This afternoon is turning out to be a rough one for Google. First, they reported less than expected earnings that sent the stock price dropping $40 as of this writing.
Then NetApplication’s monthly newsletter shipped with news that Yahoo has nipped away at some of Google’s market share:
Aliso Viejo, CA based Net Applications announces June 2007 world wide Search Engine Market Share results. Yahoo, for the second consecutive month, has regained search engine market share at the direct expense of Google.
Yahoo climbed back to 12.16% market share, and the last time they had that much share was back in September of 2006. But, at that time Yahoo was on the decline in market share. Google’s US search market share has dropped to 51.53%. Net Applications has not recorded two consecutive months of search engine market share losses for Google until now.
NetApplications takes things a bit far by speculating that Jerry Yang’s recent return to CEO status has Steve Jobs-like rebound familiarity. I doubt any changes Yang’s made during his short time in his new roll can be responsible for Yahoo’s very recent success, but it’s certainly a trend worth watching.
This afternoon is turning out to be a rough one for Google. First, they reported less than expected earnings that sent the stock price dropping $40 as of this writing.
Then NetApplication’s monthly newsletter shipped with news that Yahoo has nipped away at some of Google’s market share:
Aliso Viejo, CA based Net Applications announces June 2007 world wide Search Engine Market Share results. Yahoo, for the second consecutive month, has regained search engine market share at the direct expense of Google.
Yahoo climbed back to 12.16% market share, and the last time they had that much share was back in September of 2006. But, at that time Yahoo was on the decline in market share. Google’s US search market share has dropped to 51.53%. Net Applications has not recorded two consecutive months of search engine market share losses for Google until now.
NetApplications takes things a bit far by speculating that Jerry Yang’s recent return to CEO status has Steve Jobs-like rebound familiarity. I doubt any changes Yang’s made during his short time in his new roll can be responsible for Yahoo’s very recent success, but it’s certainly a trend worth watching.
David Kirkpatrick from FORTUNE magazine hosted an interesting forum last week
called iMeme where big thinkers in we technology got together to talk about
future trends.
Preceding the now completed event, Kirkpatrick threw a set of questions out to
invitees about current tech trends, which
led
to some interesting commentary.
Here are a few highlights:
Companies
1) For you personally, what technology has taken the most unexpected turn in
your lifetime?
I never thought search technology would turn itself into the bridge to all
content, connecting all passion and interest and securing such a scalable
business model, and it has become the darling of the investment community.
When I was at Sina, we already had search, but we failed to capture this
opportunity.
Many businesses still don’t realize this. How can a site say it understands
search without having things as common as subscribable persistent searches using
email or RSS? High quality search and subscriptions turns the web into a
customized content delivery system of interesting things.
Officer, Motorola, Inc.
1) For you personally, what technology has taken the most unexpected turn in
your lifetime?
For me personally, the technology that has taken the most unexpected turn in
my lifetime is what I refer to as “the device formerly known as the cell
phone.” I still remember many predictions that by 2000 there would only be
about a million cell phone users. Boy, were they ever wrong!
Today there are about 2.9 billion mobile device users, i.e., roughly half
the planet uses this technology for so much more than a phone call. Today
people call people, not places!
Absolutely. When I was growing up way back in the 80’s and early 90’s, my family
had no cell phones and one land line shared by four people! Because of this,
there was some competition for the phone, but more importantly, my parents got
to know my friends by occasionally answering the phone. And my friend’s parents
got to know me when I was calling for their sons or daughters. Now, there are
times where I hardly know a friend’s spouse since I’m calling a person rather
than a phone sitting in someone’s house.
We haven’t gotten there yet, but we’ll likely reach a day when everyone’s
assigned a cell phone number at birth that will stick with them throughout their
lifetime. And a domain.
Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School
2) What, for you, has been the most surprising infectious idea of the past
year?
Paris Hilton. I just don’t get it.
Sadly, I think he’s right.
I’m starting to see a two cases of Facebook spam that Facebook will need to
address. This seems critical to me, since a very similar issue is one of the things
that’s led me grow to hate MySpace over time.
First, I’ve been getting repeated friend invitations from people who are overly
aggressive business networkers. The kind of people who think quantity is as
important as quality when it comes to networking.
Second, I’m getting repeated invitations to join groups. In some cases, they’re
groups where I’ve previously been a member but decided the group wasn’t right
for me. After leaving, I’m apparently considered a prospect for joining the
group again, so the invites start coming in.
It seems like the friend request confirmation process needs a 3rd option beyond
confirm or ignore that allows users to block future requests. That would give me
the control I’m looking for to manage my relationships properly.
The group invite problem could be addressed when leaving groups. A checkbox
saying, “Been there. Done that.” which creates a “not interested” status for a
specific group would clean this up nicely.
