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« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »

May 18, 2006

Yahoo Analyst Day

Yahoo_logo Yesterday was Analyst Day for Yahoo.  They have posted the PowerPoint (188 pages worth) on the Yahoo website.  It's a lot to go through, but has some interesting slides.

Yahoo_fuse_1 Jeff Weiner, SVP of Yahoo! Search and MarketPlace, did an interesting presentation on their view of SocialSearch.  Yahoo's vision uses the acronym FUSE - for Find, Use, Share, Expand, as shown in this diagram.

Yahoo_social_monetization Yahoo! really seems to have thought through their strategy, leveraging Social Search (Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Groups),  social bookmarking (delicious) and social media (Flickr and a tbd video service) to drive revenue.  The revenue model is shown in the graphic below.  I think this vision is a real differentiator from Google, whose initial efforts (like Google Notebook) have been uninspired.


For more commentary on Yahoo! Analyst Day, check out Rafat Ali on how Yahoo is trying to catch up to Google in revenue per search, or take a look at ...not much else.  Surprisingly, Yahoo Analyst Day got hardly any coverage on the main search engine and tech blogs, compared to pretty extensive coverage of Google Press Day.

Update: John Battelle has added a few brief thoughts and will be interviewing Jeff Weiner tomorrow.

May 17, 2006

Social software solutions to knowledge management problems

Since the mid-90’s, KM companies have been trying to solve the “expert finder” problem, that is, finding the experts within your organization for a given topic or problem. 

While finding the internal expert is critical for all large companies, it’s most acute at large consulting firms and investment banks.

There have been various KM attempts to solve this problem, some simply using resumes (have skills and experience, but never get updated), while others tried to get users to update proprietary databases with skills and interests, generally with low participation rates.

Rod Boothby, at E&Y, posts about how they are using people blogs to capture and maintain the critical information about skills and projects, to quickly find the experts for a project team.

This is another example of how inexpensive and easy-to-use hosted social software applications are solving KM problems where larger, more complex applications failed.  The ease of creating blog pages (in this case, using templates for consistency), of linking project pages to people pages, and using standard web search tools, encourages adoption and makes maintenance easy.

May 16, 2006

The 50 Content Companies that Matter: TripAdvisor

Trip_advisor_logo Since the early days of the Web, travel has been one of the fastest growing segments on the Internet.  So much so that it has changed the business model of the airlines and nearly decimated the travel agent industry.

While much of the attention has been on the transactional sites that book travel, there have been many other pockets of innovation in this space.  One of the most innovative has been TripAdvisor, a subsidiary of Expedia which was spun off last year from Interactive Corp (IAC).  Expedia itself has always been a technology leader, perhaps due to its origins within Microsoft.  TripAdvisor was acquired by IAC/Interactive (which then owned Expedia) in the spring of 2004, and is a lead generation site for the travel industry. 

TripAdvisor brings together two of my favorite themes in the content industry – lead generation and reviews and ratings.  TripAdvisor provides users with travel information and recommendations for hotel accommodations, restaurants and activities on various destinations.  The most valuable part of the TripAdvisor content are the ratings.  I find their hotel ratings invaluable as a means of finding quality hotels at a reasonable price.

Tripadvisor_inside_palo_alto TripAdvisor has recently taken another step up the user-generated content chain, launching wiki-based content branded as TripAdvisor Inside.  These special content sections, each focused on a city or state (see example for Inside Palo Alto), are collaborative, user-created editorial pages with sections for history, things to do, dining scene and more.  With its recent launch, the content right now is a bit sparse (only nine restaurants in Palo Alto) but that’s sure to grow in time.

 

Just last week, TripAdvisor launched what they call goLists, where users can contribute lists of places to go, things to see, sample itineraries, etc.  Similar in concept to an Amazon Favorites List, this is another example of leveraging the community to create valuable content.

TripAdvisor has done a terrific job in building valuable content, which in turn generates significant leads for their travel partners.  Their star ratings and reviews have created a barrier to entry for new competitors, and their new wiki pages show that they understand how to leverage their community to develop more compelling content.  In creating a balance that addresses the needs of their advertisers and users, while continuing to embrace new technologies, TripAdvisor is clearly one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

May 13, 2006

Can You Spell D-O-P-E-S?

Us_capitol CNET's Declan McCullagh broke the story that Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA) has introduced a bill that would ban access to social networking sites (and virtually any other site where users contribute content) in public access locations such as libraries and schools. 

The bill, called DOPA for the Deleting Online Predators Act, has been endorsed by House Speaker Hastert.  McCullagh has posted a copy of the bill here.  The bill is clearly in response to alarmist stories on the news about predators targeting MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites to identify and engage potential targets.  The definition of social networking is quite broad: "...commercially operated Internet website that allows users to create web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users and offers a mechanism of communication with other users, such as a forum, chat room, e-mail, or instant messenger."  The way I read that, it could ban users from reading blogs that allowed comments, or even Flickr or Wikipedia.

