September 2006 Entries

I love this stuff! PEW Internet just came out with another study, called The Future of the Internet II, where they went to 742 Internet leaders, activists and analysts and tried to predict what the Internet would look like in 2020. I've downloaded it today and will be reading it over the next 24 hours. Expect more comments as I digest it. The first glance looked fascinating.

Bambi Francisco indicates that Microsoft might just be too old, too slow, too stodgy and, dare we say it, too bulky to play with the youngsters in the online sandbox any more. She points to the new YouTube clone, Soapbox, that Microsoft is rolling out.

You know, I'm starting to agree with Bambi. I've always said don't count Microsoft out, because I still remember what they did to Netscape, but they seem to be lagging further and further behind the cutting edge. Increasingly, the game is being taken out of the courts they tend to dominate in. It's okay to be late to the party if you're bringing the beer, but increasingly, Microsoft is showing up with a case of empties (okay..maybe I'm stretching the analogy beyond the breaking point).

Is Microsoft finally becoming the dinosaur that everyone's always accused them of being? Perhaps the world is changing too quickly for them to keep up. When's the last innovation that rolled out of Redmond that wasn't a pale and inferior imitation of something that already existed? One can't help thinking that perhaps Bill Gates could see the writing on the wall and bailed when he could.

Yahoo is currently taking some lumps for a slow down in a couple of sectors, but don't try to extrapolate this to the industry at large. In a Business Week column Catherine Holahan indicates why the slump is due more to internal issues at Yahoo rather than some industry wide malaise.

What is pointed out in the column that is probably more interesting is the growing fragility of Yahoo's largely banner dominated network, which has been a steady revenue anchor for the company for some time. Increasingly, online is improving the ability to put the right message in front of the right person in the right place at the right time with increased targeting options, either through behavioral targeting, online property targeting or demographic targeting.  Banner distribution on a tired stable of portals isn't fitting the bill in any of these regards. The behavioral targeting dollars are currently going away from the top 3 into smaller players like Tacoda and Revenue Science. Google has the edge in targeting ideal online properties through roll out of display in their AdSense network and MSN is definitely building a robust demo targeting platform in adCenter. Yahoo's push back of Panama, which would at least even the playing field for awhile is definitely an Achille's heel and the race is picking up here.

In the rush for ad spending accountability, Yahoo is starting to lag behind and that could prove fatal if they don't catch up fast.

My Search Insider column today was big picture stuff, looking at how search can connect us to a digitized world.

Here's an excerpt:

There is this vast binary universe out there, terabyte after terabyte of data that grows each and every second, capturing the essence of who we are and what we do. And the sole door to that world, the channel we all must pass through to gain entry, is search. In the act of searching, we connect to that universe. 

Catch the rest of the column at MediaPost.

The column drew some interesting responses, both on the Search Insider blog and emailed to me.

Martin Edic truly thought globally

In the spirit of creating a ‘brain melter’, imagine the extension of search created by GPS and satellite imaging. Suppose I want to create a search engine devoted to global climate change. If I can access these sources I could literally do a planetary search that included both digital data a geographoc, geological, weather and other environmental data all viewable as imagery, maps, text, etc.

David Gust took exception to my plaudits for Pandora: I initially thought Pandora was great, but eventually it became monotonous. A descriptor genome for the music is great, but it doesn’t decipher the music consumption genome in me.

My point is that indexing means little without context. Context is about behavior and that is where the true focus must be placed to truly unlock value of “Indexing the World”

Derick Harris,w ho obviously has a lot of time on his hands, took me to task for my "pointless" vision of an Orwellian future

I do wish that these marketing rhetoricians of search, such as Mr. Hotchkiss, would “think first” about what they are asking, in terms of “big questions” — instead of wasting our time with patently pointless essays that amount to self-serving indulgences posing as questions that really amount to a whole world Googleized into an information hell.

...Ouch! Sorry Derick, I obviously hit a sore spot.

And in the spirit of wired "Big Brother", Warren Peace (come on..that can't be your real name. But if it is, kudos to your parents!) shared his vision of a database schema for a "global object database" or GOD for short...

whereby every kind of digital data could be stored, indexed and cross-referenced, and rated for accuracy (couldn't find funding for it, though). One issue is that many things are analog, not digital, and digitizing them means losing important information. An image of a person and a list of their interests is NOT the person, just an avatar. Do we really need an avatar of every living thing?

Perhaps that's what the real "God" is - an analog, searchable object database that details absolute accuracy.

Talk about your brain melters!

More on the topic of online video. It seems the majority of stories I'm seeing in this space recently have to do with moving video to the Net. A recent one was the agreement between YouTube and Warner.

