How Not To Blog ?

Look for Google to work out a deal with Yahoo! in the next 2 weeks.

What am I, crazy? (Fundamentally, yes.)

A partnership will be monumental. It will be the biggest internet-related story since Netscape. Momentum... check! Enthusiasm and coverage... check! New technology via collaboration... check! It's the only way the next internet will be born on a mass scale (and thus, the only way either of them can survive the next 5-10 years).

March 26: HNTB mentions that Google is working out a deal with delicious.

March 29: The guy running delicious announces "outside investment" for the first time but doesn't mention specifics

April 10: The list of investors is revealed

Google either didn't end up investing in it or is hiding behind one of the investment partners just to spite HNTB. (Like they even give a fuck about my blog.) Either way, they lost out. I would have swallowed the thing whole.

However, the fact that Amazon is on the list is interesting.

Union Square Ventures leads the investment group, and the other members are Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O'Reilly, and Bob Young.

This article from the Internet Stock Blog talks about the back and forth competitve environment for email and other services between Yahoo and Google. It also mentions MSN's role in the arena. Some interesting tidbits in there.

Google has announced that Google searches can be faster on Firefox than on other browsers because Google instructs Firefox to download your top search result in advance.

Safari also has Google search built in, but Apple's market share may be too small for Google.

Is this fair?

Is Google really wasting so much time on 'cool projects' like RideFinder that are ultimately not useful?

Could the service be any more useless than it is? Sure, the concept is a workable one. But get it right. Don't just show me a small portion of available taxis. (There's no way that Chicago has only 100 or so taxis, all of them on the North side of town.) And it's impractical to show taxis in New York, so it shows shuttles. What about showing buses and trains, something even more useful than a few taxi locations? Heck, you could even show buses and trains in New York.

Google's sneaky advertising will get them in trouble. It can't be more than a few bucks they're getting from the taxi companies. If they're trying to develop something that the internet community actually needs, they're not succeeding. In a desperate attempt to outshine Yahoo, they've recently doubled storage capacity for their GMail service. They could easily outshine Yahoo or Hotmail even more by making GMail available to the general public, rather than just the web elite. (GMail turns 1 year old in April.) If they're keen on continuing to distance themselves from everyday people (such as Yahoo isn't), they could at least start to love RSS.

The other projects in Google Labs are at least worthy of some development. But to use PhD brainpower on how to best find a few taxis in Phoenix rather than how they're going to kick Yahoo's ass is plain stupid.

Try Undergoos to replace those worn-out drawers.

Now that the dude over at delicious has quit his day job and will work on the site full-time, I'm sure he and whomever else has invested some cash in the site is doing some thinking about where to take it (my money is on Google).

Google has more cash flow right now that HNTB has punctuation. It would be wise to invest in and integrate the popular site (and its concepts) into the Google gameplan. So, we must ask ourselves: How will del.icio.us make money?

What is can do, of course, is start with a community-based advertising scheme. Instead of just linking to a new used book service that I'm using that I think is wonderful, I could not only link to it, but tell the community what I really think about it in my user comments, and get paid for every click or order.

Think this isn't a good idea? Go to your favorite blogs or websites. Chances are, one or more of them will display Google Adwords (ads by goooooooooogle) somewhere on the page. These people are advertising products and services that they haven't even approved of. How much more valuable is a link recommended by someone you have some degree of trust in? A whole lot more.

Advertisers would list their products and services in the Tagwords directory. Users would pick out those products and services they're already using, add them to their bookmarks with their comments, tips, hints, recommendations, etc., for that product or service. If someone visits my links*, clicks on your product/service, and orders something, you better believe I want a premium price for the introduction. (The site operator would, of course, take a cut of that, too.)

(*Note: there's so much more that could be done with tagging and tracking sites like delicious and Technorati. I think the door has only just opened for these services. I'll try to crap it out in another post.)

Sure, there's plenty of room for abuse of the system, but a lot more room for non-abuse. Because the site is community-based, those users who abuse the system would simply not be successful at it.

