In Europe, today is 2/8/6, tomorrow is 3/8/6, Friday is 4/8/6, and Saturday is Pentium.
Technorati Tags: numbers, numerology
I saw the post A Thousand Hall Monitors from Yahoo this morning and immediately thought “why is YPN focusing on the wrong thing?”
YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) is way behind Google AdSense. They are trying – hard – to catch up – and doing plenty of smart things. They should have three goals – all really simple.
Duh. Pretty simple. So – why is someone posing as (in their words) the “cross librarian” and telling people to “tattle on publishers that are violating the YPN Terms and Conditions.”
I’m a publisher. I’m violating the YPN Terms and Conditions by running YPN ads on my left rails and Google ads on my right rails. When I’ve talked to people at Google about this, they don’t care. Several people from YPN have mentioned it to me – whenever I say “ok – I’ll just take the YPN ads down because the Google ones perform better”, my friends at YPN say “nah – don’t bother – we’ll just ignore it.”
Google understands goal #3 (actually they understand all three of these.) YPN is struggling with #3 – given that YPN is behind, they should be delighted when a publisher puts them up on their site, especially if it’s an existing Google AdSense publisher. If YPN can get #1 and #2 right, then this will help them get to a happier place.
Alternatively – Yahoo should change the game entirely, which is what Google did to them in the first place. The “hall monitor” stuff is – well – the wrong thing. To my friends at Yahoo and YPN – please take this in the spirit it is offered – as constructive feedback. To my friends at Google and AdSense – please don’t make me take the YPN ads down.
To all the entrepreneurs out there – “are you focusing on the wrong things?”
Technorati Tags: yhoo goog ypn advertising entrepreneurship
Niel Robertson made a brilliant discovery today that he has named “John Galt’s Law.” The brilliant discovery was the Atlas Shrugged Dating Site – the law that emerged is “The value of a social network is propotional to the square of the number of users of the system multiplied by the inverse of the social networks rank amongst similarly themed social networks.”
I went ahead and created an account on the Atlas Shrugged Dating Site to play around with it. However, since I’ve found my own version of Dagny Taggart I didn’t feel compelled to fork over $7 / month to join the site as a subscriber. After fooling around (with the site) a little, I’m surprised that there isn’t a “meta-dating site” that is an aggregation of all of these sites (maybe there is and I just haven’t played the field enough.) While I’m not that interested in joining a bunch of different dating sites (or any – for that matter), if I was, it seems like I’d be pretty interested in the multitude of “sub-sites” (or networks) that would be available.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with several companies that are working on networks, communities, and user identity. Note that I didn’t say “social networks” – these networks aren’t limited to social (think people networks vs. publisher networks vs. networks of things you do). When you toss in identity across multiple networks, you quickly start thinking about things like reputation (e.g. my reputation in one network should theoretically impact my reputation in another network.) I’m surprised by the current state of the art (or lack thereof) of many of the larger social network providers – it seems like they are lost in feature land rather than “core value land.” Many of these networks are closed, so it’s hard to deal with some of the interesting issues across networks, but some are completely open (and more APIs and open data models are coming), which creates an opportunity for interesting stuff across networks.
I’ve also recently invested in several companies that are working on what has been broadly defined as the “attention data” problem. There’s a different phenomenon going on here generally – deep “core value” is being created, but the application (“feature land”) layer is missing. It’s starting to spring up in some places, and a few companies I’m involved in or close to are feverishly working on rolling out stuff real people can use, but so far what’s available is surprisingly light weight.
The combination of the two is fascinating to ponder. It’s a good thing I’m in my version of Galt’s Gulch for the month thinking about it. Now – back to exploring that dating site to see if I can find some “hot” new features. Oh – and Sand Hill Slave was hysterical today – maybe she should start a dating side titled BART.
Technorati Tags: attention, johngalt, atlasshrugged, galtslaw, socialnetworks
Both of the local Denver papers ran good summary articles on the closing of the sale of Adelphia to Time Warner Cable and Comcast. This was a long and arduous process – when Adelphia went into bankruptcy there was some talk of a straight liquidation given how much of a mess the Rigas family and prior management had made of it. This has been a high profile deal in Colorado and both Time Warner Cable and Comcast have deep roots in the Colorado cable scene. If you follow this, both articles – DenverPost: Adelphia execs exit as sale finalized and RockyMountainNews: Adelphia’s assets now in hands of cable giants – are good descriptions of the end of this particular story.
Technorati Tags: acquisitions colorado