What does it take for customers to trust Web 2.0 companies? asks Steve Rubel. For example, he raves about Netvibes but won’t give them his Gmail username and password as he’s not sure whether or not to trust them – they are French, you see….
Technorati Tags: web2
Steve Rubel reports on Yahoo! Answers decision to start carrying “sponsored questions” – advertising by another name. The reaction, he says, has mostly been positive from users who recognise that free services need to be commercially supported somehow. However, he says, as the company moves to commericalise its other communities – work is already underway at Flickr – there are risks of consumer alienation. One to watch.
Technorati Tags: social media
Jeff Jarvis airs a new rule for journalists: “cover what you do best; link to the rest”.
In the rearchitecture of news, what needs to happen is that people are driven to the best coverage, not the 87th version of the same coverage. This will work for publications and news organizations. It will also work for individuals; this is how a lone reporter’s work (and reputation) can surface.
Matt Cutts posts that Google has changed the algorithm to reduce the effectiveness of so-called Google Bombs – massive link attacks which can return sometimes funny results, as in the celebrated case of the term “miserable failure” which produced George Bush as the first result.
I’m catching up on my feeds and I’ve come across this post on the Yahoo! Search Blog. I wonder if there is more significance here than initially meets the eye.
I recently sat down with Gord Hotchkiss over at Search Engine Land for his column titled, “Just Behave” and talked about the power of the Yahoo! Search experience, as I see it. We honed in on social search because, quite frankly, it’s quickly becoming a key factor in the overall success of a search experience.
In particular he cites the way in which Yahoo! Answers are featured alongside search results now.
Search has increasingly become better at refining raw information into ever more useful materials. The powerful blend of Social Search with traditional search puts this material into the hands of real people and also creates something that no machine could really ever reproduce: A connection to the world’s knowledge.
Reading between the lines, I wonder if this is really saying “we’ve lost the technology battle with Google who are just better at the horsepower than we are, so we are going to concentrate on making the social space work.” They have the assets: Answers, del.icio.us, Flickr and even, maybe, MyBlogLog. Making them all work together would create a platform very different from the machine-generated Google Operating System.
Technorati Tags: GYM, search, social media
There has been much speculation about the commercial future for Wikipedia since remarks at the LIFT conference by Wikipedia Foundation chair Florence Nibart-Devouard that there wasn’t much cash left. Last week she issued a firm statement that Wikipedia wasn’t going to close, but was in need of support. Now John Battelle picks up on the huge growth in traffic being driven by Google:
The percentage of Google’s downstream traffic going to Wikipedia increased by 166% year over year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06). Last week Wikipedia was the #3 website in Google’s downstream, after Google Image Search and MySpace.
He argues that with that much traffic going one way, something will have to give, maybe Google Adwords on the famously non-commercial site?
Steve Garfield has produced a really comprehensive guide to video blogging.
Chelsea FC has struck a deal to show archive and daily news footage on a Chelsea branded page at www.youtube.com/chelseafc, reports the Guardian. Broadcasting rights deal prevent live coverage. The content is produced by a JV between Chelsea and BskyB.
Technorati Tags: video
Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff has an interesting post reacting to today’s announcement that Google has launched Google Apps, a package of “office” tools designed to compete with Microsoft solutions in smaller companies. The bottom line: the suite won’t be a real threat until they work offline. But it won’t be beyond the wit of Google engineers to solve that problem. The Innovator’s Dilemma springs to mind….again.