NET2U

2006-10-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

After YouTube
Now that Google has snatched up the leading online video site, will rivals shell out big bucks, or will the competition dry up for smaller sites?Has the online video shakeout only begun or is the bubble about to burst?Google's $1.65 billion agreement to acquire YouTube Monday is the latest, splashiest and most expensive of deals involving companies in the nascent online video business.Industry experts say that Google's rivals, both traditional media companies and Internet firms like Yahoo!, need to reevaluate their online video strategies now that the search engine kingpin and online video leader have joined forces."I think certainly there is going to be a lot of activity. I don't think anybody wants to cede the market to Google and there are a lot of media companies that are poised to do something," said Greg Kostello, founder and CEO of vMix, a privately held video site.But some caution that media companies also have to be careful of overpaying.

2006-10-04T16:49:00.000-07:00

Google launches literacy portal Search engine Google has launched a portal to connect literacy organisations around the world.
The Literacy Project enables teachers, organisations, and those interested in literacy to use the internet to search for and share literacy information.
The new online service was announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany.
Users can search for information in digitised books and academic articles, and share information through blogs, videos and groups.
A global problem deserves a global solution Karin Plötz, Litcam
The tool also allows people to find literacy organisations around the world using a searchable and zoomable map.
It has been created in collaboration with the Frankfurt Book Fair literacy campaign (Litcam) and Unesco's Institute for Lifelong Learning.
Jessica Powell, European corporate communications manager at Google, said: "Our objective at Google is to organise the world's information and to make it accessible to everyone.
"We think the internet has an important role to play in terms of accessing information."
This was especially important for areas such as literacy, she added.
Copyright wrangles
Karin Plötz, from Litcam, said: "A global problem deserves a global solution, and we believe that cooperation and the sharing of best practices is key in the fight against illiteracy."
The move ties in with the search engine giant's foray into the literary world: Google Book Search.
Users can now use it to search through an archive of digitised books to uncover the literature that contains their words of phrases of choice.
Publishers, such as Penguin and HarperCollins, and libraries, including Oxford University's, have allowed Google to scan their books.
If the book is in copyright, users can only access limited information; if it is out of copyright, it can be downloaded.
But it is not without it is critics. Some believe Google is infringing copyright law by digitising works without the copyright holders' permission, in fact the Authors Guild of America, the Association of American Publishers and publishing company La Martiniere is suing the company.
But the search engine claims that by only revealing snippets of text, no copyright is being violated.

2006-10-04T16:36:00.000-07:00

How Yahoo! Gave Itself A Face-Lift Its redesigned home page is based on data from users' clicks, not its hunches
When Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO ) embarked on a mammoth redesign of its front page last year, almost every department at the company suddenly had an opinion. Naturally, conflicts arose. "Sales would want the ad front and center, and the Yahoo Mail person would say: That could potentially cannibalize my business,'" recalls Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's vice-president for front doors, who oversaw the project.

