1 Comment on Adventures In Keyword Ad Matching – The Osama Edition
Adventures In Keyword Ad Matching – The Osama Edition
Found by my colleague David Grubb from HP:…
Found by my colleague David Grubb from HP:
Category: Random, But Interesting
Building A New Map And I Need Your Help: What Are The Key Categories of Data In Today’s Network Economy?
Many of you probably remember the "Points of Control" Web 2 Summit Map from last year, it was very well received. Hundreds of thousands of folks came to check it out, and the average engagement time was north of six minutes per visitor. It was a really fun way…
Many of you probably remember the “Points of Control” Web 2 Summit Map from last year, it was very well received. Hundreds of thousands of folks came to check it out, and the average engagement time was north of six minutes per visitor. It was a really fun way to make the conference theme come to life, and given the work that went into its creation, we thought it’d be a shame to retire it simply because Web 2 has moved on to a new theme.
As I posted last week, this year’s theme is “The Data Frame.” From my updated verbiage describing the theme:
Read MoreSet The Data Free, And Value Will Follow
(NB: Much has been written and said on this topic, and this post is in no way complete. We'll be exploring this issue and many others related to data at the Web 2 Summit this Fall). Perhaps the largest problem blocking our industry today is the retardation of consumer-driven…
(NB: Much has been written and said on this topic, and this post is in no way complete. We’ll be exploring this issue and many others related to data at the Web 2 Summit this Fall).
Perhaps the largest problem blocking our industry today is the retardation of consumer-driven data sharing. We’re all familiar with the three-year standoff between Google and Facebook over crawling and social graph data. Given the rise of valuable mobile data streams (and subsequent and rather blinkered hand wringing about samesaid) this issue is getting far worse.
Read MoreAnnouncing Web 2 Summit 2011: The Data Frame
If you've been reading my musings these past few months, you may have noticed an increasing fascination with data. Who owns it (the creator, the service, both? Who has access to it – ISPs? Device makers? Marketers? The government? And how are we as an industry leveraging data to…
If you’ve been reading my musings these past few months, you may have noticed an increasing fascination with data. Who owns it (the creator, the service, both? Who has access to it – ISPs? Device makers? Marketers? The government? And how are we as an industry leveraging data to create entirely new classes of services?
Well, expect a lot more musing here, because (finally!) we’re ready to announce the theme for the Web 2 Summit, 2011, and it’s this: The Data Frame. From my overview, just posted on the site:
Read MorePlato On Facebook
One of my first "big books" out of college was James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science and it still resonates with me, though it's been so long I think I'm due for a re-read. In any case, the next book up in my ongoing self-education is Gleick's The…
One of my first “big books” out of college was James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science
Early in the book, Gleick narrates the birth of the written word, which if you think about it (and he certainly has), is quite an extraordinary event. Turns out Plato, who was literate (and therefore quotable today), was not a fan of the written word. His mentor Socrates, Gleick reminds us, was illiterate. Well, OK, that’s not fair. Socrates wasn’t illiterate, he was, in Gleick’s words, a “nonwriter.” In any case, the passage that struck me is Plato speaking about the written word, quoted in “The Information”:
Read MoreA Funny Coincidence, or a Glimpse of the Future?
I took a ride today, and it was gorgeous as usual. That's not my story, but it's certainly a part of it. As I rode I used the AllSports GPS app on my iphone to track my progress (guys, if you're reading, your upload is busted). I knew I'd be…
I took a ride today, and it was gorgeous as usual. That’s not my story, but it’s certainly a part of it.
As I rode I used the AllSports GPS app on my iphone to track my progress (guys, if you’re reading, your upload is busted).
I knew I’d be able to see the whole ride on Google Maps later, which is cool. It also tracks stuff like distance, vertical, speed, etc. Tons of fun.
Read MoreGo Forth And Invest
This headline caught my eye this morning: US VCs Raised $7.7 Billion In Q1, Highest Influx In A Decade. Of course, if you've been following the news in our industry, you know there's a raging debate on over whether we are in "another bubble." This news will of course…
This headline caught my eye this morning: US VCs Raised $7.7 Billion In Q1, Highest Influx In A Decade. Of course, if you‘ve been following the news in our industry, you know there’s a raging debate on over whether we are in “another bubble.” This news will of course be interpreted as evidence that, in fact, we are back to bubbly levels…after all, one decade ago was when we had our last big hurrah, right? When VCs gave mostly incompetent founders way too much money, and the whole thing came crashing down around us.
Well, yes….and ten years ago, there was no way our industry, social culture, or technological infrastructure was ready for the big ideas VCs wanted to fund.
Read MoreWatch This Space: The Next Generation of “Social Networks” Won’t Look Like Facebook.
Lately in talks and private conversations, I've been thinking out loud about the role of Facebook in our lives. It's an extraordinary service (and company), and deserves its extraordinary valuation. But its approach to our "social graph" is limiting, as I and others have pointed out quite a bit. While…
Lately in talks and private conversations, I’ve been thinking out loud about the role of Facebook in our lives. It’s an extraordinary service (and company), and deserves its extraordinary valuation. But its approach to our “social graph” is limiting, as I and others have pointed out quite a bit.
While in Mexico I had the chance to sit with a couple of entrepreneurs who have an idea I feel is deeply *right* about social networking, and it couldn’t be further from how Facebook works today. I can’t outline what the idea was, but I can say that it hit the same nerve, that we are on the precipice of entirely new ways of thinking about our relationship to others as leveraged over digital platforms, and while Facebook may well be the oxygen or the landmass of this ecosystem, it won’t be the entire ecosystem itself.
To that end, this piece in TNW hits on some parts of what I’m on about. In it, the author writes:
Read MoreGuy’s Enchantment
I'm a Guy Kawasaki fan, so this isn't really a "review" as much as an appreciation for his new book Enchantment. I read it over this weekend, it's the kind of book you could skim in an hour, or spend a lot of time with. I fell somewhere in…
I’m a Guy Kawasaki fan, so this isn’t really a “review” as much as an appreciation for his new book Enchantment. I read it over this weekend, it’s the kind of book you could skim in an hour, or spend a lot of time with. I fell somewhere in the middle, stopping every so often to consider his advice and apply it to situations I find myself in all the time. (Disclosure: Guy works with my company FM in various ways, but I’m writing this mainly because Guy, in his enchanting way, asked me to blog my thoughts here.)
Enchantment is, in essence, a book of simple advice for succeeding in business, and I found myself agreeing with most of it. Guy is a folksy writer and he loves simple anecdotes, the book is full of them. I rolled my eyes when he encouraged us to “make a checklist,” or to smile when meeting someone, and smile with integrity at that. But he’s right, and I realized that every time I see Guy, or see pictures of him, he’s got the real deal smile working, and it really does work to put whoever he’s meeting into an open frame of mind.
Read MoreGoogle “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…
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.”
Read More