Anil Dash raised an interesting point about the human nature of tagging in a
post titled, “toread is tobehuman” where he reflects on the optimism shown by
people who tag items with the toread tag.
toread is
tobehuman
The most profound, to me, is the tag “toread”. Though sometimes
used as a public indicator with the knowledge that others can see this
declaration of intent, toread is usually a simple reminder that the tagger wants
to come back to that story, that article, that bit of information, and give it
the attention and focus that it deserves.
As he mentions, this
is generally content that deserves attention, making it interesting - yet
sometimes long - content. Examples of this could be long lists of
self-improvement tips or tutorials. Or manifestos on important issues by
influential bloggers.
For those not familiar with the “toread” tag,
click here to
see a list of web pages that have been tagged with that term on
del.icio.us. The resulting
pages are things people like found interesting but couldn’t commit to reading at
the time they discovered them.
Other tag along this same line is
“howto” which tends
to aggregate tutorials ranging from checklists of blogging tips to instructions
on how to wake up without an alarm clock. To me, this provides similar optimism
as people are noting information that will help them live more successful and
interesting lives.
Both tags do something other than describing the information directly, the way a
tag for “blogging” or “php” may do. Instead, the tags refer to how people relate
to the information. Do you know of any other examples of this?
National efforts at hyperlocal media seem to consistently face the same
challenge: how to find hyperlocal advertiser willing to pay enough to support
the content with a few bucks left over for profit.
Unfortunately, this has been a challenge for a number of reasons.
How did we get here? I’m pretty sure the evolution of local media went something like
this:
First
the Earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came. A few years later, a guy
named Robert (disputed) started chiseling
out a news tablet. It turns out that some of the local traders (let’s call them
all Hank) wanted publicity alongside the
news, so Robert started taking ads.
The
traders who took ads found that they paid off since
Robert was distributing his news-tablets
to a hyperlocal community. Robert’s news
tablets were published so regularly to such a predictable audience that they
often became the advertising venue of choice for local traders (and service
folks like wagon towers). Robert’s readers
found the ads valuable as well, since it made it easy for them to find someone
local to call them their roof leaked.
Fast forward a disputable number of years: A guy named
Al (disputed) invented the Internet, and
he guys like Robert - why by now had
switched to driving trucks full of paper around their towns rather than hauling
tablets - had the option of publishing their news on this Internet thing.
It turns out that it wasn’t particularly difficult for guys like
Robert to move their media to the part of
the Internet called the Web since they were already using computers to create
the content.
UNFORTUNATELY, local traders like
Hank (and folks like roofers,
real estate agents, and restaurant owners) were a bit slower to make the move to the Web. They didn’t use computers in their day to day work and didn’t have web sites. If they did have
websites, they weren’t proud enough of their sites to justify spending money
driving traffic to them.
That’s where things broke down. Hank
wasn’t in a position to spend similar dollars on online advertising as he’d
previously been willing to spend on paper or tablet forms.
Robert’s distribution costs are now lower,
but he still needs a lot of ad dollars to cover the costs of his staff.
If you were advising Robert, what would
you tell him to do? How does Robert create
an online media site that deserves a similar level of advertising investment
from Hank as
Hank’s used to paying? How does
Robert recreate the value his offline
newspapers online, both from an advertiser and consumer roll.
Robert knows his readers find the ads
valuable in the print edition, but hasn’t figured out the formula for recreating
it on this Internet thing.
National efforts at hyperlocal media seem to consistently face the same
challenge: how to find hyperlocal advertiser willing to pay enough to support
the content with a few bucks left over for profit.
Unfortunately, this has been a challenge for a number of reasons.
How did we get here? I’m pretty sure the evolution of local media went something like
this:
First
the Earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came. A few years later, a guy
named Robert (disputed) started chiseling
out a news tablet. It turns out that some of the local traders (let’s call them
all Hank) wanted publicity alongside the
news, so Robert started taking ads.
The
traders who took ads found that they paid off since
Robert was distributing his news-tablets
to a hyperlocal community. Robert’s news
tablets were published so regularly to such a predictable audience that they
often became the advertising venue of choice for local traders (and service
folks like wagon towers). Robert’s readers
found the ads valuable as well, since it made it easy for them to find someone
local to call them their roof leaked.
Fast forward a disputable number of years: A guy named
Al (disputed) invented the Internet, and
he guys like Robert - why by now had
switched to driving trucks full of paper around their towns rather than hauling
tablets - had the option of publishing their news on this Internet thing.
It turns out that it wasn’t particularly difficult for guys like
Robert to move their media to the part of
the Internet called the Web since they were already using computers to create
the content.
