|
Wow!
July 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized
Context, Context, Context (as always)
June 17, 2009 · Leave a Comment
I thought this was a validating article for those who have been arguing with me about this for years.
Study: Context Matters for Online Ads
June 16, 2009
Like print ads, context matters when it comes to the effectiveness of Internet ads, according to new findings from media researcher McPheters & Co. Analyzing the effectiveness of Internet banner ads, McPheters, collaborating with Condé Nast and CBS Vision, found that online ads running on sites with related content were 61 percent more likely to be recalled than ads on sites with unrelated content—a finding that would seem to undercut the case for ad or behavioral networks, which target viewers based on their Internet usage habits.
“The behavior networks are more focused on who they get in front of instead of the environment sites provide,” said Rebecca McPheters, CEO of McPheters & Co. “This says the site on which your ad appears matters.”
The firm also found that not all types of sites are created equal when it comes to recall. Social-networking, shopping and food sites generated the highest recall levels (29 percent to 39 percent), while search and portal sites had the lowest (under 5 percent).
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized
Wolframalpha – not a great name
May 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Wouldn’t it be fun to see Google get its ass kicked? Nothing personal, just good fun seeing the big guy knocked down. Well, it’s not happening any time soon, but what goes around eventually comes around.
Check out: www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
Wolframalpha (annoying name, isn’t it?) makes use of contextual algorithms as compared to Google’s general keyword and link-based algorithms—so it’s pretty smart if you ask it something it knows. Wolfram might say about Google, “to a hammer everything is a nail.”
[As a reminder, context is always king—the evolution of the web is about narrowing context to create more and more relevancy and engagement—see the name of this blog if you need proof.]
The first public version of Wolframalpha is more about discovering specific information than it is about discovering websites that contain specific information. Of course, one of Wolframalpha’s subject-matter domains could easily be website discovery—that is, the entire business of website discovery could be just one of the many domain-specific algorithms Wolframalpha offers. On the other hand, what Wolframalpha provides is already a small subset of what Google currently provides, to a degree, so long as the questions posed to mister Google aren’t too tough.
It can be said that Wolframalpha is just the latest flavor of directed search with a few semantic chops on the side. But this time around I believe there is real potential to cover much more domain-specific ground than previous efforts—wikis have taught us much. Can Wolframalpha (or similar efforts) adequately cover what most humans currently discover via traditional keyword search? The current “social search” efforts (let’s leave Twitter et al out of it for the moment) may be irrelevant, but there’s no doubt that capturing the world’s knowledge with domain-specific algorithms will take the work of many hands.
It’s obvious that domain-specific algorithms are more interesting (provide more relevancy) than generic keyword algorithms. Isn’t that why search within Twitter has everyone aflutter? But we’ll all get over the novelty of social discovery and the real-time web soon enough because I believe something much smarter is coming, and on it we will flow.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized
Tagged: context, Google, semantic, Wolframalpha KickApps
Flashy TV
January 7, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Of course KickApps has the most spectacular drag-and-drop application for building nearly any kind of Flash container (no actionscript skill required, thank you very much), so these developments are nothing but good from my perspective.
|
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized
The Social Graph Engine
May 13, 2008 · Leave a Comment
FAQ of the day: What about Google Connect?
The short answer:
Anytime the large social networks make it easier for us to help our customers (web publishers) promote audience growth, it’s a very good thing.
The long answer:
While few and far between, my blog posts have always been about the opportunity large social networks and traditional portals have to begin serving publishers across the entire web. I’ve used phrases like “open portal”, “anti-portal” and “the distributed web” to describe this opportunity. In sum, if the major players hope to extend their ad networks to credible publishers across the web, they will have to earn that inventory by helping publishers grow their audiences. After all, Fox and NBC have to earn the right to place ads across their network of independent television stations by providing their affiliates’ programs that grow ratings. The same is true for internet ad networks.
Recent “openness” initiatives by MySpace, Google and Facebook Connect begin to ask the right question: How can we begin providing value to the universe of websites outside our domain? It’s a first step, but only a baby step.
While these initiatives allow website publishers to make limited use of mega-portal social information, they don’t empower publishers to aggregate and own their own user profiles and social graph information. I believe this limitation is fatal if the major social networks hope to interoperate with high value web publishers in a meaningful way. Moving forward all serious publishers want to contextually inform their advertising experiences and user applications with real-time user data that is unique to their audience. It is therefore essential that publishers own and control their own community profile management, reporting and social graph engine.
