Category Archives: Web 2.0

It’s a buzzword, but an effective one.

A Paraphrased Conversation with Ross Levinsohn of News Corp

November 9, 2006 12:54 am / 2 Comments /

levinsohn.jpgPerhaps one of the most well-known acquistion guys in the Web 2.0 world is Fox Interactive President Ross Levinsohn. The following is a paraphrased conversation he had with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier today:

JB: So you bought Myspace, it exploded. Google bought YouTube. You said that if YouTube had shopped themselves maybe they could get 2 billion, is that what you’d pay?

RL: No, I went on to say we probably wouldn’t participate at the price they sold for. YouTube is a fantastic property. It would have been fun to be involved. It went very fast, and perhaps it was the right deal for both companies.

JB: Give us some insider information, what happened when you heard about the deal? You and the folks at Fox weren’t pleased?

RL: No, that’s not fair. Pre-Google I had always expressed my support and had spent some time wtih Chad and Steve and the VCs there, and expressed an interest that we’d like to be involved if they ever wanted to sell.

JB: So after they sold they made a visit, did they have to make nice since Myspace provides so much traffic to YouTube?

RL: No, they didn’t need to make nice. Google is a large strategic partner for us, they are our largest partner really, and we are a big partner of theirs. When you look across the web, those who are your biggest partners are often your biggest competitors. You just have to manage these relationships and make them work.

JB: So the deal you did with Google and Myspace. $900 million deal across Fox Interactive. What is that $900 million for?

RL: It’s for Google to power search across Fox properties except FoxSports due to our MSN deal. It’s a pretty simple deal although the negotiations were fast and complex. People were saying years ago I was the dumbest guy on the planet and that News Corp was crazy for paying what we did for Myspace. You’re neither as dumb or smart as people make it seem. This is a hard business, nothing is as it seems. It wasn’t as bad a deal as it seemed at the time, and if we don’t pay 100% attention to it and grow it, it won’t be as good as some think it is now.

JB: Myspace streams more videos than YouTube, so really that price tag for it’s worth is now over 1.65 billion. Do you plan on ever selling it?

RL: You’d have to ask Rupert, but we have no plans to do so. But never say never.

JB: According to Nielsen, traffic declined at Myspace from August to September. Are you worried about that?

RL: I’m not worried, most sites are down at that time of year, it’s seasonal, and we had a similar dip a year ago. We’re launching internationally, Myspace Japan, etc. We added 320k profiles yesterday, that’s like the size of Buffalo. Time spent on the site has grown 30% in the last 6 months, and we’re up to 38 billion page views a month.

JB: What do you look for in a company when you’re thinking about an acquisition, and are you still looking?

RL: IF we’re not looking we’re not doing our job. we haven’t bought a single company in the last four to five months however.

JB: Does that mean there aren’t any good companies now? Have they all been bought up?

RL: No, I’ve been here all morning at this conference meeting with people and my head is spinning. It’s a great time in this business and media. I get excited about new things. It’s much easier for us to integrate companies into Fox now than it was a year ago. When I look at acquisition targets, I look at the people, and you can see their passion. I’ve met with people who I could tell they were just buliding to sell.

JB: Barry Diller said yesterday that an entrepreneur with a great idea shouldn’t sell. Do you agree?

RL: I disagree. Not to hedge, but in some cases if you’re building a really good feature, it may make more sense to sell. If you’re building the next Google, then obviously you don’t want to sell too early.

JB: One of the previous founders of Myspace keeps suing you guys. He’s now suing you over censorship because you are blocking his sites apps from being shown on Myspace. What can you say about this?

RL: It’s Brad Greenspan, and every motion he’s filed against us has been thrown out. It’s like a boxer who fought Mike Tyson who kept getting knocked down and then getting back up. He got thrown out of the company years before we bought it, and he made $40-50 million in the sale but won’t let it go. Life is too short.

Question from an audience member: Will Myspace open up it’s data like Facebook?

