Malcolm Gladwell reports that Nathan Myhrvold assembles geniuses to create inventions, and it's working like crazy.

But then, in August of 2003, I.V. held its first invention session, and it was a revelation. “Afterward, Nathan kept saying, ‘There are so many inventions,’ ” Wood recalled. “He thought if we came up with a half-dozen good ideas it would be great, and we came up with somewhere between fifty and a hundred. I said to him, ‘But you had eight people in that room who are seasoned inventors. Weren’t you expecting a multiplier effect?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but it was more than multiplicity.’ Not even Nathan had any idea of what it was going to be like.”

The original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year. Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three thousand ideas. Wood said that he once attended a two-day invention session presided over by Jung, and after the first day the group went out to dinner. “So Edward took his people out, plus me,” Wood said. “And the eight of us sat down at a table and the attorney said, ‘Do you mind if I record the evening?’ And we all said no, of course not. We sat there. It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the attorney comes up with eight single-spaced pages flagging thirty-six different inventions from dinner. Dinner.”

I can believe it because this is how I feel about the internet - there are still millions of great ideas out there, waiting to be implemented.

Even Bill Gates is impressed by these guys - which partially explains why Microsoft is stalled. Microsoft's muse is simply more excited by other stuff...

Bill Gates, whose company, Microsoft, is one of the major investors in Intellectual Ventures, says, “I can give you fifty examples of ideas they’ve had where, if you take just one of them, you’d have a startup company right there.”

There’s this idea they have where you can track moving things by counting wing beats. So you could build a mosquito fence and clear an entire area. They had some ideas about super-thermoses, so you wouldn’t need refrigerators for certain things. They also came up with this idea to stop hurricanes. Basically, the waves in the ocean have energy, and you use that to lower the temperature differential. I’m not saying it necessarily is going to work. But it’s just an example of something where you go, Wow.”

¶ 5/12/2008 0 comments links to this post

If you want to see what a good old-fashioned internet rant looks and sounds like, Joel Spolsky unloads it for you.

He's talking about Microsoft, Ray Ozzie and Live Mesh. It's important to note that Joel used to work at Microsoft, and contributed to what I consider the single greatest app of the PC era: Microsoft Excel.

As you read through the crescendo of angst at Microsoft's over-engineered cluelessness, be sure to note the tell-tale long sentences at peak rantage. You can feel the pounding that the keyboard took when this was typed:

It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop.

And later, more unimpeded flux from the keyboard:

It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT.

Good stuff!

Stick around for the end, cause Joel gives bonus ranting, and targets Google...

Labels: joel, microsoft, rant

¶ 5/08/2008 0 comments links to this post

Mary Jo Foley nails why Microsoft is continuing to decline.

Foley: There's always been this dichotomy between "Bill's guys" and "Steve's guys." Steve's guys have MBAs and their roots are in sales. Bill's guys have been traditional technologists. The people who are more like Steve will probably get more power and will run the show, so I wonder who's going to be the tech champion for Bill's guys. I think that's going to be a big cultural and noticeable change once Gates is out from his day-to-day duties.

This effect has been going on for the last 3 years and has ruined Microsoft's future: over-dependence on MBAs, and loss of technology touch.

It's nice when someone as smart & connected as Foley says things you've always believed...

¶ 5/08/2008 0 comments links to this post

Marc Andreessen has a post praising dual-class stock structures. To me this means he's recommending that public tech companies create shares that enable management to control the voting rights of the company, even though they may own a minority of the shares.

His post is extensive, and he admits he's going over to a new view (previously, he believed in the corporate version of one man / one vote). However, I think it's crazy talk and unsupportable with the arguments he's making. I think the downsides and unintended consequences are far worse than he admits.

Leverage Now Good for Marc

Andreessen spent the last half of 2007 posting a lot of sarcastic notes on how Wall St. bankers and corporate titans were basically lying about their exposure to over-leveraged debt & derivatives. He reveled in exposing these guys.

In short, the problems for Wall St. were caused by excessive leverage.

Now, Pmarca is arguing that to fight potential raiders, hedge funds, private equity and other Schumpterian-type attacks, Silicon Valley should adopt the same techniques.

I.e. they should LEVERAGE their stock voting power. Basically, give insiders stock that is 10-100X more voting power than what they sell to everyone else.

The keystone of his argument is that Google does this.

He proposes the following four "commitments" that should make it OK for tech companies to operate this way:

• The key leaders of the company -- typically the founders -- who will own the controlling Class B shares, are also major economic shareholders in the company. They own a significant portion of the company and are therefore highly incented to maximize the value of the company over time.
• The key leaders of the company who own the controlling Class B shares have a long-term goal of building a major franchise, and the commitment required to execute against that goal.
• The controlling Class B shareholders have a commitment to treat Class A shareholders fairly and equally in all respects other than voting power.
• All public shareholders understand what they are getting into up front -- no bait and switch.

I think all four of these are impossible to hold management to, and about as likely to be judged in good faith as a politician's campaign promises.

Seriously, can Andreessen name ANY Silicon Valley founder who wouldn't believe that they would be able to satisfy all four of these "commitments"? Remember to ask them this at the time they are about to go public.

At a simple level, once most founders companies' go public, they have more frickin' money than god, and are not really that incented to maximize the value of the company. Is Filo that excited to do that (would he really know how?), or would he rather spend his days reviewing hardware purchases of Yahoo's teams?

As Bud Fox once said: "How many yachts can you waterski behind?"

It Works For Warren

Citing Google and Buffett as the "good" users of dual class structure is like citing Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant as good examples of why a kid should leave school early to pursue his NBA career - "Hey, it worked great for those two!"

Rather than go with Buffett, I'd lean towards Peter Lynch for the guidance: "Go for a business that any idiot can run - because sooner or later, any idiot probably is going to run it." Should those idiots have this leveraged control?