While I am not surprised at this knee jerk reaction, it's just disappointing to see Congress jump into things that they clearly do not have an understanding of.  You don't protect children from online predators by reducing their access to the Internet any more than you would protect them from offline predators by banning children from parks and schools.

If the United States is to remain competitive economically, it's critical that we, as a society, embrace technology.  While the Government challenges the science of Global Warming and Evolution, the one bright area for the U.S. in the sciences has been our continued innovation in the technology field.  Between this DOPA bill and the COPE Act - telecom/cable efforts to charge a premium for Internet access, Congress is on the verge of mucking up the entrepreneurial innovation engine of the Internet.

I would like to propose a new Act; I call it No Congressmen Left Behind.  It would require all members of Congress and their staffs to demonstrate proficiency in the basics of the Internet before they would be allowed to vote on any issue that impacts its use.  I urge you to contact your Representatives and tell them to oppose both COPE and DOPA.

In the meantime, if you have children, take a few minutes to look at their MySpace page.  Ask them to show you their FaceBook listing.  Have a mature and intelligent dialog with them about the risks of sharing too much information on the Internet.  Help them understand the boundaries.  MySpace and FaceBook are not the problem.  And ignorance is clearly not the solution.

May 11, 2006

Google Co-op - Update

Google_logoDanny Sullivan has an in-depth overview and analysis of Google Co-op at his Search Engine Watch blog.

Danny describes it as Rollyo-like vertical search, combined with tagging (or, as Google calls it, labels).  Users can "label" pages into various topics.  Unlike end-user tagging with delicious, Google labels are geared towards publishers (or other vertical market developers) wishing to tag or categorize large numbers of pages into a predefined taxonomy.  This process will be similar to what content providers have done for years using manual tagging or automated categorization software.  The taxonomies can be hierarchical, with labels and sublabels.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out.  One reason that categorization has succeeded for large content providers but has often failed inside the enterprise is that it takes a fairly rigorous editorial process to apply consistent tags to content.  Google has always emphasized the machine's ability to make information navigable through algorithms.  This approach, bringing editorial decision making into the process, is sure to lead to some compelling discussion.

Jotspot acquired by Yahoo?

Jotspot_logoTechCrunch is reporting a rumor that Yahoo has acquired ASP wiki provider JotSpot. 

Jot_alacra_wiki We've been using JotSpot at Alacra for a few months.  Similar to WetPaint and SocialText, Jotspot has positioned the hosted wiki as the web 2.0 version of Knowledge Management.
With Yahoo potentially getting into the mix, wikis could quickly proliferate into mainstream use, which would help players like SocialText who are better suited to the enterprise.

This is still just a rumor, as TechCrunch comments indicate current Jot employees were not aware of any acquisition.


The 50 Content Companies that Matter: Topix

Topix_logo There are many news aggregators in the market today.  Most of them add value to the news content by tagging and organizing it for their markets.  While most have adopted some level of automation, they still rely heavily on editorial expertise to ensure accuracy.

Topix.net is a news aggregator which relies solely on automated indexing to create a comprehensive taxonomy to drive relevancy.  Founded in 2002 with a mission of helping users quickly and easily find targeted news on the Internet, Topix.net today categorizes news from more than 10,000 sources into over 300,000 specific topics in near real-time.

Rich_skrenta The founders at Topix.net came out of the Netscape-driven Open Directory Project, an editorially-driven project to categorize sites on the Internet.  According to co-founder and CEO Rich Skrenta, their experience with tends of thousands of volunteer editors made him “decide to avoid editors in Topix.net and stick to algorithms”.

Early on, one of their key issues was resolving how to serve relevant contextual advertising on a news site.  While Google AdSense typically serves relevant advertising to static web pages, the results for news were less relevant and often embarrassing.  In one of the more notorious examples, the New York Post published an article about a murder where the victim’s body parts were found in a suitcase.  Adjacent to the article was an AdSense ad touting luggage (for those "do-it yourself-ers", I guess).

To combat that, the technology team at Topix.net developed a set of algorithms and a knowledgebase that could better understand what a news story was about and serve up more relevant ads.  The knowledgebase is focused on key topical areas, such as geographical map data, lists of movies, CDs and entertainers, and more.  The Topix.net algorithms leverage the information in the knowledgebase to classify each news article to the correct topic.

Today, Topix.net gets more than 3 million unique visitors per month.  They estimate that to be about half of their readership, as 50% comes through the sites of partners AOL, Yahoo, CitySearch, Ask.com and others.  Topix revenue is largely driven through serving AdSense ads on their pages.

Last year, 75% of Topix.net was purchased by Gannett, Tribune and Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy).  That investment assigned a healthy valuation of $64M to Topix.net; not bad for a company with estimated revenues of $1M.