RL: Email Tom Anderson. It’s a good idea and one we’re thinking about and talking about.

Posted in: Acquisitions, Advertising, Conferences, Random, Web 2.0

Jeff Bezos Talks Amazon Web Services at Web 2.0

November 9, 2006 12:15 am / 2 Comments /

bezos.jpgI’ve always liked Jeff Bezos persona as he comes off as a very honest and energetic guy who’s passionate about the web and what can be done on it. He started out by talking about the Amazon we know today that has 61 million active buyers and will surpass 10 billion in 2006 sales.

However Jeff came to speak at this summit about their newer developer business called Amazon Web Services that is less known. Currently they have over 200,000 registered developers in 10 different web service offerings. He primiarly came to talk about S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).

S3 (Simple Storage Service)

  • Storage in the cloud of services
  • Programmatic access via web services API
  • Easy to use


EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

  • Compute capacity in a cloud
  • Scale capacity up and down in minutes
  • Developers control their machine instances
  • Very inexpensive
  • Integrated with Amazon S3
  • $70 month for a 1.7 GHZ machine if you were using computing capacity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Jeff showed some examples of companies using their services. Second Life moved to Amazon S3 service in the middle of the distribution of their application download very seamlessly, and without even contacting Amazon about it.

He believes the biggest benefit is that it removes capacity from being an issue when running a web application.

Why are people so excited over access to hardware?

It removes the capacity problem, and allows companies to focus more on creating the core kernel of your idea. Over 70% of time is normally dealing with the heavy lifting that Amazon’s services take care of.

He closed with a quote: “We make muck, so you don’t have to.”

Tim O’Reilly then sat down with him to ask some more questions about Amazon Web Services. The following is a paraphrased version of the conversation, please don’t take them as exact quotes:

TO: Jeff, you mentioned Microsoft is a customer, you’d think they’d have their own infrastructure?

JB: They have lots of businesses, and obviously they do infrastructure, but they have business units who want to get work done today. (Slight dig at Microsoft!)

TO: You are a retailer, and this seems like a service that would come from a company more like Google or Yahoo. What’s the future of Amazon? Are you a dark horse in this race?

JB: We’re not a dark horse. We’re a “lightning-colored horse”. We’ve been running a large capacity web application for 10 years, and we hae low margins so we need to keep our infrastructure costs low. We took the things we’re good at and learned how to turn them to the outside.

TO: Why do this? Wall Street has been good to your stock, but analysts are confused.

JB: Well, we’ve been doing this for 10 years. We’re good at, we know how to do it, and we think it can be a meaningful and financially attractive business.

TO: Will it replace your other business?

JB: No, we have three businesses. We have our consumer-facing business, seller-facing business, and now this developer-facing business. But the more powerful response to your why question, is why not?

TO: Why has EC2 been succeeding?

JB: It’s simple to use, self-service, and inexpensive.

TO: Where does Alexa and A9 fit into this?

JB: It’s part of the same set of services. Alexa has one of the best web crawls, and that’s some heavy lifting. If we can take that fixed cost and sell it as a variable cost we think that’s attractive.

TO: What’s missing from the muck next?

JB: We have more services coming, some we’ve been working on for two years. But I won’t tell you what those are.

TO: What about one-click as a service? You have the best shopping cart.

JB: That’s a good idea. One that’s in early beta is Fulfillment by Amazon. People can use our API to send us a notification that they’ve shipped us merchandise to our fulfillment centers. We’ll stow it, and then you can use the API to alert us to ship it to a specified address. A fulfillment center is heavy lifting, so if people can buy that service by the drink, that’s great. You can treat a fulfillment center just like a printer.

TO: So how long before you make money?

JB: All our costs are covered by our main business. So we’ve priced it to make money right away.

TO: What about costs for power in the datacenter wars?

JB: The biggest cost isn’t power or servers, it’s lack of total utilization. If most data centers really add up how much the servers are being used, it will only be some percentage of the time. It’s like buying a Boeing 747 and leaving it parked most of the time.