Should Terry Semel (who made about $500M from Yahoo in 4 years) really have had this kind of control?

For 95% of tech companies, which is more likely?

1. Idiots have control.
2. The CEO / founder is the second coming of Warren Buffett.

And really, are investors going to understand the implications of dual-class structures? Should they have to?

Andreessen is arguing for a great weakening of already weak corporate governance.

Should Yahoo have Dual Class shares?

Would it have been good for Yahoo to have such a class structure? I don't know, but I'm sure Yahoo would have judged itself to pass with flying colors on all four commitments.

In fact, I'd argue that Yahoo is proof that companies don't really need the dual class structure to achieve control. They can simply do what they've always done and pack the board with yes-men and women who couldn't care less if the founders were presiding over a controlled flight into ground.

Upshot: Weak Governance Considered Harmful

My belief is that this technique will become more common, and will hurt innovation in Silicon Valley more than help it. In general, the companies that do go public with this type of structure will look more like European companies of the late '80s and '90s, where management had almost no incentive to govern the company for anyone's benefit but their own.

And yes, the argument that Wall St. forces some companies to focus on the short term too much is true, but that doesn't mean founders should concentrate control so drastically. If the founders are magnanimous enough to be able to handle Andreessen's four "commitments", I'd think they'd be bright enough to run their franchise effectively without dual-class controls. After all, it has been done many times - eBay, Cisco, Oracle and many others seem to have done it.

Dual class structure would be an easy way out, and wouldn't promote healthy governance. It'd be yet more insulation from the real world for the management of most companies, and the temptation to abuse it would be huge.

I guess Andreessen doesn't think that Silicon Valley founders would be subject to that temptation, and they don't already derive enough benefits at the top of the tech-company pyramid.

Ask yourself: aren't their egos and wealth big enough already? Or do they need this leverage technique to compete with the East Coast mega wealthy in PE and on Wall St?

I don't think it'd be healthy to try.

Recommendations For Improvement

Before making it easy for insiders to isolate themselves, I'd argue that if you want more public tech companies, and more innovation, make it easier to go public. Repeal big chunks of Sarbanes-Oxley (SarBox). I think that could help without weakening corporate governance too much.

If Marc wants to recommend this dual-class technique to Facebook, where he is apparently becoming a board member, I'd add one suggestion: Give the Class B power shares to all the employees and early investors.

Or, if that doesn't sound good - how about this: Stay private.

Labels: andreessen

¶ 5/06/2008 0 comments links to this post

The new site is redesigned to look better, and the back-end is much faster than the old one.

Search results for Amazon Prime products related to "grand theft auto". The horizontal blue bars separate categories of results, i.e. "Video Games" vs "Books" vs "Music". By clicking on the blue bars, you can hide or expand each category.

I've also added some nice features. It finds many more products than any other Amazon search site that I know of, and it shows them on one page.

There are sections of results by category, and you can hide categories you don't care about.

I wrote a spelling suggestion corrector based on product names. So now when you type in a misspelling or a typo, you get a suggested correction, like on Google.

Get Auto-complete for Amazon Prime searches, by adding searchamazonprime to your Firefox search toolbar.

Finally, you can now add searchamazonprime to your Firefox search bar. If you use the search bar in Firefox, you will get auto-completion style suggestions as you search.

It's really easy - and there's step-by-step instructions here.

So if you have Amazon Prime, or buy a lot of stuff from Amazon.com, try it out, and let me know what you think.

Labels: amazon, prime, search

¶ 5/05/2008 0 comments links to this post

These cracked me up so much, I'm just gonna rip them right off Andrew's blog:

Here's Andrew's impersonation of John Battelle's Twitter stream:

• "So Google just acquired Volvo! Cool for a number of reasons. I will have a *lot more* to say about this but right now I am slammed at SXSW and will be back up for air soon."
• "Holidays. Just loading up the jalopy right now taking the family down to Panama - I sure picked a crazy week to take off what with Larry Page turning out to be Obama's surprise choice for VP... lots happening... back next week..."
• Intrigued by the nonexistent Twitter ad model. More to come...

Labels: battelle, goodman

¶ 5/02/2008 0 comments links to this post

Did you know the post office is selling stamps now for 41 cents that will continue to work after the rate goes up to 42 cents on May 12.

The cost of sending a first-class letter will rise by a penny, to 42 cents, on May 12. But the "forever" stamps -- currently selling for 41 cents -- will remain valid for full postage after the increase. The U.S. Postal Service estimates Americans are buying 30 million "forever" stamps a day.

Get some now and save yourself the hassle of dealing with the rate increase.

Labels: postage

¶ 5/02/2008 0 comments links to this post

Business Week says that mobile phone usage will be Google's undoing. This could be right - a change in how people use the web. We know Google's not threatened by Microsoft or Yahoo.

But is mobile search adoption happening fast enough? Other than the iPhone, most mobile browsing simply sucks, and people don't use their phones to buy online.

That will slowly change, and Google will have to cope with less screen space for ads and search results.

But I do think that Google has many more years of people using large screens to do most of their shopping research and transactions. And they will adapt in time to increase mobile browsing usage.

Labels: google

¶ 4/28/2008 0 comments links to this post

Lately, they really make you *work* to get low-cost clicks. The complex quality-based bidding formula is not entirely profit-oriented, but some of the reason they’ve been so profitable during an economic downturn is because they’ve managed to squeeze higher prices out of the “low priced” keyword inventory. They’ve taken aim at “lowball bidders” in some categories, and made it harder to bid low, plain and simple. Either you pay more than you used to pay, or your ad doesn’t show up.

...

