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…

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…

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…

There may or may not be much to moan about ‘Web 2.0’, but one person, Michael Arrington has clearly become its nexus, through TechCrunch. With that fact is something that restores my faith in the inherent meritocracy of the web, because the mystery, special sauce that makes TechCrunch successful is that its just plain good.