German Blogger Robert Basicpoints me to a new blog by Google, which does not promote Google services, but instead it writes about how the CPG industry is tackling online marketing. Which makes this whole blog a service to this industry. And lets us guess about the relative importance of this industry for Google…
Our motto: all the news from Google’s ad team that fits in your fridge or pantry…and maybe a little bit more. […] Our sales teams are organized by industry so that we can focus on the distinctive qualities and business needs of our advertisers and marketers.
[..] Our goal for the blog is to communicate with you, our advertisers and agencies. We’ll talk about the ways in which CPG is tackling the changing world of online marketing and how we work with advertisers to create the best experience for their customers. We’ll also strive to keep you on top of relevant news from Google that can affect CPG.
A good idea. But will people read it? Only the long tail run can tell us.
PVR Wire has a good analysis of the YouTube acquisition by Google.
Google itself is already the 3rd busiest site on the internet, and now that it owns YouTube the company has control over a tremendous number of internet users, probably a higher percentage than anyone else!
Here is an Alexa comparison of Google Video and YouTube:
So Google has bought themselves a few eyeballs, since Google Video didn’t perform quite as well:
Putting criticisms aside you need only look a the amount of users and growth of YouTube to see why Google bought them. 20 million regular users, the Top 10 site on the net, and 100 million video views a day.
According to PVRWire there are three main things Google can do now with the new pool of content:
Video adverts in YouTube videos: selling adverts within or rather after the clips of users, preferrably context-sensitive.
Selling premium video, just like on google video.
Licensing content to TV stations like Blib.tv. Actually, a colleague of mine suggested to me today, that Google could start or at least support an extensive TV Network with channels broadcasting those thousands of clips clustered by topic, user votes, relevance, etc. per channel.
Regardless of these benefits, there are two winners these days, and they may look like your average around-the-corner geek, but take care, they’re multi-millionairs now, with only about a year or two worth of work:
The quality is a typical average user quality, with the little mishaps at the end – true user style, I like that. It has been viewed 560,859 times in the last two days, which makes it not top-video (yet), but I am confident they’ll make the top ten of their own site.
ZDNet writes about Swicki tapping communities for search and really describes a new way of making search more relevant. This is the question most search engines are currently trying to solve and the model of Swicki seems to be similar to Rollyo:
„Rollyo offers the ability to search the content of a list of specified websites, allowing you to narrow down the results to pages from websites that you already know and trust.“
… but then again, not quite. Since they don’t only allow for predefined filters, but also measure user behaviour to identify which results will be relevant in the future. This also what might differentiate them from Google: it’s not just about what people „voted for“ by placing a link but also about what they actually visited.
Swickis combine Web crawling with filters defined by site owners and algorithms that analyze user behavior (keywords and pages accessed) anonymously and automatically, re-ranking results based on the community’s search actions.
(Just as I typed this I thought: who knows, if Google isn’t already measuring our behaviour anyway? – I mean, how would we be able to tell? In theory, they can measure our clicks on the pages of the search results – but in addition they can track us on any page that has Google Adsense Advertising – which would mean a lot of pages across the hit- and niche-websites of the web.)
Seems to be an interesting tool – if I have some time over the weekend, I might start my own Swicki search in this blog…
There is a rather interesting story on Technology Review by James Surowiecki, who wrote the book „wisdom of the crowds“ (very recommendable) and is also a writer for the New Yorker. He interviewed Joshua Schachter, who founded del.icio.us and later on sold it to Yahoo!. He was one of the first to introduce the tagging-system to organise information. A very useful invention, since the internet is more and more becoming a jungled web of microcontent that resides (for example) in blogs, addressable by permalinks. You find an article, you loose an article. And if Google decides to change their algorithm from one month to another, you will most likely never find that piece of information again. And here comes del.icio.us. Invented by Schachter for that one sole purpose: have a well functioning bookmarking system, in which you can find information sorted by your own criteria, i.e. tags. He first only built it for himself, but soon noticed the power of it. Later he sold it to Yahoo! and now he thinks about how to increase the user base from the still rather small number of 300.000 to a number that more resembles the „early majority“:
But even as tagging has become an industry buzzword that businesses are straining to associate themselves with, Schachter is confronting the fact that the vast majority of people on the Web don’t tag at all–and probably have never even heard of tagging. So how does he expand his sites audience? „You have to solve a problem that people actually have,“ Schachter says. „But it’s not always a problem that they know they have, so that’s tricky.“
I had the same problem. I wanted to manage the microcontent that’s out there on the web, but I didn’t have a useful tool except bookmarks, which are tedious to manage. And even when I started using del.icio.us, I had to get used to it. Quite frequently I forgot to press the del.icio.us button and then, a couple of surfs away, I noticed it.
However, tagging and folksonomies are great, when it comes to organising information in a swarm like behaviour. And it is especially nice for the companies engaging their users in this manner:
The real magic of folksonomies–and the reason sites like del.icio.us can create so much value with so little hired labor–is that they require no effort from users beyond their local work of tagging pages for themselves. It just happens that the by-product of that work is a very useful system for organizing information.
– which leads me to another news item:
Google Image Labeler asks users to associate tags with images taken from their image search. Clever move. To better organise their image search, they moved to a folksonomy. Asking people to tag pictures, instead of looking for meta-information on the page the image is located on, will greatly improve the relevance of the results of their image search.
Of course, you ask yourself: why would anyone go through the effort of tagging other people’s pictures for no good reason? Well, Google made a game out of it. You play against another user. Within 1.5 minutes you have to put as many tags against images, as possible. Whoever has more, wins. (I just haven’t found yet, what you can actually win.)
Very clever, indeed…
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