Charlene Li of Forrester on the latest moves at Yahoo! which she thinks are really significant….
Technorati Tags: yahoo, social media
Monthly Archives: April 2008
Groundswell data presentation 2.0
Groundswell is a new book about the impact of social media written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Forrester analysts both. The web site has a great visual tool for displaying the categorisation system for social media they have developed. There must be hundreds of uses for a cool presentation like this.
Technorati Tags: social media, tools
The New York Times covers blogging
Marc Andreessen reacts to the New York Times article on blogging: In a Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writer Blog Till They Drop.
Google and the new economy
Jeff Jarvis reacts to the news of Google’s surprisingly healthy profits in the first quarter with his own theory: Google is rewriting the economics handbook and changed the definition of “the economy”.
The old definition meant and measured the performance of big companies and their impact on each other. This was especially the case in media and advertising, which served only companies of a certain size because only large companies could afford to advertise in large outlets. But Google’s marketplace for advertisers of all sizes represents the small-is-the-new-big economy: no limit of small enterprises that can now add up to a critical mass. The fact that it is an auction marketplace also means that this economy is more fluid; it fills in voids.
This means Google may be protected from an economic downturn in quite unprecedented ways:
when there’s an economic downturn that affects, say, travel, that will affect a magazine like Condé Nast Traveler; airlines and hotels of a certain size will advertise less and there aren’t new advertisers to fill in that void at Traveler’s price. But on Google, if American Airlines and the Ritz aren’t buying the keyword “Paris” this month, there are no end of advertisers who will step in to buy the word. The price of that keyword may decline. But in Google’s very broad economy, the prices of other keywords (e.g., “credit”) may rise.
Comscore started a run on Google’s stock by pointing out that fewer people were clicking on Google’s ads – though Google said it was tuning ad placement to improve relevance. In the end Google ends up looking smarter than Comscore and Jeff argues that the old sampling methodology’s days are numbered as it simply can’t measure the niches.
Technorati Tags: advertising, economy, Google, metrics
Alexa Announcement
Alexa are changing their ranking methodology by adding in more sources. But as Ciaron points out, since they don’t tell us who their new sources are, we won’t know whether the new rankings will be any less error-prone than before.
Online ads grow rapidly
A joint study by the IAB and PriceWaterhouseCoopers shows rapid growth in online advertising last year:
Online advertising has grown from being the smallest market sector in 2003 to the third largest in 2007, with a new high of £2,812.6 millions. This represents a 38% year-on-year like-for-like increase, taking the medium to a market share of 15.3% (up from 11.4% in 2006). Internet advertising spend in 2007 exceeded the most generous forecasts and is now larger than press classifieds and regional newspapers.
Tools geeks use
A group of tech-savvy Americans has been travelling in Israel this last week checking out the state of the Israeli tech industry. What web tools do these cutting edge types use on a daily basis? Find out here.
Community manager profile
Ever wondered what the profile of a community manager is? Based on a rather unscientific sample Jeremiah Owyang provides his list of characteristics, abstracted from the 19 respondents to a recent job ad he posted.
Technorati Tags: community
Widgets: show me the money
Where is the money to be made in widgets? Jeremiah Owyang provides a few (fairly unconvincing) suggestions.
Twitter tools
Jeremiah Owyang has a useful post listing all the handy Twitter tools that add value to the popular micro-blogging platform.