Content Killer

By | November 22, 2011
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Good piece by Publishing 2.0 » (Google Is Killing the Economics of Content) on how Google’s AdSense is killing the internet by driving the creation of sites that exist solely to squeeze money from AdSense. Here’s how it works in brief, based on Robert Weisman’s piece in The Boston Globe :

A company amasses hundreds of thousands of Internet domain names — and not just silly names, but ones like photography.com, bookstore.com, or jobfinder.com — and then puts a few links on it that look like content but aren’t (new term: “content-light”) . Users go there by typing in the name (rather than searching on Google, as many users apparently do; another new term: “direct navigation”) and then click on AdSense links on the site. As Scott Karp puts it:

The sites were talking about here are NOT about content and they are NOT about serving web users in any meaningful way — they exist for one purpose — pay-per-click ad revenue. …

Why bother with the expense of creating content? Google certainly doesn’t care. And the advertisers dumping billions of dollars into AdWords and similar ad networks don’t seem to care where their ads appear. It’s all about the click.

Companies involved: NameMedia, Marchex. According to alarm:clock, which monitors new tech ventures, NameMedia has acquired a leading domain reseller, BuyDomains, GoldKey, and dozens of smaller domain collections over the last year to create a portfolio of more than million domain names. It was formerly called YesDirect, and claims to have more than 25 million visitors a month.

Shoot The Messenger

By | November 22, 2011
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Every time I start to feel warm and fuzzy about Microsoft something jumps up and slaps me back to reality. Here’s my latest slap:

For some reason my Trillian messenger wasn’t connecting to MSN because of some weirdness with my ISP so I had to download and install the 9 MB behemoth that is MSN Messenger. As usual it tried to change my homepage (at least it asked first, which I don’t remember the MSN Search bar doing so) but it worked ok. But try closing it down and you get an error message:

Msn1

Which says:

There are other applications currently using features provided by MSN Messenger.  You must close these other applications before you can exit MSN Messenger.  These applications may include Outlook, Outlook Express, MSN, MSN Explorer, Internet Explorer, and Three Degrees.

Whatever Three Degrees is. (Why hasn’t Diana Ross sued yet?) Why should I have to close all these programs just to close this clunky jalopy of a program? I thought Microsoft was past all this nonsense? I didn’t have to close those programs to install the messenger, so I can’t imagine they have somehow become seamlessly integrated with Messenger inbetween whiles. Or could they? And if they could, why wasn’t I asked? And is this a good thing? No wonder my mail box is full of plaintive complaints from folk who feel their computer’s been taking over by aliens. Or zombies. Whatever.

Advice for today: Until further notice, don’t install anything that, well, has Microsoft on it.

Keep a Blog, Get Fired

By | November 22, 2011
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Here’s an interesting statistic, in the light of Scoble’s departure from Microsoft (no direct connection, I promise, but it does raise issues about whether corporates really like blogging): 7.1% of companies have fired an employee for violating blog or message board policies.

According to email security company Proofpoint, whose survey you can download from here, decision-makers at large U.S. companies show growing concern over sensitive information leaving the enterprise through electronic channels such as email, blog pages and message boards: “In fact, 55.4% of these large companies (with 20,000 or more employees) have expressed their uneasiness that regulations guarding the firm’s privacy will be violated by members of the “e-communication” community.  In an effort to reduce risk of exposure, 44% of larger companies employ staff to monitor outbound email, and nearly 1 in 5 companies (17.3%) has disciplined an employee for disobeying blog or message board policies.”

Proofpoint’s survey suggests they may be right: “more than a third (34.7%) of companies report their business was affected by the disclosure of sensitive material in the past year. Furthermore, more than 1 in 3 investigated a suspected email leak of confidential or proprietary information and 36.4% investigated a suspected violation of privacy or data protection regulations in the past year.” While a lot of this is email, “companies fear that financial data, healthcare information, or other private materials may be posted in blogs, sent through instant messaging, or transmitted by other means.”

