Saturday, May 31, 2008

Friday, May 23, 2008

Oops - Google can't keep its own videos on Youtube


I was just going to watch the Google Sites announcement on the official Google blog - alas, Youtube had taken down the video! Might this be showing up on the newly started Youtomb, the inofficial Youtube graveyard already?
Here's the screenshot:

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Is Microsoft the new All Advantage/ Zotspot?

Microsoft announced this week that it's going to give back advertising revenue to users when they make a purchase after conducting a Microsoft Live search. Ad Age has a good write-up. Does anyone remember All Advantage?http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif Or zotspot? A quick search reveals other players such as Slashmysearch, Blingo, Winzy and Luckysearch. You might wonder, what do all of these have in common? They fail. Why? Because the economics of search require the search provider to make money somehow - and to have great search results. None of these players ever gave 100% of the ad revenue to the searcher but Microsoft is doing just that. If I was a Microsoft shareholder, I'd rather have them buy treasury bills than throw money at users - this really reeks of a desparate attempt to regain some lost search market share from Google.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

1,000,000 little WiFis covering San Francisco


A few weeks back I attended Web 2.0 in San Francisco. It was great seeing some old friends and meeting new ones but overall I thought the show wasn't that useful to attend (the free exhibition floor pass is the best way to go). Thankfully, the folks at O'Reilly have released a lot of the presentations here and I recommend sifting through some of them. What really struck me is this image from Ryan Sarver's presentation on Skyhook Wireless. It shows the density and quantity of WiFi networks in San Francisco - riches are awaiting those who can figure out how to really weave them all together. Fon is an early contestant but i'm sure that someone will ultimately figure out a way to make money of this.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Dogster cooperates with Lifetime on orginial content

Former vertical social network and now self-proclaimed "vertical portal" Dogster has launched a cooperation with Lifetime in which they're featuring some pretty neat videos that show "doggish" twists on movie classics. This is a great example of a niche specialist cooperating with a larger, traditional broadcaster on content generation, syndication and engagement. I think we'll see more of these types of partnerships evolving in the future as old media and new media converge. Here's an example:

Friday, May 09, 2008

Brickfish creates easy-to-share contests

I've started talking to a company called Brickfish about doing contests for Takkle. They have just put out a new campaign with North Face centered on the "never stop exploring" theme. Here's my entry (vote for me!) - this took me about 10 seconds to create and syndicate, a really powerful platform for web 2.0 style contests. I'm curious whether veterans like eprize will catch up with this soon.

Very funny - F.L.I.L.F.

Not so "Real Beauty" from Dove?

Ad Age has a story today claiming that the famous "campaign for real beauty" done by Ogilvy and Dove in fact isn't that beautiful - supposedly all the pictures were airbrushed over. What a blow to this successful "real" campaign!
Dove's 'Real Beauty' Pics Could Be Big Phonies - Advertising Age - News

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