Month: March 2011

Google “Head End” Search Results: Ads as Content, Or…Just Ads?

Today I spoke at Sony HQ in front of some Pretty Important Folks, so I wanted to be smart about Sony's offerings lest anything obviously uninformed slip out of my mouth. To prepare I did a bunch of Google searches around Sony and its various products. Many of these…

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Today I spoke at Sony HQ in front of some Pretty Important Folks, so I wanted to be smart about Sony’s offerings lest anything obviously uninformed slip out of my mouth. To prepare I did a bunch of Google searches around Sony and its various products.

Many of these searches are what I call “head end” searches – a lot of folks are searching for the terms I put in, and they are doubly important to Google (and its advertising partners) because they are also very commercial in nature (not in my case, but in general.) Usually folks searching for “Sony Tablets” have some intent to purchase tablets in the near future, or at the very least are somewhere in what’s called the “purchase funnel.”

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+1: Google Figures Out a Way To Leverage Search.

Google today did something smart in social – they offered a human way to do something they had already offered – the ability to indicate your approval of a search result. Previously, you could push a result up or down, but that action was not social in nature. Now…

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Google today did something smart in social – they offered a human way to do something they had already offered – the ability to indicate your approval of a search result. Previously, you could push a result up or down, but that action was not social in nature. Now you can “+1” a search result, so as to indicate the result was good and/or valuable to you. That recommendation is then translated to others in your social graph.

Cool! But I sure wish it integrated with Twitter, at the very least. And man, it’d sure be powerful if it worked with Facebook. Wouldn’t it, now?! But from what I can tell, that will NEVER happen.

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Recent Signals

I've fallen down in my promise to RSS readers out there (all 250K+ of you). I told you I'd post summaries of my Signal work each week, and it's been more like each month. Well, here's an attempt to rectify my failure, below, the past seven Signals. I'll try…

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I’ve fallen down in my promise to RSS readers out there (all 250K+ of you). I told you I’d post summaries of my Signal work each week, and it’s been more like each month. Well, here’s an attempt to rectify my failure, below, the past seven Signals. I’ll try to do this more often.

Monday Signal: The Moral Corporation?

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Everbody Forgets About the Power of Intentional Declaration

I love that Facebook is testing real time conversational advertising. In short, the idea is that the right ad shows up on someone's Facebook page when they declare some intention. As the Ad Age coverage puts it: Users who update their status with "Mmm, I could go for some pizza…

I love that Facebook is testing real time conversational advertising. In short, the idea is that the right ad shows up on someone’s Facebook page when they declare some intention. As the Ad Age coverage puts it:

Users who update their status with “Mmm, I could go for some pizza tonight,” could get an ad or a coupon from Domino’s, Papa John’s or Pizza Hut….With real-time delivery, the mere mention of having a baby, running a marathon, buying a power drill or wearing high-heeled shoes is transformed into an opportunity to serve immediate ads, expanding the target audience exponentially beyond usual targeting methods such as stated preferences through “likes” or user profiles.

Sounds great, but hollow – kind of like a 4/4 beat missing a bass drum. And what’s the bass? It’s the consumer, of course.

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Why Color Matters: Augmented Reality And Nuanced Social Graphs May Finally Come of Age

I read with interest about Color, a new social photo app that was much in the news today. The main angle of coverage was the size of the pre-revenue company's funding – $41 million from Sequoia and Bain. Hell, the company isn't just pre-revenue, it's pre-product….at least for now….

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I read with interest about Color, a new social photo app that was much in the news today. The main angle of coverage was the size of the pre-revenue company’s funding – $41 million from Sequoia and Bain. Hell, the company isn’t just pre-revenue, it’s pre-product….at least for now. Tomorrow the actual product launches.

If it works as advertised, it may well be the first truly execution of augmented reality that truly scales.

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The Battles Continue

Look at these two headlines coming off my IWantMedia feed this morning. Sheesh. Talk about Points of Control…. we forgot to put the lawyers' offices on the map…….

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Look at these two headlines coming off my IWantMedia feed this morning. Sheesh. Talk about Points of Control…. we forgot to put the lawyers’ offices on the map….

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Intel’s Visual Life Contest

I've agreed to be a judge in Intel's Visual Life contest, the details of which can be found here. Intel has been a partner and supporter of both my work as well as Federated's for as long as I can remember, and I was honored to join my former…

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I’ve agreed to be a judge in Intel’s Visual Life contest, the details of which can be found here. Intel has been a partner and supporter of both my work as well as Federated’s for as long as I can remember, and I was honored to join my former partner Chas Edwards, among many others, as a judge of the content.

The contest invites folks to upload visuals of their life – either photos or videos – and will have HP prizes in multiple countries for four different categories. I’m looking forward to reviewing them all. The full rules can be found here. I’m a bit late to the game, entries are due in just a few days, so get on it!

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A Report Card on Web 2 and the App Economy

As I noted earlier in the week, I had the opportunity to speak at a GM conference today. I was asked to peer into the future of the "app world," and deliver any divinations I might discover. I like a challenge like this, as it forces me to weave any…

As I noted earlier in the week, I had the opportunity to speak at a GM conference today. I was asked to peer into the future of the “app world,” and deliver any divinations I might discover.

I like a challenge like this, as it forces me to weave any number of slender threads of my current thinking into a more robust and compact narrative.

Below is an updated version of a slide I presented today. As I thought through why I have a negative gut reaction to the world of apps as they currently stand, I realized it’s because they violate most of the original principles of what makes the web so great. And when I thought about what those principles are, I realized that a list already existed – in the opening presentation Tim O’Reilly and I gave at the first ever Web 2 Summit, in 2004.

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The Obama Valley Dinner: POTUS Got the Seating Chart Wrong

This one has bugged me for some time, but I've not had the time to write it. Now that I'm on a plane for the next four hours, and it has Wifi, I can finally get around to bitching out loud about the photo below: ' Now this photo was…

This one has bugged me for some time, but I’ve not had the time to write it. Now that I’m on a plane for the next four hours, and it has Wifi, I can finally get around to bitching out loud about the photo below:

obama valley dinner.png ‘

Now this photo was widely discussed when it was released by the White House, a few weeks ago. Folks speculated on who the people were that we couldn’t see (the woman with her back to us? The guy next to Zuckerberg?!), and while I may know who those folks are, that’s not my point.

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Pandora’s Facebook Box

(image) I flew to Detroit today, and thankfully Delta had wifi. Since I'll be speaking at a GM conference later in the week, and the fine folks from Pandora will be there, among others, I went and checked in on the site, which I'll admit I haven't visited in…

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(image) I flew to Detroit today, and thankfully Delta had wifi. Since I’ll be speaking at a GM conference later in the week, and the fine folks from Pandora will be there, among others, I went and checked in on the site, which I’ll admit I haven’t visited in some time (I still consume music the old fashioned way – I buy CDs and rip them to iTunes). Now, the theme of GM’s internal conference is all about “the app economy” and fortunately, lately I’ve found myself thinking a lot about this samesaid phenomenon. Given that, allow me to digress. As usual, I have no idea where this is going, but at least I know where it’s going to start: With my first visit to Pandora in some time.

Here’s what happened. Pandora has done a “deep integration” with Facebook since my last visit (yeah it’s been a while), meaning that when I showed up (and was logged into Facebook already), Pandora went ahead and filled out my profile using Facebook data. To the site’s credit (and I hope based on some terms of service from Facebook), the service notified me of this, and asked me if using my Facebook profile was OK.

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