The Praized Blog

Every time I come to San Francisco, I always count the number of billboards on highway 101 advertising pure-play .com companies.  I use it as a straw poll to measure if we’re in a bubble or not.  In 1999-2000, billboards were the way to advertise your new Internet company, almost like a vanity play.  Yesterday night, driving from SFO to downtown San Francisco, I saw many telco and hardware manufacturer billboards but I only saw one from a pure-play: video search engine Blinkx.com.

Here’s a picture of it but, according to various sources, it looks like the billboard has been up for a couple of years already.  So, no bubble for now! 

Update: the New York Times talks about a related topic, ”Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again“, this morning.  

The day started with Robert Scoble discussing how “social graph-based search” (Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook, etc.) is going to beat Google and other search engines.

Scott Karp summarizes Robert’s points:

• Humans can judge what’s missing from an aggregation of information on a topic
• The key to effective human filtering is leveraging a “fabric of trusted individuals”/”people who are trusted and credible”
• By connecting these trusted people through a social network, you can leverage that resulting social graph to validate trust and create network effects

Then, Karl Martino added:

(…) there is a growing role for “Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web”. Our friends, our families, our communities. Not just machines and algorithms. My favorite and fellow bloggers, Slashdot, Salon, the home page of the NYTimes, Philly Future, Shelley Powers, Scott himself, my news reader subscriptions, are all trusted humans, or representations of trusted humans, filtering the Web for me. So it
still comes down to trust - What organizations do we trust? What systems do we trust? What communities do we trust? What people do we trust?

What it means: I believe the web is slowly transforming itself into a big word of mouth machine. Social will eventually be embedded directly in the fabric of the world wide web. Media companies have an advantage today as they are a trusted source but those that resist the “socialization” of the web will be left behind. In the directory business, there is a saying that word of mouth is the biggest competitor out there. I think it can become the biggest opportunity in local search.

(via Research Brief)

According to the Online Publishers Association, Internet users are spending nearly half their online time visiting content, a 37% increase in share of time from four years ago. The Internet Activity Index, conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings, shows that communications accounted for 46% of consumers’ time online in 2003. A dramatic shift has taken place since then, with consumers now spending 47% of their time with content and only 33% with communication.

The OPA found a number of other important factors behind the changes, including:

• A more accessible, and much faster, Internet is driving increased overall time spent online.
• The increased popularity of video is leading to more time being spent with online content.
• The improvement in search allows consumers to more easily and quickly find the exact content they are looking for, increasing the likelihood they will engage more deeply with that content.
• The Web simply offers far more content than it did even four years ago, increasing content’s share of time.
• The rise of instant messaging (IM) as a key communications tool has been a factor in communication’s reduction in share of time. IM is a more efficient communications vehicle than email.

What it means: for anyone who doubted the strength of the content tidal wave (professional and user-generated), these numbers leave no doubt. If you are traditional media, make sure your offline content is ready for the web and published there as well. Create also web-specific content and allow users to comment, tag and contribute additional content. And don’t forget that content can be accessed using non-traditional platforms: mobile, Nintendo Wii, etc.

AdWeek reports on a study called “State of the Media Democracy” that was released by Deloitte & Touche’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications practice.

Highlights from the study:

1) User-generated content

• 51% of all consumers are watching/reading personal content created by others; the number jumps to 71% for Millennials.

• 55% of Millennials and 42% of Xers read blogs, while 62% of Millennials and 41% of Xers watch YouTube or other video streaming sites.

• 40% of all consumers are creating their own entertainment, such as editing movies, music and photos. Millennials may be the majority of the creators at 56%, but Matures are also participating – 25% of them report creating their own entertainment.

2) Traditional Media

• 79% of all consumers discuss their favorite TV shows with friends, family and colleagues, compared with 38% that discuss favorite websites.

• 72% of all consumers enjoy reading print magazines, a proportion that’s consistent across the generations.

• 23% of all consumers expect to spend more time reading books this year. A slightly larger percentage expects to spend more time hanging out with family and friends.

3) Cell Phones

• 46% of Millennials embrace their cell phones as an entertainment device.

• 57% of all consumers text message on their cell phones compared with 84% of Millennials.

• 56% of all consumers take photos with their phones, including 37% of Matures.

4) Advertising Insights

• 76% of all consumers find Internet ads more intrusive than print ads, and 64% pay more attention to print ads than those online.

• 28% of all consumers would pay for online content to avoid seeing ads.

• While offline advertising is effective in driving web traffic, 84% of all consumers visit a website after finding it through a search engine and 82% do so because of a personal recommendation.

