Content Matters

Michelle Leder does.

If you're trying to find the stuff that public companies would rather have you not know, you can generally find it buried in the footnotes of their filings.  Michelle Leder and her colleagues at Footnoted.org read through the filings and uncover the egregious, the horrendous and the often simply bizarre arrangements that companies have to disclose.  While the topics vary, most are tied to executive compensation and related perks.

Footnoted is currently conducting a poll to pick the dumbest footnote of the year (scroll to the bottom of this post to see the details).  Readers can choose from among the following  lowlights:

• Qwest allowing the stepdaughter of the CEO to use the corporate jet to commute to high school.
• Whole Foods CEO John Mackey hiding in the newsgroups on Yahoo Finance
• Morgans Hotels spending $30k per month on a corporate apartment for its CEO (I guess he didn't think their own property offered acceptable accomodations)
• i2 Technologies spending $1 million to fly its CEO between home and work (6x what they spent for the same the prior year)
• Countrywide giving president David Sambol a $2.7 million bonus just before the stock imploded

You can vote at the Footnoted.org site (poll is on the right hand toolbar).  And thanks, Michelle, for reading all the fine print all year long.

Last week, Google quietly put out the word about Google Knol, a new user-generated content site that enables "experts" to pen articles about topics they know.   There was no official press release, nor interviews with the media.  Just this short blog post.

Google is positioning Knol as the next logical step in their quest to organize all the world's knowledge.  Knols will be html pages that include information about a topic along with various links.  In that sense, they're similar to a Squidoo Lens or a Mahalo page.  The Knol platform will also include community aspects, so readers can rate a Knol or review it.

In order to motivate users to write Knols, they will also support advertising with the revenues shared by Google and the Knol author.

While Squidoo and Mahalo are the models that Google seems to be following, one can't help but think that it's Wikipedia who is the real focus of their attention.  Alexa ranks Wikipedia as the 8th most visited site, while it ranks Squidoo 714th and pegs Mahalo at 3,614.  Clearly, for it to move Google's needle, Knol will need to get Wikipedia-like traffic.

And that's where the controversy comes.  With Google controlling more than 80% of the search traffic these days, how will it determine the page rank of Knol pages?  Will Knol pages get a better rank than a comparable Mahalo or Squidoo page? 

TMCNet's Rich Tehrani sees the combination of Knols, Wikipedia and Answers.com listings dominating search rankings and squeezing out the little guy:

This move just means it will be that much more difficult for smaller players to show up on search results. Keep in mind these companies will be forced to buy more and more Google ads as this happens. So for Google this is truly a win/win scenario.

Meanwhile, Wired's Scott Gilbertson doesn't see a threat to Wikipedia, asking how users will know that the author of a Knol is truly an authoritative source:

Without that system of trust knols may still have value — only time will tell — but it isn’t likely to spell doom for Wikipedia.

A couple of years back, a Reggae-influenced hip hop artist named Shaggy had a hit with a song called It Wasn't Me.  The thrust of the song (pun sort of intended) was that Shaggy had gotten caught in the act with the girl next door by his girlfriend.  Regardless of the fact that his girlfriend was watching him with this other woman, his approach was to simply deny everything:

She saw the marks on my shoulder (It wasn't me)
Heard the words that I told her (It wasn't me)
Heard the scream get louder (It wasn't me)

I hadn't thought of that song in quite a while, but it popped into my head this morning while reading Alan Greenspan's commentary, The Roots of the Mortgage Crisis, in this morning's Wall Street Journal.  Following Greenspan's recent book, The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan has now turned to the Journal's editorial page where he lays the blame for the current mortgage crisis on... the collapse of Communism???  To quote Greenspan:

The root of the current crisis, as I see it, lies back in the aftermath of the Cold War, when the economic ruin of the Soviet Bloc was exposed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Following these world-shaking events, market capitalism quietly, but rapidly, displaced much of the discredited central planning that was so prevalent in the Third World.

