Monterey Bay Aquarium: Home Page
Been a long while since I've blogged. My personal reality hasn't been all that good as of late, some circumstantial, some my own doing. It was with that mindset that Diana and I chose to escape the sweltering heat of the valley last Friday to spend a day in sunny but comparatively mild Monetrey Bay.

The drive down was beautiful (well, at least once we'd reached the 156W) landing us in Monetrey just past noon after a lazy morning of minor errands. We immediately headed for the friendly and playful sea otters, watching them dive and play (it's amazing how long they can hold their breath). We spent the next several hours checking out the rest of the exhibits: sharks, octopi, jellies, tunas and so much more. Such a diversity of life, and... locomotion.

Eventually our bellies grumbled and our feet grew tired, so we took a scenic stroll from the aquarium to the old pier, stopping at all of the bay-side restaurants along the way to compare offerings. We eventually settled on happy hour margaritas and oster's rockefeller, before heading to a proper dinner at rappas at the end of the pier. As luck would have it, we were seated window side, and enjoyed a tasty dinner while watching the sea lions & otters play amidst the sail boats. Belly's content, we walked back as the sun set, glittering off the navy blue bay waters, and the windows of east-bay hotels we had stayed at in days past.

A beautiful day, to be sure.

BBC NEWS | Business | Potential hitch for Google float

Does failing to register options/shares that you granted to investors and employees, then offering to buy them back at pennies on the dollar, qualify as DOING NO EVIL?! How is it that Google isn't being taken to task for treating its employees this way?

Susan Mernit's Blog
My friend Susan Mernit, whom I respect, expressed her perspective on what it would take for online advertising to eclipse magazine advertising.

Unfortunately, her argument is based on two key points: 1) demographic data is necessary for precise targeting, and 2) demographic data is necessary to establish ROI.

Clearly, demographic data is valuable to advertisers. Such data provides a basis for understanding ones existing customers, and sourcing (i.e., lead generation) additional potential customers.

However, with the rise of search engine marketing (SEM), it has already been shown (to the tune of ~$2-$2.5B in CY2003) that a user's "intent" is more than sufficient for targeting. Hundreds of thousands of businesses large and small have continually spent more per click to capture user intent over the last few years, all of them implicitly understanding that they are segmenting online users into potential customers through the user's expression of intent through search keywords.

And guess what? These businesses are more than capable of understanding the ROI on their advertising spend; simply, the margin on sales to the converted subset of these leads, minus costs. In fact, internal calculations at Overture shows some businesses generating ROI approaching 8000% (yes, eight thousand percent). Much like phone books of old, online search is minting millionares left and right, comprised not only of those running the search co's, but those building their businesses through them. All without knowing age, gender, surveying, etc.

All of which is NOT to say that demographic data isn't valuable. In fact, a far more powerful advertising model, one that mixes intent, contextual setting, demographic, pyschographic (et al) targeting will emerge in the future (with pet projects already in the works at Tacoda, Overture and others).

But such complexity isn't necessary for online advertising to surpass magazines... all that is necessary is for SEM and similar solutions to be packaged appropriately for your average SMB.

Blogger crashed (losing all of the changes to the template format) while trying to republish ~600 blog posts to our domain. I've restored much of the template changes, but there's still some tweaking to be done. Fortunately, that won't stop new posts!

As I get serious about taking some time to pursue a few consulting engagements, I've put some effort into reworking my site (www.buzzhit.com), and have decided to move my blog to my domain (which I probably should have done soon after starting it).

It'll mean losing my page rank, but hopefully it won't mean losing YOU!

HTML readers, you can find me at: http://www.buzzhit.com/buzzblog.html

RSS (Atom) readers, full feeds are at: http://www.buzzhit.com/atom.xml

I hope you'll make the transition and visit often. Be well!