Folksonomic clouds like delicious or Technorati must make changes if they're to integrate revenue concepts into their sites.

When I visit Technorati, I want to be able to look at their links, and easily add any link to my favorites. I should then be able to add my own personal tag and comment on the link for future reference. (And perhaps make the tags publicly viewable on my personal page.) "Tads" can then be implemented within this context. And how about giving me the ability to go to the next page while you're at it?

delicious should allow users to add a notes and other metadata to their bookmarks. (See del.irio.us for some reference.)

Though most users (including myself) would be annoyed at the new system for the ads, I think if the tagword ad (or tad) is 1) relevant; 2) not annoying; and 3) recommended by the bookmarker then I don't think most users would have a problem with the system. Remember, the last part is the most important part.

Of course users would display their regularly scheduled links. And you could set it up so that a user could only display one tagword ad for every x number of non-tads in my bookmarks.

Any visitor that visits my link page or searches for a tag will see my tads along with regular results. The number of ads per result set could also be limited so that a particular tag isn't littered with them.

Bloggers already link to do products and services that they love all the time. Why not make a little money in there somewhere at the same time?

Google is already trying out a new form of contextual advertising called AdLinks, where you can click on a keyword or keyphrase and be taken to a page of relevant advertising. If it does indeed partner purchase with del.icio.us, it would be taking the concept one step further.

Following up to my article, Google working out a deal with del.icio.us, Joshua Schachter of delicious writes on March 29:

After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and
then consume all my waking hours, I've decided to quit my job and work
on del.icio.us full time.

I've given a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately
decided that the best way forward is to take on some outside investment.

Although in the next line he confuses a bit, saying, "I've taken this step because it lets me continue to grow del.icio.us while keeping it independent."

My guess is that he's already sold off part of the company on the condition that he and the user community maintain full control over it. But it's anybody's guess.

We'll see what develops. It should be interesting.

As the web becomes more integrated into peoples' lives, internet companies need to be able to better satisfy more of users' emotional needs than ever before.

In life, people seek out situations and experiences that are likely to fit in with their emotional patterns. A person's life experiences are, in a way, extensions of their complex personality. The web isn't much different.

The same way getting out to go shopping, going to a certain restaurant, or talking to a certain kind of stranger is an expression of one's self (and thus, emotions), people will seek out and continue to visit the websites that will most possibly fulfill their emotional requirements. A person's leisure time, it can be argued, is really time to validate their existence.

Compared to similar internet portals such as MSN, Yahoo, and even AOL, Google's range of services provide great utility without being emotionally stimulating. The longest-lasting, most successful internet-based consumer goods and services companies will make a business out of evoking, manipulating, augmenting, sharing, and extending a user's emotions. One can pretty much gauge the lifespan of an internet company (or the length of your relationship with it) by asking one simple question:

How does it make me feel?

How many consumer electronics companies or internet companies, for example, have come out with great products that were very innovative and useful but simply did not survive the marketplace? We say that those companies were "before their time". Perhaps many of them weren't before their time at all - they simply didn't know how to elicit a useful emotional response and create their own market.

Google, of course, will still say that they're not a portal and don't want to be a portal, all while being a portal but with no focus. I guess advertising revenue is good enough for them. But if people choose other sites over Google for their needs (including search), where will Google's cash come from?

People used to get very emotional over Google. It's still happening, but I think on a much less scale than before. How could one be so bold as to mess it all up? What does Google tag itself with? Will its lack of focus soon attract only schizophrenics? Google can do still do alot while maintaining focus - it just has to want to.

The marketplace isn't simply conscious. It's emotional, too.

Look for Google to work out 'a deal' with del.icio.us soon, on the heels of Yahoo's announcement regarding Flickr.

If Google does, indeed, acquire or partner with delicious, they'll be making strong headway into the social media & content field. All that would be then left to do to get back on track is to tie all of their services together in an easily digestible format and then spend some marketing dollars.

