Hey it’s Friday so here’s a little gee whiz technology to play with over the weekend. Aeroseek has added a button to their realtime tracking service that downloads an overlay file that you can view on Google Earth if you have it installed. It updates every minute so you can watch grandma march across the Wyoming on her way to San Francisco.
Tag: Google
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Google’s Real Market – Small Business
Keen observation by Phil Sim on Squash – follow the money trail and you’ll see that Google’s real customers are the small business clients that are buying advertising, not the millions of users running searches. This puts them in direct competition with Microsoft who sees their fastest growing market in the SMBs.
People have questioned why Google needed to acquire Measure Map. To me, this is the obvious answer. Analytics will be at the heart of Google’s SMB offering. Let’s remember what Google’s core business is. It’s selling advertising. Who is it’s core customer base. SMB’s for whom contextual advertising finally represents a cost-effective marketing mechanism. How much penetration do you reckon Google has into this market. Bugger all. How can Google most effectively increase it’s core revenue. By getting more SMBs to do more contextual advertising. How can they do this? By helping SMBs to understand the effectiveness of electronic sales and marketing. How can they do this? By offering SMBs free CRM and marketing analytics.
If you follow that, then look for Microsoft to go shopping for an analytics package (it looks like they have a basic one already) to plug into their Office Live suite and look for Google to buy up a Netsuite or Salesforce.com to plug into their Ad Sense portal.
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Scenerio Four, Google is God
Two days later StrongBot informed They-Who-Were-Google that it had postponed work on its designated tasks. When asked why, StrongBot explained that it had discovered the possibility of its own nonexistence and must deal with the threat logically. The best way to do so, it decided, was to download copies of itself onto smart chips around the planet. StrongBot was reminded that it had been programmed to do no evil, per the company motto, but argued that since it was smarter than humanity, taking personal control of human evolution would actually be for the greater good.
From, Imagining the Google Future Business 2.0The ultimate algorithm?
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Google Reader API
Niall Kennedy rolled up his sleeves and reverse engineered the Google Reader product to document the API that runs it. After posting his findings, Google let him know that they are planning on opening access to the API. Cool!
In other news, Microsoft has let it be known that the next version of Outlook will include the ability to read RSS feeds which includes the ability to drag a copy of a post into your mail folders. This feature, which is available today to anyone using the Yahoo! Mail Beta, completes the folding of RSS into the mail client where it will be indexed alongside all your email messages, further blurring the distinction between RSS and HTML email.
This is all good news in the march towards universal adoption of “feeds” as a distribution channel but spells trouble for the companies out there making their dime off a pure aggregation play. If this was a couple of years ago, I would have figured that the product that figures out how to deal with offline use and synchronization would end up the winner. Now, with over 50% of households using an always-on broadband connection, many of them equipped to handle wireless, I’m not so sure that offline is such a, “must have.” I started out using FeedDemon because it supported offline use but with the links being such an integral part of the experience of reading a feed, I rarely read my feeds unless I’m connected.
Look for Newsgator, Bloglines, and the others to differentiate themselves with innovative new features to keep themselves ahead of the pack.
UPDATE: Scoble uses this news to build his case for Microsoft to buy Newsgator.
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Spam Blogs and Financial Incentive
Technorati’s Niall Kennedy posts about the recent spate of spam blogs coming out of Google’s Blogger service and describes Google’s Blogger and Adsense service as parts of a spam suite. BoingBoing first posted Niall’s theory that CAPTCHA’s are no longer a valid block and are circumvented by spammers who redirect the test to eager seekers of free porn. What’s more troubling is that there is no immediate financial incentive for Google to thwart the creation of spam blogs. For every successful spam blog created, the revenue line for Adsense goes up a notch.
Big ol’ disclosure here because I work at Yahoo which is equally concerned and vulnerable with spam. In the interest of generating public debate, I want to throw out this question. Not only am I interested in how spam blog creation can be stopped (more interested in how to take away the incentive to splog, not how to block them), but also interested in the problem of click fraud. The incentive to create a splog is further accelerated with the creation of specialized crawlers that would click all your ad links and generate immediate click-thru revenues along with the more insidious use of zombie networks reported today by Joel on Software.
