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Tim Geithner Separated at Birth

2009-03-23T14:59:00.000-07:00

Here's someone - actor Tony Goldwyn - who's not an investment banker or Bank CEO who's actually gonna make money from the Geithner plan.


Tim Geithner	Tony Goldwyn

He's gonna make a killing when the inevitable movies about Geithner are made.

But Goldwyn is already richer than Timmy. He's been a successful actor / director and he's the grandson of Hollywood studio pioneer Sam Goldwyn. You might remember him as the bad guy in Ghost, or - a bit more recently (and relevantly), a smarmy presidential aide in "The Pelican Brief"

Hacking the Internet with your Playstation Cluster

2009-01-01T23:30:00.001-08:00

Security researchers have created a rogue certificate that would allow them (if they were malicious) to perform man in the middle attacks on any website. I.e. They could easily pretend to be your bank and steal your login info, amongst other things.

If this seems shocking to you, it's regular stuff for security on the web. Don't read security alert news if you like to blithely use the internet, is my advice.

Anyways, the key to this vulnerability is that some Certificate providers were still using MD5 as a cryptographic tool when creating certificates. MD5 is vulnerable and these guys have now proved it. Cool.

But the fun thing is - they use a cluster of 200 Playstation 3 gaming consoles to do their computation. That's just so cool. Maybe we can all harness Xbox Live next week to break SHA-1?

Can you picture criminals now deciding to turn your network attached Playstations and Xboxes into zombies so they can launch cryptographic attacks from the cloud?

Question. How much did your proof of concept research cost?
Answer. It took a few months to design and implement our method, based on a lot of knowledge and skills that we have developed over the last two years. We spent about USD 700 on purchasing test certificates from a CA. The computations needed for our work were done on a cluster of about 200 PlayStation 3 game consoles in the cryptanalytic lab at EPFL.
Question. Why were game consoles used? What other hardware is suitable?
Answer. Game consoles use hardware specialized for the computational needs of the detailed 3D graphics in games. This hardware is also very suited for the basic arithmetic used in cryptographic algorithms and greatly outperforms general purpose computers on brute-force computations. We have found that one PlayStation 3 game console is equivalent to about 40 modern single core processors. The most computationally intensive part of our method required about 3 days of work with over 200 game consoles, which is equivalent to 32 years of computing on a typical desktop computer. Common graphic cards have been used by some for MD5 cryptanalysis as well.

Christmas Gift Idea

2008-12-16T22:42:00.000-08:00

Need a gift idea for a 30-something techie who has everything?

How about this: Mio Knight Rider GPS?

This GPS device talks like the car on the original 1982 edition of the show "Knight Rider." It will even address you as "Michael," or you can switch the device to another name.

I think that "address you as Michael" in KITT's voice part pretty much overcomes any rational objections anyone could have...

Who Knew?

2008-12-06T00:17:00.000-08:00

Apparently Free Credit Reports aren't REALLY free?!?

The people at SmartMoney clue us in.

Who could have known that something delivering zero-cost digital goods driven by tons of ad spending could be a rip-off?!

"Despite the consumer complaints and the ongoing investigation in Florida, the company and its clever marketing campaign march forward."

Thank god for clever marketing campaigns.

Google Server Secrets Revealed

2008-11-30T18:55:00.000-08:00

An unexpected side benefit of industries need to be seen as "green": Google has put up a bunch of pages detailing their datacenter infrastructure.

A long time ago on this blog I speculated about various things in Google's infrastructure:

Now, in the name of Green-ness, Google is telling you a lot about how their infrastructure works, how much power their data centers consume, how they build servers.

I think Microsoft and Yahoo and Amazon EC2 have all contributed to a lessening of the advantage that Google has in infrastructure, but something tells me that if Google is putting this info out now, they have other advances that they are not telling us about.

Week 2: Best NFL Games on Sunday Ticket

2008-09-11T21:19:00.001-07:00

My first week with DirecTV Sunday Ticket was great. I had an overwhelming urge to order plates of hot-wings, nachos and creamy dips. It takes discipline to watch 4 games at one time, I tell ya.

I'm gonna try and pace myself a little better in week 2.

Here are my picks for the best NFL games to set your DVR to record this weekend - all times PST:

Game	Time (PST)	Channel
Bills vs Jaguars	10am	705-1
Patriots vs Jets	1pm	714-1
Steelers v Browns	5:15pm	NBCHD
Cowboys v Eagles	Mon 6pm	ESPNHD

Cowboys vs. Eagles is a great rivalry, too bad ESPN MNF has it - I can't stand those guys. And Patriots vs. Brett's Jets should be good too. Those two teams really don't like each other either.

NFL Games of Week 1 on DirecTV Sunday Ticket

2008-09-05T11:44:00.000-07:00

This year, I bit the bullet and got DirecTV Sunday Ticket, which allows you to watch ANY NFL game you choose on Sunday. They show them all.

I also got an HD DVR with the subscription, so I can record up to 2 games at a time. This is nice, because I don't actually get to watch any full game... too busy most Sundays, but this will allow me to catch the best parts.

Here's the problem: I have to plan in advance and set my DVR for the games that might be good.

So as part of my preparation, I'm planning to blog every Friday, and make a note of the 4 best games on the DirectTV Sunday Ticket schedule. Now only if my HD DVR had an API...

Anyways, here's what I want to record this Sunday:

Game	Time (PST)	Channel
Jets v Dolphins	10am	705-1
Texans v Steelers	10am	707-1
Cowboys v Browns	1pm	713-1
Bears v Colts	5:15pm	NBCHD
Vikings v Packers	Mon 4pm	73

BTW, this post is an example of one of the main benefits of blogging - writing things down so I don't forget them later...

Behavioral Targeting Ad Networks Hit By Politics

2008-09-04T22:23:00.000-07:00

Reportedly, NebuAd's and Phorm's ISP customers are slowing trials of their ad systems based on deep packet inspection. This is where devices are installed at the ISP which can track everything a user does when connected to the internet. The resulting data is analyzed and used to serve more targeted ads.

Except now that Congress and the privacy watchdogs are starting to awaken, apparently the ISPs are scuttling trials or at least slowing them down.

I think that it's likely that these companies will be the proverbial pioneers with arrows in their backs (a bit like DoubleClick, circa 1999). But this technology will eventually be adopted when people aren't so vigilant.

In fact, what company is the big winner if the ISPs can't monetize their packets so easily?

HINT: It starts with a "G" and ends with "ogle".

They have the data that the ISPs have for the most part, and they also have the technology to exploit it, and the marketplace.

So far, for the most part, they've decided they don't need to use that data, and NebuAds and Phorm's political travails mean that Google can defer exploiting ALL of their data for as long as they want to. Or they can deploy so slowly that people don't notice. Either way, they win.

Recession 2008

2008-08-31T23:54:00.000-07:00

Here's what the "recession" looks like on a lovely Sunday afternoon at the Apple store in Palo Alto.

Insane Bandwidth

2008-08-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

I had to move from my old DSL enabled office, and I rented a new place which had just installed wiring for Comcast cable.

The cable guy comes to install the internet, and tells me I'm one of 3 guys using the system in the building, and that comcast just put it in, and it's really nice - "really just an extension of the plant - it's like your sitting on the head end". (That's cable-guy talk for INSANE BANDWIDTH).

Now I just watch HD videos all day and run speed tests. My best so far is 20Mbits. Usaully it's 18 or 19Mbits/sec. Crazy.

Now I also understand why sites like sports.yahoo.com are littered with images, and videos - it's because the web teams at Yahoo (and ESPN and CNN) all have crazy fast connetions to the internet, and they think everyone else does to. Now that I have insane bandwidth, those pages are actually usuable.

The internet is a whole new ballgame, a really fast whole new ballgame.

Here's a tip, in case you have a slow connection and are jealous: just browse the web with lynx all day, and pages will load really fast for you too.