To avoid design by committee, Yahoo deferred almost every decision to an impartial judge: data generated by users' clicks. "We have this culture of data," Bhat explains. "It is the biggest enforcer of honesty." If sales wanted an ad smack dab in the front page's prime real estate, the company would whip up a page to those specifications, serve it to actual users, and record their clicks. If traffic increased, great. If not, it was back to the drawing board. The refreshed home page went live in September. Now, with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to promote the redesign under way, the company is keen to see whether it has truly created a page based on what users like rather than what Yahoo wants.Getting the home page right is crucial for a portal like Yahoo, especially since the company's advertising revenue has been slowing. Yahoo announced on Sept. 20 that third-quarter gross profit would probably be in the bottom half of its forecast of $925 million to $1 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 14% to 20%. That's slower than the last two quarters by one-third to one-half."The Yahoo home page is a very important driver of revenue," notes James Friedland, an analyst at New York investment bank Cowen & Co. (COWN ) He estimates that 40% to 45% of Yahoo's $4.7 billion in annual sales comes from display ads such as banners, which appear on pages that users often reach through the front page. Says Bhat: "Any link on the front page has huge ripple effects all throughout Yahoo, and it affects our revenue."Yahoo made a commitment to harnessing its trove of user clicks in 2004 when it acquired DMX Group, a data mining consultancy founded by former Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) researchers. Now called Strategic Data Solutions (SDS), the department has a daunting task: combing through the 10 terabytes of data that Yahoo users generate daily by clicking links (the equivalent of all the text in the Library of Congress), plucking out the relevant bits, compressing it, and storing it. So far, Yahoo has enough user data to fill more than 1,000 Libraries of Congress.Of course, all that information would be useless without a way to make sense of them. Before Yahoo bought DMX Group, a simple test of how users interact with a page required help from technologists and a month of preparation. Now nearly all employees have access to easy-to-use software tools that can run tests over a few hours or days. Along with providing the tools, the SDS department has worked to spread the gospel of data. "We say: Use data to make decisions. Don't make decisions based on a fad or what your competitors are doing,'" says Bassel Ojjeh, vice-president for SDS.BRITNEY VS. BRITTANY To help drive that message home, the SDS team this spring invited Stanford University business professor Robert I. Sutton to speak at Yahoo. Sutton and his Stanford colleague Jeffrey Pfeffer are co-authors of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management. The book owes a debt to evidence-based medicine, an approach in which doctors use recent clinical research to inform decisions about treatment. Applied to business, the approach requires managers to base decisions on facts rather than opinions. "It's this attitude that instead of sitting around having debates about what will work and what won't, let's run some experiments and learn," Pfeffer says.What Yahoo learned often belied initial impressions. Throughout the redesign, the company used a blend of focus groups, one-on-one interviews, test pages, and data mining. "What people say they want isn't always what they actually click on," Bhat says. In focus groups, users consistently said they wanted serious world news. "I don't want Britney Spears anywhere on my page," Bhat recalls one user saying. "What if my boss came by and saw?" But when Bhat's team studied users' clicks, world news got little attention, while Britney Spears stories ranked among the most heavily trafficked.The mixed messages led to important insights. In the end, Yahoo kept world news prominent on the front page because users feel secure knowing that it's easily accessible, even if they don't often click it. Conspicuous placement also went to entertainment, which draws heavy traffic from people seeking a diversion at work. By contrast, seemingly work-related content such as finance gets ample use in the evening when people pay bills and manage personal portfolios.Another gem unearthed through data mining: Small changes can make a big difference. The redesign team was excited about a new feature called Personal Assistant, which lets users hover their pointers over icons to see preview boxes of content such as e-mail. "We knew this was going to be the wow' element of the page," Bhat says. But the data showed that users were less than wowed. Turns out the preview boxes opened too quickly, an unusual peeve in this caffeinated, wired world. So the team began fiddling with the speed at which the preview boxes appeared and introduced a slight delay. Bingo.Although Yahoo's front-page redesign is finished, the testing is not. "There's always some test running," Bhat says. "It's part of our DNA." Now if only Yahoo could collect as much data about its advertisers' spending habits.

2006-10-04T16:35:00.000-07:00

Oct 4, 2006 02:57 PM
AOL launches free desktop software that combines its most popular services into one user interface, the latest move by the Internet service provider to lure former subscribers back to the fold.
OpenRide, which is optimized for broadband, but could also be used on dialup connections, provides access to email, instant messaging, Web browsing, online search and a digital entertainment media center in one application. The latter service lets users watch video, listen to music and view photos.
Each service is delivered in a separate window on a four-pane screen that lets people, for example, check email while watching a video, or send an IM while listening to music. AOL, a unit of Time Warner, plans to eventually allow users to add other said in August that the services it offers in a proprietary Internet community for narrowband users would be made available at no charge to broadband subscribers.
AOL's customer base has been declining for several years, as people switch to broadband. The number of U.S. consumers with high-speed connections at home grew 30 percent to 102.5 million in May from 78.6 million a year ago, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The number of narrowband users, meanwhile, fell by 31 percent to 40.3 million from 58.8 million.
Other AOL services released so far include security tools, online storage, owns 5 percent of AOL and also has an ad-partnership with the company.

2006-10-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

The other Google search site
October 3, 2006 4:51 PM PDT
Google has created a search site without any Google branding to test new features. The site, SearchMash, has a simple blue and white interface with a search bar and an option to click on "popular searches." Once keywords are entered, the results page features links to results running down the left side of the page and the top three image results on the right side.
SearchMash also lets you click on a result and drag and drop it to change the order. Also, when a link is clicked on, the user is offered the option of opening the listings in the current window or a new window, seeing more pages from the Web site or finding similar pages. Additional results are added to the bottom of the original results page by clicking on a "more web pages" link.
With SearchMash, Google "plans to test user interface ideas without Google's brand somehow skewing the tests," Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch.com wrote in a blog posting on Monday. "It's pretty slick."