YouTube is as hot as a high grade viral infection right now, which is what it essentially is. It's the latest Net "Buzz" poster child, and it's reaping huge amounts of traffic. That's a great step towards sustainability, but as we've seen in the past, the Net's traffic patterns are notoriously fickle. The tide can turn overnight and head to a new spot. What YouTube has to do is grow up without growing old. Kafka gets it right in his article.

Kudos to Warner for understanding the ebb and flow of the Internet. You have to watch where the new communities of interest are gathering, and shift your strategy to be in the right place at the right time. Presently, YouTube is the right place. The only question is how long is the "right time" window. YouTube in it's present form is all hype and little substance. We're still playing with the novelty of online video. We still get a kick out of watching teenagers lip sync to a popular song (or the theme song for Pokemon) in his/her bedroom. That will get old fast. Not to mention the questionable legality of most of the content on YouTube.

Warner is smart enough to realize that the consumer is at the wheel and will control where distribution occurs. They're laying their bets on YouTube, and it's probably a smart bet. At least, it's a smarter bet that where the competition is placing their chips. Universal is still trying to maintain the illusion of control by going head to head with another red hot property, MySpace.com, with threats of legal action due to copyright infringement. EMI and Universal has also gone with SpiralFrog, a start up. They have obviously given up traffic for greater control.

But for YouTube, the trick will be to provide more meat as it transitions from a viral novelty to an internet mainstay. This trick has been successfully pulled off only a few times in the past. One was Google.

 

 

The talks that Google and Apple are currently in about video will likely start defining the future of video entertainment as we know it. And it's just one more example of "push" going to "pull".

The news story is about iTV, the new device that bridges the gap between the TV and the PC, letting you viewed video from your hard drive on your TV. It's the continuation of convergence that I've been talking about for some time now.

But what is interesting about this to me is not so much the hardware as the extension of searchability to online entertainment. It's just a matter of time before the walls come down between something like YouTube and the world of broadcast TV. They're already crumbling rapidly. And setting your viewing preferences based on searchability opens up a whole new world. I've had just a taste of it through Microsoft's Media Center and I like it. You can search up to two weeks of programming by keyword, looking for a particular topic, director or actor.

Now, let's extend this the next logical step. Let's open up the rapidly exploding world of video. All the movies, all the tv shows, all the documentaries ever made, as well as the crushing wave of consumer generated video content, all as searchable as the web thanks to Google. You in the mood for a show about 9/11 conspiracy theories? A quick search and you're watching Loose Change. Plus, Google suggests other shows you might be interested on based on your topic. It's just a matter of time before somebody does for video what Pandora is doing for music, allowing you to explore the world of video entertainment based on similarities to what you already like.

Social tagging opens up more possibilities, allowing you to tap into the most popular choices of the various online communities you belong to. The buzz effect takes over (as we see currently on YouTube) and suddenly watching online video becomes a communal experience.

It's a revolution in video distribution, and the seeds are being sown currently in the chat that Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt are likely having as we speak.

Whoa..this is a bold move!

Just saw a thread on Webmaster World that indicates Google is testing removing top sponsored ads after a number of searches where a user doesn't click on anything. Tried it myself and sure enough, after 4 or 5 refreshes, top ads were gone.

After refreshing on the same query, the ads disappeared for that query, and any modifications of the query, but still showed for a totally different query. After I went through the same process with the new query, all my top ads disappeared.

If Google sticks with this, it demonstrates a huge dedication to the user experience. Our research has shown how valuable this real estate is from a monetization perspective, but Google's feeling (and rightly so) is that if you're skipping past it anyway, the probability of a click on these ads is minimal. Why impair the user experience but taking up prime real estate with something that the user is just filtering out anyway.

I did some more testing with some different patterns to see where the sponsored filter seems to be tripped. If you do a number of different searches without clicking on sponsored listings, it doesn't seem to kick in. It's only if you do a lot of return visits to the same set of search results without hitting a sponsored link. But once the ads are gone, they're gone for every query from then on til you clear your cookies.

Ironically, my only hesitation with this is from the user experience perspective. My feeling is the thresholds might be set too low. Intent plays a huge part in how we interact with search listings, and this can vary greatly from search to search. It's also very difficult to determine from the nature of the query. So, if I'm in a fact finding mode, even if I'm using what appear to be very commercial terms, and I skip over ads on 4 or 5 subsequent returns to a page, that doesn't necessarily mean I don't want ads on any search. One anomalous search could filter out top sponsored results for days, weeks and even months and the user would never know what happened. There is no indication on the page that Google is applying any type of filter. There is no way to turn them back on. For 99.9% of web users, they'd never know what happened.

Now, it's not all ads, but only the top ones that disappear. But the fact is, the difference between visibility and performance of ads in the two locations is so significant, that moving the top ads over to the side is almost like removing the ads from the page. Almost everyone starts scanning at the top of the page.