People who’ve been neglecting paid search trends also don’t realize all the amazing free and low cost tools that are now available to improve your ability to build, adjust, and refine campaigns on the fly. New advertisers look at the old paradigms (large keyword lists, lowball bids, bid management to ROI) and don’t see that the game truly is about relevancy today. Careful attention to user intent, and providing “scent” right through the buying process, is a big part of what drives successful campaigns.

(emphasis mine)

That pretty much sums it up for the difference between 2005 and 2008.

Labels: adwords, goodman

¶ 4/28/2008 0 comments links to this post

This means that, very soon, web Advertisers will no longer be able to trust the data they get from publishers or these traffic rating agencies.

The Big Picture | Soon to be worthless: Nielsen Net Ratings and comScore Media Metrix

¶ 4/25/2008 0 comments links to this post

ComScore (SCOR) is taking some heat for convincing Wall St. that Google's year over year click growth was very low. Kedrosky thinks it was a factor as to why expectations were so low:

I lean to the first bullet: Blame Comscore. As some are pointing out, and as Comscore's aftermarket weakness is showing, this is turning into an acid test for Comscore -- and it's failing.

The funny thing to me is that ANYONE ever believes ComScore any more. Not only have they been demonstrably wrong on query counts, search share, and click growth before, but the people who run Google, Yahoo and other publishers have said as much.

Eric Schmidt gave comScore the equivalent of the Obama finger in yesterday's earnings announcement.

Paid Clicks - Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 20% over the first quarter of 2007 and approximately 4% over the fourth quarter of 2007.

Here's Anand from datawocky describing comScore's methods.

ComScore sets a lot of store on their "panel-based" approach, which collects data from a panel of users, similar to Nielsen's method of collecting data on TV viewing using data from a few households that have their set-top boxes installed. ComScore has been in this business longer than anyone else, and has arguably the best methodology (i.e., algorithm) in town to analyze the data.

I don't think they have the best model, simply because it's been wrong many times before. Here are a few of the ones I've documented in my blog - not a comprehensive list of all of their mistakes, since I gave up whining about this in 2007...

• 11/2005 - How many searches does Google really get?
• 4/2006 - Google VP Peter Norvig Clues Us In
• 4/2006 - Yahoo earnings call (Sue Decker upbraids comScore subtly).
• 8/2006 - ComScore Traffic Numbers - Wrong Again
• 10/2006 - MySpace Demographics

You can find other bloggers who discuss comScore's data in 2007. I believe that comScore has never been very good at analyzing the traffic or click patterns of top 10 web properties like Google, Yahoo and MySpace.

comScore did release a press release two days before the earnings, which seems to provide some cover contra Kedrosky's off-the-cuff "blame comScore":

The data from Comscore, which was not released publicly but provided by Wall Street brokerages, was seen as welcome news for Google after a difficult month in which many financial analysts lowered their expectations for the search company's first quarter.

Comscore last month prompted concern among investors and analysts when it reported weakness in the number of consumers clicking on the Internet giant's search ads in February.

The explanation that the data "was provided by Wall Street brokerages" doesn't make much sense as written - probably comScore secretly provided a CYA set of data TO Wall St... who knows?

Just remember this the next time comScore reports on some key metric.

Labels: comscore, google, yahoo

¶ 4/18/2008 0 comments links to this post

Google prospers while many were predicting doom.

Gross revenue exactly in line with consensus--$5.2 billion, up 42%. Net revenue $3.7 billion, slightly ahead of consensus. Non-GAAP EPS of $4.84 blew away consensus of $4.52.

I was playing golf last week with a friend who used to be CEO at a big software company, but he's not a search geek. He asked what I thought of Google.

I said Google has at least 10 more good years. They are a powerhouse similar to CSCO and MSFT of the 1990s. Financially, what people underestimate is Google's level of control of their own business. Simply put, Google has an algorithmic way to produce money. This means that when they need to, they can control monetization and produce good results.

A simple example of this is the number of search result pages (SERPS) on which google chooses not to place ads. Google optimizes total site review better than MSFT or YHOO which tend to optimize page revenue. If Google needs to be more profitable, it has a fair bit of leeway to do it.

In addition Google still has macro trends in it's favor:

• Search is the most valuable thing on the internet.
• Ad spends are still migrating online.
• Google's competitors suck.

One thing people underestimate is the increasing importance of search. It's value is not declining, it's usage is not going down. Search is becoming more important to the average internet user than any other function - including email.

Similarly, as everyone well knows, ad budgets of large companies are slowly moving online in proportion to the amount of time people spend on line. Those ad budgets will be playing catch up for the next 5 years, and Google benefits.

Finally, Google's competition is incompetent. Microsoft and Yahoo are so far behind in search that Google's lead is still 2 or 3 years, and growing. It's not just quality of a SERP for a given query, but brand, traffic growth, international penetration, etc.

People will talk about unsustainable growth, declining click rates, the company becoming too big, etc. Certainly those are all reasonable objections, but they are not enough to stop Google from becoming ever more dominant for the next few years.

Google surprised Henry Blodgett and much of the punditry by not falling apart in a weakening economy. I'm not that surprised given the tremendous advantages Google has.

And I think it will keep out-performing for the next 5+ years.

Labels: google, q1 2008

¶ 4/17/2008 0 comments links to this post

Lots of startups fail, and this one never got product / market fit, despite a huge potential market.

The argument up to now has been simply that there are roughly 3 billion phones out there, and that when these phones get on the Internet, their vast numbers will outweigh PCs and tilt the market towards mobile as the primary web device. The problem is that these billions of users *haven't* gotten on the Internet, and they won't until the experience is better and access to the web is barrier-free - and that means better devices and "full browsers"

Something to think about whenever you hear that the mobile market is so huge - it's the next big thing. Maybe true, but Russell thinks that day is a ways off...

Let me say that again clearly, the mobile traffic just isn't there. It's not there now, and it won't be.