UNFORTUNATELY, local traders like
Hank (and folks like roofers,
real estate agents, and restaurant owners) were a bit slower to make the move to the Web. They didn’t use computers in their day to day work and didn’t have web sites. If they did have
websites, they weren’t proud enough of their sites to justify spending money
driving traffic to them.
That’s where things broke down. Hank
wasn’t in a position to spend similar dollars on online advertising as he’d
previously been willing to spend on paper or tablet forms.
Robert’s distribution costs are now lower,
but he still needs a lot of ad dollars to cover the costs of his staff.
If you were advising Robert, what would
you tell him to do? How does Robert create
an online media site that deserves a similar level of advertising investment
from Hank as
Hank’s used to paying? How does
Robert recreate the value his offline
newspapers online, both from an advertiser and consumer roll.
Robert knows his readers find the ads
valuable in the print edition, but hasn’t figured out the formula for recreating
it on this Internet thing.
National efforts at hyperlocal media seem to consistently face the same
challenge: how to find hyperlocal advertiser willing to pay enough to support
the content with a few bucks left over for profit.
Unfortunately, this has been a challenge for a number of reasons.
How did we get here? I’m pretty sure the evolution of local media went something like
this:
First
the Earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came. A few years later, a guy
named Robert (disputed) started chiseling
out a news tablet. It turns out that some of the local traders (let’s call them
all Hank) wanted publicity alongside the
news, so Robert started taking ads.
The
traders who took ads found that they paid off since
Robert was distributing his news-tablets
to a hyperlocal community. Robert’s news
tablets were published so regularly to such a predictable audience that they
often became the advertising venue of choice for local traders (and service
folks like wagon towers). Robert’s readers
found the ads valuable as well, since it made it easy for them to find someone
local to call them their roof leaked.
Fast forward a disputable number of years: A guy named
Al (disputed) invented the Internet, and
he guys like Robert - why by now had
switched to driving trucks full of paper around their towns rather than hauling
tablets - had the option of publishing their news on this Internet thing.
It turns out that it wasn’t particularly difficult for guys like
Robert to move their media to the part of
the Internet called the Web since they were already using computers to create
the content.
UNFORTUNATELY, local traders like
Hank (and folks like roofers,
real estate agents, and restaurant owners) were a bit slower to make the move to the Web. They didn’t use computers in their day to day work and didn’t have web sites. If they did have
websites, they weren’t proud enough of their sites to justify spending money
driving traffic to them.
That’s where things broke down. Hank
wasn’t in a position to spend similar dollars on online advertising as he’d
previously been willing to spend on paper or tablet forms.
Robert’s distribution costs are now lower,
but he still needs a lot of ad dollars to cover the costs of his staff.
If you were advising Robert, what would
you tell him to do? How does Robert create
an online media site that deserves a similar level of advertising investment
from Hank as
Hank’s used to paying? How does
Robert recreate the value his offline
newspapers online, both from an advertiser and consumer roll.
Robert knows his readers find the ads
valuable in the print edition, but hasn’t figured out the formula for recreating
it on this Internet thing.
Yes, according to Caribou Coffee’s WiFi access, which blocks the site, Geeks Are Sexy.
This is a great example of how imperfect parental filters can be. Geeks Are Sexy is a sexy site . . . if you’re into technology news is a turn-on.
I have previously been blocked from accessing The Superficial from a Panera Bread location, which felt more appropriate since I can understand why a place may not want screen caps from Paris Hilton’s latest amateur video work on computer screens near people who are trying to enjoy their You Pick Two’s.
If you’re a blogger running a blog on the Blogger platform (a domain that’s something like yaddayadda.blogspot.com) you should take advantage of the update to Blogger’s FeedBurner integration ASAP.
FeedBurner reports how many people have subscribed to your blog along with a large array of additional information about what people are reading. It also allows you to easily integrate additional features into your blog’s RSS feed, such as comment counts, and action links like “Digg This” buttons.
Darren Rowse explains the benefits in a post on this subject at ProBlogger.net:
FeedBurner Offers Blogger.com Blogs Integration
The beauty of doing this is that now you get a fuller picture of your Feed stats. Those subscribing to your old blogger feed will now be counted in the overall Feedburner count and you’ll now be able to track what they do with your feed like you can with those who were subscribing via the Feedburner feed previously.
While Blogger users have been able to use FeedBurner all along, it wasn’t as technically easy to do so as one would like. Because of this, I often come across Blogger powered blogs where the blogger has burned their feed and put a link to their burned feed in their sidebar, yet they didn’t update the RSS URL location in their blog’s HEAD tag. Because of this, they end up splitting their subscribers between two feed URLs.
This change addresses the split issue by redirecting direct subscribers through the FeedBurner URL.
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