Yes, from a timing perspective, I guess the troubles did begin in the late 80's.  As Herb Greenberg points out, that's also about the same time as he began his term as Chairman of the Fed. 
That's not to say that Greenspan is the primary target for our subprime woes.  However, he certainly has culpability, which you'd never sense from reading his memoir or today's editorial.  The Fed is supposed to anticipate how the market may react to interest rate changes.  While there are other agencies with primary responsibility for monitoring the banking industry, few had the ear of the public and the markets that Greenspan had.  There were many warning signs, particularly as lenders began to steer borrowers into esoteric offerings like negative equity loans. 

Of course, Greenspan isn't the only person whose words left me wondering this week.  Newspaper magnate and soon to be convict Conrad Black caught the attention of many with his pre-sentencing courtroom statement earlier this week:

The other thing I'd like to say is I do wish to express very profound regret and sadness at the severe hardship inflicted upon all of the shareholders, including a great many employees, by the evaporation of $1.85 billion of shareholder value under my successors.

Yes, facing years of jail time, Black showed no remorse for his crimes, but simply disdain for the people who tried to clean up the mess he left behind at Hollinger.

To quote another Alan (Dershowitz), it takes chutzpah.

Via Doug McIntyre comes word that United Online Media (UNTD) is cancelling the planned IPO of its Classmates.com division due to market conditions.

The much-anticipated spin out and IPO was to raise $125 million.

As PaidContent points out, while there was enthusiasm for a pure-play social network, Classmates.com subscription model was not quite the same as a Facebook offering.  Rafat sources a recent Cowen & Company report that may have tempered investor enthusiasm:

“We expect the Classmates.com subscriber base to peak in the first half of 2008, followed by a steady decline to zero by 2012.”

Ouch.

Headline from an email press release sent out by Hitwise today:

Hitwise: Google Dominates Search in November

And people wonder why email open rates are dropping.

Someone at Hitwise (or their PR shop) needs to get & read a copy of David Meerman Scott's "New Rules of Marketing and PR".  Heck, even the old classic Ogilvy on Advertising would tell them they need a more compelling headline.  Oy.



 

LinkedIn took the wraps off the beta version of their new user interface today.

The "borrowed" aspect would be the more prominent positioning given to the "Network Updates" section, taking a page from Facebook's news feeds.  They've also added a "Company news" section, which pulls web news content, tied to your company or industry as well as what others in your network are reading.

LinkedIn also announced today the launch of their API, what they call their Intelligent Applications Platform.  The first three apps are internally built widgets for People Search, Job Search and Answers.  They have also announced a partnership with Business Week whereby links within Business Week content will link directly to a pop-up box showing the user the number of LinkedIn contacts they have who are tied to that keyword.

The Intelligent Applications Platform will support two types of applications:

1. Bringing LinkedIn content into your own website or application via API or widget
2. Developing your own applications to run within LinkedIn, leveraging OpenSocial.  According to the LinkedIn blog, they will maintain some level of filtering or control over the apps that can run on their platform.  Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn will manage the flow of new apps to ensure relevancy to their business market.  That's probably a good thing for both users and publishers.

The goals of the new site appear fairly straightforward.  LinkedIn is trying to reposition itself as more of a destination social network site, as opposed to a tool used periodically for specific tasks.  That's critical if they are to increase their page views.  As I've described previously, only about a third of LinkedIn users login at least once per quarter, as compared to nearly 60% of Facebook users who log in on a daily basis.

That said, LinkedIn has an advantage over Facebook today in that it has more than 15 million users who already use it for business purposes.  While it may not match the hype of Facebook, the LinkedIn platform could enable b2b content providers to actually make money.

OK, so that's probably an exaggeration.  But, I received "Elf Yourself" emails from a half-dozen people yesterday.  And, when I went to click through during office hours, I couldn't get past the "Loading" message.  Last night, on my free time, I was able to get in without problem, so it's pretty clear that everyone's doing this at work, rather than at home.

So, it's a great campaign by OfficeMax (though I doubt most users will remember which company hosted it).  They've simplified user-generated content to make it easy for anyone with digital photos to participate.   The ElfYourself site was first introduced last year and got more than 36 million visitors.  But this year, the hype seems even greater and they should surpass those numbers.  This year, for those who can't get into the holiday mood, they've added a new Scrooge Yourself version.

So, grab a few photos of family or friends and Elf Yourself.  But try it during off-hours.