What it means: a couple of interesting insights for the Praized blog readers. First, younger generations love user-generated content and mobile access, which means a local/social mobile application could be a killer app. In addition, traditional media is far from dead. It’s just competing in a much more fragmented world.

Following my post last Tuesday on teenagers and how they live their online lives very publicly, I was predicting the arrival a new job: the Web cleaner. To my surprise (you’ve got to love the clarity of my crystal ball!), the Washington Post talked on Monday about calling in pros to refine your Google image.

The article exposes the story of Sue Scheff, a consultant to parents of troubled teens, who came under cyber-defamation attacks in 2002. She would type her name in Google and find many pages attacking her personally. The article continues: “The stream of negative comments began in 2002 after a woman who had sought advice from Scheff turned on her. The postings appeared on PTA Web sites in Florida, where Scheff lives. On bulletin boards and online forums. There were even YouTube videos threatening her. She sued for defamation and won an $11.3 million verdict, but the attacks only got worse. In December, Scheff turned to ReputationDefender, a year-old firm that promised to help her cleanse her virtual reputation. She no longer dreads a Google search on her name. Most of the links on the all-important first page are to her own Web site and a half-dozen others created by ReputationDefender to promote her work on teen pregnancy and teen depression. “They created Sue-Scheff.net,” she said. “They created SueScheff.net. They created SueScheff.org. . . . They created my MySpace account, for God’s sake. I didn’t know how to do any of this stuff.”

Additional article highlights:

Charging anything from a few dollars to thousands of dollars a month, companies such as International Reputation Management, Naymz and ReputationDefender don’t promise to erase the bad stuff on the Web. But they do assure their clients of better results on an Internet search, pushing the positive items up on the first page and burying the others deep. (…)

Companies like IRM try to outthink Google. Search engines comb the Web with complex and ever-shifting algorithms, evaluating relevance and authority by looking at many factors: Is this a government Web site? How many people have linked to it? And so on. The point is, said ReputationDefender founder Michael Fertik, “Google’s not in business to give you the truth, it’s in business to give what you think is relevant.” The goal is to get Google and other search engines to seize on relevant sites that contain positive information on their clients and to downplay the rest. Google does not object in principle to people adding positive content to outrank the negative. But a spokeswoman said in an e-mail, “if you use spammy and manipulative techniques to get this positive content to rank highly, we may take action on it.”

What it means: wow! this is going to be big business in a few years. I would suggest that everyone working in search engine optimization today starts thinking about how this could positively impact their business.

Lots of things I want to blog about today (the Facebook f8 Platform announcement, Christer Pettersson’s presentation at the EADP conference) but, as I’m just coming back from Barcelona, I have a lot of catching up to do and am still jet-lagged. So, here’s a grab bag of noteworthy news that happened while I was away:

• Local Matters launched a beta version of LocalGuides.com, their Local-Social play (what I call Local 2.0). Perry Evans had shown me an alpha release a few weeks ago and I was very impressed with the concept and the site. They describe it as “a new approach to creating a “social-local” experience in the Local Search domain”. Perry adds: “The site empowers consumers with the tools to create, annotate, expand and share lists of local businesses
  and places – publishing their own personal local guides.” You can read more on Perry’s blog. I’ll get back to it in a few days once I’ve had the chance to play with it.

• Publicar announced the re-launch of their local search engine for Latin America at www.PaginasAmarillas.com. The new site powered by i411 provides business and residential information for 14 countries in Latin America.

• Directories.ch offers 3D views from selected Swiss localities (via EADP.org)

The Wall Street Journal talks about the age of fragmentation in this article about the Copiepresse/Google case. I called that phenomenon “Atomization” in my 2007 predictions. Here’s my “atomized” version of this article…

TV:

For years, the implicit bargain underlying free TV was that consumers watched shows at certain times and accepted a certain number of commercials and promos for other shows on a given channel. That bargain was dented by VCRs, (…) DVRs fulfilled VCRs’ promise by making finding, recording and watching programs easy. (…) Increasingly, consumers don’t know or care when their favorite shows are on or what channel shows them — they find them through search interfaces and watch them whenever they wish. TV has the burden of being reworked from two directions at once — the other hammer blow is coming from sites that let consumers post video, such as Google’s YouTube.

Music:

For years, consumers bought albums to get a song or two they’d heard and liked. The handful of hit albums paid for the many albums that failed, as well as the cost of developing new bands, promoting existing bands, making recordings and mounting tours. But that implicit bargain had a flaw that would eventually prove fatal: Consumers liked songs better than albums. When digital technology broke albums into individual songs, consumers voted against the album by either stealing individual songs from peer-to-peer
networks or buying them from services such as iTunes.

