06.27.06
Pickle Phobia
Saw this on boingboing but felt it was worth re-posting. Apparently they got it from Coop. Who knows. Nothing is original online.
I don’t care for pickles either. But I have a more subdued response - I just push them away.
Netscape Beta: Do You Know?
I was reading this entry on Jason Calacanis’ web site about the new “Do You Know?” feature on the Netscape beta site.
I haven’t actually signed up for an account yet so I haven’t used it. I’m suffering from account creation fatigue on the web these days. Hopefully one of the federated identity projects will start to make some headway one of these days. But that’s the subject for another day.
Anyway from reading Jason’s update about the feature, it sounds like a mini-social networking site built into Netscape beta. I know I’ve been writing a lot about social networking lately, but I think this is important to mention as it may hint at a future trend.
Perhaps social networking as a standalone service has a limited potential, but maybe it will grow as a component of larger sites like Netscape beta or digg or bloglines or really any kind of content portal. This fits well with my earlier thinking that one potential business model for social networking startups is to create the backend platform. Then sites like Netscape beta can plug the social network into their site as a drop-in, adding and integrating additional features that make sense for their specific needs.
It would certainly help with my account creation fatigue.
As a side note, it’s interesting to me that AOL is making their social networking play by reviving the much abused Netscape brand. I don’t know what to read into that. Maybe nothing.
Tags: Social Networking, Netscape, AOL
06.26.06
Microsoft adCenter Labs: Demographics Predictions
I saw this on ProBlogger and thought it was very cool. Microsoft has a proof of concept site here where you can enter in a query or a URL and it will predict the gender and age breakdowns of likely readers/searchers.
The service is not meant for prime time yet, and I don’t think you’d want to stake your million dollar ad buy on these numbers, but I hope to see a competing service from Google and Yahoo soon! I don’t often find myself thinking of Microsoft as moving the web forward, but in this case I’d say they are. Very cool.
Tags: Demographics
Social Networking as a Marketing Platform
I received a comment on my earlier post about the potential future of the social networking space. Reader Andy has written his own thoughts on the subject of social networking and brand marketing. It’s an interesting read, and I left him a comment with my thoughts which I’ll not re-post here.
It does get me thinking, though. I’m quite sure when these sites were starting up they were not intended to be “platforms” for use as marketing vehicles by third party corporations. The closest to that expectation is probably the MySpace movie and film areas, but those are targeted more towards independent (and perhaps less savvy) content producers.
Because these sites have traction and a lot of page views, they have become more appealing to companies, but I wonder how that will drive the look, feel, and features of such sites going forward.
Locket Cuff Links
I saw this entry on Luxist about cuff links which are also lockets. I don’t wear French cuff shirts, and I don’t have anyone important in my life, but I know that other people do, so for you, I share as a public service.
Tags: Cuff Links, French Cuffs
06.24.06
Tags and Content-based Advertising
I don’t follow the online advertising space, so I may be late to the party with this thought. It may already be done. But if not, I think it should be. For the most part, online advertising (especially things like Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network) use keywords on the page to determine relevant ads to post.
That’s all well and good, but somewhat error-prone. Sometimes it’s hard to determine the topic of a web page just from applying some heuristics to the content. And thus irrelevant ads may be served, which does nobody any good.
But why not take tags into account? While there is “tag abuse” and “tag spam” out there, all that would hurt is the site and the relevance of the ads served. On the other hand, for sites that play by the rules, it should be a very efficient and accurate way for ad networks to find highly relevant ads to serve. And technically it’s quite simple to just grab the links with rel=”tag” attributes out of a page. Certainly much simpler than trying to determine the content of a page based on a natural language analysis.
Tags: Advertising, Ads
The Real Use of Yahoo RSS Ads
I added Yahoo RSS ads back to my feed the other day. I used to have them, and then I think one of my Wordpress upgrades killed them and I didn’t notice and/or forgot about it. The thing is, the ads (at least for me) are totally irrelevant to the content and thus produce no revenue. Not that any ads on this site produce any revenue. Probably since nobody reads this site. Go figure.
But there is a real benefit to the Yahoo RSS ads, even if it’s not monetary. It lets me see how many people read the site through RSS (not that many). Up until now there hasn’t really been a good way to do that. I can look at how many times the feed was downloaded, but since any subscriber’s RSS reader will check the feed a bunch of times that data means nothing. Granted I could write a program to analyze the log files in a more involved way ot perhaps get better numbers. But it’s not worth it to me.
Plus subscribers reading through web-based aggregators like Bloglines or My Yahoo! would never show up in that way.
Granted it would be possible to put a small image “bug” in the RSS feed content, which is what I would have done if I cared. But it’s nicer to just look at my Yahoo RSS numbers. Although, nicer is a relative term, since the number of readers is really small. Oh well. This isn’t a commercial web site, so I suppose I don’t care.
If I wanted to write a “blog” site to get rich from, this wouldn’t be it. (it would be the blog/podcast Showbiz News - Online which I will, some day, revive)
beta.netscape.com Suggestion
Add nested comments, as digg did a while back. That’s my helpful advice for today.
Tags: Netscape
06.22.06
Netscape’s Answer to Digg
Netscape has soft-launched beta.netscape.com as an answer to digg.com. I haven’t really had any time to play with it yet, so I don’t have an opinion yet. Just wanted to post a note in case people hadn’t seen the site yet. Opinion forthcoming.
Where Social Networking Needs to Go
Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York, wrote a post on his site recently about social networks. His venture funds haven’t invested in the social networking space yet, but looking at the minimal initial investments required and large returns from companies like MySpace makes him wonder if he should jump in. I commented on his post to share my thoughts, but since it was a long comment I figured I may as well just save it here so I can remember what I said later.