What's going to drive that traffic eventually? Better devices and full-browsers. M-Metrics recently spelled it out very clearly - in the US 85% of iPhone owners browsed the web vs. 58% of smartphone users, and only 13% of the overall mobile market. Those numbers *may* be higher in other parts of the world, but it's pretty clear where the trend line is now. (What a difference a year makes.) It would be easy to say that the iPhone "disrupted" the mobile web market, but in fact I think all it did is point out that there never was one to begin with.

Apparently the mobile market is still mostly a vertical app space (i.e. you should concentrate on a small slice like iPhones only, or perhaps SMS subscriptions in India...)

BTW, This reminds me - I can't wait for the iPhone 2.0 in June...

Labels: mobile

¶ 4/17/2008 0 comments links to this post

Robert Wagner 2002

Robert Wagner 2008

Yes, I know he's old as dirt (born in 1930), but MAN! This guy was married to Natalie Wood in 1957 (and then again later on...)

He's been OLD forever - and yet he'd always looked the same. How did THIS happen?

Labels: randomness

¶ 4/17/2008 0 comments links to this post

The internet enables the arbitrageur. More and more people are going to make their living doing arbitrage.

Example: a guy who became proficient at acquiring Hermes handbags - specifically Birkin bags, which are scarce and expensive. They start at $10,000 and can be found on ebay as I write this for up to $60,000.

He managed to buy over 130 bags a year, even though there is supposedly a 2-yr waiting list. His book details the various methods he used. Then he'd sell them (mostly on Ebay) for profit.

I posted once that over 1.3M people make their living full-time from Ebay. And those are the people that deal in actual goods. There's probably another 1M internet arbitrageurs who deal solely with virtual goods or transactions.

Eventually a significant percentage of many people's income is going to come from arbitrage.

Labels: arbitrage

¶ 4/15/2008 0 comments links to this post

I've been planning to mess with Google App pretty soon.

This dude ported the Google App Engine SDK to Amazon EC2.

No question that Amazon EC2 is the thing you'd actually use to do anything real, but while Google's price is free (for now), it might be fun to mess with.

Update: Re-reading this post, I realize it'd be much more productive to spend time experimenting with Amazon EC2 more, and really develop something valuable on it. It can do everything Google App Engine can do, and a lot more. It's an open garden for production apps, while Google's is much more closed toy playground. I probably shouldn't get distracted by Google's.

Labels: amazon, google

¶ 4/14/2008 0 comments links to this post

How does he do it? He uses automated content generation on computers - he has a Windows program and databases, and Bayesian techniques to actually generate Word documents. His favorite topics are long-tail subjects like "the outlook for bathmat sales in India." The video below demonstrates his system at work:

He's also patented techniques to generate games (such as crossword puzzles in any one of 600 languages), quizzes and videos. An example automated game in the video: "A 3-D shooter, featuring a 'clever tomato' that can teach Spanish speakers English". I kid you not. It took him about 5 minutes to generate that game.

As far as I can tell, Parker is not using his technology to create rank-able spam affiliate sites. Most of my friends might say: "What? Why hasn't he created a spam blog empire as well? He'd make millions!" But maybe he's smart - he's staying under the Google spam radar :)

He does have a dictionary web site with automatically generated "word of the day" 3D animations (again featuring a 'clever' talking tomato). The domain names shows that Parker is not completely up on the latest in domaining or domain trademark law: http://websters-online-dictionary.org.

But he does have affiliate links and an interesting approach to a site map on that site...

Labels: bayesian, content generation, nyt

¶ 4/14/2008 0 comments links to this post

The protesters trying to track down the Olympic torch in San Francisco used iPhones to get updates as the police re-configured the route of the torch.

Photo-blogged here.

Sometime around two o’clock I noticed something very odd happening on the outskirts of the protest. A few people — almost all of whom were visibly holding iPhones or similar electronic devices — began sprinting northward along the Embarcadero. I caught up with one man as he paused to scrutinize his iPhone, and asked him what was going on. He said that an underground text-message system had been set up by tech-savvy radical protesters, and if you knew how to access it, you could get minute-by-minute updates about the exact current location of the torch.

Also interesting in this chronicle the photographic litany of various type of people who are protesting China for one reason or another.

¶ 4/11/2008 0 comments links to this post

Ten works of art in Florence that will blow you away. Most of this art is in Florence due to the legacy of the Medici family, and is located in the Uffizi museum.

The height of Florence's power was the 1400s, as the Renaissance was breaking out. Prior to this, almost all Italian art was related to the church. Therefore, the bulk of art in the Uffizi is religious, and the museum is laid out chronologically so you go through about 7 rooms full of saints, martyrs and Madonnas with child.

This context sets up the mind blowing explosion of humanism that is the Botticelli room.

Botticelli

Boticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1486, Galleria Uffizi, Florence

Birth of Venus. The model for Venus was Simonetta Vespuci, and Sandro Botticelli was probably in love with her. She was mistress of Lorenzo Medici, however.

Boticelli's "Primavera" in the Uffizi in Florence

It's fairly insane how under-appreciated Botticelli is, given the colossal power of the paintings in this one room. Remember that Birth of Venus and Spring are both huge canvases. Room 10, Uffizi is all I'm saying. It only costs about 7 Euros to go to this museum, but it's a good idea to call ahead to get a reservation: Phone +39 055 238 8683.

Spring, by Botticelli

Botticelli, Madonna of the Pomegranate

Probably the only Madonna giving baby Jesus a Pomegranate you're likely to see in a while. (The pomegranate signifies passion).

Botticelli, Madonna of the Magnificat

A more classical mother & child.

A Michelangelo

Doni Tondo - a wedding gift by Michelangelo. The frame alone (not shown, but also by Michelangelo) is worth the trip to Florence.