Just last week, Topix.net announced the launch of its publisher platform, a revenue-share model targeted towards small-to-medium news providers.  They are also extending the invitation to bloggers a la Pluck's Blogburst.

Topix.net has done an amazing job of leveraging technology and domain expertise to create a fully automated system for categorizing news and serving relevant ads.  Publishers often view editorial’s role in categorization as simply checking or verifying automated results.  Topix.net has demonstrated that a more effective use of this domain knowledge is to use it in the development of a knowledge base and set of algorithms that can automate the labor-intensive tasks.  And for that, they are clearly one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

May 10, 2006

Notes from Google Media Day

Google_labs_1 At Google Press Day, Google announced four new products.

Google_trends Google Trends is a new visualization application that creates a trend map comparing searches and mentions of various terms over time.  Google Trends builds on Google Zeitgeist to give you a sense of what users have been searching.  It could be very useful for developing SEM strategies.

Google Co-op is a beta of an application that will allow content providers to tag/annotate web pages.  This metadata can be used by users who "subscribe" to that content.  One example Google provides would be that "a doctor can label web pages related to arthritis, and users who subscribe to that doctor's information will receive options at the top of the results for more specific information such as "treatment," "symptoms," or "for health professionals" when they enter a relevant query."  Google Co-op is supposed to be available at google.com/coop, but right now that page doesn't produce any results.  According to Philipp Lenssen, the widely rumored Google Health might be tied in to Google Co-op.

From the sound of it, Google Coop could be a Rollyo-like application, enabling you to create custom, vertical searches, but with the addition of tagging as well.  Until the info from Google becomes a bit more clear, it's hard to tell how they envision it being used.

Google also announced version 4 of Google Desktop.  This version adds Google Gadgets, along with an API for development of new gadgets.  Initial gadgets include things like clocks, weather maps and games.

Announced, though not available until next week is Google Notebook.  Google Notebook is an online notebook where users can paste text, images or links from sites they are visiting into a personal notebook.  The notebook can be shared with other users.  Beginning next week, it will be available at http://www.google.com/notebook.

For more details and insights from Google Media Day, read:
Philipp Lensen's  Google Blogoscoped
Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion
Nicholas Carr's Rough Type
Matt Cutts' blog
GoogleRumors
eWeek blog
Official Google press release is here



May 09, 2006

The Future of Magazines

Flipping through the May issue of a trade pub for the content industry, I landed on the “executive changes” page.  My reaction, after glancing at the first few was “that’s ancient news”.  These were based upon press releases that went out two months earlier.

It made me give some thought to the role of magazines in today’s media framework.  I understand the editorial and production cycles of a monthly magazine, but I think that it’s important that publishers adapt their editorial content to what is relevant for a monthly cycle.  If you’re publishing monthly (or even weekly), your mission should be analysis and context, not news delivery.

With direct-to-consumer press releases, readers don’t depend upon monthly trade rags for news; instead, they want perspective and insights.

Many suggest that magazines are dying as a medium.  I disagree.  Magazines still have appeal, but the context in which they are read has changed.  Their format makes them easy to slip into your briefcase for a train or plane ride.  For certain consumer magazines, the ability to archive a collection has appeal.  Magazines like the Economist or the New Yorker leverage their form to provide in-depth articles on a specific topic.  (When’s the last time you read a 20-page article online?)

But many of today’s trade publications run the risk of becoming irrelevant, as a new generation of users turns to other sources for the information traditionally within the trade publication domain.  In order to remain significant, trade pubs need to put the needs of their users first.

Those willing to rethink their role will realize that they have many strengths which they can leverage.  The greatest strength is their community of readers and advertisers.  For most magazines, their online presence is simply an extension of the offline edition, perhaps updated with greater frequency.  Rather than simply duplicating the content of the print version, magazines should begin to take advantage of the many web 2.0 tools out there to develop their community, for example using wikis and blogs focused on special topics.  New applications such as interactive podcaster Waxxi could be used for participatory events.

Returning to the “executive changes” section, magazines could take advantage of their breadth of coverage to show trends in the changes (who’s hiring and who’s losing talent) providing rankings or tables, rather than simply reprinting old press releases and labeling it news.

Trade publications have the brand, reach and subscriber base today to enable them to create strong communities which would, in turn, allow those brands to thrive for years to come.  Those strong brands would continue to command top dollar from advertisers looking to reach that community.  Those who insist on keeping to the editorial calendars of the past will find their impact and their brands diminishing.

Alacra seeks top performing sales executive

Alacra is looking for an experienced Sales Executive.

The position combines managing an existing territory of financial institutions and professional service firms and new business development.  Working with a dedicated Account Manager in a team approach, you will jointly introduce new products and services, renew existing agreements, negotiate contracts, prospect for new business and prepare all meeting materials.  Alacra is a rapidly growing information services company headquartered in lower Manhattan. 

If you're aggressive, have a proven track record as a top quartile performer and relationships in banking and professional services, send an email to [email protected].

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