TO: What are you getting from your relationship with 37 Signals?

JB: These guys are really humble and smart, and I’m going to learn a lot from working with them.

Photo Credit: Niall Kennedy

Posted in: Conferences, Random, Web 2.0

Why Won’t Google Let Us Move Our Search Data?

November 8, 2006 11:26 pm / 4 Comments /

When asked at the Web 2.0 Summit Google CEO Eric Schmidt answered when asked that Google would like to allow people to export and move their search data “as long as it’s authenticated”. Greg Yardley states on his blog that he’d like to see it, and asks “is this going to actually take place?”

While I can’t rule it out obviously, I was there when this question was asked, and it seemed to me like Schmidt was trying to blow it off and spit out the authentication piece as a tricking sounding phrase that the audience would assume meant there was some huge technical challenge they had to overcome first.

There isn’t. How hard would it be for Google to allow you to login to your Google Account and click a button to export your search history in various formats? Google routinely tackles far more difficult tasks on a daily basis. So, I think the real story is that they either aren’t planning to do this at all, or they are at least not ready to do so.

Why? Well, Google profits from owning/holding our data, in fact many companies do. They don’t want to be so quick to give it up.

Ross Levinsohn of Fox Interactive was also asked if Myspace would allow users to export their data and take it to other services. Ross referred the question asker to Tom Anderson’s email address and simply said they’d talked about the idea.

Posted in: Conferences, Google, Random, Web 2.0

Yahoo’s Web 2.0 Strategy at Web 2.0 Summit

November 7, 2006 8:40 pm / 1 Comment /

y31.gifI was looking forward to the Yahoo Web 2.0 Strategy session as there have been a lot of questions about Yahoo’s strategy since they missed the YouTube deal and haven’t acquired Facebook. While I think it’s pretty strange to really judge their strategy based on those two things alone, I was hoping this session shed some light. It started off a bit slow as an overview, but delivered some interesting things at the end.

Yahoo and Social Media
Eckart Walther, the Vice President of Product Management for Yahoo! Search led off. Eckart went through a powerpoint that gave some basic definitions of social media and how Yahoo feels about it. He pointed out that Yahoo’s mission is to “Enrich people’s lives by enabling them to find, use, share, and expand the world’s knowledge.” Obviously, social media and much of what Web 2.0 seems to be about fits their mission well.

He also defined it as “Anyone with a XXXXX is now a XXXXX.” So, anyone with a keyboard is now an author. Or anyone with a camera is now a photographer. Anyone with a computer is now a publisher. Basically, users are now empowered.

He broke down what they’re seeing in four categories:

1. User generated content. Flickr is an example of this as users generate all the content.

2. User organized content. This is where del.icio.us comes in, as it’s really about organizing URLs through tagging.

3. User and publisher distributed content.

4. User developed functionality. Mashups like combining Yahoo Maps with Flickr to create geotagging.

He ended with pointing out that Yahoo is the world’s largest community.

Integrating Advertisers with Web 2.0
Next up was Colin (I think) Fishburn. He’s the Director of the Client Strategist Group which means he’s responsible with helping integrate advertisers into Yahoo’s social properties. Colin led off with a bang by declaring that “the killer app of the web is really other people.” He pointed out the media evolution that’s occurred from moving from people consuming Mass Media (newspapers, broadcast TVs), to consuming My Media (My Yahoo! and personalized web apps), to We Media (social applications of Web 2.0).

When they look at brand partnerships on these properties they want them to be:

1. Great for the users

2. Great for the advertisers

3. Great for Yahoo!

This limits what they can do, as they don’t think it’s great for users to slap advertising all over communities like Flickr and del.icio.us. Instead, he gave a couple of examples of what they’ve done:

Nikon Stunning Gallery
Nikon Cameras created a web site using the Flickr APIs to show off images that were being taken with their cameras. Users tag pictures with nikonstunninggallery to have them show up on the site. Nikon then took the top 16 submitters and gave them a new camera they had released, then used the images those submitters took with the camera in national ad campaigns where their pictures were used in magazines such as National Geographic and others. I thought this was a great example of a creative way to partner with an advertiser in a social media context.