Chatfield Reveals the Key Secret of AdWords

2008-07-28T21:36:00.000-07:00

Jeremy C. has a post about ad auctions. At the end he says something that you may have heard before, but never as clearly or succinctly put:

Let me give you a disturbing vision… Google is actually operating a CPM bidding system. Yup. Your bid position is a consequence of the value you give to Google, per thousand impressions - but quantised to a penny per click.

It's pretty important to grok this if you want to understand AdWords...

Congresswoman Speier says: Lower Speed Limit

2008-07-11T13:41:00.000-07:00

Jackie Speier (D-CA) introduces a bill to lower the speed limit from 65 to 60, claiming it will save fuel.

She's a new congresswoman, yet she upholds the traditional inability of elected officials to do math.

Press Release here details her bogus rationale.

She cites figures from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, www.fueleconomy.gov, that say gas mileage decreases rapidly after 60 mph. “If you drive a Ford Taurus or Toyota Camry, which averages 25 miles per gallon on the highway, the difference between driving 60 mph and 70 mph results in a yearly savings of over $250. For pickup truck drivers, that increases to $470 and if you own a full-size SUV like a Toyota Landcruiser, we’re talking about a savings in excess of $750.” These figures are based on national averages of 12,000 total miles per year, of which 45% are highway miles.

Jackie says that if we go from averaging 70mph (which is above the current speed limit in most places?) to averaging 60mph, we'd save over $250 / year in our Camry.

Let's go to Google calculator:

12,000 mi / yr * 45% hwy mi = 5400mi/yr on the highway.

At 25mpg at our supposed 70mph max, that's 216 gallons.

With regular gas at $4/gallon, it's $864/year.

Now if we save over $250, we'd spend $613/yr in gas. And that means we would have improved our gas usage by just over 29%! AMAZING!

Of course later in the press release we see this is impossible:

The EPA’s numbers show that fuel consumption rises dramatically at speeds faster than sixty miles per hour. The website claims: “While each vehicle reaches its optimal fuel economy at a different speed, gas mileage usually decreases rapidly at speeds over 60 mph. You can assume that each 5 mph you drive over 60 mph is like paying an additional 30 cents per gallon for gas.”
An April 2008 article in the San Francisco Chronicle cited Patricia Monahan of the Union of Concerned Scientists: “For every mile per hour over 60 mph, she said, fuel economy drops by an average of around 1 percent.”

Those two quotes both don't jibe with anything close to 29% savings. The top quote from the EPA site equates to about a 15% savings going from 70mph to 60mph.

Applying that bottom rule linearly would give us a maximum of 10% total savings (and actually, the current law is 65mph, so it *might* mean 5%.)

Of course, no one would actually drive 60mph, and fuel consumption in real world conditions wouldn't really be affected by more than 2-3% But hey, who am I to question Congressional ability to screw up simple math?

Prediction: This will actually happen.

2008-07-07T22:57:00.000-07:00

Funniest South Park bit since the World of Warcraft parodies.

Apparently the southpark guys now have their own video distribution, as well.

Internet Nutballs Explained by Jay Leno

2008-06-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

The internet naturally gives rise to nutballs - people who are so obsessed with some random hobby. This article sums up the personalities behind internet nutball-ism, even though it's about cars. And it's by Jay Leno.

Car Guys and Auto Fans:

You expect people to collect Duesenberg and Ferrari parts, because there's a lot of money in them. But the guys who fascinate me are the ones who collect parts for Cushman Scooters, Nash Metropolitans and Ford Model Ts. No matter what you're into, there's someone out there who's into it so much more than you are it's not even close.

Reminds of a great Homer Simpson quote which I've used twice in relationship to internet nutballs.

Yahoo and Kafka: Separated at Birth?

2008-06-19T09:40:00.000-07:00

Another insane Kafka-esque email from the Yahoo Search Marketing API team. I get about two of these a week (another example), and they remind me of Orwell or Kafka in their impenetrable bureacrat-ese.

Dear Valued Client,
We have encountered unforeseen circumstances from the maintenance on end-point https://ews11.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/ Currently, we do not have an estimated time of resolution for the residual system slowness and delay in books closed time for Keyword/Ad reports. However, our technical teams are working around the clock to resolve this as soon as possible and we will continue to update you on the status of this delay constantly. We greatly apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

[emphasis mine - on the stuff that's just pure obfuscation].

Yes, Yahoo search marketing (i.e. Panama), does have an API. But with Yahoo giving up in search, it's probably not worth your time to use it, and have to parse these maintenance emails.

At this point, what Yahoo search marketing needs most is a copy of Strunk & White.

How Many Pooches Can Yahoo Screw?

2008-06-12T22:32:00.000-07:00

Ugh. Sometimes the end does come with a bang and whimper at the same time.

Yahoo is giving up in search.

The stock lost 10% today, and will continue to descend to it's proper level of about $15 / sh. Until someone picks up the pieces for about half of what Yang was holding out for.

It's not just the shareholders - the search customers and Yahoo's regular users are all losers here. Not to mention the employees. It's not that fun watching a CFIT (controlled flight into terrain), which is what Yahoo! has been on ever since they hired Terry Semel.

Meanwhile, Google is up, and feeling good about the monopoly it has!

As Ash writes:

Microsoft offered $44.6B to acquire all of Yahoo! in early February.
Yahoo! Chief Yahoo spent 4 months trying to make that go away… today he settled for $800M in top line incremental revenue.
That means in some 50+ years (44.6B/$800M), investors will be indifferent. So net-net, “Jer”gets what he wants today, investors can go pound sand and come back in 2024.
Way to go, Jer.

I dumped my YHOO at $24.68 after MSFT pulled out. And I rolled it into GOOG. So I guess I can be thankful for that.

This is sad on so many levels. Back in 1995, I was the first employee of an ad serving company whose first customer was Yahoo!. It's sad to see Yahoo capitulate and march towards nothingness.

Oh, and did I mention that Jeremy Zawodny is leaving too. Need any more proof?

Maybe Yang and Decker can treat the remaining team to a premiere of "The Happening". Cause that seems depressingly similar to the nightmare Yahoo has committed against itself.

Google Doodle Branding

2008-06-06T10:43:00.001-07:00

Google puts up different logos for offbeat memorials and birthdays. Some smart battery marketing guy is taking advantage today, and a friend of mine pointed me to it in this chat:

Bite1: hey - props out to the guy who ran the adwords campaign on today's google doodle
John: ?
Bite1: hit google.com and click on he doodle
John: yeah
that's pretty expensive though
Bite1: he's the only guy there....
battery guy is what I get.
John: yeah but he's getting like 30K clicks today
some CRAZY number
probably not at 5 cents
John: That is one strange google doodle
ugly
and
WTF?
is so important about Velazquez?
Bite1: yeah - they're really stretching for stuff.
John: What's next the Jim Gray memorial doodle?
Bite1: heh
John: don't laugh
it could happen
Bite1: no doubt
John: a lot easier than say Memorial Day
or anything that GOD FORBID had the US flag on it.
Bite1: no kidding.
John: Che Guevara coming soon.
Bite1: man....
John: Thurman Munson doodle day?

Sad Proof that Vista is a Failure

2008-06-05T12:52:00.000-07:00

Windows Vista was officially released (after over 11months of delay) on Jan 30, 2007.

It was critically panned (by me for example). Now that I've seen it and tried it, the main result has been for me to switch to Mac and Linux machines for my daily use.

You Can Still Get an XP Laptop from Dell

But here's what's so sad about this. Dell, one of Microsoft's biggest distribution partners is still promoting the fact that you can STILL GET XP. Yes, even though Dell "recommends Windows Vista® Business", you have until June 18 to buy a Dell laptop with XP on it.

This is the back page from a Dell catalog I just received. Man that's some cheap laptop!

And then there's this: Microsoft's Ballmer Touts Vista-To-XP Downgrade Program

Google's Downfall: Building a New Campus

2008-06-05T09:34:00.000-07:00

Uh-oh. The surest sign that the decline of a tech-power is nigh:

Google is going to build a new HQ.

