Google Addiction reports that Google is building a calendar app.
September 2005 Archives
Frank Barnako quotes Alfred Tolles of Lycos on Technorati as a desirable acquisition target: "This is the kind of company we are looking at, seeing if they are acquisition potentials or whether we have the ability to do the same thing ourselves."
(Via Paid Content)
Susan sez: Think this comment will fuel (another) acquisition bubble?
Gary Price has a good write-up of Rollyo, a new tool to organize and narrow searches and provide focused results. More comments from Rex Hammond, Steve Rubel, Library Clips, and founder Dave Pell, among others.
Susan sez: There are other roll your own search tools in development, with more launches coming this month. Will be interesting to see user adoption for these services (translation: I think they are neat...will a broader audience use them as well?)
AOL UK Study: Brit kids go online at school more than at home (this is so different than the US!)
Seattle Business Journal: Merrill Brown advising Curious Office Partners, a new venture incubator funding a Brit RSS company called FeedDigest whose home page says :"With FeedDigest, mix, filter and republish or syndicate feeds to HTML, JavaScript, WAP or PHP, or to a new feed."
Living the Romantic Comedy:Cousin Billy's been almost famous-and has great Dylan tales to tell.
Classified Intelligence: Peter Zollman says: " Google is aggressively moving to include classifieds listings in its organic search results, making the rounds of classified advertising Web sites, requesting a direct feed of listings."
Tech Memeorandum: Have you checked out page A1, as creater Gabe Rivera calls it, of blogosphere emerging tech news? A marvelous new aggregator updated every 15 minutes.
SF Chronicle: Google to take over Ames Airforce Base in Mountainview, CA and build Borg-sized campus. No, really--if no one is going to ever go home, they need a lot of space.
More interesting comments on Web 2.0 and definition of:
Richard MacManus (who will be in the Bay area momentarily) likes my post and has good words of his own.
Silkworm blog says: "I believe Web 2.0 is like many other things, that are compared to love - you can't satisfactorily describe it to anyone but you know when you are in it."
Dion Hinchcliff has a round up of comments, including Jeff Veen on giving up control on the web,
Josh Porter on web 2.0 as an era of interfaces, and the Unauthorized Microsoft Weblog on Microsoft's recorg and the wish to address 2.0 themes (and opportunities).
The conference center T-3 (!) went down this morning, so I am now in a crunchy coffee shop in Estes Park, feeding my digital addictions aka checking email and blogging.
Did ya miss me?
No, don't answer that, please.
Proof that blogging, like yoga, is infectious: B.K.S. Iyengar, father of yoga in the West, checks out the Yoga Journal conference blog in our own little blogging room.
Dave Winer says: Web 2.0 is really simple, it's RSS 2.0, but I would venture to disagree.
While RSS is an amazing tool, to me the heart of Web 2.0 is the user.
The enduring lesson of all of the social media and emerging technologies is that we've created an a la carte, do it yourself platform where users can engage with sophisticated forms of search, feeds, metadata and APIs, social networks and identity, and commerce and fill these vessels with their own information
--And that's the heart of the revolution, IMHO.
The tools power it, but the people do it.
And I celebrate them.
(Via The Compass)
Update: Danah's post
Tim writes: "In order to preserve the principles of journalism, we must change its practices and form. We must create journalism we can sell. We must commit journalism by any means necessary. [Read: Journalism by Every Means Necessary.]
The future of news belongs to those who build it. Journalists are not excluded from this process - although they have been acting like they are. Were I to rewrite the Quality Manifesto, I could call it the Innovation Manifesto or the Reinvention Manifesto (or the Phoenix Manifesto in honor of Phil Meyer's up from the ashes metaphor). More likely, though, I'd title it Intentional Journalism."
Tim's post is long and thoughtful. If you are riding the edge of change in journalism or participatory media, this is a good read.
The frequently numerical Tristan Louis has an interesting post about the size of Google's index and the idea the company now sees MSN as its nearest competitor (no surprise there.)
Google has 24 billion items indexed, considers MSN search nearest
Yahoo says its index is over 20 billion items, but as John Battelle points out, it's not clear who's zooming who.
Tristan writes:
"The original index was 24 million pages. From there, it is easy to multiply by the 1,000 factor they talk about in their blog and get a number of items in the Google index.
That number would be 24 billion items in the Google Index, a little more
than what Yahoo! has in their index."