Newspapers:

In moving online, newspapers have become collections of individual articles, each of which often stands on its own. Once, readers encountered articles by reading the paper a page at a time. Now, such readers are being supplanted by voracious online consumers who get their news in any number of unpredictable ways. Articles are emailed around, copied to blogs for commentary, grouped together with stories on the same subject from rival publications, and found by search engines and aggregator services.

What it means: if your business is not one of the three mentioned above, how is it being atomized by the web? Make sure you do the exercise and think strategically how things could evolve in the future for you. Learn from the TV, music and newspaper experience.

(via MediaPost)

According to a new Hitwise report, 25% of the traffic coming to newspapers Web sites arrives from search engines.  This comes on the heels of a custom Nielsen//NetRatings study for the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) showing record traffic numbers of 59.5M unique visitors to these web sites in March.

Challenges:

1) Monetization is not happening as fast as that traffic growth.  “While online ad revenue has been growing, our share of that revenue is not in synch with our reach into the audience,” said Randy Bennett, vice president of audience and new business development for the NAA.”

2) User fragmentation.  “Info from the Hitwise report revealed that news consumption is beginning to fragment, with the share of visits to the top 10 News and Media Web sites (which include newspapers like The New York Times) declining by almost 4%.”

Solution?

“According to Bennett, building awareness of that reach and making it easier for advertisers to buy bundles of local and national ads are key steps toward securing more ad revenue.”

What it means: as Martin Nisenholtz of New York Times Digital said this week at the YPA Conference, the “walled garden” era is dead.  Search engine optimization is a key strategic element if you run a media operation.  Search engines are entry doors to web content and because of their extensive reach, you want to be found in them.  But SEO is not enough.  You need to have a specific syndication strategy to disseminate your content, your brand and, hopefully, your business model throughout the web.

 

 

eMarketer analyzes a Vizu Answers and Ad Age report that discusses the way readers find new blogs.

Survey highlights:

• “Two-thirds of blog readers discover blogs by links on other blogs.”
• “Recommendations account for another 23% of blog finds. “
• 20% finds them through search engines
• 6% through blog search engines like Technorati or Google Blog Search

eMarketer adds:

The fact that blog awareness is effectively spread by word-of-mouth is key for anyone using one in a campaign. Not only can you not build it and expect them to come, you cannot even build it and optimize it for search and expect them to come. Blog launches must be accompanied by links on established blogs, and some good recommendations from established, influential bloggers.

In addition, the survey asked respondants their main reasons for reading blogs:

Two-thirds of blog readers said that they read to be entertained, and 43% said that they read to keep up with personal interests or hobbies (multiple answers were allowed). A third said they read for education and 12% for business, making these clearly minority opinions.

What it means: high-level, here’s what I’ve learned about blogging (and blog linking) since I started writing 5 months ago.

1. Before you start blogging, you need to identify the ecosystem(s) in which you’re going to “evolve”. The Praized blog is part of multiple ecosystems: Above all, it is part of both the Local Search ecosystem and the Social Media ecosystem. But geographically, it’s also part of the Canadian bloggers ecosystem.
2. Once you’ve identified your universe, you need to start reading blogs from these worlds. I follow updates through a RSS reader (I use Google home page, nothing fancy). I read about 40 to 50 active blogs (by active,I mean daily updates) that operates in those three worlds. You’ll find a good subset of these blogs in my blogroll (I have not updated it in a while).
3. Pretty soon, you’ll want to start commenting in these blogs. This will allow you to find your voice.
4. You’re ready to start blogging. Continue commenting in your ecosystem’s blogs and make sure you refer to other blogs when you find interesting news on them.

I’ve also found some interesting qualitative data about blog post “tagging” (the “Categories” in the right column), which might help you with search engine indexation, but that story is for another day…

Meta-Praized is a collection of links & stories we’ve “dugg” on Digg.com in the last few weeks. By clicking on that link, you can always follow what’s on our mind.

• “Socially-driven charity” on NewAssignment.net
• “Overview of Clustering and Clusty Search Engine” on Read/WriteWeb
• “The “most connected” Americans watch the most network TV” via ArsTechnica
• “NBC exec joins Google” via News.com
• “Is Google just too big” via the National Computing Centre web site
• “For AT&T, Ad-Sales Success Is No Cinch” via MediaInfoCenter.org (Wall Street Journal)
• “IM Predictions for 2007″ on BigBlueBall.com
• “Ads quietly introduced in Google Video content ” via BoingBoing
• Second Life releases its source code via their corporate blog
• “YouTube rivals (Revver, Guba) look for answers” via News.com
• “World of Warcraft surpasses 8 million subscribers worldwide” via Blizzard’s corporate press release