Or at least they are going to do a massive expansion at NASA in Mountain View, on land next to their current HQ.

The land near Google HQ in Mt. View, CA.

This is an old Silicon Valley saw - when companies build giant new facilities, they tend to go downhill soon thereafter. It's a classic "market-top" signal. The litany of examples includes: Apple, Cisco, Intel, 3Com, BEA, Sun, SGI and many others.

And it makes sense - the companies that do this are generally getting too big and prospering in their mid-life. They plan a massive expansion and something happens - maybe the economy slows down, or maybe they lose focus. In any case, building the new HQ is usually done at the peak, and often portends bad times ahead.

Now I'm still bullish on Google, but planning for expansion like this worries more a lot more than anything Microsoft would do.

Yahoo's Main Problem: It's a Bureaucracy

2008-06-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

After the saga of Yahoo is over, many people will find reasons as to why Yahoo failed. I know the real reason: it's a boring, impersonal, faceless bureaucracy. Although Yang and Filo try to keep it culturally cool (free soda and coffee for all employees!), they have utterly failed.

The Yahoo brand has no identifiable or consistent "voice".

The amazing thing to me is that someone hasn't renamed Yahoo to:

Yahoo! Internet Service End-Points!

Here's all the proof you'll ever need - an email from the people that run Panama (aka "Yahoo! Search Marketing".)

YSM-Tier2Support to me
 
 
Dear Valued Client,
 
We will be performing a routine system maintenance during the following time frames on Friday, June 6, 2008:
 
6:00AM PST to 11:00AM PST
7:00PM PST to Saturday June 7 2:00AM PST
 
The following end-points will be unavailable during maintenance:
 
https://ews11.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/
https://ews12.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/
https://ews13.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/ 
https://ews41.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/
 
Should you have any questions regarding this matter, 
 please contact your account manager directly or technical services at ews-help@yahoo-inc.com.
 
Thank you for choosing Yahoo! Search Marketing!
 
Sincerely,
 
Technical Services
Yahoo! Search Marketing

Note how there's not a real person's name in the whole email - including mine. FYI, my actual name is not "Valued Client".

Look at the 4 deep subdomains that Yahoo forces on it's services. https://ews12.marketing.ews.yahooapis.com/. There's two ews's in there! No wonder I can never remember that URL to login to my account. Compare to say: http://adwords.google.com, or even adwords.com.

And WTF is a "end-point"?!?

Even the email addresses they use are robotic. Apparently, it's not a real Yahoo email unless there is a dash in it somewhere: ews-help@yahoo-inc.com

But luckily, they recover from this unbranded, un-personal, techno blather form-letter email with the friendly closing:

Thank you for choosing Yahoo! Search Marketing!

Yay!

Windows is Not Cloudy

2008-05-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

Amazon EC2 is a hyped technology that is actually exceeding it's expectations. It's cloud computing, and when Amazon added recent features to enable datacenter level fail-over and cluster tools, it became the best way to scale any large internet service.

It now has over 60,000 customers, some using thousands of instances of virtual hardware. Combined, they use more bandwidth than all of Amazon.com. Companies like RightScale are examples of a blossoming 3rd party support and service eco-system growing around EC2.

Google is attempting to do something similar with Google App Engine, and Sun and IBM have cloud models as well.

But Amazon EC2 doesn't do Windows. You can't run the Windows stack on it (at least in any real way). You can run Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and almost any other Unix you can name. But no Windows. Windows is gonna fall further behind as the internet infrastructure shifts to cloud models.

Windows isn't Cloudy.

Google: "Facebook You Ignorant Slut"

2008-05-18T23:41:00.001-07:00

Corporate blog cat fight: Google Code spells out in excessive detail why Facebook is lying about their justification for blocking Google Friend Connect on Facebook.

Background:

Google introduces Friend Connect, which basically is a container for managing authentication.
Facebook announces they are blocking Friend Connect from being used on Facebook apps, ostensibly due to privacy concerns. Zuckerberg and Facebook claim to be worried that Google could pass your Facebook data around.
Google Code Blog details in terms any 3rd grader could understand just what Friend Connect is doing with Facebook data.
Zuckerberg says maybe we should talk to Google and work something out.

In short Google shows that it's not doing anything to justify Facebook's holier-than-thou attitude. (Ever see how Facebook collects you Gmail contacts if you let it, or perhaps you recall Facebook Beacon on initial launch?).

Upshot: Google is revealing Facebook's hypocrisy, and doing it with the panache of Dan Akroyd finishing a faux-debate with Jane Curtain: "Jane, you ignorant slut."

Now that's proper use of a corporate blog in my book!

Philipp on Microsoft Live

2008-05-16T12:27:00.001-07:00

Ouch:

"Of the three major search engines, only Microsoft’s Live.com – if you want to call it a major search engine – returns much worse results..."

-- Philipp Lenssen, Google Blogoscoped

Why Facebook Apps Mostly Suck

2008-05-15T18:02:00.000-07:00

Why are all the apps on Facebook trivial, crappy or spammy?

Facebook originally launched the app platform with a lot of talk about how to create value out of the social graph.

Why hasn't that happened, with all the energy being spent on developing Facebook apps? Ben Rattray has a good answer - mainly because the structural incentives are all on creating virality.

The reason there are few and little use of utility-based applications is not because users don't want to use them or because app developers don't want to develop them, or even because Facebook doesn't want to encourage them (which they clearly do). It's because the means of distribution inside Facebook are structurally biased against them.
...
[I]t is very difficult to achieve a viral coefficient of over 1 through word of mouth. Ironically, this difficulty is compounded inside Facebook because the proliferation of viral action apps inundates users with invitations and makes them less and less likely to accept anything – including invitations to utility-based applications. So the barrier for going viral increases even further

Ben also categorizes the kinds of apps that could be useful, and which ones make sense on a social platform. It's very useful to look at - if you are thinking of how the web will be shaped by increasing adoption of "social" techniques into websites.

Apps that are inherently social and which let users better coordinate/connect with friends
- Help people organize local sporting event leagues
- Share travel schedules with friends (ala Dopplr)
- Organize carpooling
- Discuss and coordinate events / gatherings with friends (ala Skobee)
- Allow for the creation of affinity groups that require custom features not available in the traditional "groups" feature set
Apps that aren't inherently social, but which are given enhanced value with the social graph
- Share news (e.g. a personalized Digg)
- Share restaurant / service provider reviews (e.g. a personalized Yelp – so I don't just get undifferentiated restaurant reviews, but only those from people I trust)
- Share bookmarks (e.g. delicious with all my friends)
- Job seeking / networking
- Collaboration on work / documents
Apps that are neither inherently social nor benefit from the social graph, and would have no reason to be in Facebook
- purchasing a plane ticket
- managing your finances

Of course there are more types of apps, and the list of examples is thin, but it's useful to think about if you plan to adapt to the ever-increasing "socialness" of the web.

There are Millions of Great Ideas In the Air

2008-05-12T23:01:00.001-07:00

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.”

Now THIS is a Rant

2008-05-08T23:25:00.000-07:00

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...

The Money Quote on Microsoft

2008-05-08T17:15:00.000-07:00

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...

Andreessen Loves Leverage

2008-05-06T15:05:00.000-07:00

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?

Idiots have control.
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.

Search Amazon Prime - Revamped

2008-05-05T13:32:00.000-07:00

Update: The new URL is http://searchaprime.com. Amazon asked me to not use "amazon" in the URL.

I rewrote searchamazonprime.com to make it better. It's designed to find products on Amazon.com that are eligible for Amazon Prime free shipping. To do this, it finds only products sold by Amazon.

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.

This is Battelle on Twitter

2008-05-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

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...

Forever Stamps - Save Yourself Some Hassle

2008-05-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

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.

Is Mobile the Real Threat to Google?