Some other titbits:

  • Nearly 1 in 3 companies (31.6%) has terminated an employee for violating email policies in the past 12 months. More than half (52.4%) of companies have disciplined an employee for violating email policies in the past year.
  • More than 1 in 5 (21.1%) companies were hit by improper exposure or theft of customer information (whatever that means), while 15% were impacted by improper exposure or theft of intellectual property. (I think this means customer information or other sensitive data were stolen.)
  • Companies estimate that more than 1 in 5 outgoing emails (22.8%) contains content that poses a legal, financial or regulatory risk. The most common form of non-compliant content is messages that contain confidential or proprietary business information.
  • Here’s a funky one: 38% of companies with 1,000 or more employees hire staff to read or analyze outbound email. 44% of larger companies (those with more than 20,000 employees) employ staff for this purpose. I bet you didn’t know your company was hiring people to read your outgoing email.
  • Nearly 1 in 5 companies (17.3%) has disciplined an employee for violating blog or message board policies in the last year. 7.1% of companies fired an employee for such infractions. Ouch. 10% of public companies investigated the exposure of material financial information via a blog or message board posting in the past year.

Of course, Proofpoint have a point to prove (thank you) here, but probably this information is sound. There’s definitely a sense out there that blogging is something that needs to be controlled, for better or for worse. Of course, the bigger point is that information is no longer something that can be kept within organisations. Once it became digital, and once employees could move that digital data out of the company easily (remember when company email was not Internet-based, and there was no gateway out of the company email system? I do) then the walls were already tumbling down. The question now for companies is: do we try to ring-fence as much as we can, or do we put more trust and faith in the hands of employees so they don’t feel the urge to vent outside the company gates?

Light on the Water

By | November 22, 2011
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Here’s a cool way from Equa System (via Digg) to know how hot the water coming out of your taps is (there must be an easier way to say that):

Faucet1

Here are some more links on related light-coded home gadgets: LED faucet light, a $15 device that makes your water appear bright blue, temperature sensitive faucets from Hansa (via Engadget), the Krystal Electronic Light Showerheads (also via Engadget), and the KWC Eve Faucet (“sensuous light play” in the kitchen).

Scoble Shift

By | November 22, 2011
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Robert Scoble, Microsoft blogger and the subject of a couple of Loose Wire WSJ columns in the past, has quit Microsoft for PodTech, a podcaster and videocaster. Techmeme, the technology bloggers’ portal, is full of the news. It’s as if the Pope has quit his day job and joined AC Milan.

There’s lots of speculation, but Scoble says there was no acrimony, no scrimped expense accounts, and lots of effort on the part of Microsoft to get him to stay. For sure the loser in this is going to be Microsoft. While there are thousands of other Microsoft bloggers, none of them had Scoble’s long leash and roaming brief. For many people, especially opinion formers and early adopters, Scoble was Microsoft — more than Gates or that other guy, whatsisname (Ballmer – ed). As Mathew Ingram of the Globe and Mail puts it: “Flack or not, corporate shill or not, I think he has single-handedly done more to humanize Microsoft than all the millions of dollars spent getting Bill Gates to kiss babies or hug orphans or whatever they do to make MSFT seem less like the Borg.”

It will be interesting to see how this pans out for Scoble, and for Microsoft. Will Microsoft continue to feed Scoble the inside dope that is the staple of his blog? And if so, will he appear more or less credible as a result? Will Microsoft move to fill his shoes by hiring another high profile blogger, or move one of the 3,000 other bloggers into his unique slot? Will Microsoft revert to the Evil Empire in the eyes of the technology community, or has Scobe succeeded in convincing it that this view was outdated and unfair?

I think Scoble is a pretty unique character, and it was partly his ebullience and personal approach — not just his Microsoft access — that won him fans. That will make it harder for Micosoft to replace him, and it should make it easier for him to move his brand and followers somewhere else. (As a footnote it’s interesting that while most folk outside geekdom have never heard of Scoble, his move did get some coverage from mainstream media. Here’s one from Reuters, used by The Washington Post website.)