Pity the poor guy that has this on his business card. Sort of like the Empire State building meets Japan, in a very bad way.link » tags: [weird] via Wists: link
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Probably the single biggest asset that Friendster has now: United States Patent: 7069308
Metropolis Magazine reviews Google’s horrid new offices. It takes the ‘working here is so much fun we’re so playful’ spin to its most simplistic architectural representation – bright colors and toys. All of these, of course, are a thin veneer over the reality – a strip lit, cubicle ridden, hell hole, like a parody of The Office. Google’s products are still failry sophisticated – I hope the office environment doesn’t rub off.
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…
Ironic – you can now check your previous dependencies on Independence Day. A good time to check and see if your last name shows in the Origins Database, if you have Irish or British ancestors. The site will be free for a day and a half over the holiday. OriginsNetwork.com – 4th July Independence Day Offer
“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…
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…
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