2008-04-28T23:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Andrew Goodman on The New Secret to AdWords

2008-04-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Andrew Goodman of PageZero Media sends out a summary / soft-promo piece in email which contains two paragraphs that sum up the changes in the PPC market (i.e. Google Adwords) over the last 3 years:

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.

Barry Ritzholtz on ComScore

2008-04-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

I missed this, but it's good cynicism about ComScore and Nielsen. Media companies are basically trying to pump up their numbers. They are incented to do so because those numbers influence ad rates.

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

ComScore Wrong Again - As Usual

2008-04-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Google Q1 2008 Results - Why the Bears were wrong

2008-04-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Mobile Market - Not Web Ready Yet

2008-04-17T10:22:00.000-07:00

Russell Beattie, once a somewhat famous web2.0 type blogger is shutting down his mobile startup after 1 year. He's in debt and looking for a regular job.

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...

What the Hell Happened to Robert Wagner?

2008-04-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

Just 6 years ago, he was playing #2 in an Austin Powers movie. Now he's pushing reverse mortgages for seniors on an informercial.

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?

A Life of Arbitrage

2008-04-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Google App Engine on Amazon EC2

2008-04-14T16:05:00.000-07:00

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.

The King of Automated Content Generation

2008-04-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports on Philip Parker, who is a business professor at Insead, and is the most-published author on Amazon, with over 200,000 titles.

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...

Using an iPhone to Coordinate a Protest

2008-04-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Top 10 Paintings / Art You Must See in Florence

2008-03-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

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

Michelangelo, 1503, Doni Tondo (Uffizi)

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

Raphael, Pope Leo X

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

This large marble statue by Giambologna is sitting outdoors in the Loggia next to the Palazzo Vecchio. It blows me away that the original has been sitting there since 1583.

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

You may think you know this sculpture - maybe you have the fridge magnet, but you really haven't seen anything until you turn the corner of the gallery academie and see it in real life.

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.

The Google Button

2008-03-12T23:26:00.000-07:00

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?

Optimizing PDF files for Search Engines

2008-03-11T12:36:00.000-07:00

Marketing Sherpa tells you how to make sure your PDFs can be indexed by Google.

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!

AdWords Use of Search History

2008-03-11T09:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Top Keywords / Search Terms on Google

2008-02-28T08:23:00.000-08:00

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.

Great Ideas for Your Next Science Project

2008-02-20T20:15:00.000-08:00

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.)

How Yahoo / Microsoft Actually Makes Sense

2008-02-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

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.

How to Raise a Child like Helmut Newton

2008-02-16T22:19:00.000-08:00

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.

Great Websites in Internet History, Part I

2008-02-16T21:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Microsoft / Yahoo - The Best Coverage

2008-02-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

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.

Microsoft AdCenter Coupon - $50 Free Clicks

2008-02-09T22:49:00.000-08:00

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.

What Microsoft Should Do Right Now with Yahoo!

2008-02-04T08:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Microsoft & Yahoo - My First Reaction

2008-02-01T09:42:00.000-08:00

Microsoft's buying Yahoo. A ton of early reactions. Here's what comes to my mind:


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.

Frankfurt: Worst Airport in the World

2008-01-30T16:42:00.000-08:00

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.

Presentation Tips from Steve Jobs

2008-01-28T23:40:00.000-08:00

A good article from BusinessWeek on how to present like Steve Jobs.

Reporters Have No Idea How Many Searches Google Gets

2008-01-28T22:01:00.000-08:00

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.

Vistaprint Address Labels

2008-01-18T23:19:00.000-08:00

I ordered some address labels from Vistaprint.com. They give them to you basically for free, and you just pay shipping.

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.

Why You Should Learn Map Reduce & BigTable

2008-01-18T23:05:00.000-08:00

Rich Skrenta points to a web article by database experts Michael Stonebraker and David Dewitt, as they exude a fusillade of hate on Google's Map / Reduce computing model.

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:

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.

How the iPhone Changed Wireless

2008-01-16T14:58:00.000-08:00

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.

Multiple Monitors For Your Desk - Which Size is Best?

2008-01-10T09:02:00.000-08:00

For the past 3 years, I've had 3 or 4 monitors on my desk. Two 20" Dells, a 17" Dell and a laptop.

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.

Funniest Infomercial of All Time

2008-01-08T12:10:00.000-08:00

I was watching late nite TV and saw this ad. (See the website, in the upper left corner.)

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.

Perl Quiz

2007-12-22T11:55:00.000-08:00

I've been interviewing people, some of whom have Perl skills. Here's a question I like to ask:

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.

Google Knol, aka googlepedia or about.google.com

2007-12-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

Google is going to release a wikipedia / about.com like user-generated content tool.

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.

The Best Gift for Christmas

2007-11-28T20:18:00.000-08:00

Instead of the usual pair of socks or V-neck sweater that I receive for Christmas from the wonderful readers of my blog, this year, I have a special request.

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.

Switching to Opera

2007-11-15T23:02:00.000-08:00

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.

Dogs & Cats: Blodgett + Kedrosky on Yahoo?

2007-11-08T18:22:00.000-08:00

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).

The Big Lie About Facebook's Ad Data

2007-11-06T08:37:00.000-08:00

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.

The Irony of Calacanis

2007-10-12T22:15:00.000-07:00

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.

ESPN has Ruined Monday Night Football

2007-10-08T17:38:00.000-07:00

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:

Tony Kornheiser and Mike Tirico can't stop blathering about ANYTHING BUT FOOTBALL.
Suzy Kolber and Michele Tafoya. (see above)
The player intros where some teammate gives us the nicknames of all the players.
Do we need a soundtrack from Kid Rock and J.Lo or Pink or someone for each show.
The booth visit from some famous person, usually someone appearing on Dancing with the Stars this season.
Chris Berman's halftime act is just tiresome.
The lack of replays.
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.

Proof that Ad Frequency Works

2007-09-21T22:31:00.000-07:00

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.

How to Get a Job at Google

2007-09-13T23:12:00.000-07:00

So you want to work for Google?

Well, Google wants you to work for them, if you are a halfway smart computer science grad. To see this, do a search on any relevant computer science topic, and look at the ads.

Google is going out of its way to train you for free on their tools before you even get there. Check out this blog post at Google Code and the free tools posted here and at Google Code for Educators.

You can now learn how to use MapReduce and BigTable (actually Hadoop - the open source version of Google's internal parallel computing infrastructure) on your own laptop using VMware, while read the courseware that Google interns used this summer.

If you can master Hadoop, and you can solve some classic programming puzzles that Googlers like to ask in interviews, you too can work at the Googleplex.

If you are not good at interviews, perhaps you can start your own company using Hadoop on rented hosted machines, and just wait for Google to buy you...

In any case, going the step beyond by learning Hadoop won't hurt your chances, and it might prove useful in the future.

NFL 2007: The Breakout Meme is "Aaron Schatz"

2007-09-13T12:17:00.000-07:00

Remember when the annoying media phrase: "He's the difference maker?" became the thing that every broadcaster, beat writer and NFL fan repeated? I think Difference Maker was the NFL breakout meme of the 2005 season.

Last year (2006), I think the meme was: Fantasy League. As in "Fantasy Leagues have now surpassed the actual league in importance." For 2004, I'd say the breakout meme was the phrase "It is what it is..."

Well, I already know what the meme for 2007 is. I've even contributed to it.

It's "Aaron Schatz". The man behind footballoutsiders.com. He also wrote the best football book for NFL fans.

All of a sudden, Aaron Schatz is everywhere! Here he is in a Bill Simmons column. You'll be hearing about him on pre-game shows within the next couple of weeks - I guarantee!

So "Aaron Schatz" is the meme for all NFL coverage this year.

Here's a handy glossary of key Aaron Schatz terms you will start to see:

DVOA - defensive value over average. For offense, a good number is something above 12-15%. For defense, a good number is below -10%.
PAR - points above replacement value. The whole statistical basis of Aaron's system is to compare how well a player or team did against what an average player would do. So if Tony Romo has a 16.4 PAR, he's worth 16 points more than an average replacement player.
FO - is footballoutsiders.com, Aaron's website.

