Quick, what’s the second-stickiest site on the Web, has 25 million members worldwide, and gets 2.2 billion pageviews per month?
Dec 302005
Dec 272005
Wikis have been an interesting form of community – they always seem to hover between accomplishment and anarchy. The recent blowup at Wikipedia was an example of the potential fallibility of wikis; a user “jokingly” inserted a false reference about another individual, and the entry remained in the online encyclopedia for months. In » Flap over Wikipedia won’t slow down enterprise Wikis, Ross Mayfield asserts thaqt the corporate environment will find wikis increasingly useful tools for collaboration.
Dec 242005
Most web marketers have a LOT of information about their customers. Web analytics are extemely powerful, and give quantitative marketers far more data than what is available from traditional broadcast media. But what if you could get inside the heads of your customers, and see what’s happening at the most basic level? That’s the topic of the new Neuromarketing Blog. The main topic of the blog is using the tools of modern neuroscience for marketing and sales.
Dec 212005
We’ve known for a while that what you say online can get you fired – apparently, it can get you convicted, too. In this case, a teen confessed in his blog to being to blame for a fatal accident. Despite his later removing the entry, the end result was a conviction for the crime.
Dec 212005
It may seem strange to talk about the death of DVDs even as their sales are growing and higher capacity formats are fighting for market share, but if you are in the movie rental business you really have to think about what will happen when people have sufficient bandwidth to download a movie as easily as they download an MP3-format song today. Fiber to the home is coming, albeit not quickly enough, and that’s going to change the way entertainment is delivered in this country.
Dec 202005
In » Reverse Greenmail: Google, AOL, and Carl Icahn, I suggested that Time Warner shareholder and long-time corporate raider Carl Icahn might have written the script for extracting a $1-billion greenmail investment from Google. Apparently, Icahn is not happy. No doubt from his standpoint as a big shareholder looking for a quick return, a full cashout of AOL in a Microsoft purchase would have been preferable to a the strategic arrangement negotiated with Google. One thing the Google deal accomplishes is effectively keeping AOL off the auction block, since the major potential buyers (Microsoft or perhaps Yahoo) are most interested in the potential search and content advertising.
Years ago, the practice of greenmail became popular. A corporate raider would buy a small minority stake in a public company, make lots of noise about tender offers and replacing management, and allow his shares to be repurchased by the firm for a handsome premium. The deal would usually include an agreement that the raider would stay away for a period of years. This seemed so much like extortion that the practice was dubbed “greenmail”. One famous greenmailer is Carl Icahn; he’s considered by some to have invented, or at least perfected, the practice. Icahn happens to be a Time Warner shareholder currently demanding that TW do something with its poorly performing AOL property.
Dec 192005
As reported by MSN.com in Police blotter: Nude ‘profile’ yields Yahoo suit, Yahoo won a case in which the plaintiff had harassing information posted about her. The woman’s ex-boyfriend posted nude photos of her and her actual contact information in a Yahoo member profile, and conversed with other Yahoo members pretending to be her.
A few weeks ago, the web’s most popular webmaster and SEO forum, Webmasterworld.com, made an abrupt and complete exit from Google’s search index after owner Brett Tabke implemented a set of measures to keep robots and spiders from capturing the site’s content. One of these measures included a ban on all bots in the site’s robots.txt file. While Yahoo and MSN retained many of the site’s pages in their search index, Google offers webmasters a “removal” feature. A webmaster can exclude individual pages, sections of a site, or even all site content in the website’s robots.txt file, and then tell Google to check the robots.txt file and remove excluded content from its index. This is a useful feature if a webmaster discovers that Google has indexed confidential content, or if a site reorganization has left Google with incorrect pages in its index. Google’s security for this procedure is simple: only the owner of a site can edit its robots.txt file; there is no further test to see if the individual requesting the removal is, in fact, from the site itself. While Tabke had no intention of immediately purging all Webmasterworld.com pages from Google, as soon as the completely exclusionary robots.txt file was in place, various other individuals submitted removal requests. Google dutifully cleared its index of all the pages in a day or so.
Dec 152005
In a discussion at TechRepublic, Wardriving – Legal or not?, IT pros debate the legality and ethics of “wardriving”. The practice involves looking for an open wireless access point, sometimes by driving around in a car with a wireless laptop computer.