Like Botticelli, Michelangelo's painting blows you away - it was probably the 16th century equivalent of the introduction of color TV. It's stunning and the image on the right, like all the images you see here, is a pale, pale imitation.

Now we continue in the Uffizi.

There are several paintings of Saint Sebastian's martyrdom, which you'll come to easily recognize by the arrows piercing his torso. Then all of a sudden...

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538 (Uffizi)

Venus of Urbino, Titian

Hard to believe that Titian's Venus would not be considered NSFW back in 1540. Mark Twain famously remarked on this painting:

It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed --no, it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe that attitude there would be a fine howl --but there the Venus lies for anybody to gloat over that wants to --and there she has a right to lie, for she is a work of art, and art has its privileges. I saw a young girl stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gazing long and absorbedly at her, I saw aged infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic interest.

Raphael - a technical masterpiece

This painting has such amazingly rich texture, you can feel the silk of his clothing.

Just outside the Uffizi there's an amazing set of sculptures.

Giambologna, The Rape of the Sabine, 1582

Rape of the Sabine

Iconically Famous David

Finally, you've got to go to the Gallery Academia to see basically one sculpture. Michelangelo, David, Galleria Academie, Florence

Michelangelo's David

In fact, that's true for all of the works, you have to see them in person. Thank the Medicis when you go.

And that's not the end of it, Florence has at least 10 more of the top 100 pieces of art you need to see before you die. Rome has another 20 or so. You might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. It's just insane.

Finally, this post is dedicated to my high school art history teachers, especially Mrs. Gullickson.

Labels: art, florence, italy

¶ 3/21/2008 2 comments links to this post

When kids design a keyboard for a laptop, the important stuff gets it's own key.

And really, what keyboard shouldn't have it's own Google button?

¶ 3/12/2008 0 comments links to this post

It's a set of basic tips (make sure you have a recent version of Acrobat, add meta-data, divide large files, etc.), but one important one is:

Step #2. Identify the text

You cannot manipulate the text in an image like text in a word processor. To do that in Acrobat, you need to open your image-based PDF and run “optical character recognition.” Go to the “document” menu. It will scan your document and translate the image-text into text that can be edited so search engines can read it.

Acrobat may not have been able to recognize all of your PDF’s text after running OCR, however, so some portions may be marked “suspect.” To find your PDF’s suspects and check their accuracy, click:

Document > OCR Text Recognition > Find all OCR Suspects

This will enclose all suspect words in boxes and allow you to check whether the translation is correct or whether it needs to be modified.

Now go out there and spam the world with those optimized PDFs!

¶ 3/11/2008 0 comments links to this post

Wow. Jeremy Chatfield is one of the few search engine marketers (SEM) bloggers who still publishes substantive research on Google Adwords, and today he rips Google for using search history and personalization in determining which ads to show.

Google’s success was built on delivering search results that matched user expectation. Once again, we see Google acting to enhance revenue, without any concern for advertisers. This time, however, they have screwed the pooch. Users see less relevant results, too. This is not a good idea, as it will decrease the value of the search results page *for users*, and that will inevitably weaken interest in using Google.

Pretty strong words - I mean if it came from Aaron Wall, well, we all know how he loves to hate on Google, but coming from Jeremy, it's pretty sobering. Jeremy also provides a detailed example of the decrease in ad relevance based on recent searches.

And perhaps its one of the hidden factors in Google's recent CTR drops (on the search side - the content side is easily explainable).

I think that the examples above make it clear why keyword search performance has dipped recently, reducing average CTR, reducing conversion rates and making the behaviour closer to that for content match. This is not the precision marketing tool that I was using last year. This is a weaker, more expensive and less precise tool that brings in a wider range of less interested users.

Overall, it's good to have Jeremy still posting real info. Most other SEMs have given up sharing any real info as the industry has become more efficient.

Labels: google

¶ 3/11/2008 0 comments links to this post

Levi at Wordze is giving away a list of over 100,000 keywords that are popular Google searches. It's an excel file with each keyword and it's rank.

Click here: for Google Keywords list and you'll be asked for your email. Then you'll be mailed the list.

The mail will also have a subscription activation link for wordze, which you don't have to click or complete. See my review of Wordze here - it's a valuable service for building keyword lists.

Labels: keywords, wordze

¶ 2/28/2008 0 comments links to this post

This renews my faith in American education. Plus it's hilarious.

http://www.photobasement.com/41-hilarious-science-fair-experiments/

I'm serious, there are some great experiments in there... ("Crystal Meth: Friend or Foe?" is not one of them however.)

Labels: randomness

¶ 2/20/2008 0 comments links to this post

There's a lot of press out there predicting that the incipient Microsoft takeover of Yahoo is doomed to fail. It's the dominant meme.

However, one set of potential users is rooting for it: People who buy search ads.

Andrew Goodman estimates at the London SES conference, attendees are for the merger at a 7-to-1 ratio.

When you look at it, it makes sense, and I've highlighted the key reason before:

Google market share in search is something like 60-65%, and in Europe, it's higher.

Yahoo's share is currently around 25%, and Microsoft is about 10%.

Put together Microsoft and Yahoo, and you have a decent #2 at 35% share.

Simply put, PPC buyers want to go to fewer places, and want a more viable alternative to Google.

Microsoft could throw away most of Yahoo, except Mail and the front page, and have hopes to turn this acquisition into something useful - simply because search is where the money is! Sure it's expensive just to compete with Google in search, but when you are Microsoft, you need to protect your cash cows from incursion by Google.

I think Ballmer's best option and natural tendency is to go after Google's cash cow. Yahoo's really the only way to do that.

I'm still pretty sure Microsoft's current management isn't the team to do it, but at least you can understand why it makes sense from a PPC buyer point of view.