2006-10-03T07:58:00.000-07:00

$100M more for DemandMedia
Demand Media, the company pursuing the audacious strategy of buying up a bunch of generic Web sites that have no staff generating real content of their own — to throw advertising on them — has raised another $100 million.In May, we reported it raised its first $120 million. Lately, though, the company appears to be buying content as well, including acquring Hillclimb Media, a producer of niche web sites.Some people connect this company that buys web sites to spam and crap content, yet it is worth mentioning due to its ability to raise hundreds of millions to scale up its operations. The company claims to reach more than 40 million people per month through out its web sites.

2006-10-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

$375 million to buy IncesiveMedia
Incisive Media, owner of network of different web sites including several popular ones such as Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies Conferences agreed to a $375Million (USD) buyout deal with Apex Partners on last Thursday.As reported today by Search Engine Strategies Social Coordinator and PubCon Director Joseph Morin, Incisive Media CEO, Tim Weller made approximately $20.8Million on the deal. Earlier this month, Search Engine Watch editor Danny Sullivan stunned the search marketing world with his announcement he was leaving Incisive and thus stepping down as Search Engine Watch editor and SES conference coordinator as of December 2006.We think it is not the typical web 2.0 like deal we are witnessing lately and aside the fact that the price represents 20 times their earnings on average, if we got it correctly, is pretty good deal, yet their entire network of web properties are considered used up on the web, i.e. no room for father growth, which to justify this price. No web 2.0 buzz around which to take these properties to the next level and so on.Apex Partners is a 30-year old global private equity investment group with holdings in the tech, telecom, retail, consumer services, media, healthcare and financial services sectors. It holds over $20Billion in capital and investments.Some quotes below:“We feel the next phase in the company's development would be better realized as a well-backed private company, rather than by remaining on the quoted markets," Stephen Grabiner, a partner of Apex Partners, said in a press statement.

2006-09-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

$18 billion for web advertising
A market research conducted and released these days by Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers reveals that this year (2006) the money spent for online advertising is going to be around the incredible number of $18 billion.What grabbed our attention in this study is the fact that it went out in a moment when Yahoo! announced weakness in advertising revenues from automobile and financial firms, two key sectors in marketing.Money earned from Internet advertising is crucial for many top internet companies including Google. In one of our postings few days ago, we pointed out that Yahoo’s decline in ad revenues might not be victory for Google’s ad earnings and in our vision it might have been caused by a large number of small to mid level contextual players entering the web arena.Our big question today is: how much of the money meant to be spent this year for online advertising will go for contextual ads?

2006-09-27T17:06:00.000-07:00

VCs start to like web 2.0
A Dow Jones research subsidiary has just published a report on Web 2.0 venture capital funding, and it contains a few interesting finds. Out of $13 billion in VC investments in the first half of 2006, only $262 million went to Web 2.0 companies and projects, yet it represents a significant growth for that particular niche.First of all we’d like to comment a bit on what is believed to be Web 2.0-based venture. Many people do think and believe that any of the following should be considered Web 2.0-like “a dynamic interface facilitating participation through such methods as user-created content, networking, and collaboration. Applications used include podcasting, tagging, blogs, social networking, mashups, and wikis. Technologies used in these applications include: AJAX, RSS, SOA, CSS, XHTML, Atom, and rich Internet applications."In earlier publications on this blog, we pointed out that no technological aspect solely names a project Web 2.0, but in our view the conceptual vision also brings web 2.0 nuances and in some instances is even more important than simply putting AJAX functionality on your home page.This year is on pace to double or maybe even triple those amounts, and the average deal size has grown from $3.9 million to $4.4 million and the trend shows that since 2002 the VC deals with web 2.0 companies continues to grow year after year.What is interesting here to be noted is the fact that more and more web 2.0 ventures are getting bought out from larger companies rather than going public - known to be the normal approach by the Venture Capitalists.What we know so far is that no prominent and popular web 2.0-like company is currently publicly traded on NASDAQ and perhaps any of the next years might change that fact.Unlike in the nineties when any even-little-promising web based company was going public it seems that today’s successful business strategy is to do acquisitions, mergers and buy outs rather than going for an IPO.What makes us think this way is that we have witnessed many super popular web sites from the web 2.0-era getting acquired over the past 2 years instead of pursuing an IPO on their own. Even now we are up to several highly expected acquisitions such as YouTube’s and Facebook’s.

