Charlene Li has a very interesting write-up on Verizon's Pay For Call (PFC) offering. Of particular interest:
- Provisioning of local vs. toll-free numbers; the devil's in the details, and some smart product manager somewhere figured out that offering local businesses a phone number with a local exchange makes a lot of sense (nice!). OTOH, there are local businesses that one might call remotely (e.g., a florist in the town that I want flowers delivered to, stadiums/arenas, etc) that should consider toll-free vs. local carefully.
- Verizon plans to create generic category ads (e.g., "Taxi"), that redirects calls to the current high-PFC-bidder, from, and this is key, a single, unchanging number. As with Charlene, it's a big question in my mind if consumers will call a generic number... but the notion of re-intermediating your own marketplace is facinating...
- Verizon's getting into the arbitrage biz, buying clicks on Google to flow traffic at its PFC customers. This is fine so long as you don't mind sharing revenue with Google, but eventually you need a healthy portion of these people coming to you for free (SEO) or, better yet, directly. (Working at a search start-up, I undersand this in practice and principal.)
All in all, it looks like they're thinking and innovating, good signs indeed. Now where's the kick ass mapping?
A huge belated CONGRATULATIONS to Greg Sterling (one of the brightest lights in the search analyst space) on the birth of his second child.
Greg, since you started it with the comment about naming rights on eBay, I'm going to take the low road as I did with Pamela, and go with... George Patrick Sterling, or, GPS for short... because a) I can't think of a good search advertising TLA that ends in "S", and b), well, nothing says local search like GPS.
Alright, back to my day job where thankfully I'm not paid to be funny...
Deeje calls my attention to a post by Ted Schadler of Forrester (substituting while Charlene Li gets some much deserved R&R) on why PointCast (note the internal caps, folks! *smirk*) died.
Ted states, "Push exploded on the scene with Pointcast, landed faddishly on millions of desktops, and then just as quickly died away. (Of course, Push has been rehabilitated as RSS, but Push’s big problem -- content overload -- remains.)"
Ted, we'll have to disagree on this one. Prior to and after the Connections Channel (our open to all channel based on CDF, the precursor to RSS), PointCast users were limited to 10 channels (except in certain OEM and intranet uses, where the number was 11 or 12). I don't recall a single complaint from users about feeling "overwhelmed" by the amount of PointCast content they could gather; rather, it was IT admins complaining that users liked PointCast too much (i.e., that the app used too much bandwidth). Bandwidth saturation != end user content saturation.
That said, content saturation is a real problem and RSS/aggregation "enhances" it; I know, I just got finished scanning 7500 posts from the past 5 weeks. It happens with RSS, it happens at your local Chinese all-you-can-eat buffett, and it happens in TiVO equipped households. Ultimately, it's self inflicted and self-curing (though some very obvious functionality could make it all a lot easier to deal with).
Siliconbeat has solid coverage of Google's initial moves into print advertising.
This is intesting to me, because a) Overture had been talking about it for at least a year or two when I arrived on the scene in Jan 2003 and still hasn't done anything with it, b) it gives us a clearer picture of Google as Ad Agency, and c) there are many opportunities in reverse publishing (web to print) and syndication.
On the latter ('c'), it'll be interesting to watch for the tipping point wherein Yahoo, Google et al reverse publish their classified listings, ratings and reviews, etc, to print properties they partner with or acquire. The hunt's been on for a while; perhaps 2006 is the year?
Jeff has announced the first SDForum Search SIG event (on audio search), to be held 9/14/2005 at Yahoo!'s campus. I'm planning to attend, traffic and limited patience permitting.
Jeremy asks an interesting question in "How did you learn to search?"; actually, it reminds me of a piece that appeared on the Yahoo! Search Blog about a year ago (my response here). In it, he makes the case for teaching basic search skills (boolean operators and the like) as part of our K-12 curriculum; no argument here.
And I suppose the latter, all self interests exposed, is where I currently sit. There are certain domains that are of significant personal importance but beyond the scope of the education most of us have; health certainly falls into this category. Search engines with a semantic understanding of a topical space can, potentially, educate and guide me by putting my queries in context.
After all, a large part of the "search problem" goes beyond the blocking and tackling of advanced search UI manipulation; people simply don't know what they don't know, and it's hard to form a question when you don't know much about what you're searching for (and/or you don't know the words/jargon that "experts" use to write about the subject)! ;-)
Jeremy points to the Technorati Accelerator (via his link blog), a parody on Technorati's current interactive search response time issues.
A lot of folks have piled on to Technorati while the company has struggled to keep up with its (and its market's) hyper-growth. Perhaps there's something behind it that I don't know (I've certainly never heard anyone complain about Technorati "arrogance" or the like), or, perhaps it's just user frustration.
Either way, just a reminder... it's really damn hard to build a business, product and team in a start-up environment (especially with Google, Yahoo & MSN seemingly hiring anyone with a pulse). Remember the stones you cast from the sidelines; you'll likely have a different perspecive when you're neck deep building your own start-up.
Some very, very interesting stats from ClickZ on the distribution of advertiser impressions (by advertiser and advertising category) amongst search engine marketers (SEM)... most notably, that eBay represents ~3% of all SEM impressions.
I've written before about eBay's reliance on SEM to acquire and reactivate its customers. It'll be interesting to see how eBay addresses this beyond buying properties with existing audiences.
Greg Sterling waxes poetic about the value of query refinement within search verticals.
Couldn't agree more. Semantic (vs. purely statistical) query refinement is a key differentiator for vertical search plays, and one that I'm certainly mindful of as we build our solution.
But I have to disagree with Greg that this is an alternative to user generated content. Knowing that a service provider says that s/he is open from 7AM to 7PM (et al) is critical; knowing that 9 out of 10 reviewers think the service is quick, friendly, helpful, etc addresses a different consumer need entirely.
Looks like a fun event. The photos are great; we can live vicariously through attendees. This one is my favorite; haven't seen the smiling Ofoto, err, Easyshare Gallery (barf) faces of Dave Geary, Lee Kirkpatrick and Kamran Moshenin in a long time... great shirt Kamran! ;-)
Deeje says (in discussing various UI treatments in Apple's current lineup) "Fonts serve no purpose other than to distinguish one set of characters from another."
Err, sorry bud, I'm not following you here. Of course font faces differ from one another in appearance (lest they have no reason to exist). But to say that Helvetica exists only to be different than Courier New misses the real reason(s) for font face variation; to improve readability in different sizes and mediums, to convey personality or emotion, to different uses (e.g., headline [traditionally sans-serif] vs. copy [traditionally serif]), etc.
UI variation should serve a purpose, even if that goal is simply to "be different".
A quick note that I will be attending John Battelle/O'Riley's Web 2.0 Conference October 5-7th here in SF (I guess that means I should note that I've also relo'ed to SF from SJ).
Please drop me an email or a comment if you plan to be there and want to connect. (I'll be there in my "official" capacity with Healthline vs. as an invited blogger.)
Analysis of online business and technology trends, including: Search and Directory, Digital Media, Social Networking, RSS, and E-commerce. Written by buzzhit!'sTony Gentile.
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