Don Dodge frequently states that Yahoo can’t make money from their traffic because only search gives you a way to effectively target advertising. Michael at TechCrunch recently got sucked into this idea too.
It’s a nice theory - just a pity it’s totally wrong. Yahoo (and other portals) don’t make much money from their traffic because [...]
A short pointer to a post on my work blog: Taxonomy directed folksonomies.
If search is only 5% solved then searching for a hotel is most definitely in the 95% of unsolved problems. Below is a screenshot of the Google Search results for New York Hotel.
The extent of the problem is clear from the fact that the first organic search result isn’t even in New York.
Microsoft’s Live.com does [...]
Google Custom Search has recieved a lot of attention since its release. One thing I discovered while developing an implementation at work was exactly how customisable it is. It isn’t clear from the simple examples, but some of the more advanced examples and the documentation show how it is possible to do facet-based navigation of [...]
Comscore is a media measurement site similar to Hitwise or the Alexa site rankings. They do a decent job, but people are beginning to take their data way too seriously for the accuracy that their methodology delivers.
Essentially, they (like Alexa) rely on users installing software which monitors which sites they visit.
That methodology means your samples [...]
When I first heard the rumours of the Google/YouTube deal I didn’t like it. Now that it has gone though, I’m having second thoughts: they might have got a bargain.
Google were prepared to pay $900 million for 3 years of search advertising on MySpace, which makes $1.6 billion to own a site that gets (very [...]
Demitrious Kelly has an absolutely fascinating blog about operations in a modern web environment.
The whole thing is worth reading, but his comments on the use of Amazon EC2 is particularly compelling.
Traditional OPS VS Amazon AWS (part 1)
Traditional OPS VS Amazon AWS (part 2)
Traditional OPS VS Amazon AWS (part 3)
MySQL on Amazon EC2 (my thoughts)
Reading his [...]
One of the reasons I started this blog was to explore some more speculative ideas. Online Application Composition (OAC) is one of these ideas.
To some extent this idea this is inspired by Chris Anderson’s post on embedding Google Spreadsheet in a webpage. The real trigger, though, was Google’s release of the GData API for Google [...]
Greg and some other commentators have posted a few thoughts on how spam on Digg is becoming a problem
It should be pointed out that Netscape.com has an even bigger problem:
It takes less votes to get to the front page on Netscape
There are even more users of Netscape than Digg
Netscape users are often less experienced than [...]
I’ve written a piece on my work blog which may interest some readers: AttentionTrust: why not everything that seems like a good idea is. In it I argue that many of the principles set out by AttentionTrust.org are not the wonderful ideas they seem.
(Thanks also to my fellow antipodeian Richard MacManus for the link love [...]