Once again, Google announced financials that are incredible. If I’m on the exec team at Yahoo or Microsoft, I’m having a drink tonight wondering what I’m doing wrong and what dramatic moves I can make to try to regain some momentum and take some of it away from Google. Hint – publishers, publishers, publishers.
I finally had my bizarre TSA / toothpaste confiscation experience. It was bound to happen – I’m just surprised it took this long.
Yesterday I went through security at DIA. Like a good little traveller, I had put my toothbrush, toothpaste, and bacitracin (for the cut on my knee that is still healing) in a small ziplock bag. I took the ziplock bag out of my carry on bag and put it in the grey storage tub, along with the contents of my pockets, my shoes, my laptop, my spare laptop battery, and my coat (ok – it was three tubs.) The person behind me bumped me and pushed my stuff forward as he was trying to undress and get all his paraphernalia into a tub.
I went through the metal detector and got a polite wave from the TSA screener. I then stood and waited for my bags (and tubs). And waited. And waited.
Eventually, the TSA guy came over holding my little ziplock bag. He asked if it was mine. I said “yup.” He said “your toothpaste container is 4 oz.” It was a Tom’s of Maine plastic see through container and it was obvious that it was less than half full. I responded “yes – but there’s not 3 oz of liquid in there – my guess is there is less than 2 oz.” The nice TSA man responded “I’m sorry – but if the container is larger than 3 oz, it’s not permitted.”
While I was a little baffled, I was cutting it close and didn’t really feel like arguing. So – I shrugged. My TSA friend then said “if you’d like, we can mail it to you.” I responded that I thought this was a poor use of taxpayer dollars and he should feel free to either take it home with him or throw it away.
At my hotel (The W in Seattle), I asked them if they had any toothpaste. I now have a very nice micro-toothpaste tube (1 oz) that I expect I’ll have no trouble smuggling onto the plane later today.
I believe I’m seeing a steady increase in the lack of critical thinking from everywhere. In an effort to be recursive, I thought about why I thought I was seeing more of this (and if in fact it was an increase, or I was just noticing it more.) My “instinct” is that I’m seeing more of it, which amuses me when I ponder it.
My hypothesis is that it’s coming from a few places:
I ran into two particularly strong examples of critical thinking in two categories that I’ve seen a huge lack of it in – (1) climate change / global warming and (2) Software as a Service.
Now – it might be that I’m just more tuned into this because of all the time I’ve been spending with Atlas Shrugged – but I don’t think so. When Amy and I were talking about this the other day, she reminded me of the bumper stickers from the 1970’s that said “Stop Continental Drift.” Er – um – yeah. It turns out you can sign a petition to help stop continental drift.
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
I have listened to NPR every day that I’m in the car on my way into work for as long as I can remember. I have fond memories of hearing Morning Edition in the car as a kid whenever my dad drove me in the morning (which was very rarely – my bike got a good workout.) Last year house Republicans tried to kill funding for NPR and PBS – it was defeated.
They are trying again this year. Stuff like this always baffles me when I see what our tax dollars are being used for. If you are like me and are a NPR (or PBS) fan, here’s an easy way to sign a petition to tell Congress to save NPR and PBS again this year.
I had a superb run this morning through the English Garden in Munich. This is only the second time I’ve ever been in Munich – the first time was with my friend Bruce over 20 years ago. While it was cloudy, it was a lovely morning, the park was fresh, green, and hidden from the city, and there were some wackadoodle surfers practicing in the small river under a bridge with a water pipe. I discovered the incredible value of the map function of my new Garmin Forerunner 305 – without it I would have been lost in the park and would have never been able to find my way back, especially since none of the signs made any sense to me except the ones that said “GaragePark” which weren’t of much use and I forgot to leave myself a trail of bread crumbs.
BoingBoing has noticed that something weird is going on with the clock on 24. Rick Stratton asked me – with regard to my post that the first 25,000 users are irrelevant, whether I was referring to “free, ad-based ‘consumer’ web services” or did I also lump paying enterprise web services users into the mix. Nice catch Rick – I only meant the free consumer ones (e.g. my portfolio company Rally Software has less than 25,000 individual users, but ever one of them is very relevant, especially since we get paid for each one each month.) Finally, Tali Aben saved me 58 minutes by blogging a great summary of a breakfast “fireside chat” with Bruce Chizen, the CEO of Adobe.