One.org
This is an organization and site based on working to end poverty. They used Flickr, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers, Google Video (strange but true), Yahoo! Maps, and other services to power all the various parts of the site. Basically, the site is an organized mashup of Yahoo services aimed at a particular audience. And yes, Bono is involved.

The 9
Yahoo! teamed up with Pepsi to create an online show that highlights nine funny/interesting videos out there on the web. They integrated Pepsi throughout the site and built it together in a collaborative project.

Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo!
Yahoo! Music teamed up with Nissan to create a new version of the AOL Sessions concept where musical artists come and record a special set of songs. The difference is that Yahoo! is also involving the fans by bringing in 250 fans of the artist and giving them Nokia phones enabled with Flickr access so the fans can take shots during the show that get added to the Nissan Live Sets site. Of course the video of the performance can be watched, songs can be downloaded, and they cut an EP from it as well. It’s very new and they are very excited about it.

What’s interesting is all these things had flown under the radar for me, and I think Yahoo! is that way right now. Not everything they do gets spread all over the blogosphere like Google, and they have a lot of interesting content initiatives going on all over the place. While it might not get as much buzz, I think Yahoo! is really delivering some applications that general consumers will be heavily involved with.

What Publishers Want
Next up was Josh Meyers, Senior Director of Yahoo! Publisher Network and GM of Domain Match.

Josh focused his talk on the four main things publishers want:

1. Content

2. Audience

3. Monetization

4. Control

The Yahoo! Publisher Network vision then is to satisfy these things and enable consumers and businesses of all sizes to realize the full value of publishing.

How do they do it?

1. Content – Yahoo has a broad set of content offerings they can offer to publishers. The One.org site is an example of using Yahoo! content to add or create a site with. Personally, I think this is a huge opportunity that they need to package better and include in the Yahoo! Publisher Network interface. As a publisher, how can I get Yahoo Answers content integrated on my site? Yahoo Groups? Flickr feeds? Yahoo Videos? Package this up and put it in the interface. This would be a way Yahoo! could differentiate from Adsense and it’s offerings as they own far more content than Google.

2. Audience – Josh mentioned My Yahoo! and other ways in which Yahoo! could actually drive audience to publishers. Besides My Yahoo! I couldn’t think of any other examples of them pushing audience to publishers. I guess one could consider del.icio.us and MyWeb as Yahoo auidence that ends up clicking through to publishers. Again though, these opportunities should be packaged in some way to make it easy for Yahoo! Publisher Network publishers to take advantage of it.

3. Monetize – Yahoo! Publisher Network is what monetizes for publishers. They have their normal contextual ads, sponsored search, and even provide display advertising for some publishers. I think the “Panama” Yahoo Search Marketing platform update should help bring more advertising dollars into their network.

4. Control – Allow publishers control over their advertising, and they also are counting on the Yahoo! Developer Network and APIs to help give publishers control to build tools.

That sums it up. What stood out to me was the brand advertising integration examples and the opportunity Yahoo! Publisher Network has if they can package their tools and content to be used by publishers in better ways.

(Full Disclosure: Yahoo! is a minority investor in my employer Right Media, but these opinions are my own.)

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Publishing, Random, Web 2.0, Yahoo

I Like JellyFish Smack Shopping Deal of the Day

November 7, 2006 1:00 am / Leave a Comment /

I was a bit guarded and perhaps skeptical of Jellyfish when they initially launched, and had a good dialog with their CEO via e-mail which gave me a more positive view of what they’re trying to achieve.

I hadn’t heard much about them lately, and I’ve been curious to know how their service has been growing. I don’t know the answer to that yet, but they hit the news again with their launch of the Smack Shopping Deal of the Day.