Labels: microhoo, microsoft, yahoo

¶ 2/20/2008 1 comments links to this post

If you don't know, Helmut Newton is a world famous photographer, who mostly takes sexual pictures of beautiful women. Anyways, here's how he describes his childhood:

I was sickly and fainted a lot and I masturbated like a world champion! My mother was always fearful of my health so I was driven to school by a uniformed chauffeur to avoid germs. I was not allowed to touch a railing or to handle money. I was spoiled, unbearable, and an awful coward.

He's from a time when people lived a bit more...

When you were 18 you fled Nazi Germany on a ship to Singapore. Yet your recollection of that time in history is “I screwed through the Mediterranean. I stuck with married women around 30 years of age.”

You must understand that for the Jews that ship was an island paradise because finally no-one could hurt us. Every evening there was dancing, drinking, f***ing. But I always found 17 year old girls less exciting than older women who were glamorous, sophisticated, and had sex appeal!

When you arrived in Singapore you had five dollars to your name, which you immediately spent in a brothel.

My sound financial sense told me there was no difference between having five dollars and being completely broke.

Note that he's been immensely successful in life:

Your about to be published autobiography stops in 1982. What have the readers missed?

Nothing! People who reach their goals are very uninteresting. What could I have written about the last 20 years? I met a lot of awfully boring Hollywood bimbos. I earned a lot of money. I fly only first class.

You don’t make it sound like much fun.

It would have been fun to say I f***ed her and I f***ed her, but my wife June and I have an agreement not to talk about such subjects.

Upshot: Don't worry too much about how much your kids masturbate.

Labels: randomness

¶ 2/16/2008 0 comments links to this post

This post is the first in an irregular series.

Seminal site of the day: here.

Feel free to suggest other historically important classic internet sites in the comments. Thank you.

¶ 2/16/2008 2 comments links to this post

Henry Blodget has been en fuego with his coverage of the Microsoft / Yahoo deal. Today he adds this little nugget:

Because of the overlap of Yahoo and Microsoft shareholders, many of Yahoo's largest shareholders also own even larger stakes in Microsoft. It is in the economic interest of these shareholders to have Microsoft keep its bid exactly where it is. Their interpretation of what is "best for Yahoo shareholders," therefore, may be different than that of shareholders who don't also own huge stakes in Microsoft.

You aren't reading that kind of stuff anywhere else.

Labels: microsoft, yahoo

¶ 2/11/2008 0 comments links to this post

Even though Yahoo's board may try to reject the Microsoft takeover, there is no resisting the borg. Microsoft will buy Yahoo.

If you haven't tried Microsoft adCenter, they have a great promotion for US customers: they give $50 in free clicks when you sign up for a Microsoft adCenter Account.

I've griped about usability in the past, but for many of my campaigns, AdCenter has the highest conversion rates, more than Google AdWords or Yahoo Panama. The problem is low volume.

In all likelihood, Microsoft will buy Yahoo, and AdCenter will eventually have 35%+ search market share.

So get ahead of the game, and get started learning adCenter today.

Labels: adcenter, coupon, microsoft, yahoo

¶ 2/09/2008 1 comments links to this post

I just woke up from a dream where I met with Steve Ballmer. I told him how to make PPC search advertising much more profitable once the Yahoo deal closes.

In my dream I kept my sentences short and to the point. I pounded the table a few times. I speak Ballmer-ese, at least in my dream.

Here's what I said:

Me: Steve. You can make your $53B acquisition of Yahoo work!
SB: It's $44.6B, actually.
Me: It'll end up at 53 when all is said and done.
SB: OK.
Me: Here's what you do.
Me: 1. Focus on search monetization. That's where the profit is. That's where you can attack Google.
SB. I'm listening.
Me: 2. Throw away the Yahoo search marketing interface
SB: Good.
Me: 3. Build a fat client interface for advertisers.
SB: I like that... on top of .Net!
Me: No! - it can't be on top of .Net!
SB: Why not?
Me: It has to run on Macs, too.
SB: Crap.
Me: OK - focus, here's the important part.
Me: It must look and feel like Google's AdWords editor.
SB: OK, we know how to copy look and feel.
Me: Right. And it must export data into Yahoo Panama and AdCenter.
SB: Why?
Me: That way people can instantly buy on both from one interface.
SB: What about the web UI?
Me: Well, once you have the fat client it won't matter much, but you should just copy (and I mean exactly copy) Google's.
SB: I kinda like this.

It went on from there. I told Steve that Google is pissing off advertisers left and right with all of their quality score BS. I told him that Microsoft could write the AdWords Editor equivalent right now, and people would love it.

I also gave Steve the names of projects he should cancel at Yahoo - he really liked that. Integrating display and search is a waste of time. Just sell, sell, sell. He ate that up.

But then I went too far - I told him that he's ruining MSFT with his army of non-technical bureaucrat VPs, and he just got up and left (taking his chair with him). I don't think he's gonna follow any of my advice now.

Oh well. I, for one, welcome our new Google masters.

Labels: ballmer, microsoft, yahoo

¶ 2/04/2008 1 comments links to this post

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Labels: matthew arnold, microsoft, yahoo

¶ 2/01/2008 1 comments links to this post

Kedrosky votes for London Heathrow (LHR), but I'm here to tell you that Frankfurt (FRA) is the worst airport in the world.

Here's why Frankfurt is 2X the crappiness of Heathrow.

• It's ugly
• There's no place to sit
• The workers are German, not known for hospitality
• You miss a connection, good luck Charlie.
• You are in Frankfurt, Germany. Not London England.

The one good thing about Frankfurt - the beer and pretzels in the Lufthansa first class lounge.