ComScore Reports Yahoo's Traffic Growth is Negative

2007-09-11T22:32:00.000-07:00

Henry Blodget refers to an analysis of ComScores Year-over-Year traffic data and reports that Yahoo is really sucking wind. Basically, they are losing users, while Google is growing by 20%+

Actually, the traffic growth has been slow to non-existent for Yahoo for a while. Of course, for the past 2 years, the incredible lameness of the search monetization has served to distract people from the fundamental overall lack of user growth at Yahoo.

Morrison:
Yahoo attracted total worldwide users of 476 million in July, down 1% annually. Pageviews declined 7% in the period, and minutes spent were down 1%. Annual usage at Yahoo Mail declined by 9%, at Yahoo Games by 47%, at Yahoo News by 6%, and Yahoo Sports by 11%. On the positive side, Yahoo Messenger grew by 36%...Yahoo Answers by an astounding 332%, and Flickr by 198%. While [this is] promising...these areas are typically monetized at a fraction of the rate of Yahoo!'s premium content areas.

Short of saying "Comscore is wrong," it's impossible to put a positive spin on this. In fact, it's an absolute disaster. Perhaps the reason Jerry Yang doesn't plan to announce a significant restructuring when he finishes his 100-day review is because he's realized there's no reason to bother.

OUCH.

ComScore is usually wrong about market share numbers, but they are probably correct on overall traffic counts relative to their own data from last year.

As for Google, things are growing nicely.

From July06 to July 07:

worldwide users +20%
US users +18% (now 22% of 552 million global total)
time spent on sites +113%
page views +56%
Google Maps: blows past Yahoo to 682 million pageviews/mo +98% (vs. Yahoo's 397 million, +32%)

Anecdotally, I find myself moving more and more to the Google world. I'm using spreadsheets and docs, I'm using gmail for enterpise, and I still use this crappy blogspot thing.

I have started to use Panama a lot more however... But even there, I create the campaigns in Google's AdWords editor first, and then convert them over.

Top 10 Slowest Tech Blogs

2007-09-11T21:56:00.000-07:00

Although I use Google Reader sporadically, for some of my favorite blogs, I sometimes can't break the habit of going to the actual blog site.

But more and more, these blogs are filling up with images, inline YouTube players, a ton of ads, crap like sphere and digg iframes, etc.

The fact is, over time, they accumulate a bunch of crap that slows them down.

How slow are they? I installed Firebug, and YSlow to check load times:

Blog	Load time
avc.blogs.com	96.6s
paul.kedrosky.com	35.16s
blog.pmarca.com	29.9s
techcrunch.com	24.43s
blog.domaintools.com	21.0s
www.internetoutsider.com	17.8s
reader.google.com	15.4s
traffick.com	13.7s
gotads.blogspot.com	11.7s
techmeme.com	3.9s

Leading the list is Fred Wilson's blog famously full o' crap (not referring to his writing, of course). Note that the VCs tend to have slow blogs. That tends to happen when you stick a bunch of ads on your blog. And what, do the VCs really need the adsense money?

Actually, the technorati tend to be early adopters of blog craplets, and then never take them off (or in Wilson's case, replace them with even heavier / slower crap).

Perhaps the subtle takeaway is the inverse correlation between speed and number of readers. At least in the tech world, the slower you are, the more readers you'll have.

Cringely Explains Jobs

2007-09-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

If you want to understand Steve Jobs (pay attention Paul Kedrosky), you must read Bob Cringely's opus to Jobs ego this week.

Cringely opens with a great anecdote. Cringely was going to interview Bill Gates and Steve Jobs about their relationship for a Vanity Fair article. Jobs says "OK - as long as you interview Bill first." So after a month of scheduling, Cringely gets an hour with Gates, just on Jobs. Now it's time to talk to Steve.

The promised interview with Jobs never happened. His excuse was that the antitrust case against Microsoft had reached a point where it would have been imprudent for Jobs to comment on Gates. Come back when the case is over (or Hell freezes, whichever comes first).
While I suppose there may have been some legal reason not to talk, I really doubt that was the issue. Rather, Steve Jobs just liked snubbing the world’s richest man. It was classic Jobs, and I should have seen it coming. We both should have. So the Vanity Fair story never happened.

Cringely then turns to the iPhone pricing incident, his thesis being that Jobs knew exactly what he was doing: "So Steve does things like this because he can. It reaffirms his iron grip over both Apple and Apple’s customers. It’s a lot about ego and a little about business, though with Steve Jobs they are hard to differentiate."

And then, in the brillant summary bit that made me laugh out loud:

So Steve slapped his customers around a bit and what happened? Apple got free publicity worth tens of millions and the iPhone, which was already the top-selling smartphone in the world, will now sell two million units by the end of the year, up from an estimated one million. And Steve, having deliberately alienated his best customers, now gets a chance to woo them back. He has finally placed millions of people in the role of every key Apple employee — being alternately seduced and tormented.

In the end, Cringely's psycho-analysis of Jobs says that everything he does is a reaction to being fired by Apple back in 1985.

In the 22 years since that humiliation, Jobs has devoted himself to proving: 1) that he can deliver the numbers (and does he — Apple is the best-managed computer company on Earth), and; 2) that he is a better marketer than Sculley, the supposed marketing genius. The product vision part is easy. Not only does Jobs push these products out without apparent effort, he couldn’t make himself not do it if he tried. It’s an obsession. So he puts the real sweat into managing and marketing and occasionally beating up on anyone who gets too close.
And that 1999 quote from Bill Gates [from the interview, Gates wondering why Jobs would go back to Apple] about Jobs: “He has to know that he can never win."

The ironic part, and perhaps with a bit of foreshadowing is that Gates is now the one lost in the wilderness while his company is run into the ground by pretenders without a technology vision.

Save YouTube Videos Locally

2007-09-06T14:56:00.000-07:00

If you ever include a YouTube video in your blog, or on a website, it's a really good idea to SAVE IT LOCALLY! Keep a copy in your own stash, that is.

Here's a basic article that tells you how to do it manually. With some searching, you can find more tools to help automate the process.

Why do you need to save videos locally?

Because a good percentage of videos get taken down eventually. It's intolerably high if you like your blog content to be useful and relevant for more than a few weeks.

This is especially true if you link to videos that were captured off TV.

If anybody knows if there's a Wordpress plugin to automatically copy videos locally somehow, I'd love to hear about it.

The Best Book for NFL Fans

2007-09-06T09:48:00.000-07:00

OK, The NFL Football season is starting. If you really care about football, you MUST buy this book: Pro Football Prospectus 2007: The Essential Guide to the 2007 Pro Football Season

Here's a sample of the kind of stat-laden goodness you can expect from the author: How To Look Like a Genius When You're Picking NFL Sleepers

So if you watch more than 1 NFL game this year, or if you want to win an office pool, or you speculate at all on your friend's fantasy league - Don't Walk. Run. And get the book.

Online Taking Ad Spend from TV, Cable, Print & Radio

2007-08-21T21:49:00.000-07:00

Henry Blodget and Silicon Alley insider have good commentary on how Google / Yahoo / AOL and Microsoft are grabbing ad spend away from the likes of Time Warner, Viacom, CBS, NYT and other TV, Cable, Print and Radio outlets.

The online companies, in other words, picked up 7 percentage points of market share in a single year.
...
Traditional media executives--especially in the newspaper business--often blame their current woes on "the real estate market" or "cyclical weakness." Economic weakness may be exaggerating the downturn, but it's not the real problem. Whatever weakness is hitting the newspapers is also hitting Google.
...
These trends are secular, not cyclical: TV networks, radio networks, and newspaper companies won't suddenly wake up one morning and find themselves back in charge. Individual Internet companies may screw up (see Yahoo/AOL), but if they do, others will rise to take their place (Google).

