technology

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...

"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...

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.

Quines (self-replicating programs)

The guys behind Blox were the Oddpost guys, and they pretty much created ajax. Blox was an online spreadsheet app and it was great but before its time. With the release of Google Calendar, Excel is the only reason I have to go near a PC or any Microsoft products. I've got nothing against Microsoft as a big corp, I just think their products are like badly made, vintage toys So please, I want Blox back. Google Calendar

Valleywag: Gizmodo talks to YouTube: "Q: Facebook just turned down a $750 million offer, saying they were seeking $2 billion. Do consider yourself a million-dollar-kind-of guy or a billion-dollar-kind-of guy? A: What we're really committed to is providing the best experience, and we're not really thinking about what we're worth. We're just viewing this as solving a really hard problem and that's how to distribute video in an entertaining way. So as we move forward, we're just going to stay committed to that" or... 'Look we're a one show (America's Best Home Videos) product with clips we didn't secure the rights for. We can't talk money till we make sure we're not just a free version of Akamai.' But hey, users are everything, right? Yes if you are Google, and Overture's business model rains greenbacks out of the sky like an endless ticker parade. No if you are Napster and...

Microsoft employee on Vista: "I wouldn't buy it with someone else's money. Then again what do I know, I've only been testing the dog for the last 2-3 yrs". ... and the built in search could be called something lucky like Alta Vista. PC Pro: News: Microsoft employees call for Ballmer to go

Craig Newmark has a proposal to counter Goodmail. craigblog: a big advance for spam and phishing fighting? The problem with Craig's proposal - that authorized, digitally signed email passes through spam filters - is that it doesn't create a sender 'cost'. This therefore cannot be a true cure against spam, since spam is a product of almost zero cost for the sender. As we are seeing, costs are always introduced in any marketplace, and with email being free to send, the self-emergent cost, in dealing with spam, is passed to the receiver. The postal service did not grow exponentially until it switched from a receiver to a sender pays model, and US cellphone use lags other developed nations because both call sender and recipients pay. If neither sender and recipient pay, as with email it seems that the recipient ends up paying. So the Goodmail solution plays into the way...