Basically it’s a reverse auction where they have a limited quantity of an item to sell and the price drops on it over time and users can buy whenever they feel they need to in order to get one. If the users all can hold off, the price drops lower and lower, but then you risk missing out if you don’t buy in time. They also have forums involved so that the users can discuss the Smack and try and plan strategies or talk each other into or out of buying.

It looks like a fun game, as well as a fascinating study in psychology. It also does something which a friend brought up to me recently, it harnesses the power of buying in numbers to get a good price. The web doesn’t do enough of this, so this is one of the first shopping applications I’ve seen that takes advantage of that. Some may compare this to Woot, and it has some similarities, but it seems like a more strategic buying process that can end up with a better deal.

Posted in: Ecommerce, Random, Web 2.0

Heading to Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco

November 5, 2006 10:57 pm / Leave a Comment /

I’ll be representing Right Media at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week.

The speaker lineup and sessions looks incredible, so I’m pretty excited. I’m not sure what the laptop/blogging situation will be but I’m hoping to blog about some of the speakers and sessions here and at the Right Media blog.

If you’re going to be there, drop me an email and we’ll meet up.

Posted in: Conferences, Web 2.0

What Digg and Netscape Can Do For You In Organic Search Results

November 3, 2006 11:52 am / 9 Comments /

diggsearch.jpg
Publishers and bloggers who have had the experience of having their content “Dugg”, “Scaped”, or featured prominently on any other social news or bookmarking sites have seen the short traffic spikes that tend to occur from this experience. Many have commented that beyond those huge traffic spikes there isn’t much long term value from having your content featured, and why submit to them at all if your content isn’t going to make the front page when the traffic spike occurs?

A recent experience with organic search results and some research has caused me to believe that the long term value proposition is changing and will get even better. It also sheds some light on which social sites may grow in traffic, and which of the three major search engines indexes them the best.

The Initial Query
My parents have an ecommerce site primarily selling an ergonomic stool called the Swopper Chair. I provide some technical consulting for them and I needed to look up some PHP shopping carts. So I did a Google search for “best php shopping cart”.

I started reading through the results, and noticed the result from Digg half way down. Knowing what Digg is, I figured it’d be a good recommendation and probably have some comments and additional links that might help me out. I read through the comments and ended up clicking through to both the Dugg URL and some of the URLs in the comments.

This made me wonder if there is potential for organic search results for social news and bookmarking sites to drive long tail traffic to your site, maybe even if your article never got many votes and never made the front page of the site.

The Tests
It was time to start picking some search queries and see what kind of results appear from social sites and what about those sites makes that happen. I’ll link to the query along with what social sites have results and where the original article ends up in the results.

Test 1: john battelle keynote

This was a search term from the post I made from John Battelle’s keynote at the Blog Business Summit last week that did not get many votes on the social sites, and got a few links to my post from the blogosphere.

Google:

  • 5th – Netscape
  • 7th – Digg
  • 11th – ConversionRater (my post)

The result of that is if I hadn’t submitted my article to Netscape and Digg I’d have no chance of getting any visitors who didn’t pass the first results page. Of course, the visitor has to click through Netscape/Digg to get to my actual article, but the chances of that are decent based on how those sites are structured.

Yahoo Search:

  • 3rd – ConversionRater

No results from the social sites. Either Yahoo doesn’t index them well, or index them quick enough.

MSN Live Search:

  • 10th – ConversionRater
  • 13th – Netscape

Interesting that Digg was not here at all when Netscape was listed.

Summary: Google provided the best and the most beneficial results for using social news to get higher rankings for an article than I could get on my own without submitting it.

Test 2: yahoo invests

This term is from the title of a more popular article than our first test. This one is from SmartMoney.com to the tune of 137 Diggs that was on the Business and Finance front section on Digg, and I also made a blog post with the same phrase in the title.

