How Not To Blog ?

The only way Google will survive is to rebrand itself as a content-sharing portal.

But, alas, it doesn't want to be a "portal" at all. It doesn't want to tie any of its many services together in a coherent way like Yahoo is doing (especially with 360). It's doing everything portal-like while at the same time screaming that it's not a portal, doesn't want to be a portal, and isn't competing with portals.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Schmidt said Google would not seek to turn its website into a broader internet portal, a move that would take it into more direct competition with Microsoft and Yahoo.

How stupid is that? We're not talking AOL, here. We're talking about a new generation of content-sharing portals, a la Yahoo 360 on steroids. I'm sure Google knows that the average user spends less than 3 minutes on Google. For Yahoo, it's more than 5 times that.

Rule #1 at Google should be "Don't Be Stupid", not "Don't Be Evil". Lately they seem to be having trouble with both.

Google is already a portal. Their unwillingness to communicate what they already are to consumers (yes, consumers) will be their downfall. Google's Picasa, desktop search, GMail, Hello, Blogger, Keyhole, Adsense, Adwords, web search, news, mobile services, local search, discussion groups, freelance expert answers, catalog directory, their soon-to-be-released browser, and a whole lot more will show up at the bottom of Google searches if they don't follow in the direction that Yahoo is going.

Google needs to actually spend real money marketing themselves and communicating to you and me. Google's old strategies will not continue to work indefinitely. No one is talking about Picasa, Google's Flickr-like offering. People are talking excitedly about Flickr itself.

Advertising accounts for near 98% of Google's revenues. This would scare the fuck out of any reasonably intelligent company. Google should be ashamed to focus on search so much.

Why?

Not just because MSN and Yahoo are re-developing their search algorithms, but also because RSS feeds and other aggregators will kill Google searches (and revenue). Yahoo knows this and is embracing RSS and I'm sure will popularize it even more and begin to use it in ways that Google can't imagine. Google search will continue to remain as relevant as it is today, but RSS and other types of feeds (that effectively bypass search) are even more relevant. The only way to handle this is to become a content-sharing portal.

Where's the ?Add to My Google? button? Wait... where is My Google?

Yahoo is forcing a reluctant Google into being a portal but, alas, only Yahoo sees the big picture.

Now that Google is a publicly-owned company, it is mandated to grow, grow, grow. I guess it has no interest in remaining competitive. Google needs to diversify its revenue base, for one. But first it needs to get its head out of the sandbox.

Is Ask Jeeves really worth $2 billion?

Ask Jeeves owns Ask.com, Excite.com, and iWon.com. It also effectively purchased Bloglines through its purchase of Trustic in February.

Yahoo got a much better deal when it bought Overture in 2003 for $1.6 billion. For that purchase, it now has more than double the profits every quarter than it would have had otherwise.

However there's a bigger picture here, and I'm sure Barry Diller sees that.

They both realize that the future lay in bundled social services that tie together social networking, photo-sharing, blogs, and other content. If you want to retain your users, this is the way to go.

They seem to want to make personal blogs and the sharing of media as popular as email. They could even be thinking of these new services as a type of replacement (or enhancement) of email. I love email but, really, there's got to be a better way. And who isn't annoyed by spam? They could market these services as a spam-free, dynamic way to communicate and get everyone signing up. (No, most people in the US don't even know what blogs are, silly. You're in your own little world.)

Yahoo has Overture for PPC, search, mail, and is putting a new spin on blogs with its 360 service. It's also coming out with a publisher network to rival Google's Adsense. It has also recently acquired Flickr, a photo-sharing service (I'm guessing they paid $200 million, which fits in with previous purchases and the kind of value that Flickr brings to the table).

Google has Adwords for PPC, search, Blogger for blogs, GMail, and Adsense for advertising on blogs and other smaller sites.

Microsoft is coming out with its own blog offering, MSN Spaces, Hotmail, and will have MSN Adcenter (an Adsense rival).

Now, Barry Diller, a bisexual, gets to swing both ways. He also purchased ZeroDegrees, a social networking site, in 2004. That, on top of IAC's many other offerings.

And soon, there will only be a few of these companies around - those that can afford to keep up.