He's got some nice analysis plotting and exploring the growth curve for Google and MSN--
* Growth Curve of 50%: MSN Index is now 7.5 billion items
* Growth curve of 75%: MSN Index is now 8.75 billion items
* Growth curve of 100%: MSN index is now 10 billion items
And concludes "... it appears that the Google index is sitting somewhere between 22.5 and 26.5
billion items indexed and, more probably than not, at the 24 billion items indexed mark. This gives it a slight edge over the Yahoo! index and shows that the company considers Microsoft its nearest competitor."
The whole thing is worth a read if you're a metrics geek.
Thank you to everyone helping to spread the word about the new Yoga Journal blog and the live conference coverage we're providing here in the Rockies.
The blog is filling up quickly--yogis, YJ editors and the blog team are all posting pix, MP3s, and video.
KQED, Pluck, Feedster, Learning the Lessons of Nixon, Hip and Zen Pen, Morning Mysore, Read/Write Web, RadioFreeBlogistan, Roland Tanglao's Weblog, The Bay Are Is Talking(TBAiT),Vacuum (Ed V), Rebuilding Media/Bob Cauthorn, and Yoga Weblog have all linked--thx.
Peter Caputa gets the prize for best sense of humor and link to flickr images. Steve Rubel #2 for channelling Yogi Berra.
Bonus pix (and then I will shut up about this conference--Lori's snap of log-time yoga student Annette Bening and Mr.B.K.S.Iyengar at dinner last night. )
Here's the ever-growing flickr gallery for the conference.
And a link to the blog.
And a photo of the blog team:
ONA's released the list of 2005 finalists.
This year, LA Observed's Kevin Broderick and I represented the blogging tip, check out the list and see what you think.
Via Slashfood: "The Nippon Ham Group hosts a gallery of hot dog art on their site. Actually, it?s more than just a gallery. There are instructions on how to create roughly a dozen little hot dog creatures."
In LA, taking part in judging for Judging for the sixth annual Online Journalism Awards, presented by the Online News Association and the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
The jury for this year's awards, which is meeting today and tomorrow at USC Annenberg, is:
- Beau Brendler, Director, Consumer Reports WebWatch
- Sue Gardner, Senior Director, CBC.ca
- Mitch Gelman, Senior Vice President And Executive Producer, CNN.com
- Ruth Gersh, Director of Online Services, AP Digital
- Rich Jaroslovsky, Executive Editor, Government and Economy, Bloomberg News
- Chris Jennewein, Director of Internet Operations, The Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
- Susan Mernit, Partner, Founder, 5ive Group
- Anthony Moor, Editor, OrlandoSentinel.com
- Michael Parks, professor and director, USC Annenberg School of Journalism
- Kevin Roderick, journalist, creator of the L.A. Observed blog
- Neal Scarbrough, Vice President and Senior News Editor, ESPN
Susan sez: Kevin and I are the bloggerati in the group, but the (growing) openness of this organization is heartening and the process has offered up some cool surprises.
Charlene Li: Google Talk's potential --searchable conversation
Dan's Diner: "Community is at the epicenter of a disruptive earthquake of changing consumer behavior in media."
Feedburner: Pingshot "notifies aggregators, search engines, and directories about your content updates as quickly as possible."
Ted Rheingold: "Yes, you read that right, Dogster & Catster are profitable." (Via Clavier)
CNET: " Just about the only thing that's changed over the last decade is that Microsoft's amorphous nightmare has a name: Google."
Tantalizing post by Kevin Werbach: "Soon, though, most of the major Internet players are likely to be hybrids of two or more layers. Google and eBay will be infrastructure and applications; Yahoo! and News Corp. will be applications and content; telephone, wireless, and cable operators will be infrastructure nad content; Microsoft and Time Warner will span all three levels. And that's just what we've seen announced so far. In this market, everyone is in play."
(Via Emergic.org)
Via Steve Rubel: AP: ?A Paris-based media watchdog has released an ABC guide of tips for bloggers and dissidents to sneak past Internet censors in countries from China to Iran.?
Jay Rosen on Times Select: " My own questions start with this sentence in the corporate side?s press release, describing TimesSelect as ?a new product offering subscribers exclusive online access to the distinctive voices of the Op-Ed, Business, Metro and Sports columnists of The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune (IHT).?
The phrase ?exclusive online accesss? advertises two different goods. The first good is the work of the Times columnists themselves. The proposition that some will pay for that is hard to prove until you try, but it?s simple to understand. The second good being advertised is exclusivity. You, the lucky TimesSelect subscriber, have access to these voices. Others do not. The value proposition there is muddled. If we prize up-to-date information about petroleum markets, we might value it more?and pay a premium?if the news is exclusively available to paying customers; but do we value Nicholas D. Kristof?s column more if he?s an ?exclusive??"
