You can catch Passing Strange: The Movie at the IFC Center 323 Sixth Avenue at West Third Street
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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).
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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.
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Tagged: context, Google, semantic, Wolframalpha KickApps
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.
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The idea of starting the company I now call KickApps Corporation came to me in the winter of 1995, the morning after an evening visit with my grandmother. Grandma Ann was about ninety years old at the time, and we had spent a long evening eating Chinese food (Chow Mein was her favorite) and talking about her life growing up in Lower Manhattan. We had had this conversation many times before, but this time I remembered to bring my video camera and was able to capture two hours of fascinating storytelling from a women that was nearly a full-grown adult at a time when “the iceman” delivered house-to-house from a horse-drawn carriage. According to Gram, electric refrigerators didn’t make it to her neighborhood until “long after the War” (I’m still not sure which war she was referring to).
Anyway, I went to sleep that night very pleased that I had finally videotaped my grandmother and woke up the next morning with the idea of building a company that invites people to share their video memories online. Timing is everything, of course, and in the pre-cable modem era no self-respecting venture firm would touch my idea with a ten foot pole. So I put “KnowHow Video” (that’s what I called it in those days) on the shelf and began building a series of venture-backed companies based on technologies I licensed from military contractors like ITT and Lockheed Martin (e.g. Meshnetworks, SkyCross). But I would periodically return to my video sharing idea (always my favorite), and eventually built an initial prototype at www.KnowItAllVideo.com.
KnowItAllVideo was around long before the world knew anything about social networking and user-generated video, and we continue to keep that website live in its original form, mainly for nostalgic reason. Although I must admit that it stung a little bit to see the birth and explosive growth of similar sites that followed KnowItAllVideo, building a destination website was never part of my entrepreneurial DNA. My vision was always to power every website with user-generated content and social networking functionality. So KickApps is a hosted platform company designed to do just that.
I write this blog on the eve of our public launch with high expectations. We have a talented and motivated team, supportive investors and a vision that we all believe in. My grandmother is gone now (she made it to ninety-nine!), but I know she would have been proud of what she inspired.
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