2006-09-27T13:22:00.000-07:00

Yahoo’s Massive Marketing Campaign
This week Yahoo is set to rollout an onslaught of integrated television, radio, cinematic and online advertising which will focus on its new Yahoo Homepage, Yahoo Mail Beta and Yahoo Answers; among other offerings.
According to a Reuters story, the campaign’s theme will center on life; with and without Yahoo. Allen Olivio, Yahoo’s VP of Global Brand Marketing told Reuters that the campaign is going to be the largest marketing push that the company has made in two years.
The integrated advertising blitz will also feature user and film school generated ads along with a Dunkin Donuts coffee giveaway campaign.
More :
The U.S. television spots, which were produced with Soho Square and OgilvyOne Worldwide, begin on prime-time TV on Thursday, Sept. 21. They will air on professional baseball games, MTV and late-night comedy shows.
New ads will run in major U.S. markets on radio, in 21,000 cinemas and on online sites in the coming months. Television and radio ads will only run in the United States, Olivo said. Other elements of the campaign will be localized to run in 14 international markets.
Will this increase usage of Yahoo search?
Unlike the previous MSN Search (now Live.com) and current Ask.com campaign, Yahoo’s new campaign may just let Yahoo Search ride shotgun during this campaign as more ‘marketable’ services such as Answers & Mail may drive more registered users, who will later trickle into search since Yahoo’s services are all,in one form or another, search driven.

2006-09-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

Rotating Google AdSense with Related Links?
A recent post on the Inside AdSense blog suggests running the Google Related Links publisher tool on your site and rotating it with Google AdSense. The basic theory behind the suggestion is that regular users of a site will naturally become attracted to the relevant video, news, and search content served via Google Related Links, and that by sometimes rotating in AdSense, one may benefit monetarily from that same space.

2006-09-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

Google Promoting Google Base Listings in Product Searches
In preparation for the online holiday shopping season, Google plans to integrate Google Base into its main web search results.
According to information a Google official shared with those attending the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) Summit, Google will be serving an alternative Google Base search box when Google users search for specific products on Google.
The result of such Google Base Box searches will all be generated by merchants who have indexed their products in Google Base (formerly Froogle).
Brian Smith of Comparison Engines adds that there has been a natural progression at Google to further implement Google Base generated results in product searches:
Google’s been making a lot of moves to prepare for the holiday shopping season: removing Froogle from the homepage, ramping up Checkout, adding simple reporting to Google Base, adding attribute refinements to Google Base, and now it seems the company will be driving shoppers to Google Base (or put correctly, whenever a search is done for a product this holiday season, Google will show shoppers a second search box which will take them to Google Base results).
Simply put, Google Base listings are now more important than ever and Google will continue to push its Google Base merchant listings to its users who are ready to compare and purchase products online.
And just how do you make sure that your products are being found on Google Base? Easy… Optimize!
Brian adds his input on Google Base Optimization :
Google Base happens to be the only shopping search engine which allows merchants to define their own attributes (optional fields).
If you want better results on the shopping engines, try optimizing your feed - it’s no longer good enough to just post all your products and expect your listings to be found.
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

2006-09-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

LinkedWords.com seems pretty good at some other aspects too such as the ability to get contextually linked from tens, hundreds up to millions of words, phrases and sentences as the only cap is your site’s size…or in other words, how many linked words can your site get contextually linked with LinkedWords.com

2006-09-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

Posted on September 26th, 2006By Erin Teeling in Other, Web 2.0, Website review
Here's a riddle for you: What do the Internet and the real estate market have in common?
Answer: they're both eking all they can out of "Web 2.0" hysteria.
Recently, we've written many entries explaining the Web 2.0 craze and how it has affected everything from social groups to newspapers to politics. What we haven't discussed yet is how the Web is affecting the US real estate market and the way everyday people buy their homes.
As in many other industries, the Web is helping home buyers and sellers alike cut out the filter of the media and other top-down information and marketing services. With the emergence of real estate websites and blogs, home buyers and sellers can throw away the classified and real estate sections of their newspapers. They can forget the phone number of the local real estate agent. And most of all, they can take an active role in finding the home of their dreams by themselves.

2006-09-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

150,000 Sites link to LinkedWords.com
We wish to thank to all sites that linked to LinkedWords.com in the first weeks of its existence, many thanks to all!Here we will try to publish all sites that linked to us... although according to Yahoo, there are more than 158,000 places on the web currently linking to LinkedWords..comhere we go with the first 50... more to come...~~~~~~