Jay's point is underscored by the fact other sites are carrying much of this content--free.
NY Post's got an article saying Google's in talks "to lease a whopping 270,000 square feet in the former Port Authority Commerce Building at 111 Eighth Ave. at W. 15th Street."
This building is home to dozens of telecom and hosting companies.
Guess the G's plans to take over the planet via digital services are becoming more and more real..that war chest can fund lots of fiber.
For the next week, Yoga Journal and a small group of blogerati will be working together to create almost real-time quality coverage of the 10th annual Yoga Journal conference in Estes Park--and of the visit of Mr. B.K.S. Iyengar, father of yoga in the West.
I'm part of this happy crew and we'll be posting posting lots of unique photos, video, audio--plus lots of talk/observations/comments so that everyone interested in yoga, relaxation, wellness and balanced living can tune in and enjoy a look at what's happening here.
Kick off is Monday, but the blog goes live today.
Side note: We're going to bring some of the techniques of covering tech conferences--flash movies, podcasts, photo galleries, accounts & chronicles--to this unique yoga event--so if you are into yoga, or into emerging tech, check it out all next week.
Bob Cauthorn scred on the decline of newspapers and the (complacency) elephant in the room. Favorite snippet (the whole piece is worth a read--and applies not just to newspaper businesses):
"You need brains now to save newspapers. Active brains. Big ones. With fresh ideas and no fear."
And:
" What if newspapers were to become product focused rather than brand focused? The old modes of thinking will crumble. The print problem and the digital opportunity will be viewed as separate, but entwined, issues.
Digital media will be recognized for exactly what it is: a full medium in its own right, with its own internal logic, unique advantages, specific shortcomings and opportunities. Newspaper companies will begin to ask the proper questions about digital media, instead of simply mumbling about cannibalization and print."
Susan sez: Is the tipping point approaching--or are we just realizing we've passed it? (I think the latter.)
Tim O'Reilly's posted a picture of the meme map describing Web 2.0 that foocamp attendees made--I'm going to print one to stare at for a bit..good stuff.
Meme maps adapted from business model maps developed by Beam Inc.
PaidContent reports that iMediaconnection's being sold to DMG World Media,, who also own Ad:Tech.
Researcher Anthony Townsend's sharing del.icio.us links
Bloomberg: Whitefish, Montana's the geekish Aspen?
Rojo founder Kevin Burton announces TailRank, a next-generation weblog ranking system--and his new start-up/
Click Z reports: " Erik Flannigan, most recently VP of programming for Walt Disney's Buena Vista Datacasting, will head up a new unit at America Online. Flannigan will oversee Moviefone, AOL Music, AOL Radio, and AOL Television, and will develop new content initiatives for both the AOL service and AOL.com."
Welcome to Dulles, pal. Please bring back Mr. Showbiz.
ABC News has a raft of new blogs and one of them is by Jake Tapper. Jake is super smart with lots to say, one of those print to TV to web guys, and now new bloggerati.
Down and Dirty is Jake's take (I wanted to say that) on pop culture and politics--topics he's been engaged with for most of his career.
First posts are on New Orleans, let's see what's next(hopefully something more unique...)
And here's the RSS feed.
NJ educator Tom McHale has a lively piece about today's HS students and how they are digital natives--tribal members of the always on/always connected generation. A snippet (the lede):
"Meredith Fear sits in her room doing her homework. Books are scattered about, and a computer monitor glows before her. She is working on two Word documents and has four Web sites open. She checks her school e-mail account, her Bloglines news aggregator, and Furls of an online article for her independent study. She quickly transitions from this to respond to group members on Instant Messenger who have attached PowerPoint slides for an upcoming class presentation.
"The computer gives me a contact to all the people I need to talk to," Fear says. "It's a gateway to the world."
A good piece on kids and, well, devices.
Came across Brian's weblog and noticed this post about j-school and what learning matters:
"What I?m getting for my tuition is, ideally, the same I would have been getting 30 years ago. I?m not here to learn how to use WordPress as much I am here to learn how to write. I?m not here to learn how to use InDesign as much as I am here to learn what makes a good magazine page layout. While the medium may change, the basic elements of educating an intelligent, insightful, talented journalist stay the same. Great research skills. Great writing skills. A dedication to honesty and truth. These are the guiding forces of what made a good journalist 30 years ago, what makes one today and what will make one 30 years from now.