Google:

  • 3rd – Digg
  • 5th – Searchmob (A Digg like site from John Battelle about the search industry)
  • 6th – SmartMoney.com Article (Actual article that was Dugg)
  • 7th – ConversionRater blog post

Solid results, and the presence of social sites and linking between them and my blog post allowed this one story to take 7 of the top 10 search results, even though Yahoo has invested in many, many things over the years. This provides a lesson that sites like Digg hold a huge page rank and authority now that it ranks higher than most media outlet sites that have reported on Yahoo investing in various things.

Yahoo Search:

  • 17th – ConversionRater blog post
  • 21st – SearchMob
  • 23rd – DuggMirror (site that mirrors popular articles on Digg)

So where the heck is Digg? They haven’t been on either test so far. Does Yahoo not index Digg? Now that Searchmob has shown up on two engines, maybe it’s an important site to add to the submission mix even though it’s not as well known as others. This is the only story I’ve ever submitted there, so that looks promising. Yahoo also had much more varying results instead of just the Right Media investment story, so perhaps Google’s top results are more time-sensitive.

MSN Live Search:

  • 2nd – ConversionRater blog post
  • 11th – SmartMoney.com article that was Dugg heavily
  • 17th – Digg
  • 19th – SearchMob

Live Search likes my blog the best which is great, but also interesting to see SearchMob popping up again in the top 20.

Summary: Google’s results make Digg and Searchmob look especially important to get higher rankings. It doesn’t look like social sites matter to Yahoo, and MSN results are mixed.

Test 3: toyota logo

A few weeks ago my friend Mike Rundle had a little run in with Toyota based on a company working for them taking the 9rules leaf logo and barely changing it for a site they were running. I figured this search query might be a bit harder to rank high on, so it’d be interesting to see if the social networks helped out.

Google:

  • 6th – BusinessLogs.com original post
  • 10th – Digg
  • 11th – Netscape
  • 20th – Reddit

Not bad, but the social sites might not help all that much as the original post would probably get clicked on more. It is interesting to see our first sighting of Reddit.

Yahoo Search: No results

Ugh, Yahoo hates social sites and blogs!

MSN Live Search:

  • 4th – Digg
  • 8th – BusinessLogs Original Post

The Digg listing is a big help here at potentially getting more search traffic.

Summary of Tests
Even though it was a pretty quick test, and the search terms I tested aren’t that competitive, it’s clear that submitting your site to the social news services can help drive more traffic to your site through organic search.

I think we can also see that Google seems to embrace fresh content and the social news sites more than Yahoo and MSN, and Yahoo definitely isn’t a big fan. This is probably not a big deal as most publishers are primarily concerned with Google traffic anyway.

What does this tell us about the social sites?
Digg and Netscape were definitely the most commonly found sites, and I ran some more additional quick tests and found that Netscape seems to also show up ahead of Digg in many cases. I had an extremely hard time finding Reddit or del.icio.us in any results. Why is this? Let’s take a look at why each of these sites may or may not rank highly:

Digg:

  • Lots of link popularity and authority. 8/10 Google Page Rank (if that means anything).
  • Uses title of article in the page title well.
  • Article title in an h3 tag.
  • Uses title in search-friendly URL.
  • Community comments make the page have more text and makes the Digg listing page like an article itself. It can provide more keywords and variety.
  • They provide incentive to blog about their stories (and thus get more link popularity) by listing the Digg users who blogged about the story with a link back to their blog.
  • There are sites like Duggmirror and blogs that basically just republish Digg listings and content so it drives more links.

Netscape:

  • Even more link popularity than Digg, but this is a benefit of Netscape.com’s long time place on the web. 9/10 in Google page rank. This could account for why Netscape sometimes comes up ahead of Digg for the same stories.
  • Uses title of article in the page title well.
  • Article title in an h3 tag.
  • Uses title in search-friendly URL.
  • Community comments make the page have more text, but usually not as many comments as Digg.
  • Didn’t see any incentive to blog the stories.
  • Probably not as many mirrors or sites republishing their content as Digg.

