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Feb 26 2004
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Will AOL buy Ask Jeeves

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

John Battelle: “the rumors are flying again about Jeeves being in play. CBS Marketwatch is fueling them, saying AOL might buy the company and drop Google. I don’t think so, but you never know” Certainly if Ask Jeeves don’t get bought they look very lonely out there as a destination site powered by Google ads revenue. They are less vulnerable than Looksmart in that there is little incentive for Google to ditch them as a channel in the same way that MSN ditched Looksmart as a provider (although Google have leverage in terms of split on ad revenue). I agree with John that they won’t get bought by AOL. They have traffic and a search product but their ad network is provided by Google. AOL have more traffic and search, despite the hype, is a commodity. AOL would be better off with an ad network.

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Feb 24 2004
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RSS tracking for marketing

Posted by | rss | No Comments

Email marketers have a big problem. HTML email is a better marketing medium and is more trackable than text email. This is because remote content such as images can be loaded as the email is opened and used to monitor impressions. Even if payment is for clicks and these are tracked, the impressions to conversion ratio is a must have. Unfortunately, email clients are soon going to block dynamic content in email making it impossible to track impressions directly. This, coupled with the fact that up to 40% of HTML email doesn’t get to its destination because of spam filters, has lead people to look to RSS as a possible savior for email marketing. Aside from the fact that RSS (as implemented currently) is not as good a medium for ads. If RSS is to be successful it needs to be trackable. This means tracking clicks and impressions. At first…

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Feb 24 2004
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RSS has nothing to do with push technology

Posted by | rss | No Comments

Weekly Read has one of the few articles which point out that people confuse RSS and push, although it stops short of the reality. RSS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH PUSH. You go to a URL and pull something down. The reason why people are confused, is that when you use OTHER weblog inspired publishing methodologies in concert with RSS, such as alerting a ping server, then you can push things to a client. A ping server plus HTML and permalinks gives you much the same thing. RSS gives you clean headlines (and on rare occasions, extra metadata) so in theory you do don’t have to scrape websites. The reality is that you do have to scrape websites (ask Google News) because the majority of RSS doesn’t contain full text for search engine indexing – but that is another story.

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Feb 22 2004
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Report predicts that global warming will spark nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting

Posted by | politics | No Comments

The Observer: “A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” Funny how this kind of headline always crops up in the Sunday papers. I guess the Observer needs to boost its circulation.

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Feb 16 2004
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Will Yellow Pages be Google’s next step.

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

At $40 billion a year for traditional print advertising (10 times the size of the existing search engine advertising market), the online Yellow Pages advertising market is the biggest revenue opportunity for search engines now that the pay-per-performance revenue model is cemented. Since most services transactions happen offline, Google/Overture style PPC (Pay Per Click) is the perfect way to charge advertisers. Latest figures show that search for local services is twice usual estimates, at 25% of all commercial searches online. The market for local services has traditionally been owned by the phone companies who used phone numbers as the key for Yellow Pages listings, however, Yellow Pages publishers have been lazy and arrogant and are just realizing that they could be crushed by the likes of Google, since the majority of revenues will soon come from online advertising. Traditional publishers’ online Yellow Pages are usually very poorly executed, for example,…

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Feb 10 2004
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Will Paris’ American School students be arrested on graduation day?

Posted by | education | No Comments

Given that traditional academic clothing, mortarboard hat and black robe, has religious origins, does that mean that it is now illegal for French scholars or teachers to dress as scholars? Also, since it is traditional for American high school students to graduate wearing mortarboard and cape, perhaps the students of the American School of Paris would be expelled were they at a public school. Perhaps next time professors parade around the Sorbonne in traditional garb for a formal occasion, someone should test France’s proposed law and demand their expulsion. Satire aside, this excellent New York Times article outlines some of the real complexities of the issue. 1. It is backed by the head of the Paris Mosque who: “praised today’s vote as “impressive” and a “buffer” against Muslim fundamentalists intruding into French secular institutions” 2. Communism has been historically agressively secular but French Communists are among the few detractors of…

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Feb 10 2004
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Why doesn’t HTML support this:

Posted by | metadata | No Comments

Jon Udell looks at multiple metadata values within CSS class attributes. CSS is the logical place to put metadata in that metadata often, but not always, needs to be styled – e.g. a ‘headline’ might be big bold and blue. But the main problem for me is that by using attributes in HTML tags to define metadata you have to count nested tags in a parser, which is a total pain and can cause problems if fragments of information are syndicated. Wouldn’t it be much better if HTML were amended to include closing attributes? i.e. you could say: <pre class="headline">DOJ sues Microsoft</pre class="headline"> instead of: <pre class="headline">DOJ sues Microsoft</pre> That way people wouldn’t have to invent tags, which couldn’t be styled, such as: <headline>DOJ sues Microsoft</headline>

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Feb 07 2004
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Tivo wishlist

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

TiVo and PVR wishlist: 1. All PVR’s are sold as commodity hardware with no signup or subscription fee or tie in to Cable or Satellite. 2. TV listings are provided for free by ad supported online services. 3. Opt-in targeted ads based upon your personal and viewing profile (with ability to remove items from viewing profile) are served alongside listings. 4. You have total control and ownership of your profile to block certain advertisers or limit your profile. 5. Either onscreen or via a webpage you can buy from ads based on what you have watched. For example if you watched a travel show about Hawaii you can choose special vacation deals from your nearest airport (you can store your zipcode in the profile), if you want to buy what they are wearing on Sex in the City (heaven forbid), then you can. Basically I want to walk into a…

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Feb 06 2004
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White Suprematism and the Democratic party

Posted by | politics | No Comments

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Jim Crow Stories . Democratic Party | PBS “The South remained a one-party region until the Civil Rights movement began in the 1960s. Northern Democrats, most of whom had prejudicial attitudes towards blacks, offered no challenge to the discriminatory policies of the Southern Democrats.” Clearly the Democratic party is now the more tolerant party. When did it change?

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