... In fact, I think it is the very change in media ? from radio to television to internet and beyond ? that keeps young people interested in journalism. As the number of media outlets expands, so too will the amount of people willing and capable of being good journalists."
Staying with friends in my old home town, Park Slope, Bklyn.
The area's gentrified further since I last lived here, but the charm of the streets is
just as strong--and the parade of owners and dogs back and forth to the park at dusk is just as eclectic and delightful.
If I were to move back to NY, I would definitely think about returning to this
area...there's a small-scale charm that's very special and accessible, and that still captures my attention.
Flying today, light posting till tonight.
More fuel to the Google can't let AOL go to MSN discussion reported by Paid Content, who quote Merrill Lynch media analyst Lauren Fine: "We believe it is entirely possible that Google could consider making a bid for AOL as well. This would certainly protect Google's revenues from AOL as well as enable Google to keep 100 percent of the search advertising revenues as well as gain a significant amount of content. " Fine's focus isn't on Google alone. "Should such a deal between AOL and MSN materialize, it could pose serious competition for Yahoo as well as Google in terms of audience reach and comprehensiveness of content. According to August comScore data, AOL had 88 million unique visitors and 26 billion in page views and MSN had 100 million unique visitors and 18 billion in page views, in combination exceeding Yahoo's reach of 122 million unique visitors and pretty much matching Yahoo's 42 billion page views. In addition, this would give a significant boost to MSN's search engine."
Fun, hmmn.
Another wild card thought: Would Murdoch or Diller take a peek at buying AOL? Either of those scenarios would suggest we were in a bigger bubble than the last one.
Smart Mobs: Do you know what a neighbornode is? Hint: They're hyperlocal. (Via networked performance)
Steve Shu helps BizWeek launch an MBA area. Readers can get blogs, worry about grad school, and then talk about getting hired (sounds like a plan for premium services)
Also--BizWeek's got a new podcast series tied to cover stories--This magazine keeps getting it right, more or less.
We Media fellowship recipients: The October 5th conference has awarded 15 fellowships and the list is fascinating and diverse.
Amy Gahran: So what is citizen journalism and and why should news orgs care? (Good, pragmatic tips here.)
Local CA bonus Noted: MAS, a new magazine launching in the very small, very social-media hot zone of California called Bakersfield, has a nice new website/community built on the Bakomatic platform (a great example of reskinning a product, folks).
Old style publisher E&P comments here.
Russ Beattie shares my view that Google's war chest could buy a slice of--or the whole shooting match--of AOL. Russ writes:
"Google, it seems, would be the most obvious suitor to me. They need everything that AOL already has in order to continue to compete in the online media space. Yeah, they have their Search cash-cow at the moment, but that's an undefensible lead. The switching costs for someone to move from Google to Yahoo! Search are nil - I should know, I've done it, I rarely use Google now and there was no real penalty involved in switching. Google is essentially an advertising company and needs to keep expanding its online media business, or get caught by competitors in the Search space and not have a backup. Snagging AOL would bring along some great assets that Google really needs, including the Netscape name (and campus down the street from Google in Mt. View), AIM, AOL Mail, AOL Mobile, multimedia assets, tons of content and tons of community services as well. Hell, what else is Google going to do with $4b in cash lying around?"
My sentiments, exactly, Russ!
Addendeum: Back in the day (2000) the Netscape team wanted AOL to buy Google but one of the very senior executives didn't think AOL users would ever care about the Internet or web search, so they didn't try to buy the company. They did, however, invest about $10MM, a flyer that paid off handsomely when Google went public.
There would be something poetic about Google buying AOL now, doncha think?
Heather Green at the consistently interesting Blogspotting breaks the news of an AOL Survey on blogging and why people do it. The story says that the survey reveals 50% of all bloggers blog because it's a form of self-therapy preferable to counselling. Other data points:
- 16% blog because they're interested in journalism;
- 12% blog in order to break or stay ahead of the latest news and gossip
- 8% blog in order to expose political information
In other words, now we've heard from one segment of the blogging population--how about the rest?
(On the other hand, some of the top bloggers I read are definitely practicing self therapy--in public.)
NY Post reports MSN is talking seriously about acquiring AOL and folding it into the mix. However, the reporter says: " Talks are most advanced with Microsoft, Time Warner management's preferred partner, but the media giant has also had discussions with both Yahoo! and Google over a sale or venture with AOL, according to a source close to Time Warner."