C'mon Google. You can afford it. No matter how badly I talk about Google as a company, you're still my default search engine. Don't be so pathetic!

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.

Every blogger in blogspace knows that Adsense sucks. Not many speak up about it. Afraid of getting banned from Google?

Most likely, Google is ripping you off. They won't even tell you what percentage you're getting. That's so funny. With any other company you would simply refuse to do business with them. With Google you're just taking a beating willingly. The reason they don't tell you is because it's so fucking low, you would be pissed.

Bend over, my friend! I'm going to wow you with my colorful logo and cool algorithms before I punch you in the ass. Behold! A nifty little script to install on your Blog and provide us with half a billion in Adsense revenue to add to our ever-growing Adwords pile of cash. You keep blogging, we get rich. Isn't life grand?

Are you serious?!?! Any Adwords advertiser (the system used to display your Adsense) knows that the 'content' part of their campaigns sucks big time. An ad that gets a 5-10% click-through ratio on Google search is lucky to get .8-1% on your blog. The shit's not targeted, and not interesting. They're raking in the big bucks, anyway, so they don't really care about you. As long as you remain interested in the possibility of making $20 next month with your blog and maintain faith in the Google brand they've got you.

Really, they should call it "AdCents" and get over with it.

What Google should do is let the publishers know exactly what percentage they're getting. Then they should increase the percentage to a fair 50%. (I'm guessing it's about 5-8% now from my Computor's calculations).

Following up to the article yesterday about how Google should include more of its offerings on its main page, apparently they had this up in their Google Labs for a short while, according to tuaw.

The bottom of the page read:

"Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you."

Is it really that hard for them to come up with something original, or are they really not copying Apple but Microsoft?

Come to think of it.. Google needs to go back to its "beta" days. It needs to figure out how to be smart again.

blog comment spam
they can't seem to figure this one out. Duh! Ignore the 'name' part of the comment. A billion-dollar company shouldn't suffer the same problem as a Daypop or a Feedster.

autolink
...still not communicating to the webmaster community, and the internet community as a whole. As I mentioned before, signs of Google's self-destruction. Why would you simply not care to uphold and maintain the integrity of your near-perfect reputation? That is googolistically illogical.

irrelevant results
somewhat excusable, considering the hard work is a machine's job. but how about a Craigslist-type "relevant?" feature on the results page (a tiny button would work) that lets the community filter out spam or simply irrelevant results?

the 3 month wait
new websites generally have to wait 3 months to be shown in Google's search results. They've gotten a bit better at this, but there's still a long way to go. This site is already visited by over 100 people per day and isn't even 3 weeks old yet. By the time it shows up on Google I may have retired already. There are lots of other websites worth visiting that you won't know about until a few months from now. Yahoo is a new site's friend. Being #1 and #2 for a mis-spelled search term isn't bad, indeed.

fear of clutter
because Google wants to stick to its clutter-free look, you actually have to dig for many of the services that Google offers. Not only is there this but there's also this. Not to mention Zeitgeist They forget that most users aren't geeks and haven't memorized all of its useful functions. Mom doesn't know about any of it. Neither does little Johnny, for that matter.

the competition
kicking ass. Yahoo will prevail, simply because of its more human element. (The element that makes everything more useful.) To me, Google is just a faceless machine with no personality. Google is just inspiration. Nobody uses the Betamax anymore.

Hundreds of PhDs at Google. I guess 95% just sit around all day picking their noses and jacking each-other off.

Google needs more than just Adwords as a cash cow. Yahoo has figured this out, fortunately. The market may not be so forgiving of Google if its Adwords revenues take a dive when its first-it-is-laughed-at replacement comes along. I'm sure most advertisers won't like its new format. I know I won't.

Send Google back to its own labs for a re-work. Let me know when it's ready.

I'm still waiting for someone to create a web search based on the Google API that displays results on one line only with the keyword(s) in bold. Not everyone wants to see the URL or the page file size, or even its keyword-in-context text. I fear that Google's results are becoming more and more useless due to the efforts of certain search engine optimization parties that don't mind being irrelevant (or just Google's algorithm being off. Maybe this is why some ads on Google have keywords that consistently get a +25% click-through rate - the ads are oftentimes more relevant).

