Content Matters

Well, it didn't take long for new CEO David Calhoun to make an imprint on VNU.  The Dutch publisher has decided to drop the VNU name, adopting instead the name of its leading brand, Nielsen.

The move makes a lot of sense.  The VNU name has never been part of the branding, with each business unit retaining its own identity (AdWeek, Billboard, Hollywood Reporter, etc).  Meanwhile, the Nielsen name is a compelling brand in the e-media space, with its NetRatings, Buzzmetrics and AC Nielsen products.

Alacra is currently recruiting a new Vice President, e-Commerce.

Reporting to the CEO, this role leads the Alacra e-Commerce team and is responsible for development and growth of our e-Commerce products.

Candidates should have a strong marketing background with at least three years e-Commerce experience and meet the following requirements:

• 5+ years marketing experience with at least three years leading e-commerce initiatives
• Successful track record in online marketing, including search engine optimization, online advertising, e-mail marketing and affiliate marketing.
• Deep understanding of web analytics tools; experience with HBX (WebSideStory) a plus
• Knowledge of website design and development, user flow and information architecture and their impact on the customer experience.
• Extensive Project and/or Product Management experience
• Aggressive risk-taker with documented record of success
• Experience leading technical teams
• Bachelors or Masters in a relevant domain
• Familiarity with Adobe Photoshop, HTML and JavaScript a plus.
• Knowledge of content industry and/or financial markets a plus

For immediate consideration, please email your resume and salary history to .

For more information on this role, see the full position listing on the Alacra website.

Yahoo acquired MyBlogLog yesterday in a $10M deal that's been rumored since late last year.
The acquisition adds to Yahoo 's presence in the social software space, while also providing some new capabilities for advertising on blogs.

At its most basic, MyBlogLog is a social networking application that allows users to create a profile and take that profile with them to various blogs, "joining" them.  You've probably seen photos of recent readers on Content Matters and other blogs.  These are readers who have active MyBlogLog profiles.  Once you join a blog community, you can view the profiles of other members and see what other communities they are participating in.  It's a pretty compelling way to discover relevant content you might not be aware of.

The other side of MyBlogLog is the statistics they provide to the participating blog sites.  You can easily see how many visitors you've had, how they got to your site and what they've clicked on once they got there.  It's not the full metrics you'd get with HBX or even Performancing, but it's a nice snapshot.  You can even get a view of what other pages (on other participating blogs) your community members have visited.  It's sort of like a private Digg just for people with like interests.

As they've done with Flickr, Delicious and others, the initial plan is for Yahoo to keep MyBlogLog a standalone entity.  On day one the only change you'll see is the ability to login with your Yahoo ID, rather than creating a separate ID.  Over time, they will further integrate it with their other social networking applications.

In the meantime, you can join the Content Matters community to test it out.

For more on MyBlogLog, see earlier reviews from TechCrunch, ContentMatters and A VC.
For more on the acqusition, see posts by Om Malik, Search Engine Land and Rafat.

I batted around .500 on my themes for 2006; here’s hoping I can do better with my predictions and themes in 07.  A few of these are carryovers from last year.

Vertical Search: Google Co-op Custom Search Engines will make this attractive for many new entrants, while regular Google results continue to get worse, due to the spam pages out there.

Web Advertising: The adoption of Ajax will make advertising more complex in 2007.  Page Views will no longer be the ultimate measure for advertisers.  In addition to Ajax, the use of widgets will often mean the separation of content from its site.  I’m sure that the market will come up with better ways to monetize the user experience (and the metrics to support it), but in the near-term it will lead to more confusion among both advertisers and sites.

Further consolidation in the Content Industry: 2007 will bring more M&A in the content industry.  I think that there will be a few big names in the mix, with either AOL or Yahoo being acquired (or possibly merging with one another).

There will be a roll-up of blogging tools: With so many users, I’m shocked that bloggers till have to use a non-integrated set of tools for authoring, distributing, searching for and tracking posts.  This segment is overdue for a rollup of say, Feedburner, SixApart, MyBlogLog and Technorati.  Yes, I predicted this for 2006, so it’s long overdue. Other acquisitions I’d like to see?  How about Amazon buying Last.fm, as part of  an effort to provide a DRM-free competitor to iTunes?

MySpace usage plummets: The signs are on the wall.  First NewsCorp bought them, now Time recognizes them as part of the “Person of the Year” feature.  Heck, even your mom has heard of it.  That means your kids will soon be dumping their myspace page and moving to the next new thing.  Meanwhile, the long-rumored, still-to-be-named consortium-managed YouTube competitor, if it ever launches, will implode almost immediately for the obvious reasons (big egos + conflicting goals + power sharing among unequals = failure).  That doesn’t equate to good news for YouTube, however; as media companies pull their content off YouTube, it becomes a home largely for fake porn and video spam.

RSS finally gains adoption: OK, so this one was on the 2006 list as well, but with RSS at the heart of Microsoft Vista and the new Yahoo Mail, the feeds will become ubiquitous even if the name and orange logo does not. 

Widgets gain prominence: While many web 2.0 applications were made available as widgets in 2006, most of them were niche tools, such as Yahoo Widgets, Google Gadgets and standalone widgets such as MyBlogLog.  I think that 2007 will be the year that widgets are adopted for brand advertising and application development and go beyond the realm of blog bling.  For content providers this creates the opportunity (necessity?) to make your content portable as users continue to move away from centralized portals.

The drop in newspaper readership accelerates: Print circulation will continue to plummet as newspaper companies struggle to redefine their value proposition.  While some will continue to see a rise in online readers, it’s not enough to make up for the drop in print revenue.  I’d expect to see ongoing M&A in this segment, as private equity firms continue to believe they can drive cost out of the business, but valuations will plummet as compared to 2006. 

I've been blogtagged (the blogosphere's version of a chain letter) by Steve.  So, here goes - five things that you probably don't know about me.

1. I began my career with an online service (LegiTech - sub of McClatchy) in 1985; only later did I "backslide" to print media with Nelson (now Thomson Financial), where we followed the traditional print-to-electronic conversion.
2. My athletic career peaked early when, at age 12, I got dunked on by Chocolate Thunder (aka Darryl Dawkins).  It's been downhill ever since.
3. I collect 20th century political campaign pins and related materials.  My prize possession - an unopened pack of Adlai Stevenson cigarettes (circa 1952).
4. I once had a head-on collision with a speedboat - while driving a car.
5. My first plane flight didn't occur until a business trip when I started my first job out of school.

In an effort to find bloggers who haven't already been tagged - I'll pass this along to Shannon Holman, Steve Arnold, Jake Harris, Larry Schwartz and Ed Stevenson.