Susan sez: Given the long history AOL has had with Google, and Google's interest in building out their network, I would not rule out a *surprise* purchase or investment in AOL by Google.
After all, AOL has built a terrific server network and infrastructure/backbone over the years, and that would be a strong asset for Google--as would be the millions of pages they could monetize directly.
And they'll have the war chest to do it, won't they?
(Side note to Google execs: Don't do it, you have no idea what you would be getting into!)
(Via Marketing Vox)
So not only did Google launch blog search (more on that in a sec), but they redid the Blogger start page to reflect the new search and drive more traffic into blogs. There's a dynamic crawl linking to newly updated blogs, a blog of the day clickable list, and the good ol' random link.
As for the new Google blog search, it seems to be indexing constantly--I could swear my first search on Jarvis & Dell via Google Blog Search turned up(undated) two posts with no dateline, while the one I did just now resulted in 578 nicely annotated posts. Oddly enough, when I used the new blog search box on Blogger to do the same search I got 550 results--have no idea why.
Meanwhile, my Technorati search on the same keywords provided a clearly labelled 699 posts with 20 posts in the last ten days and a Feedster search provided 390 dated and annotated results.
Susan sez: A good start from the big guys; let's see how the indexing shakes out as they make the small tweaks--and, most importantly--where they integrate this thing. The elephant in the room isn't their computing power, IMHO, it's the building GoogleNet suite of indispensable apps--as they hook them together, world domination looms.
Update: Nick W at Threadwatch says the new search focuses on feeds, not blogs.
Winer explains.
New Netratings data reports that as more and more users integrate photos into their blog pages--and as the world reports on world events--the amount of photo-publishing and hosting has grown more than 406% since January 2005, with photo-hosting sites (including blog ASPs) accounting for 10% of active Internet users.
Netratings reports that top referring sites for the top five image hosting sites during August2005 included MySpace.com, Xanga.com, LiveJournal, Blogger and MSN Spaces.
InJuly 2005, Nielsen//NetRatings reported that 20 percent of active Web users, or 29.3 million people, accessed blogging or blog-related Web sites, growing31 percent since the beginning of the year.
Money quote is from Jon Gibbs, research manager: "The large rise in blogging activity has lifted other Web sites, the primary one being image hosting sites. Simple text-based 'diaries' have evolved into a more image-oriented presentation."
(Susan sez: One might add that world events, not only evolving customer behavior, are responsible for this truth.)
The table:
Table 1. Top 5 Image Hosting Web Sites, Jan. vs. Aug. 2005 (Home & Work, U.S.) ______________________________________________________________________ Site Jan 05 UA (000) Aug 05 UA (000) Jan-Aug Growth ______________________________________________________________________ PhotoBucket 1,537 12,241 696% ______________________________________________________________________ ImageShack 1,150 3,444 199% ______________________________________________________________________ Putfile.com -- 1,302 -- ______________________________________________________________________ TinyPic.com -- 715 -- ______________________________________________________________________ Imagevenue.com -- 559 -- ______________________________________________________________________ Category* 2,912 14,734 406% ______________________________________________________________________Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, September 2005
*Note: Category is comprised of 50 image hosting Web sites.The demos (yes,teens are into it)
Table 2. Highest Indexing Age & Gender Groups for Image Hosting Sites
(U.S., Home & Work)
_________________________________________________________________________
Demo Group Unique Audience (000) Composition % Composition Index
_________________________________________________________________________
Female 12 - 17 2,219 15% 259
_________________________________________________________________________
Male 12 - 17 1,532 10% 191
_________________________________________________________________________
Male 21 - 24 479 3% 182
_________________________________________________________________________
Male 18 - 24 1,004 7% 175
_________________________________________________________________________Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, September 2005
So AOL's now added access to podcasts. In addition, TVEyes Podscope search will be integrated with AOL Search and there will be lots o original podcast programming from AOLChannels (and members, one would think.)
Susan sez: This is yet another great example of how podcasting fits the populace, making it quick and straightforward to adapt. AOL didn't add blogging till 2004, quite a while after blogging took off, but they're quick(ish) to adopt podcasting.
Anyone in the Bay area interested in volunteering their expertise for the October 8th Craiglist Foundation Non-Profit Boot Camp - Ask the Experts tables?
Just heard they need some more volunteers--if you are able to provide some services, this is a really worthwhile program--volunteers are needed to work 2-hour shifts for one on one Q&A with attendees.
Check the site for details.