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.
There is a bit of a debate in the blogsphere about what exactly “social media” is. Robert Scoble pointed out this really comprehensive post from Marianne Richmond of Resonance Partnership, a marketing and branding consultancy, which explores the phenomenon in some depth. Worth a read if you have some time.
Tags: social media blogging
Folio Magazine has a cover feature on b2b media’s year of mergers and acquisitions.
Each media banker has a different spin on how many deals occurred in 2006 and how much was spent overall. But all agree that the market was booming. DeSilva + Phillips reports 151 transactions and a dollar volume of $20.5 billion in media transactions, making it the strongest year since 2000 (and close to that year’s total volume).
The following chart illustrates the significance of the activity very well:
Folio looked at 10 of the top deals in more detail:
• CMP Technology/United Business Media
• 1105 Media
• VNU (Renamed Nielsen)
• Penton (Prism)
• Reader’s Digest Association
• Primedia
• The Wicks Group
• Metal Bulletin
• Summit Business Media
• CondeNet
The prospects for more activity, fuelled by easy access to debt, look just as strong, says the magazine.