They have a spreadsheet that spells it out in stark numerical detail.

AdCenter Will Turn On Contextual Ads By Default

2007-08-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

Microsoft AdCenter is launching ContentAds (a contextual / AdSense competitor ) later this month.

As I warned a while back, AdCenter's default is to automatically add content ads distribution to your AdCenter campaigns.

You can avoid this potentially costly situation by opting out.

Caveat emptor

We're excited to announce the release of the Microsoft Content Ads Beta to all U.S. adCenter advertisers on August 29! With this release, you can extend your advertising reach beyond search, and choose how your accounts are upgraded.
Choose how you want to upgrade
On August 29, you don't have to make any changes and your ad groups will automatically expand to hybrid distribution, meaning they will distribute to search and content pages.

Update:

You have to fill out a form so that your account can be "upgraded" without content ads enabled by default. Here's the message you get:

Thank you for completing the Content Ads: Upgrade to Content with only Search Distribution Active form.
Your adCenter ad groups will be upgraded to Content Ads, but Content distribution will be turned off at the time of the upgrade. If you wish to turn on Content Ads at a later time, you are welcome to do so. Remember that all new ad groups created after the upgrade will be set to hybrid (expanded to both our search and content network).

They certainly are going out of their way to make it hard to not be automatically in ContentAds...

Facebook Apps Doing $1,000 / day with AdSense

2007-08-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

Inside Facebook has a good live blog transcription of AppDevCon (a Facebook developer conference hosted by social media) in San Francisco today. There's a lot of meat on how advertisers / publishers will move into the Facebook system.

Random factoid: James Hong of HotOrNot says one of his team's Facebook apps (Pets,Moods,HotOrNot) is doing $1,000 / day with AdSense. He wasn't sure which one it was.

The Secret of Zappos Success

2007-08-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

Marketing Sherpa has a great article on the top 10 reasons why Zappos online shoes is one of the biggest success stories in online marketing.

If you boil the 10 reasons down, it's basically: relentless focus on customers.

I'm going to excerpt a bunch:

Lesson #1. Customer retention

Rather than putting the lion’s share of their marketing budget into advertising, Hsieh and his team have allocated an increasing amount of dollars into customer retention, including three key tactics:
- Free overnight shipping
- Free return shipping
- 24/7 fulfillment operations (including order processing and customer care)
Lesson #2. Beta-test new products

When they first started to create brand awareness, they bought mass ads, including expensive sports stadium signage. But the tactic didn’t create enough conversions to justify either the often inaccurate response forecast or the unspecific ROI analysis once the campaign ended.
Lesson #3. Maintain accurate inventory

Until four years ago, they used drop-shipping quite a bit and suffered from the fact that 80%-90% of the product being displayed on the Web site was currently in stock. The data feeds going from retailer-to-manufacturer-to-fulfillment produced regular glitches in the pipeline.
“That means 10%-20% of our customers were finding out a couple days later that their item was out of stock, and they’d be extremely upset, creating a lot of negative word of mouth,” Hsieh says. “Drop-shipped orders were producing 25% of our revenue, and we walked away from it because we knew it was important to be true to our brand.”
Lesson #4. Service and selection over price

Shortly after joining the company in 2000, Hsieh had his marketing team test discounts and ecoupons for six months. What they discovered was that these tactics attracted too many price-minded, one-time customers rather than brand loyalists.
“In terms of the three major areas -- service, selection and price -- you can really only offer two of them at the same time,” he says. “Our brand [niche] was in service and selection.”
Lesson #5. Centrally located fulfillment
In 2002, Hsieh moved their fulfillment operations to a Shepherdsville, KY, facility, creating more expeditious delivery, as the United Parcel Service’s largest domestic shipping hub was just 20 miles away. And, the new fulfillment spot fell within 600 miles of two-thirds of the nation’s population. The relocation was crucial in allowing them to trot out an ongoing free next-day shipping offer.
Lesson #6. Do it yourself
[They decided to stop using a lot of consultants for advice...]
“You have to avoid falling into the trap of a consultant telling you that, ‘If you spend a large amount of money with us, all of your problems will be solved, and you’ll never have to worry about this again.’ In the end, they are outsiders and do not understand your business as well as you do.”
Lesson #7. CRM: investment or expense?
When balancing the books, Hsieh once ledgered CRM/fulfillment costs in the “expense” column rather than as an “investment” -- where categories like marketing dollars were accounted. Now, he and his team view customer service as an investment.
Lesson #8 Positive word of mouth
While many marketers have increased their focus on seeded viral efforts, such as videos on YouTube and through guerilla blogging, getting the best word of mouth is by having excellent customer service. Hsieh says traditional WOM -- when followed up with service that exceeds expectations -- produces better lifetime value than many trendier marketing mediums.
Lesson #9. Don’t fret the competition
Hsieh says he doesn’t keep a close eye on what other online shoe retailers do. Unlike other retailers who worry about potentially competitive data getting around, he lets his distribution vendors see exactly what is selling at all times.
Lesson #10. Keep core values intact
When the company began to rapidly grow, Hsieh knew that brand identity -- so reliant on company reps at all points of contact -- might evolve into a runaway train. So, they created a list of 10 core values that would help determine whether to hire someone -- for call center reps, order packers, marketing director or CFO.
Here’s the list they’ve followed:
- Deliver “wow” through service
- Embrace and drive change
- Create fun and a little weirdness
- Be adventurous, creative and open-minded
- Pursue growth and learning
- Build open and honest relationships with communication
- Build a positive team and family spirit
- Do more with less
- Be passionate and determined
- Be humble

Zappos has a unified vision - and it permeates their success (they will likely sell $1B worth of shoes in 2008). For example, you can see why they can have a large affiliate program - they pay a lot for that first sale, but the affiliates are doing the hard work of acquiring new customers. Zappos doesn't pay the affiliates much for the return business, because the customers remember the brand and go back directly.

There's more in the full article at Marketing Sherpa.

Lego + Star Wars = Internet Geek Heaven

2007-08-08T23:24:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of Star Wars geeks on the internet. There are a lot of Lego geeks. And of course, there is the overlap: Star Wars Lego geeks. It's as if the two largest rivers in the world (the Amazon & the Nile) met in the same estuary.

So me and my son are watching Revenge of the Sith on DVD. The opening has some very cool star ships with a big red stripe down the middle. When I'm putting him to bed, he's dreaming of ripping his Imperial Star Destroyer lego model apart and building a new model like the ships in the movie.

So I do a quick search, and learn that they are called "Venator-class Star Destroyers". Appending "Lego" on to that search, you find some impressive models.

But I think I'll let my son work on his model without showing him the pix of these expertly built Lego Venator-class Star Destroyers. If I did, he'd probably lose motivation. Reminds me of a great Simpsons quote:

   Bart:  You make me sick, Homer.  You're the one who told me I could do
          anything if I just put my mind to it!
   Homer: Well, now that you're a little bit older, I can tell you that's
          a crock!  No matter how good you are at something, there's always
          about a million people better than you.
   Bart:  Gotcha.  Can't win, don't try.

We wouldn't want that...

Vistaprint Free Business Cards - The Best Templates

2007-07-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

When I build websites, I often get a set of free business cards from VistaPrint. I'll pass these around to people so they'll remember to try my new site.

VistaPrint will send you 250 cards on good quality paper for free. You only have to pay shipping - which is under $6. It's cheaper and easier than printing them yourself.

The problem is that VistaPrint offers 42 fairly mediocre designs for the free cards. I prefer simple cards, often with a white background.

Here are the 6 templates I currently like best. I'm not saying these are great designs, but they do the job just fine, and they're basically free.

Pg. 3
Pg. 1
Pg. 2
Pg. 4
Pg. 3
Pg. 1

If you click on these, it'll take you to vista print. The page number under each card is the page the specific template is on in the VistaPrint "Select Your Design" form. Fill in your info (I often leave fields blank, and just put the URL in the main name location) and get some free cards.