Providing publishers their own social graph engine is core to the KickApps product offering. In fact all KickApps applications (e.g. UGC, social networking, widget building, programmable video players, media management, member management), along with 3rd party OpenSocial and Facebook apps, are fully integrated with the KickApps social graph engine out of the box. What’s equally important is that we provide a full set of APIs, customizable feeds, widget builder tools and a plug-in architecture such that our publishers can easily build and deploy their own custom applications that make full use of our social graph engine.
The KickApps platform will certainly integrate with Google Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace because these initiatives may help our website publishers accelerate audience growth by tapping into “friends” on the big social networks. But this value to publishers is modest relative to the benefits of leveraging their own social graph engine. KickApps will continue to earn long-lasting relationships with publishers because our sole mission is to serve them.
More analysis from around the web:
Google Friend Connect: What’s the Point? Mike Gunderloy, Web Worker Daily, GigaOm Network
Why should I, as a webmaster, set aside part of my page for you to have a conversation in? Why should you, as a user, come to my site to talk with your Facebook friends, rather than using Facebook? Why should I have to choose which identity to share with a site, rather than just logging in with OpenID and interacting with other users of that site? What are we getting in return for pushing another stream of data through Google?
Google Confirms Friend Connect Erick
Schonfeld, TechCrunch
But it is not there yet. For instance, it doesn’t work with Google’s Social Graph API, and many more social and identity networks still need to be connected. …The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.
Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect Charlene Li, Groundswell
Prying Open the Social Graph Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOM
→ Leave a CommentCategories: anti-portal · social graph
Tagged: social graph engine
Hooman on semantic web
March 17, 2008 · 1 Comment
I enjoyed Hooman Radfar’s post re semantic web at Widgify. When semantic web finally rolls out in a meaningful way I doubt consumers will have any idea that they just experienced the “semantic web”. They’ll just find that many separate services that they normally use in an ad hoc fashion are suddenly integrated in more interesting ways. Semantic web will also bring new ways to navigate the internet. More on that later.
→ 1 CommentCategories: social graph
KickApps 3.0
January 29, 2008 · 1 Comment
It was a pleasure watching the KickApps troops in action over the last few weeks. Our new release is the result of an amazing team effort, and I’m looking forward to sharing KickApps 3.0 with our customers.
Stay tuned—we have a few more big surprises on the way.
→ 1 CommentCategories: Web
“Openness is the yin to Jerry Yang’s Yahoo”
September 13, 2007 · 1 Comment
Yahoo Reaches Out For Ad Partners
By Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 13, 2007
search firm’s deal with Bebo is the latest in its push to sell ads beyond its
own sites.
Openness is the yin to Jerry Yang’s Yahoo. For its first
decade, Yahoo Inc. grew by attracting more and more people to its
stable of websites. Now, with its co-founder and new chief executive at
the helm, it’s reaching out to find advertising opportunities elsewhere
on the Web.
Yahoo and the other major portals are now all working strategies to place ad
inventory on the entire web, not just within their own domains. Their
short-term focus appears to be paying lots of money to sites like Bebo in order to “buy” the right
to place ad units. But doesn’t that seem like an expensive, non-scalable way to go in the long run?
I’d like to think that the KickApps platform presents a
much more cost effective, long-term model for the way Yahoo (and other portals) might “earn” real
estate on 3rd party websites—by providing those sites a range of
media functionality and, in turn, helping them build incremental page
impressions.
In an earlier blog I described all this as an “Open Portal” strategy, the idea
being that portals need to open up (distribute) their content and functionality
to web publishers if they wish to effectively compete for advertising real estate off their domains.
I’ll repeat my favorite analogy: Think of the way NBC
earns the right to insert ads on
3rd party television stations by providing them television shows.
Imagine if NBC provided only ads to television stations (e.g. no television
shows). Clearly the “adsense model” would not work for television networks and
it won’t work indefinitely on the Web. And so it won’t be long before Google (and others) begin to think about packaging hosted applications with their ad programs
to earn publisher loyalty. In a nutshell, that’s what KickApps is all about.
→ 1 CommentCategories: anti-portal