Michael Dell once said that to fix Apple, they should: “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders”.

Apple is doing just fine, it survives on true innovation, but perhaps Dell should be shut down now.

Profit Falls by Half at Dell - New York Times

Three days after its announcement of a vast safety recall, Dell reported little but bad news yesterday: profits down by half, and an informal Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its accounting.

We’ve moved Wists to hardware with five times the horsepower and into new datacenters. the overall speed is several times faster than just before the move.

Traffic has been doubling every two and a half months (interestingly with no reflection of this on Alexa - oh well), and we’re getting ready for the roll out of Wists rev 2!

Since its such a pain for people to install bookmarklets in Internet Explorer, we’ve automated the process with an installer.

Wists, top web picks from for all. Wists, social shopping scrapbook, wishlist

When junk mail comes through the door with moneymaking scams like - make $100,000 in 2 months, its typically supported by testimonials that aren’t quite outright falsehoods, but are, lets say - economical with the truth.

…It typically goes straight in the trash can.

So when one of the worlds biggest business magazines prints an even bolder claim “this kid made $60 million in 18 months” in tabloid sized lettering on its front cover, and it turns out to be an outright falsehood, does Business Week look like something serious investors and business people should subscribe to, or something to put in the trash can?

There is nothing actually wrong with the companies or the people mentioned in the piece - they are all interesting.

However, Scott Rosenberg etc. are rightly on Business Week’s case.

In doing so the tech press may turn this around to make the responsible reaction to the piece, rather the the article itself a defining moment of web 2.0 and the refusal to fall for 1999 style hysteria.

An idea that my good friend Simon Perry had a while ago - provide inline links to specific points in video and you create the video web.

Without time based web links into binary files, video would be like a web where text links were only to entire websites, not individual pages- useless.

Official Google Video Blog: New Feature: Link within a Video

Probably the single biggest asset that Friendster has now:

United States Patent: 7069308

Back from vacation and noticed that the People Aggregator is already up.

Congrats to Marc and everyone involved! Wishing you every well deserved success.

Marc’s Voice

Focus on ‘Reach’, use Rank anomalies, and the ‘geek factor’ for audience, to lower the reach figures to get the real picture for some sites.

Many ‘web 2.0′ startups are likely to have a bunch of their own employees who have the Alexa bar installed and are feverish stats obsessives. For moderate ranked sites this can skew Alexa since their own traffic is a significant percentage of the overall number of Alexa users who hit the site. Fortunatley, you can actually use this to help correct the stats.

Here are some rules of thumb I use to get better stats:

1. Ignore Page views and Rank, for sites that are not in the top 5,000.

2. Always monitor your own site, from a machine that does not have Alexa istalled then look at your site’s reach vs another’s reach and then your sites rank vs another’s rank. If there is a marked difference in the spread between these 2 sets of figures such that rank looks relatively better than reach for the competitor site, then they probably boost their own Alexa figures. Depending on the spread you can actually use this to your advantage to calculate the appropriate reduction in their reach numbers.

3. Weigh in the ‘geek factor’. A site with 1000 geek marketing types will likely have a higher Alexa than 100,000 teens. Look at inbound links to the sites and try and figure out the audience and weight appropriately.

“If Google bought MySpace, it’d all of a sudden be waist deep in the content creation/publishing business”

… oh, cummon. Its not like Google have avoided being in this business, ever, vis a vis Orkut and Blogger neither of which really played into a big strategy one way or the other.

Just because Google doesn’t do something does not mean its a strategic move. Google do not have any plans to put a man on the Moon, as far as I know. Perhaps that’s because the online advertising industry isn’t big on the Moon.

John Battelle’s Searchblog: Google Not Buying MySpace Was Not A Strategic Blunder

Google makes a lot of money from cost per click (CPC) advertising. But for a vendor, cost per action (CPA) advertising (e.g. someone actually buys something rather than just clicks on the ad) is actually a much better proposition, since you only pay when you are making money, making it easy to guarantee profit.

Small businesses - the very ones that may not have sophisticated tracking systems to make sure that CPC ads are profitable but are the main CPC buyers - also may not have the resources to tie their shopping cart system to an advertising system. So CPA based advertising, in theory the web’s holy grail, has ceded to the compromise of CPC for small vendors, while the big guys who can even measure the benefits of brand advertising, still buy impressions based ads. Larger publishers, who vendors actively want to advertise with, have some leverage on the type of advertising they can get and therefore want to sell impressions based (CPM) ads (because they can guarantee ad revenue). For the rest of us there was Adsense…until now.

There are some things, that people are ready to buy just by reading an ad, e.g. ‘buy tickets for U2′.

Google checkout could mean the return of CPA based affiliate programs for 2 reasons: it allows people to bring transactions closer to ads, improving conversion rates; it solves the problem of hooking the shopping cart system to the ad system.

Google checkout would allow, for example, a distributed Ebay with classifieds appearing on blogs and social networks. It will make a ubiquitous CPA based ad network, with the creative design elements of CPM based advertising to make people hit the ‘buy’ button, viable.

…making Google checkout a big deal, and making Ebay look very slack for doing squat with Paypal.

Wired News: France Launches Maps Site

1. Geoportail isn’t comprehensive.
Google allows you to see a map or picture of anywhere you want (kind of what maps are for), Geoportail is limited to the France and its ‘colonies’.

2. Geoportail doesn’t actually work.
The site has been down since launch.

3. You have to pay for Geoportail in France, even if you don’t use it.
The site was funded with several million dollars of tax payers money (not necessarily a problem if it was any good).

4. Les Mashups?
Non, pas ici.

5. Front page does not have search.
From the few pages that eventually load, it looks like nobody involved has actually ever used the web.

In short, French people should ask for their money back from this execrable, committee driven, pile of old cobblers. The French government, meanwhile, would be better off focusing on creating the kind of business environment that would Foster small startups that would do a much better job.