Month: April 2006

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Engine?

Not I, sez Mr. Parsons. An interesting AdAge article. From it: The Time Warner chief said the two search-engine giants are overturning the old realities of advertising and media and are "very good for the content side of our business because they provide new ways to reach more people…

Wolf

Not I, sez Mr. Parsons. An interesting AdAge article. From it:

The Time Warner chief said the two search-engine giants are overturning the old realities of advertising and media and are “very good for the content side of our business because they provide new ways to reach more people with more content.”

“I think they present an interesting challenge to the distribution side of our business — the cable side of our business,” he said. “But that challenge is not imminent and I see ways that the two can actually work together to provide consumers with an enhanced set of offerings that can cross-promote each other.”

1 Comment on Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Engine?

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Reader Joe Writes…

Reader Joe writes: If we assume that 84% of the comments are spam, 10% are irrelevant, 5% are stupid and 0.9% are marginally psychotic it leaves only one comment in a thousand that I need to be reading….

< ![CDATA[Reader Joe writes: If we assume that 84% of the comments are spam, 10% are irrelevant, 5% are stupid and 0.9% are marginally psychotic it leaves only one comment in a thousand that I need to be reading. ]]>

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Akismet For MT: Death to Spam

If that headline means anything to you, then rejoice. It's long been known that Akismet, WordPress's remarkable anti-comment spam technology, was the best out there. Moveable Type users (like me) salivated at the thought of having Akismet-like functionality on our sites. The technology works in an AI like fashion,…

Akismet

If that headline means anything to you, then rejoice. It’s long been known that Akismet, WordPress’s remarkable anti-comment spam technology, was the best out there. Moveable Type users (like me) salivated at the thought of having Akismet-like functionality on our sites. The technology works in an AI like fashion, learning from the edges – bloggers like us – what is spam, and what is not. It’s elegant, and it scales.

Well, thanks to the folks at Automattic (and a big assist from Scot Hacker, Searchblog’s native web jockey), it’s now possible to run Akismet as a Moveable Type plugin. Searchblog was among the first to test the Akismet plugin, and it is working beautifully. Sure, you’ll see spam on this site from time to time. But as soon as I label it “junk” in my MT backend, it’ll never show up again. Yeeehaw!

PS – Akismet tracks spams blocked on its home page. According to those figures, 84 percent of all comments left in the blogosphere are spam. Holy crap.

27 Comments on Akismet For MT: Death to Spam

Webmetrics Guru writes…

Webmetricsguru writes: I don't have a problem with Google going full out and declaring itself a Portal; people's needs are constantly evolving and what made sense 10 years ago (concentrate only on search results) is not applicable anymore….

< ![CDATA[Webmetricsguru writes: I don’t have a problem with Google going full out and declaring itself a Portal; people’s needs are constantly evolving and what made sense 10 years ago (concentrate only on search results) is not applicable anymore.]]>

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When WIll MyYahoo RSS Go Full Text?

Yahoo Publisher Network has its own blog now, and I like watching it to keep up with what is sure to be a big year for Yahoo as it rolls out a more full throated response to AdSense. And most of you know I'm also pretty interested in new…

MyyahoorssbbYahoo Publisher Network has its own blog now, and I like watching it to keep up with what is sure to be a big year for Yahoo as it rolls out a more full throated response to AdSense. And most of you know I’m also pretty interested in new ad models generally, and RSS specifically. So this headline on the new site: “So What’s All This About Ads in RSS” certainly caught my eye.

The post explains the basics of RSS, and how folks who publish feeds can make some extra revenue by adding Yahoo RSS ads (YPN text links for now) into their feeds. The post explains how RSS readers work, using examples like NewsGator, Bloglines, SharpReader, Firefox’s Live Bookmarks and others. These are all full text readers, so Yahoo’s RSS ads will show up in them (they appear at the end of a post).

But the problem is this: One of the largest RSS readers in the world is My Yahoo. In fact, in the post, Yahoo promotes it’s “Add to My Yahoo!” RSS feature as a great way for a publisher to promote their RSS feeds. Yet My Yahoo’s implementation of RSS is crippled: It only pulls headlines and snippets. It strips out URLs and ads. In other words, it won’t show the very ads that Yahoo is promoting (or any others, for that matter).

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5 Comments on When WIll MyYahoo RSS Go Full Text?

And We Thought It Would Never Come

Google Calendar is here. Now, I don't want to go on a random walk, but it's time we called a spade a spade. Google is a portal, plain and simple. The company made its name, its brand, and its money on being one thing – a non judgmental service…

Googcal

Google Calendar is here. Now, I don’t want to go on a random walk, but it’s time we called a spade a spade. Google is a portal, plain and simple. The company made its name, its brand, and its money on being one thing – a non judgmental service that quickly moved you from intent – your search query – to content – someone else’s page. Now, it’s moved quite systematically – with Base, Finance, Mail, and everything else – to being a company that is clearly about monetizing its core revenue asset – AdWords – on anything google.com related. That, my friends, is a portal. It’s a version 2.0 portal, but it’s a portal.

Now, is this a bad thing? Well, depends on your point of view. I think this is inevitable, and the next phase will be about traction with these new services. You don’t have to use Calendar, or Mail, but when you type “GOOG” or “YHOO” into the simple interface of Google these days, your first choice is now a Google page, not someone else’s. That’s a fundamental change, worth noting.

18 Comments on And We Thought It Would Never Come

Yahoo Says: Map This

Yahoo rolls out higher resolution satellite images than Google, it claims. And lots of international stuff. And updated developer APIs. Here's where I am right now as I type this. One meter resolution! Looks like game on here…….

Maps Sat YahooYahoo rolls out higher resolution satellite images than Google, it claims. And lots of international stuff. And updated developer APIs. Here’s where I am right now as I type this. One meter resolution!

Looks like game on here….

10 Comments on Yahoo Says: Map This

All Good

The response to my search this blog post was pretty overwhelming, the box isn't moving. meanwhile, I am, hitting LA for some great meetings around FM and then over to Arizona for some time with family during my kids' spring break. Posting will be sporadic……

The response to my search this blog post was pretty overwhelming, the box isn’t moving. meanwhile, I am, hitting LA for some great meetings around FM and then over to Arizona for some time with family during my kids’ spring break. Posting will be sporadic…

2 Comments on All Good

Search This Blog

So I'm thinking about moving "Search This Blog" from it's prominent spot on the left. Why? Well, I think perhaps there are other, more important features, like a list of recent posts or perhaps a sponsor unit, that might be better over there. Before I do, how many of…

Search This BlogSo I’m thinking about moving “Search This Blog” from it’s prominent spot on the left. Why? Well, I think perhaps there are other, more important features, like a list of recent posts or perhaps a sponsor unit, that might be better over there. Before I do, how many of you use it on a regular basis, and like where it is?

28 Comments on Search This Blog