Google's intentions are noble here, but they're actually removing control from the user. I'm a big champion of organic results, so I can't believe I'm saying this, but Google might be too hasty in stripping out top sponsored ads. In two different eye tracking tests, we found that it was clicks on these top sponsored links that actually offered the highest success rates for users. I'll be watching with great interest to see how the test progresses.

 

My guest post on Manoj Jasra's blog is live. Just to keep it controversial, I went with a topic to stir up some discussion, "SEM has no Future".

Here's a teaser

Search engines, and the form of marketing we’re currently familiar with, will disappear in the next 5 to 10 years. But here’s the good part. The act of a user requesting information through a query, either implicit or explicit, will pervade everything online.

Hop on over to Web Analytics World for the rest.

 

 

I've been surpressing this for a couple weeks now, but I'm threatening to blow a gasket if I don't do some venting.

Enough with the frigging Da Vinci Code already!

While over in Europe, I fulfilled some lifelong dreams by visiting the Louvre in Paris, as well as Florence and Rome. But everywhere I turned, I kept bumping into adverts for the Da Vinci Code. The Louvre even has it's own Da Vinci Code tour.

Okay, nothing against Dan Brown. I've read the book, as well as Angels and Demons and Deception Point. I enjoyed them. They're entertaining, but they're blips on the cultural radar. Mr. Brown is a writer on par with a John Grisham or a Michael Crichton. The plots are mildly interesting, the characters are about as thin as the paper it's printed on and the dialogue is as stiff as the hard cover. The whole ancient religious sect angle raises it to slightly better than average, but just slightly. There is no justification for this tidal wave of attention that the book seems to be garnering. I thought it was restricted to this side of the Atlantic, but I was sadly disillusioned to see that it's taken route in Europe as well. Give me a break, Paris, Rome and Florence, you're better than this!

If you really want to see how this whole angle can be handled masterfully, take a big juicy bite out of some of Umberto Eco's works. Compared to Foucault's Pendulum or Name of the Rose, the Da Vinci Code is like a postcard of the original Mona Lisa.

Check out Enquiro co-hort Manoj Jasra's Web Analytics World blog this week for guest posts from Jennifer Laycock, Rand Fishkin and yours truly. Today the guest poster is Avinash Kaushik, Director of Web Research and Analytics at Intuit, inc.

Just stumbled on the Music Genome Project at www.pandora.com. I've only been playing with it for a day or so, but so far, I'm impressed. Feed in a favorite artist or two, and it suggests other music you might like. Along the way, you can refine by indicating whether you like the suggestions or not. Give it a spin (oops..anachronistic references to the old days of vinyl are a symptom of my age).

Eric Schmidt now sits on the board of Apple, which is leading to a flurry of speculation about what potential partnerships between Google and Apple may be in the offing. So far, the speculation seems to be rather mundane meanderings about integrating Google search technology in iTunes, possible assistance for Google in assembling a suite of apps to compete with Microsoft, and possible entertainment content distribution deals, with Jobs ties to Disney.

To me, the potential lies in the possible creation of power positions on Microsoft’s outposts, rather than assembling the forces for a head to head onslaught on the heavily fortified desk top app market. Even with Apple at their side, Google faces a daunting task in taking on Office with their tremendously entrenched position. At best, I would see them capturing a good percentage of the relatively small "alternative" market, but unless something shifts in market positions, I don’t see them swinging many main stream customers away. These apps are squarely in the pragmatist market, and the customers adverse to the risks inherent in a switch, especially when there will be a seamless upgrade path offered by Microsoft to a live version of Office.

But the cozying up takes on a more interesting dimension when you explore the possibilities beyond Microsoft’s power positions. In the mobile computing world, Microsoft has been struggling to gain market share, and the step from an iPod to a full mobile pc is not that far. Tie that together with Google’s work in creating compelling mobile apps and a web based application matrix and some interesting possibilities present themselves. We’re not far from the horizon where mobile computing starts to replace the desktop. And mobile distribution of entertainment content is rapidly moving through the early adopter stage. A chasm crossing of significant magnitude isn’t far away. I’ve got to believe that Jobs is visionary enough to see this. Apple never managed to beat the Wintel cartel on the desktop, but the hip pocket is a whole new ballgame.

Also of note is what this means for Eric Schmidt himself. Is this move solely for the benefit of Google, or is Eric positioning himself for life after Google? As the Times articles states, this moves him into a pre eminent position as a Silicon Valley power broker, and he has had political aspirations in the past. While Schmidt has done an admirable job in minding the kids at Google, the power triad structure has never been that elegant, leading to questions of its stability.

Whatever the outcome, in the swirl of partnerships that have recently been announced, this emerges as one of the more interesting developments, with some intriguing long term possibilities.