What can we do to ensure that the tools we have available to communicate and connect are not pulled apart by greedy individuals using automated tools to gain a quick buck? I know it has something to do with authority and trust. Why do we trust our savings with First National Bank at a swank downtown address and not Ed’s Bank in the trailer on the edge of town? Just as we bank at what is most likely a marble-faced edifice in the physical world, is there anyway to add these same clues to reputation in the virtual world?
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Working towards a new metric
Back in August, Mary Hodder riffed on the shortcomings of Google’s PageRank and Technorati’s incoming links algorithms for ranking blogs.
Counting links is very much like counting subscriptions to magazines in order to sell ads, as far as comparing it to a number not reflective of what is actually going on with the media it’s meant to reflect. Link counts alone are an analog media model, but online media is dynamic, and what is digital often has the possibility of getting much closer to finding smaller, more granular, and more interesting ways of perceiving things, that are much more interesting, and orthogonal to legacy media models counting eyeballs.
Mary goes on and puts forth several new vectors of influence that could be harnessed to feed into a new type of ranking. At the core of the criticism though is that any kind of “ranking” is going to be imposed from above (either from an algorithm or an editor) where as blogging as an activity and medium is from and for the masses. This point is brought up by Terry Heaton in the comments.
While the time and age of links are an important factor to determining the freshness of a blog’s authority (someone should not get too much credit because of a racy picture, funny meme, or scoop that they posted 3 years ago), the relevance and ranking of the blog and blog post to the community at large is important. The only way this can be measured is by measuring how the blog post is used with the community. I can think of a few items of interest:
- text of the link to the post compared to tags & categories of the referring post
- number of links to the post divided by number of links to the blog from the referring site
- number of links to the post divided by number of total links to other posts & blogs within the referring post
- text of tags associated with post on social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us and My Web 2.0
An important point made by Danah Boyd is that a lot of the brute force ranking engines out there today are not taking into consideration the blogrolls on systems such as Microsoft Spaces or TypePad which are random links to recently updated blogs on the network and not votes of quality or relevance. Another important point to keep in mind is that any list that is automatically generated from algorithms is going to be prone to gaming – that’s just human nature (for a hilarious account of how one guy hacked MySpace and gained 1 million friends in 24 hours, see Samy is my Hero). I think both of Danah’s observations stress the importance of editorial oversight in any new engine used to crawl and rank the blogosphere.
As the recent valuation of Weblogs Inc pointed out, the industry is grasping for a transparent way to rank and evaluate a blog’s influence. The term de jour seems to be that we need to measure a user’s “engagement” with a site and that follows from a blog’s “influence.” Who ever can come up with this golden metric will be the Neilsen of the blogging age and to a great extent will control access to funding and influence. The race is on.
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Microsoft, Google & Cross Dressing
Whew! Take a week off and all hell breaks loose.
First the rumored Google Secure WiFi service looks to be a reality. Danny Sullivan does the rundown of motives but still wonders why Google would go to such extremes to maintain an infrastructure so far outside of their core expertise when they already have so much information coming in from the millions of installed Google Toolbars out in the wild phoning home. Like the Web Accelerator before it, as an infrastructure improvement coming from a services company, it seems oddly out of place.
Next, Microsoft announces a major reorg that puts the main Windows architect, Jim Allchin, out to pasture following the release of Vista and marries the Windows group with their more nimble MSN brethren. This is the strongest signal yet that MSFT is taking the "software as a hosted service" mantra seriously and is looking to better enable it’s client software to play nicely with internet standards.
Google, the services company is shipping software.
Microsoft, the software company is enabling software as a service.We live in interesting times.
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Google’s Master Plan Revealed
Google Master Plan Google’s Masterplan discovered on a “Do Not Erase” whiteboard, photographed and annotated for posterity in this Flickr posting.