2006-09-27T08:12:00.000-07:00

LinkedWords.com vs. Trackbacks, Link Exchange and Contextual Ad Networks
It seems the popular blog’s track backs technique, the old link exchange programs and the trendy contextual ad networks are having a new and, as it seems, better equivalent/alternative called LinkedWords.com, which is 38-million-page size web 2.0-based contextual platform. Here people do contextual linking of English words, phrases and whole sentences within the context of the content and in return the linked area gets contextual listing at LinkedWords.com with contextual link back to the page where the contextually linked words reside on… It can successfully be used on every type of content page from forums and blogs to static or dynamically generated web pages… two way of contextuality!Unlike the traditional track back where the original article might get contextual mention within the content of the new blog’s post while the track back link in return does not typically get any contextual link at all, LinkedWords gives two way of contextuality, if a word or phrase is contextually linked within the publisher’s content, the same publisher gets contextual mention/listing at LinkedWords.com together with static, permanent and life-long contextual link back to the linked content area…LinkedWords.com is not only challenging the track backs blog tactics but it also puts serious question about the existence of the traditional link exchange programs…we all know that simple link exchange is something that brings little to no results at all for the sites participated.. nor 3 way linking or one way linking do the work…what is important is the contextual level of the links that point to your site…this is where LinkedWords looks to be good enough at…A simple question pops up into my mind: if enough number of English words, phrases and sentences get contextually linked all over the web through the LinkedWords.com’s platform, will people still use the contextual ad networks like Google AdWords? Advertisers now use these ad networks with the only goal to appear contextually within the context of the content on a given page and they spend serious money to get there…so, what if there is a way for the publishers to appear contextually on millions of linked words all over the web within the content of millions of pages from Sport to Science and Politics and get there free of charge, life long.LinkedWords.com seems pretty good at some other aspects too such as the ability to get contextually linked from tens, hundreds up to millions of words, phrases and sentences as the only cap is your site’s size…or in other words, how many linked words can your site get contextually linked with LinkedWords.com..Well, people would say, LinkedWords is pretty new site and compared to the old and popular link exchange sites, not even to mention Google, it might not get the chance to get any further, but a 38-million-page web 2.0 platform sounds pretty serious to me and in my view can easily put out of business any small link-exchange site, undermine the mid level ones and rise questions upon the contextual ad networks’ giants, you decide for yourself..We’ll see what happens and how far LinkedWords.com can go...More can be read over the following places:Yahoo News PR Web MSN News Moneyspecial.de HighBeam CNN Money Canada.com EPR Network TechRepublic ZDNet
posted by NextNetBlogger at 6:54 AM

2006-09-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

THIS IS INTERESTING...................................................

LinkedWords (www.LinkedWords.com), new approach to finding and managing information on the web entirely based on grammatical, meaningful and contextual basis launches. Through its innovative contextual platform it provides web publishers with unique way to do contextual linking of words. By doing contextual linked words across millions of web documents, content areas and web pages we help common users contextually find the information they look for just on demand, at the right place and time.It represents a unique concept developed upon an innovative, WEB 2.0-based contextual platform, which generally intends to help both the common web users by providing them with contextually relevant web information on demand, anywhere on the web and the web publishers on the other side by helping them appear on contextually incorporated linked words within the context of the content found on documents and pages around the web. It is community driven, expandable on demand, ever evolving huge directory tree-like architecture where anyone can create unlimited number of contextual listings, suggest and create main categories, sub-categories and as many keyword-, key phrase- and sentence-based pages as necessary, dynamically change the listings position by voting, all this in real time, yet monitored by content editors.Unlike many popular contextual advertising networks meant for paying advertisers only, LinkedWords is freely open for all type and size of websites and is not showing java-based contextual ads based on the context of a given page. Instead of showing ads, it provides contextually precise web information only when significant interest is demonstrated by the web user and namely upon clicking on the linked words, this way avoiding the mouse over pop-up messages. Currently the platform has more than 38,000,000 and growing number of unique words, phrases and sentences based pages and categories related to every topic possible on the life, which anyone can use to get contextually linked with. Invented by Oleg Lazarov, part of Intelum, a private entrepreneurial group of e-business brainstormers and inventors since 1995, it now has, through the licensing agreement with EXIM Internet Group, Inc. signed in May but presently still subject to final shareholder ratification, access to marketing offices located in Mountain View, California, and European IT Center.Conceptually the project originated in 1998, while the major work started out back in 2000 with an extensive R&D over the internet. Later in November 2004 the platform began alpha testing and since June 2006 is fully functional in beta on the web.The platform’s mission is to grammatically, meaningfully and contextually hyperlink millions of words, phrases and sentences across pages, documents and content areas available on the web, which is believed to result in much simpler way to find and manage the information on the web, which by itself is expected to be beneficial to both sides of the web - the common web users and the web publishers respectively.For more information, please visit: http://linkedwords.com