Instead of scrolling further and further down a bulky search result list for many keywords that the SEO guys target, just show me more of what I want to see. I played video games when I was a kid, so my eyes are pretty quick. The 1-line trick would be useful.

This should be part of Google's user preferences, but it ain't.

Really, they need to liven up their core product and give users more options to display and sort what it does best before their search box becomes irrelevant.

Because Google now sucks, they have not spoken up regarding the autolink debacle.

They're trying too hard, and failing. Yahoo and Microsoft are fast gaining momentum with a shitload of new competitive offerings.

Google is now making a big mistake by not being part of the autolink discussion. Microsoft backed down from Smart Tags because of customers' comments. A sure sign of Google's impending demise is its decision not to.

Google has been a cold & inherently "evil" company ever since they went public. People are only now starting to realize it.

People will never feel comfortable paying for Wi-Fi access at exorbitant rates. Who wants to be charged by the minute or hour.. or megabyte... just for the privelege of being outside the home?

When is someone going to come along with a nice little script that allows businesses to sell targeted text ads (like Google Adwords) to display to users surfing on their wifi networks for free?

Is broadband really so expensive that companies can only think of how to charge for the "luxury" of internet everywhere? They're missing the exponential value to business everywhere by limiting the natural outgrowth of being online at home.

In my example above the more you would like me to use your wifi the more money I could actually make you.

Businesses and enterprising citizens would be screaming to spread their wifi connections everywhere. The whole country would be blanketed with free high-speed wireless in less than 3 years.

To help the process, I wouldn't mind some kind of innocent tracking cookie in my jar that allows you to show me only those ads you're pretty sure I would be interested in. Don't show a lot.. perhaps rotate one ad (and one ad only) every 2-3 minutes. That way, I'd want to see what the next lone ad is, instead of wanting to avoid that section of my screen entirely. I think an ad scarcity model would work because I think most people would long for some kind of external message/validation.

Google or some other company would surely make a killing on such ads, guaranteeing their own future relevance in the process. I would almost say that Google needs this kind of growth if it wants exponentially greater profitability.

Continue to think of WiFi as a commodity, and you miss where the real money is. Traffic.

So many people see Google as god-like, they who can do no wrong.

When Google tries out new tools from their wonderful labs, some people have a fit, others gape in wonder (link).

Googling 'google evil' we find an article from IT world wondering if Google has opted-out of their abstract policy to do no evil. We also find Google Watch's page (see bottom).

Google's toolbar is what I will call 'evil creep' disguised as an enhancement to the user experience. "Wow it's so cool" delights. Everyone is happy. Google is a multi-billion dollar company whose concern is now to shareholders, not the public. Much like slowly boiling the frog, Google now has an obligation to exploit the respect and admiration of millions of its users (though the frog never had so much fun).

I remember America Online back in the day, so respected because it offered an easy way for thousands of people to navigate online when few others besides Prodigy and Compuserve could not have foreseen the internet's potential. Who doesn't know someone now who got burned and/or screwed by the company? Simply saying "AOL" is enough to make most smart people laugh uncontrollably. It is the nature of for-profit companies to take advantage of their customers, and squeeze them for all the money they can.

Google is no different now that they are public. They are obligated to turn higher profits than they did the year before. Their model rests almost entirely on Adwords profits, which is probably not a good idea. Soon the multitudes of fraudulent clicks will put a big dent in most of the PPC engines out there. That's what happens when you allow anyone to publish and make money from displaying your ads. Brazil and Romania Clicking Crus in the house!

I'm pretty sure Larry Page and Sergey Brin would have wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. I guess they'll just settle for watching their baby burn shi7 up while starting some other cool ventures in 2008.

Don't get me wrong. I would screw you, too, and invent things like GMail and such. It's nothing personal. It's just business.