Reddit:

  • Decent link popularity at 7/10 Page Rank, but not as good as Digg and Netscape.
  • Uses title of article in the page title well.
  • No header tag around article title (ouch).
  • Does not use the article title in the URL.
  • Community comments make the page have more text.
  • Didn’t see any incentive to blog the stories.
  • Probably not as many mirrors or sites republishing their content as Digg.

del.icio.us:

  • Link popularity is good and similar to Digg at 8/10 Page Rank.
  • Does not use title of the article as the title of the page.
  • Uses h4 tag for article headline.
  • Does not use the title of the article in the URL.
  • Instead of it really being comments and a discussion, users leave notes about the bookmark. They are usually very similar notes.
  • No incentive to blog the stories.
  • I’ve actually heard before that del.icio.us blocks search engines from indexing it with their robots.txt file. I haven’t researched if that’s true, but judging from how they have their bookmark pages set up it does not appear that they are trying to get good organic search results. I did find their tag pages listed in some search results however.

Searchmob:

  • Low link popularity, currently showing a 0/10 in Page Rank. The root domain of battellemedia.com does have an 8/10 though, so that probably carries over.
  • Uses title of article in the page title well.
  • Article title in an h4 tag.
  • Uses title in search-friendly URL.
  • There is the potential for comments, but since it gets less traffic there aren’t many comments.
  • It does take trackbacks which can encourage blogging the stories. Didn’t look too common though.

Social Site Summary
Based on looking at how they have set things up, Digg and Netscape are positioned the best to continue to grow from organic search results. This will be a key to break out of the tech audience and into the mainstream web userbase. If users find Digg through Google results they may be inclined to stick around. Also, as publishers learn about the value they can get from having their articles submitted to these sites, Digg and Netscape will get more submissions while other sites won’t.

It seems to me like Reddit and del.icio.us are missing the boat here and not doing some very easy things they could do in order to get their pages show up more in organic search. Do they not want traffic?

Posted in: Blogging, Google, Microsoft, Publishing, Social Networks, Web 2.0, Yahoo

Fat Elvis Sighting and Halloween

November 1, 2006 4:40 pm / Leave a Comment /

Fat ElvisHalloween was a blast, both in the office as seen above and taking my kids out and about.

It was interesting to note the acquisition announcements as both Jotspot and Reddit were acquired by Google and Conde Nast respectively. I used both services on occasion and liked them both. I was reading Jotspot founder Joe Kraus’ blog back before he actually started Jotspot, so it was good to see it run the life from startup to acquisition.

I think the lesson is that if you build a great tool and technology that is useful and easy to use, you’ll have success whether you’re acquired or not.

Posted in: Acquisitions, Personal, Web 2.0

John Battelle Keynote at Blog Business Summit

October 27, 2006 1:48 pm / Leave a Comment /

battellegif.jpg FM Publishing and Searchblog’s John Battelle was the keynote today at Blog Business Summit.

Battelle led off with a bang by saying he missed yesterday at the event but read the blog coverage, and so everyone should “turn off their fucking cellphones”. A funny reference as many phones seemed to go off during speakers throughout the day.

He went into a background of himself through Wired, Hotwired (where he was then offered the Editor in chief job at Yahoo which he turned down thinking portals were stupid), and then moved on to starting the Industry Standard. TheStandard.com spent $16 million to get to the point of 500,000 visitors a month, which they were very proud of. Hotwired was also where the first banner ad was supposedly born as they chose to take the idea of the constant ad on Prodigy at the bottom of the screen and turn it into a banner ad.

The Industry Standard was going great until the boom in 2000 hit, and he was out of a job as the company that owned his company put him out of a job.

It was back to Berkeley to start teaching journalism, and he started Searchblog in 2003 because he wanted to publish as a professor and he was fascinated by search, and he started working on the book The Search.