Time to go have breakfast. If I remember correctly, I’ll be presented with a buffet full of meat and sausage choices, surrounded by cheeses.
Paul Kendrosky’s pickup on Joey Ramone’s affection for Maria Bartiromo made my head spin around in circles this morning. The full interview is in the Financial Times / Arts & Weekend section.
Since this is Yahoo month (which is going quite nicely, btw) I decided I really wanted to get into the Yahoo Mail Beta and check it out, especially for the new RSS stuff that I’ve heard about (and seen over other people’s shoulders, but never used for more than a few minutes.)
I’ve been “applying” for the Yahoo Mail Beta program for three months (at least ever few weeks – whenever I think of it) and all I get back is a deafening silence. I considered emailing a few friends at Yahoo; however, earlier today, Chris Wand sent me a cheat via HiveLive via the Google Operating System blog that tells you how to fool Yahoo to letting you immediately into the program.
The instructions follow:
Voila.
After 10 minutes of playing around with it, I’m reminded of Oddpost. The email is nice and snappy (although not as nice as Microsoft OWA.) I’m completely underwhelmed by the RSS stuff – while it’s nice that it’s incorporated into the email system and the online rendering is fine, it has virtually no functionality other than subscribe and view. All the RSS feeds end up alphabetically in one folder, so if you have more than a dozen or so feeds it quickly becomes burdensome to deal with. None of the normal things you’d expect, like OPML import/export are immediately obvious. And – well – no advanced features of any sort.
However, it’s a huge improvement over the current version of Yahoo Mail – hopefully they’ll roll it out to the masses soon. If not, you can always pretend you are from the UK.
Last month, I decided to spend April with Microsoft, May with Yahoo, and June with Google. As April comes to an end, I turn from Microsoft to Yahoo. I already changed my search default within Firefox and am now sending traffic to Yahoo instead of Microsoft.
In hindsight, April was frustrating. I started out by trying to switch all my software infrastructure to Microsoft, including IE7b2. In addition to bonking hard, this attempt messed up enough other things on my desktop computer at home that I quickly backed off the “all Microsoft” and went to “online Microsoft only.” The nice folks in the IE group tried to help, but the pre-release of the next version that I downloaded was too unstable (and – after one iteration – I decided I simply didn’t have the time to keep fighting with it) so I bailed and just kept using Firefox.
I dug into MSN and Live.com to try to switch from several of my web-only apps, including My.Yahoo. I found that either (a) the switching costs were simply too high (I didn’t have the desire to spend the time setting things up to my liking) or (b) when I spent the time, I ran into walls that limited my desire to continue. For example, I’m a heavy user of del.icio.us (Yahoo) and – as I tried to figure out how to stop using it and use a corresponding Microsoft tool, I couldn’t find one that was equivalent. Or – when I tried to shift from Foxmarks (to synchronize my Firefox bookmarks across computers) to Windows Life Favorites, the service was unavailable the first time I tried, I got tangled up in Microsoft Passport login hell the second time, and finally got it working the third time, but then was frustrated that I couldn’t figure out how to sort the “Your Folders” view alphabetically and gave up.
I had some positive experiences – I did two presentations where I used Live Image Search as my primary search for content and was pretty satisfied. I didn’t have any fundamental problems with either MSN Search of Live Search – after using it a month I didn’t notice that I wasn’t using Google for search.
Overall, I didn’t dig into too many non-Microsoft services that I wasn’t already using. I’m a heavy client app user (Outlook, Office Apps, Trillian, FeedDemon, Picasa, Skype, Adobe, MotionBased, iTunes, and some other client apps) so I’ve got plenty of client stuff, including Microsoft – in my face all day. However, I just couldn’t get the base under me to switch away on the web apps that I use. I expect that being intensely busy in April and being on the road all month didn’t help matters as I had lower tolerance than usual for screwing around with new stuff.
I expect life with Yahoo will be easier since I’ve been a heavy My.Yahoo user since 1997. However, I find that with RSS I use My.Yahoo less and less since I consume RSS in FeedDemon. Let’s see what else – besides Yahoo Search – I find useful this month.