Heathrow has one special charm to offset its many problems: imagine you have arrived on a red-eye from the west coast. You're getting in at 6am. You get off the plane and onto a bus. Normally I hate buses after the plane - i.e. Dulles. The bus drives thru the bowels of the airport (on the wrong side of the road). You are barely awake, but the sensation of driving thru a life-size LEGO airport, with all the little workers in colorful jumpers, driving LEGO like vehicles around, is something that amuses me every time....

I know, I'm weird, but there you are.

Labels: randomness

¶ 1/30/2008 2 comments links to this post

Andrew Goodman notes the bearishness of the press on Google's Q4 outlook. The Investor's Business Daily article he casts doubt on is typically crappy reporting on the search engine world.

In the article, they cite Nielsen numbers and claim that the number of searches that google gets is declining, month over month for the last quarter. Here's what they write:

Some evidence suggests a search slowdown. The average number of daily Google searches in the U.S. fell from 4.4 million in October to 4.2 million in November to 4 million last month, says Nielsen.

Holy Dr. Evil, Batman! How order of magnitudinally challenged can one be?

Now the actual Nielsen release covering search isn't too hard to read, but apparently the reporter at IBD isn't good at maths.

Google gets at least 4 BILLION US searches per day you idiots! See the (000) in the table column header? Not 4 million.

Thank goodness those professional business journalists have editors to catch these minor over sights...

Seriously if you want cogent analysis on search engine share, Danny Sullivan is one of the few games in town. Be sure to read the caveats.

Labels: google

¶ 1/28/2008 0 comments links to this post

The way that Vistaprint saves money is rather ingenious. They mail you the labels as sheets, and they send regular envelopes. See the picture. I ordered 480 labels, and got six envelopes. I was expecting a little roll, but I think their printing technology is cheaper based on sheets.

The labels I got were pretty plain, but Vista print offers lots of different designs. Unless you really like the roll form factor, give Vistaprint a try for the next batch of address labels you need.

Labels: vistaprint

¶ 1/18/2008 5 comments links to this post

Skrenta dubs their screed: "The sound of disruption".

Basically they mis-understand the purpose of the thing. One thing Map / Reduce is great at is processing log files. Databases aren't so hot when you have 100M things a day or more to look at.

As I wrote earlier, Google is making efforts to get college kids to learn to think in map / reduce ways. Now they are offering free access to scientific datasets in mapreduce clusters to certain universities.

The upshot is that the web requires parallel processing. No one has really extracted a lot of knowledge out of the terabytes of web usage data that flow by every day.

But the data is out there, and paradigms like map / reduce are how it's gonna be dissected. So if you want to work in the consumer web, with billions of users doing stuff every day, leaving data tracks, you should spend some time learning map / reduce.

Not to get too geeky, but to collect these in a single place, here are some key papers to read if you want to understand the google architecture:

• Map Reduce [pdf]
• Bigtable
• Google File System
• Chubby [pdf]
• Hadoop

And a bit of bonus inspiration - the story of how an New York Times blogger converted 70 years of archives (over 11 million articles) to PDF in under a day using Hadoop on Amazon EC2.

Labels: google, hadoop

¶ 1/18/2008 3 comments links to this post

A good Fred Vogelstein Wired piece on the making of the iPhone describing how the iPhone really broke open the carriers closed world.

Application developers are poised to gain more opportunities as the wireless carriers begin to show signs of abandoning their walled-garden approach to snaring consumers. T-Mobile and Sprint have signed on as partners with Google's Android, an operating system that makes it easy for independent developers to create mobile apps. Verizon, one of the most intransigent carriers, declared in November that it would open up its network for use with any compatible handset. AT&T made a similar announcement days later. Eventually this will result in a completely new wireless experience, in which applications work on any device and over any network.

The first player that brings people into the broken down walls of the garden usually has a nice advantage.

Labels: apple, iphone, technology

¶ 1/16/2008 0 comments links to this post

People may scoff at the relatively puny 20" and 17" sizes, but I also regularly go into a different office and use a Dell 30" with my laptop.

Dual 30" monitors would seem like a great solution, but my problem is that they don't have any curve to them. They are actually too big!

With a group of smaller monitors, you can angle them so they form a curved array, and that makes viewing more comfortable for me. As I swivel in my chair, I'm facing one of my screens pretty much square-on.

If I was to start over, I'd probably go for three 24" monitors, turned sideways.

But today I see that Alienware is promising to ship a curved 42" monitor. Something I've been waiting for. I think curved monitors are the way of the future for desktop screens.

Now I can wait until those curved LED or LCD monitors come out, and come down in price to about $1400. Lest you forget, Alienware is actually owned by Dell these days.

¶ 1/10/2008 2 comments links to this post

http://www.pancakepuff.com/

It's INSANELY ABSURD. It would be impossible to parody.

It just gets better and better as it goes. I pretty much spit my drink out when I saw the cream injection.

Labels: randomness

¶ 1/08/2008 0 comments links to this post

Write a short perl function to find the unique elements of an array.

And here are some possible answers:

• sub uniq { return keys %{{ map{$_=>1} @_}}; }
• sub uniq { my %seen; return grep { !$seen{$_}++ } @_; }
• sub uniq { my %uniq; @uniq{@_} = (); return keys %uniq; }

A one-line comment explaining what each one does is left as an exercise to the reader.

Labels: perl

¶ 12/22/2007 0 comments links to this post

Google VP of Engineering Udi Manber's pre-announcement details just what the hell a "knol" is. They apparently wanted to copy a wiki, but brand it with their own term.

Right now, it's invite-only, and apparently you have to be the wife of a Google VP to get an invite, but it seems like it will be yet another spammers delight (a la Google base, two years ago).

Manber does seem rather selective about who should write a knol:

Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only.