UPDATE: The New York Times covers VistaPrint - it's an impressive business model:

A printing company that has strung together 28 profitable quarters by selling — and giving away — business cards. The free cards, of which VistaPrint has distributed 2.5 billion, carry the company’s marketing message on the back.

The article describes how VistaPrint uses software to batch orders together and reduce costs by 50%. Knowing how well they measure and optimize online conversion, it's not surprising that the business is based around software optimization of a business process.

Check from AOL Security Litigation

2007-07-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

Having owned several stocks during the dot com era, I regularly get notices about security litigation. Sometimes I bother to fill them in. And, even more rarely, do I actually receive a check!

Here's my share of the distribution from a settlement against AOL / Time Warner.

Some stats: I get $180.69 from a theoretical distribution of: $2.39B. About 750,000 claims were filed. I think the laywers got most of the money, and Time Warner paid the SEC about $300M, from whence the checks have been drawn.

The wages of evil baby!

The Craigslist of Radio - KSFH

2007-07-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

You know how a lot of radio stations have a slogan like: "More Music, Less Talk"? What if there was an FM station that was "All Music, No Talk"?

There is, and during the summer, it just plays songs. All the time. One after another. No announcing of titles, no station ids, no PSAs, no emergency broadcast system, and of course, no ads. There's nobody there, so there's NO talk at all.

It's a good station, and if you live in Mt. View, CA or Los Altos, parts of Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Cupertino, you might be able to listen to it: 87.9FM - KSFH. It's run by Saint Francis High School. I think it has a transmitter made of a Pringle's can and an old umbrella, however.

Anyways, as I listen to it, I think how easy it is for well-intentioned socialists like the people at Craigslist to destroy the classifieds business, simply by doing (most) everything for free. Google uses this to their advantage as well.

A radio station has limited reach (like 5 miles in this case), but on the Internet, you can disintermediate world-wide.

Goog Q2 2007: Why They Missed

2007-07-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

A Google Miss. The second in their history (Remember Q4 2005?).

I can't say I'm surprised at the miss, because Google eliminated a lot of advertiser spend this quarter with their ad quality improvements. In short, they kicked a lot of advertisers out of AdWords.

By focusing on the worst of the arbitrage, and made-for-adsense type sites, they took a hit. These were the sites that would basically consist of all ads, and so when a user clicked away from a Google ad, they'd go to another site, full of ads. Not the best experience. By eliminating those types of advertisers from the system, they cost themselves money in the name of "better" ads.

I'm sure they planned it - and I'm guessing they look at it as a kind of "weeding the garden". It's hard work, and it cost them this quarter, but they believe they'll have higher quality results, and happier users in the long run...

Finding Sample Code for Facebook Apps

2007-07-06T15:50:00.000-07:00

So you want to build a facebook app? The easiest thing to do is find someone else's code and modify it for your purposes. Especially since the facebook API documentation isn't really that good yet.

Unfortunately, Facebook Apps aren't automatically open, like say HTML or Javascript pages are. So you can't just look at the code of a working application. That's too bad. It would help a lot.

As it stands, the Facebook docs have a dearth of sample code for the Facebook API.

However, in the process of writing my first Facebook App, I spent a lot of time Googling (try looking for 'facebook.php' and other common include files on google.com/codesearch), reading forums, the facebook developer wiki and blogs.

So here's an omnibus post on where to find example code for Facebook apps, and also a bunch of good links to posts that explain how to write a Facebook app.

Sources For Sample Code For Facebook Apps

Facebook's Simple Tutorials
After you've looked thru Facebook "Hello World", you should download their simple, but instructive, Tutorial application called footprints. It's in PHP, and it comes as part of the client library that you need to use in PHP.
NewsCloud
The biggest app out there which has released it's sample code is NewsCloud. It's open-source, and worth perusing, though it'd be a big job to try and get running.
Running a Cron Job With Your Infinite Session Key
In a application where you need to push data to facebook, for updating fb:ref handles, you may want to run your update code from a cron job. You still need to get a facebook api client, which means you have to login. You use your own infinite session key and user id in your code to do this. Here's a page on the facebook wiki which has some sample code for getting your infinite session key and using it in a cron job.
Here's a blog post on updating profiles with a code example using profile_setFBML.
PledgeBank.com
Sample code in PHP connecting facebook to a social network "pledge" system
People Aggregator
People Aggregator meta social network, with code in PHP
FQL Example from Facebook
Code (PHP) from Facebook, which has a FQL call in it.

Multi-Curl client for improving refresh performance
For those doing push updates with <fb:ref />, here's a re-written Facebook Rest Client class that uses curl_multi to parellize the refreshing of calls from fb:ref
Perl Facebook Sample Code
A Perl / CGI example Facebook app - with an example of how to integrate login to a separate into a Facebook app
WWW::Facebook::API is good for Perl programmers, but also useful to just read through the code and docs and get an idea how they adapted the API for Perl.
Sample code in a Ruby framework that implements Amazon wishlists

Other Tips for Building Facebook Applications

A few bloggers have created posts which do a good job explaining how facebook apps work from a programming point of view. These are useful to read as you get started.

Facebook App Architecture Notes

The Washington Post has a team integrating on F8. Best of all, they have some bloggers writing about Facebooks apps in depth.

Here's a sample of their blogging about the architecture:

Facebook user's data in a generic fashion. The real advantage of this approach is that with just the UID of a Facebook user, I can load related data in a Facebook page or on the user's profile without having to do any processing on my end. For example, this --
        {% for friend in friends %}
               <fb:profile-pic uid="{{ friend }}" />
                   <fb:userlink uid="{{ friend }}">
                      <fb:name uid="{{ friend }}" useyou="false" />
                </fb:userlink>
        {% endfor %}
is an example in Django template syntax using FBML that would produce a list of friends with pictures.

Here are more tips and tricks to understanding the facebook platform from the devurandom guys. Some example code in Python in this post.

Excerpt:

Notice there is a "Callback URL" and a "Canvas Page URL". The callback URL is the base URL on the developer's server (washingtonpost.com in our case); the canvas page URL is the base URL on Facebook's server. When you install our app on Facebook, you are redirected to the canvas page URL, which in turn fetches content from the callback. You can have any number of callback pages extending off the base. If you went to apps.facebook.com/thecompass/foo/, then that page would fetch content from specials.washingtonpost.com/politicompass/foo/.
Now you can't go directly to specials.washingtonpost.com/politicompass/ because without the POST data Facebook submits to the callback URL, the application won't work. If you hit our server directly without coming through Facebook, we redirect to the Facebook URL for our app. In fact, every time Facebook hits our callback URL there is a little setup that has to be done for each request

Commentary from 20bits on Building Facebook Apps

Sample FBML code and description of application architecture.

How to make a good social app so it fits in Facebook

Gotchas when using the platform. Part I. Part II.

Tips from MyMoods developer on Getting Started with a Facebook App

10 Things that would have been nice to know when starting my facebook application

Sample Hint on updating users' profiles:

To do a more periodic update, you can just iterate over all your users, get their uids, and call profile_setFBML() on each. Remember, from above, you don't need to call set_user for each, just use your own session_key.

10 Tips on Getting your Facebook App approved and Growing Users

From inside facebook - 10 tips on promoting your app

Spend time on your icons and screenshots - This is the first interaction your potential users will have with your app, so it had better be impressive, especially if you have competitor apps already out in the wild. There are three pieces to worry about: an application icon (16 x 16 pixels), an application logo (75 x 75 pixels) and a screenshot of any size you choose (which will be resized to the width of your About page). Make sure you have all of these ready to go before taking your app live.

Let me know if you find other examples and sample code, and I'll add it to this post.

The Real Reason Aaron Wall Does $1000 / day with AdSense

2007-07-06T08:10:00.000-07:00

Did you know that Aaron Wall, the successful SEO blogger, makes from $800 - $1000 a day from AdSense? He also rakes in several hundred a day from selling his SEO Book. He's pretty darned successful.

