Month: April 2006

Fathom Update

A couple of comments in my Tuesday post about Fathom got stuck in my junk folder, and I just cleared them. One of them was from Matt McMahon, at Fathom. He responds to the questions raised in the comments, so I wanted to point you to that…….

A couple of comments in my Tuesday post about Fathom got stuck in my junk folder, and I just cleared them. One of them was from Matt McMahon, at Fathom. He responds to the questions raised in the comments, so I wanted to point you to that….

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Dinner with Elliot Schrage

Last night I finally got a chance to sit down with Elliot Schrage, who was recently (well, six months ago) named VP of Global Communications and Public Affairs for Google. I'd been looking forward to meeting him – I've worked closely with his brother, author Michael Schrage, in the…

Elliot-1Last night I finally got a chance to sit down with Elliot Schrage, who was recently (well, six months ago) named VP of Global Communications and Public Affairs for Google. I’d been looking forward to meeting him – I’ve worked closely with his brother, author Michael Schrage, in the past, and more to the point, I was intrigued to find out more about the fellow who would be responsible for shepherding Google’s brand from Cute One Note Service to Massive Global Player. Elliot knows global issues – he was previously SVP for Global Affairs at Gap and a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He got his trial by fire just recently when he had to testify before a group of ornery Congressfolk on the issue of China.

The dinner was off the record, so I can’t really report the details of what we discussed, but I can say that I found Elliot frank, engaging, and self deprecating – but not overly so. He understands the essence of Google’s major challenge – becoming the company the world already expects it to be. As I’ve written elsewhere, I believe the Google brand is in need of message clarification – most folks still see it as that “Aha!” service that changed how they search the Web, but increasingly, it’s also the brand that does deals with Sony Pictures to promote personalized homepages. Clearly, brand strategy is on Schrage’s mind.

David Krane, director of corporate communications at Google and a major champion of my book inside the company, also joined us. Having been at the company for a long time, David is something of a bridge between the past and the future of the Google brand. Both seemed deeply engaged in what struck me as the right questions for the company. I’m glad I had a chance to sit down with them before finishing that last chapter of my paperback. Oh, shit, that was due last month….I better get back to writing…

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Interesting New Google Results Test

Check this out. Thanks, reader Doug. "Search this site" is integrated into the results, allowing a searcher to drill down into a particular site, right there in the SERPs. Interesting….

Check this out. Thanks, reader Doug.

Googleexp1

“Search this site” is integrated into the results, allowing a searcher to drill down into a particular site, right there in the SERPs. Interesting.

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Another Q&A: Toni Schneider of OddPost, Yahoo, and Now Automattic

This is from my Biz 2 column, which just posted on CNNMoney. From it: So you've left Yahoo, with thousands of employees, to run a company with–how many people? "There's five of us." In the Valley, some entrepreneurs like to build things and run them. Others like to build…

Toni S

This is from my Biz 2 column, which just posted on CNNMoney.

From it:

So you’ve left Yahoo, with thousands of employees, to run a company with–how many people?



“There’s five of us.”

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Et Al

Yahoo earnings met expectations. Semel's message, apparently: We're bigger than Google. There's a brewing controversy in SEM land over Google indexes AdSense URLs. At issue – a sense that Google's organic crawler should stay clear of Google's AdSense crawler. Matt Cutts of Google responds here. I'm hearing rumors that…

Yahoo earnings met expectations. Semel’s message, apparently: We’re bigger than Google.

There’s a brewing controversy in SEM land over Google indexes AdSense URLs. At issue – a sense that Google’s organic crawler should stay clear of Google’s AdSense crawler. Matt Cutts of Google responds here.

I’m hearing rumors that Google is going to make an integration/mashup play in the Enterprise space. Wait, Paul has the news.

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A Frank Interview With Jim Lanzone

You may recall my interview with Gary Flake, which ran earlier this month. I titled that "A Frank Interview With…" and mentioned that it would be one of a series, and just to show I'm not slacking off, here's the second edition. This time our victim is Jim Lanzone,…

LanzoneYou may recall my interview with Gary Flake, which ran earlier this month. I titled that “A Frank Interview With…” and mentioned that it would be one of a series, and just to show I’m not slacking off, here’s the second edition.

This time our victim is Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Ask.com. I’ve known Jim for quite a while, and always appreciated his passion for defending, well, the underdog. Read on to see what I mean…..

Google recently acknowledged that it finds the approach Ask has taken with Zoom at least worthy of a hire. What do you make of that?

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The Keyword Index Is Out: $1.39, On Avg.

Fathom's quarterly index is out, and prices "eased" a bit (3%). Average keyword price is $1.39. From the release: Following on the Q4 2005 holiday season, the drop in bids was not surprising given the seasonal nature of advertising. Overall, the average bid has increased 1.4 percent since the…

Fathom’s quarterly index is out, and prices “eased” a bit (3%). Average keyword price is $1.39. From the release:

Following on the Q4 2005 holiday season, the drop in bids was not surprising given the seasonal nature of advertising.

Overall, the average bid has increased 1.4 percent since the September 2004 inception of the KPI when the average bid was $1.37. Although prices often vary dramatically day to day, average bid prices have settled in to a predictable range.

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Google, Sony And Da Sponsorship Code

When news of this broke a week or so ago, I thought "Well, it was about time Google started to play ball with the movie folks, the way Yahoo has for years." Sure, it's interesting that Google is finally jumping into the cross promotion pool – this ain't a…

Goog Dav

When news of this broke a week or so ago, I thought “Well, it was about time Google started to play ball with the movie folks, the way Yahoo has for years.” Sure, it’s interesting that Google is finally jumping into the cross promotion pool – this ain’t a big Adwords buy, after all – but we all expected this day to come. Then I got a call from Marissa Mayer at Google, on Friday, with promise of an embargoed story. Usually Marissa is calling folks like me when a major new product is launching, like Fusion, or Finance. But this time, it was not a product, it was a promotional alliance between Sony Pictures and Google.

Now, this doesn’t strike me as big news, at least, not initially. Sure, Google and Sony are teaming up in a unique way, combining their brands to promote the Da Vinci Code. And sure, it’s being done in a particularly “Googley” way – with puzzles and codes and a contest that will ultimately crown a grand prize winner just as the movie is coming out. But….let’s consider this for a minute.

This marks Google’s first major step into the world of pure co-branded promotion, at least here in the US (we saw the Nike soccer site just a few weeks ago as well, but that was, well, soccer. For movie obsessed Americans, it didn’t have quite the same impact, and it didn’t have the same profile that this one has, for more on that, keep reading). And while this seems pretty tame – Sony is paying Google for all that traffic, right? – the deal is in fact more complicated. Because Marissa assured me that no money is changing hands here. In other words, Google feels it is getting as much from this as Sony is. Why?

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Linden on MSFT and Killing Google

He makes the point, made before but which bears repeating, that MSFT can do the most harm by really going after AdSense. Which it has clearly not yet done. In fact, it doesn't even seem on the horizon (AdCenter is, but that's only for MSN…)…

He makes the point, made before but which bears repeating, that MSFT can do the most harm by really going after AdSense. Which it has clearly not yet done. In fact, it doesn’t even seem on the horizon (AdCenter is, but that’s only for MSN…)

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