Can't wait to see those first knols on Ringtones, Viagra, and Online Poker. I wonder if Google is actually too late to the party with this? To me Google Base was late to the classifieds party, and hasn't really taken off. Will the real experts really have incentive to do a knol, rather than contribute to wikipedia.

I guess if Google starts to demote those Wikipedia entries, they might.

Labels: google

¶ 12/14/2007 0 comments links to this post

I'd be grateful if you considered supporting my wife in her fundraising for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

She's running a marathon in March and her goal is to raise $4800.

Go here to donate - any amount helps!

it's 100% tax deductible - it all goes to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Charity.

Thank you and Happy Holidays.

¶ 11/28/2007 0 comments links to this post

I'm fed up with fat, bloated, buggy Firefox and it's crappy automatic updates. Version 2.0.0.9 routinely crashed on me, and it's been a slow browser for me ever since version 1.5.x

So I'm using Opera 9 now. It's working a hell of a lot better than Firefox.

Labels: Firefox, Opera

¶ 11/15/2007 5 comments links to this post

I like both Paul Kedrosky and Henry Blodgett - they're both good bloggers. Paul isn't particularly fond of Henry - so rumors on Valleywag that they might work together on a reborn version of Yahoo Finance Vision amuse me.

Other rumored contributors include VC blogger and TV pundit Paul Kedrosky and manflesh connoisseur Henry Blodget, the disgraced Wall Street analyst and founder of Silicon Alley Insider. Blodget, at least, has experience talking up stocks.

And the title of this post - it's an homage to a classic Kedrosky archetype (which is of course a reference to Ghost Busters).

Labels: kedrosky

¶ 11/08/2007 0 comments links to this post

Today's the day that Facebook unveils their new ad platform. During the past 2 weeks the hype has been huge, with everyone jumping on the idea that Facebook has revolutionary data for doing targeted advertising. Google and Yahoo are paying attention.

Om Malik sums up "Why Google is a Afraid of Facebook":

Facebook, on the other hand, knows a lot more about us [than Google]— who our friends are, what we like, what groups we belong to, and even when we like to use its service. So what can Facebook do with all that information?

Google actually knows all of that, and at least 10X more data about users than Facebook, but hasn't seen the need to really mine the data yet, since search intent has proven to be worth about 100X more than that kind of data so far.

Adsense cookies, myspace profile extracts, toolbar data, google accounts and search engine history are more valuable and far more voluminous than Facebook's data. Google essentially already has the data that the new generation of ISP sniffers hope to get.

Facebook is not very different from MySpace, which Google has been attempting to monetize for the past 12 months. Google has all the data from MySpace profiles that Facebook is talking about exploiting. It hasn't really helped so far.

One of Facebook's beliefs is that they can ask users what they want to see, what products they like, etc. And that this will somehow improve ad perfomance. But the history of consumer polling & research has taught marketers that simply asking customers what they want doesn't necessarily improve ad performance.

Maybe Facebook will find an incremental way to increase eCPM on social networking page views from 15cents to 20cents, but I don't think the pundits and media are correct when they believe the hype about Facebook's new advertising technology.

Labels: advertising, facebook, google

¶ 11/06/2007 1 comments links to this post

This from the only friend I've ever had to block on Facebook - cause he constantly sent out his own promotional crap to his friend list. He knows advertising won't work on Facebook, but he sure believes in spamming his friend list.

Social networking is second only to chat rooms as the worst place to advertise. The content there from your friends and your family is more compelling than any advertisement. Google has the greatest advertising in media history -- search advertising. When you type a word into the box, we know what you're looking for. When you're on Facebook, we know you're looking to meet a girl or talk to your friends. It's a terrible platform for advertising. The holy grail of e-commerce forever has been that people are going to buy something online because their friends did, or that everybody here is into skiing so we're going to sell a bunch of skiing stuff. It hasn't happened. Plus, e-commerce is a low-margin business. It's nowhere near search inventory.

Jason Calacanis at the Graphing Social conference

He's right about Google and search intent. But his spam ju-jitsu shows he also intuitively knows how marketing will eventually work on social networks.

"The content there from your friends and your family is more compelling than any advertisement."

Logically, when the content from your family and friends is the advertising, social network monetization will start to work.

Labels: facebook

¶ 10/12/2007 1 comments links to this post

I was psyched when ESPN got Monday Night Football. I get ESPN in HD, and I thought it would be great.

Of course it sucks.

Basically they've sold out the game to commercialism - primarily cross-promoting ABC shows. The whole thing reeks of an 'event experience.' It's like they chose the producer of the Super Bowl halftime show to produce the whole damn game.

Here are the most annoying aspects:

1. Tony Kornheiser and Mike Tirico can't stop blathering about ANYTHING BUT FOOTBALL.
2. Suzy Kolber and Michele Tafoya. (see above)
3. The player intros where some teammate gives us the nicknames of all the players.
4. Do we need a soundtrack from Kid Rock and J.Lo or Pink or someone for each show.
5. The booth visit from some famous person, usually someone appearing on Dancing with the Stars this season.
6. Chris Berman's halftime act is just tiresome.
7. The lack of replays.
8. Pre-taped interviews / video segments that overrun actual plays.

Overall, I still look forward to the game, but the MNF production emphasizes everything BUT the game.

Labels: football, randomness

¶ 10/08/2007 1 comments links to this post

The only downside of the NFL season is the repetitive ads you must endure if you care to watch the games live. They are proof that brand advertising depends on frequency.

The most depressing manifestation of this fact is that my two boys now sing the "Viva Viagra" theme several times each week. Elvis is rolling over in his grave, though I'm sure he'd be a big Viagra promoter were he still alive.

Speaking of ads during NFL games, GEICO is putting some crazy stuff out there. Surreal, actually.

And here's a reebok ad I find amusing - even though I've seen it 50+ times on the NFL network.

Labels: nfl