You might think his success is due to one of the following reasons:

The seobook website, where he shares the philosophy that has done so well for him.
His domination of SERPs in niches like college scholarships.
His understanding of link equity and page authority, and creating value
Continual networking and partnering with link-building experts
Hard work - he spends 12-16 hours a day on the internet.

You might think that those were the reasons he's so successful, but you'd be sadly mistaken.

The REAL reason is far more arcane, obscure and mystical: letterology.

It's all due to the sequence of letters in his name. Specifically, the harmonious balance of 'doubles' - two letter repeats. Look carefully at his full name:

aaron matthew wall

See the aa, tt and ll in each of his first, middle and last name? Do you know how rare that "perfect sequence" of double letters is? It occurs in fewer than 1 in 12,480,961 full names. Notice the symmetry around the double t's in 'Matthew' - 7 letters on each side. If you ran an FFT frequency analysis on the letters in his name, you'd see a perfect Kondratieff wave! Can you believe it!?

I'm also having an Israeli letterology expert examine Aaron's domain name portfolio, since there's a certain je ne sais quoi to 'seobook.com'. Something with the o's, I think.

Damn! Can Andreessen Blog or What?

2007-07-05T14:49:00.000-07:00

Marc Andreessen's blog is pure goodness. His post on hiring / firing and HR for startups just rules. As do almost all of his posts. In 1 month, he's already written enough good stuff to make a best-selling book.

I don't understand why his domain name is "pmarca.com" What's the p for?

I recently saw him walking around in Palo Alto. He's bald as a ping-pong ball, but still looks pretty young. I think he still likes to eat at The Creamery.

Usability Tip for Login Forms

2007-07-03T14:24:00.000-07:00

Every day I log into about 10 different accounts to check reports, pay bills, etc.

A good login form should allow the user to do all the data entry on the keyboard. The user should be able to tab 2 times and press return.

Today I counted 4 login forms that break tab order. Azoogle is an example of a broken login form. Banks and credit cards often do odd things as well.

Example:

In the example above I use the "tabindex" property to ensure a reasonable tab order. I also like to see the "Need help" or "Lost Password" links or "Remember Me?" checkbox after the submit button.

I'm not saying I'm the expert on usability, but login forms that don't work this way are annoying. Over the course of the year, they probably cost me about 3 minutes of lost productivity due to unnecessary mousing - or about 1/2 the time it took write this blog post...

The Secret of Facebook's Look & Feel

2007-06-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

Why do Facebook's pages seem so clean, well designed and usable? I think the secret is: NO ROUNDED CORNERS.

$5 Billion for a Domain Name

2007-06-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

What domain name is worth $5B? Apparently, "WSJ.com" is to Rupert Murdoch.

How does he respond to this bleak picture? By musing about investing even more in newspapers. "What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but went global — a great, great newspaper with big, iconic names, outstanding writers, reporters, experts. And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you'd make ... a little bit of money. Then again, the Journal and the Times make very little money now."

He's buying The Wall St. Journal brand, and planning to make it free on the internet.

Separated at Birth? iPhone Guy v. Milton

2007-06-26T23:22:00.000-07:00

First Guy in Line for iPhone

Milton from Office Space

Is the iPhone the new Red Swingline Stapler?

Wenda Harris Millard Leaving Yahoo.

2007-06-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

This is bad for Yahoo. The Yahoo insiders that I know have always said that Wenda Millard (Chief Sales Officer) was absolutely great. Key to their success on the display side - which was their only success, since search was so screwed up.

So it's a bad sign that she's leaving as Decker and Yang take over.

Even more ominous - she's going to work for Martha Stewart Omnimedia.

I mean, does Yahoo really suck that much? I guess so. On the bright side, I'd take it that there will a bit of needed upheaval at Yahoo for the rest of the year...

Yahoo Could Build A Facebook for The Rest of Us

2007-06-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

What's Jerry Yang gonna do to revitalize a slumping Yahoo? Andrew Goodman has a very good list of action items for Yahoo!

The biggest thing I'd suggest is: "Be the Next Facebook".

Yahoo has all the pieces to build a next-gen homepage portal, and they should copy most of Facebook.

Facebook's weaknesses are:

It's legacy user-base (i.e. college kids).
A LOT of people over 25 have never heard of it.

That's it. Those are really the same things. It's not clear how useful Facebook is in organizing your life if you are not mainly into hooking up with hotties. And Facebook is run by a bunch of 24yr-olds who are trying to figure out how to make it more appealing. That's a limitation.

Yahoo already has the platform. They have, what, about 10X more profiles than Facebook. Yahoo has properties like Yahoo! Groups which are incredibly useful for soccer-moms. Yahoo is good at APIs. They have the Flickr braintrust.

Also, Yahoo already shows MUCH BETTER ads than Facebook does. And they do have a great ad salesforce.

Yahoo needs to re-invent My Yahoo, copying the best of Facebook's social features (like friends 'confirming' where they met you), opening the the social graph, integrating useful features like Groups, Flickr, Finance, Answers, Sports, etc.

They need to copy some of the design minimalism that Facebook is good at. They don't need to keep adding slow-loading graphics everywhere - like they've done with sports.yahoo.com - ruining the experience for someone who just wants to check the damn scores.

Anyways, I think Yahoo has the kernel of this idea already. Semel talked about it endlessly.

To do this, MASSIVE FOCUS is needed. That's what Facebook has that Yahoo does not! Either Jerry Yang turns the battleship around fast (like BillG did back in '95), or he'll watch Mark Zuckerberg take over Yahoo's last bastion of hope.

The Book on Facebook

2007-06-20T08:34:00.001-07:00

I admit that I've been caught up in the Facebook hype. Marc Andressen's post on their API has caught a lot of attention, and for anyone building web stuff, a ready audience of 25 million active users is hard to ignore.

So I went to Amazon and bought the only book I could find about Facebook - Inside Facebook. It's written by an engineer who worked there for all of 1 year. He was a bit of an outsider being the only guy over 30 for a long time and not being part of founder Zuckerberg's Harvard mafia.

The book really doesn't have a great deal of info in it, it's short, full of links, and better consumed as a PDF. It's more like a series of blog entries.

About 20% of the book is actually about Facebook, covering the names / titles of the early employees, a bit of the vision, and some anecdotes / factoids. For example, Zuckerberg has two business cards, one with the title: CEO and another that says I'm the CEO... bitch. Zuck also doesn't like coffee much.

If you want to know who the braintrust is at Facebook, you'll at least learn their names: Dustin Moskovitz, DeAngelo, Jeff Rothschild, Matt Cohler, etc.

Overall, the book is underwhelming, but if you are thinking of interviewing at Facebook, or partnering with them, it's definitely worth the $10 bucks and 40 minutes it takes to read.

We won't have Semel to kick around anymore

2007-06-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

Terry Semel is gone, out as CEO of Yahoo. Founder Jerry Yang taking over. I guess my proxy vote really was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Actually, it was probably the fact that Forbes ranked Terry Semel as the 2nd highest paid executive of 2006 (he was #1 in 2005). Not a great thing to be if your company has really under performed during the second coming of the dot-com bubble.

Anyways, good for Yahoo!

(via Paul K.)

How MSN Live Could Increase Share by 4 points

2007-06-12T08:22:00.000-07:00

A simple thing MSN Live search should do immediately to increase their query share:

Change the look and feel to copy Google. Live.com is the only search engine with a unique color scheme (which I once dubbed "Neptune Morose" for its depressing slate blue & green color scheme). It's also the only one using a different font.
This hasn't worked. It's time to just switch back to what everyone "knows" a search engine looks like - Google. Yahoo and Ask also look exactly like Google. Microsoft just looks odd.
By copying Google exactly (including their use of the Golden Ratio in layout), Microsoft can pick up for free all the benefits of thousands of hours of Google usability testing.

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