Category: News

How’s this for an ironic sequence of events:

• A big consumer products company announces they plan to market their latest concoction by using “blogs.”
• Newsweek runs a story, quoting a top blogifier: “It seems ironic that a company would want to manipulate a phenomenon that’s so generally bent on exposing things,” says alpha blogger Doc Searls. “In my view blogs are the antidote to viral marketing.”
• He blogs it at 4pm on Sunday, March 2.
• More bloggers decry the cluelessness of said marketers. By 4pm on Monday, March 3, it’s number 19 on popdex. I’m already sick of hearing about it.

Boy, were they stupid to think they could manipulate us into promoting their stupid product.

The web site of the Financial Times, FT.com is breaking even.

Of course, that’s an operating profit, not a net profit. Pearson has invested a staggering £200 million in this site. FT.com has struggled with changes in organization and business model since the beginning. It has evolved from a decentralized free site to an integrated paid site. Despite the subscription barrier on much of the site’s content, the number of people using the site has grown 30% to 3.5 million.

Meanwhile, the FT itself is losing money, which raises some question about whether the site, which gets its content free from its parent, can be said to be profitable.

What does it mean when the telecom monopolies get everything they’ve been asking for, and the Chairman of the FCC become apoplectic in his rage that it’s not nearly enough, and Congress holds hearings into why they didn’t get more?

Billy Tauzin, undoubtedly corrupt chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee has labeled the swing vote in this FCC decision a “renegade Republican.”

Tauzin is expected to introduce a bill to scrape TR’s face off Mount Rushmore later this year.

Sterling Hughes thinks more of Overture’s strategy than I do:

I disagree with Barry’s assement. Had Yahoo! not bought Inktomi, than I would most certainly hold the same opinion. However, I don’t think Microsoft (MSN) is happy that one of their major competitors now owns their search provider. Barry is right, traffic is important, not search: search is a commodity. That’s Overture’s advantage. Yahoo! threatens to steal traffic from the customers Inktomi powers; they are biting the hand that feeds them.

I’d be pessimistic about any company whose strategy is to be the partner of last resort for AOL and Microsoft–two companies not known for making their partners rich in the long run.
NOTE: For some reason, I get a ton of spam as comments on this particular message. I’ve decided to close comments on this message for a while to see if whoever has marked this a a good place to spam will go away. [Posted 7/12/04]

Despite the fact that Overture’s net profit margin has dropped from 20% to 5% and their quarterly net income has dropped from $30 million to $5 million, they’re on a buying spree. Overture spent $400 million to buy a couple of search companies, one failed and and one for people too cool to google.

The speculation is that Overture plans to offer “algorithmic” search to their paid search customers. What they plan to do with Altavista and Alltheweb, which now compete with their customers, is less clear.

Despite what others may think, the problem is that Overture’s relationship with its customers is asymmetrical. Overture needs its customers a lot more than they need it. That’s why Overture’s margins are collapsing and why they’ve pulled this stunt. Search and ad sales are commodities. Traffic is not. Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Google have traffic. Overture has search and ad sales. You do the math.

Cable operators don’t want to be required to offer impartial access. They say they “have no intention of blocking access to content”, despite existing contracts which permit forcing pop-up ads on users and permit differential access to preferred sites. In an unintentionally chilling statement, they continue:

“Regulation of the sort proposed by Amazon.com that purports to prohibit restrictions on such access would inevitably be used to thwart legitimate business practices and arrangements [emphasis added. Implications: alarming] that have nothing to do with blocking access to content. These efforts would deter investment and innovation [emphasis added. Interpretation: figleaf for doing nothing] in the provision of high-speed Internet services.”

Access monopolies must be treated as common carriers.

Ron Rivest has come up with a new way to handle micropayments.

By paying every Nth randomly-selected payment at N times the amount of the transaction, he says he can reduce the overhead of lots of little transactions to a single transaction. It’s also significantly less complex than some earlier solutions.

That seems to be pretty cool. I’m less sure of the advantages over simply aggregating transactions and clearing them in bulk. Also, it doesn’t seem to address the inherent behavioral issues of micropayments.

Finally, while selling music on the net seems to be an ideal application for micropayments, I’d hate to start a company whose success depends on waiting for the recording trust to do it right.

Apparently Tivo is now automatically tuning in the Discovery channel when it’s turned on. This reminds me of the way that hotel room TV’s take control when you turn them on.

Combine this with Tivo’s ability to update its own software, download unrequested programs to your hard disk, and upload information about how you use your TV, and you begin to wonder how much control you’ll have over your media use in the future.

[Thanks, Adam Greenfield!]

I have no idea what Google gets from buying Blogger that they couldn’t get for free. Judging from the response, I’m not alone. Blogging will never be a mass-market phenomenon (Blogger has 200,000 active users). The protocols that underlie blogging are so open that there are no obvious technical synergies. Giving preference to Blogger customers would throttle Google’s golden-egg-laying goose.

Dave Winer says it’s Google can offer blogging to their enterprise customers, but it’s not clear to me why that adds value to Google’s enterprise services. Mitch Ratcliffe says “The acquisition of Blogger gives Google a channel to put its automated searching capabilities into people’s hands…[it] also raises Google’s potential to reshape the Net by focusing on how links are made and managed.” But I don’t understand why they have to own Blogger to do that. Three years from now, Blogger will be a neglected subsidiary–not a strategic asset.

There are plenty of interesting grass roots efforts to make sense of blogspace, but we haven’t seen anything yet from the masters of extracting information from links. Buying Blogger seems like a step in the wrong direction.

At the low end, Google/Blogger’s combination of ease of entry, low price (free), simplicity, brand, and distribution is unbeatable.

At the high end, Moveable Type’s combination of power, reliability, low price (free), and reputation is very strong. And Ben and Mena Trott seem to be positioning themselves for a breakout with MT Pro. If only it were less intimidating to install.

Radio UserLand increasingly occupies the troubled middle ground that marks strategic doom for most companies.

It seems to me that more and more of my must-read blogs are on MT. This week, the number-two Manila site moved to Moveable Type. Radio seems more and more like a kludge every day. I’d be very interested to know what the conversion rates are for these tools. I’d bet few are converting from MT to Radio or Blogger, but lots of people are going the other way.

I don’t mean to disparage Blogger, which I genuinely admire. On the other hand, using Radio made my head hurt.