Battelle also got interested in the newer companies that were forming that were different and started the Web 2.0 Conference with Tim O’Reilly. Shortly thereafter, BoingBoing called him with a problem that their $500 hosting bill was too much and they needed to do advertising. Battelle asked how many visitors they had, and the reply was 500,000. He noticed that obviously a huge shift had occurred when it took TheStandard.com $16 million to achieve that, and it now was costing BoingBoing $500.

He thinks the shift that occurred was basically that the back office got digitized, then the front office got digitized, and the shift was that the users/customers were now digitized. Search had now become the new interface or navigational device to our computers.

Next on the list was a discussion of Web 2.0 principles:

  • The web is a platform
  • The architecture of participation
  • Lightweight business models
  • Innovation in assembly
  • The long tail

And then Web 2.0 search principles:

  • The driver of Web 2.0 businesses
  • Our culture’s point of inquiry, the spade with which we turn the web’s soil, artifact of a new culture.
  • A new reality for all forms of traditional businesses

Battelle then spoke to how amazing seach is for it’s ability to keep our search history forever, and the implications of it. Who owns our search history? Who owns our search data? Can we give our search history for our grandkid?

The next point was that search rules for marketers is because it has the cheapest average customer acquisition cost of any advertising medium. As users we declare our intent into a little box, and then search forms the world around us for what we want to see. Traditional advertising means trying to find the audience where they are consuming content, and try and gain their attention from it.

Search also drives people to social media sites, because that’s where conversations are occurring and new content is being created and aggregated. In traditional media attention is controlled by distributors, and now it’s controlled by consumers. There are new centers of attention, and content is king with landing place as queen. “All businesses must join the Point-to Economy (links = votes = attention)”.

The promise of the web is the ability to know what your customer wants, or to invite them to tell you. This requires a new set of skills, new tools, new thinking about media buying, and venturing away from the comfortable.

Next up was the idea that marketing has evolved into the architecture of participation. So this led into showing a case study of their first participation advertising done at Federated Media. They ran a campaign for Lenovo that invited users to vote. Lenovo was a bit uncomfortable, but they got over 200,000 votes in the campaign.

Another example was that Microsoft ran a campaign on WiFiNet News, and the initial creatives for the campaign were kind of irrelevant. Glenn Fleishman at WiFiNet News suggested that they change the creatives to talk about the Office wireless features. Microsoft’s agency worked with Glenn to write the copy for the creatives and it got a 60% improvement on click-through rate. A step in the rate direction for having the publishers participate with the advertising.

He followed up with a couple of more examples, and then went into FM’s business model of FM bundling quality sites together, selling them individually and as groups, and promoting conversations between the advertisers and publishers. They feel their key business value is their relationship with their publishers, and the value they create through their work. They focus on quality and engagement.

An interesting talk overall on the history of Battelle’s career and what they are trying to accomplish at FM.

Posted in: Advertising, Blogging, Conferences, Publishing, Web 2.0

Obvious Corp. Buying Odeo Interesting, But Not Common

October 26, 2006 10:12 am / Leave a Comment /

Evan Williams and other Odeo employees buying control of Odeo back from their VCs is definitely an interesting piece of news because it’s not that common, and it says something interesting about what some companies are experiencing right now. Williams sees that putting out quick products with small teams and seeing what becomes a hit is a better strategy than planning and growing some specific and larger application, and perhaps things weren’t going as fast as the investors wanted.

Mark Evans theorizes this may become common to Web 2.0 companies who aren’t seeing the amount of progress their investors want.

I disagree, I think that this is a pretty unique case as Evan Williams happens to have millions of dollars to pull such a thing off, while the majority of investors don’t have that kind of money sitting around. Sure, there are a few companies out there that have been started in the last couple of years by entrepreneurs who have had previous successes that may give them that kind of capital, but I think generally it’s not going to be something we see on a regular basis.

Posted in: Acquisitions, Random, Web 2.0