“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.

Tucked inconspicuously between London’s Swiss Cottage Library and Swimming Pool (one of them was designed by the famous modernist architect Basil Spence but I can’t remember which one, which is probably because there is not much difference between a Sir Basil Spence masterpiece and any old piece of post war local government municipal crap) is a giant turd-like bronze scupture of Sigmund Freud, who lived up the road.

On the wall behind it, someone once sprayed ‘WANKER’ in massive letters.

It worked on so many levels. Pure genious.

In the late 70s the Northwick Park roundabout in the North London suburb of Harrow, was plastered with a slogan which was sprayed with the same slap dashness of an ‘I woz ere’ graffito but was in fact a sublime mashup of Marx quotation and pop culture reference. It stood there for years, a monument to suburbia.

“Nicholas Parsons is the Neo Opiate of the People”

(Nicholas Parson’s being a contemporary Television Game Show host and partial model for Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge)

I ever become a gazillionaire I would like to buy the Northwick Park roundabout, respray it with the slogan and dedicate the place to the unknown Graffiti hero.

According to the results of this 14,000 person study about how much all of the various Abrahamic sects hate each other in various parts of the world, there is a little reported fact due to the focus on Muslim vs Christian relations.

86% of French view Jews favorably (almost exactly the same number as view Christians favorably: 87%) much more than in the US, UK or, in particular, Spain which would appear to be the place to look objectively for signs of the fastest growing anti-semitism.

There is also less difference in absolute percentage terms between how favorably people view Jews vs Christians in Germany than in the US.

Not what squarely unbalanced Fox News would have us believe.

Survey highlights Islam-West rift

Jon Udell picks ‘User Generated Content’ as his least favorite buzzword.

User suggests: adict.

Generated suggests: made automatically with no feeling.

Content, as Jon points out, suggests: the offal that fills a sausage.

What could be a more contemptuous view of a creation and its author?

This second wave of the Internet is distinguished principally by the fact that more people (ahem, users) are contributing.

Caring about these people and what they contribute, will provide genuinely useful services and any business model based upon the perceived cost benefit of cheap, user generated content, shows an inability to differentiate between poetry and the contents of a telephone book.

A celebrated Irish content generator defined a cynic as ’someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’

A proponent of ‘building a platform to leverage cheap user generated content’ does not even know the market price, knowing merely the ‘cost’ of any random string of bits and the value of nothing’.

In the grand scheme of things this is below the level of the cynic. Someone who cannot calculate the difference between value and cost will not be able to make a profit, however cynically.

If anything should hang behind my desk and show what I really want to and don’t want to do with Wists it would be a smart little wall plaque embossed with:

Oscar Wilde didn’t produce ‘user generated content’, he knew its value.