Internet Babel

So – it seems like Senator Conroy and  ‘new Labor’ are insistent on enforcing internet censorship on the Australian people.

We would suggest you read this blog post and also read Google’s view on the matter .

You may also wish to express your views at Getup: http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet&id=892

Well, the on-off affair between Microsoft and Yahoo is back on again as the companies announce a partnership arrangement aimed at improving their share of the search market.

The result will see Yahoo using Microsoft’s Bing search engine technology in conjunction with Yahoo’s ad network.

I don’t see this an an attempt to try and take Google on head-on. I think we will  find that the pair have joined forces to adopt a different tactic, aimed at gradually eroding Google’s market share.

The recent introduction of more specialised and ‘niche’ search tools, such as Wolfram Alpha is leading to a slight distillation of the search market, where certain groups of people will perform their searches on specialised tools rather than using the ‘default’ tool (Google).

I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft and Yahoo attempt to target Bing (or variations/extensions of it) at specific niche audiences, in the hope that they can chip away chunks of the search market from Google. I don’t think a full-frontal attack on Google will work anytime soon, but by being nimbler and focussing on specific markets it may be possible for them to make decent inroads into Google’s customer base.

While YouTube is undoubtedly one of the most popular sites on the web, recent figures show that Google are feeling some big financial pain from it. The delivery model behind YouTube means that much of the content delivered is not giving a return to Google. 

Goggle hopes that the cost per impression for ads carried on YouTube will gradually increase over time to start generating more significant revenue, and of course YouTube carries some major brand recognition value.

But as things stand, YouTube is losing money in a big way – estimates from Credit Suisse suggest that YouTube will lose nearly $500 million USD in 2009. Google are a huge company, but no-one likes the thought of losing half-a-billion each year…

Google has been experimenting with various advertising models to get a better return but the figures suggest that the current CPM needs to be improved something like 30-40 times before YouTube would show a profit on the current model.

Sponsored content seems to be the way to go in order to get a more guaranteed return but how many people will be keen to watch advertorials and sponsored clips? 

Google will no doubt live with the pain for a while but expect to see a shift towards sponsored content, and who knows, maybe a parting of the ways if they can’t find a cure…

Google have announced the pending (although as yet undated) lauch of their ‘Wave’ product/platform.

What is Wave?

Well – to quote from Google:

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

It is going to be in developer preview for a while, so expect some changes to occur, but looks like it’s going to be big and open-source with a full developer API and toolkits to develop your own apps based on the Wave protocol.

I don’t suppose Big G will be buying Twitter now.

Full details at the Official Google Blog

Recent figures show that the 2008 online advertising spend in the US showed an increase of over 10% on 2007, despite the Financial Crisis that was beginning to take hold in the latter part of the year.

2008 US revenue (MOT Worldwide, just the US) came to a record $23.4 billion, surpassing 2007’s record of $21.2 billion by 10.6 percent.

The figures indicate a continuing shift from traditional to online modes of advertising, and a realisation that online provides a more targeted and measurable approach, which can be important when every advertsing dollar needs to be accounted for.

Search related advertising kept its position as the main player, accounting for almost half of the total spend, with an almost 20% increase over 2007. ‘Direct’ advertsing is also growing.

The largest vertical markets were, as in 2007, retail, financial services, computing and automotive.

The full article can be read  here:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/03/30/online-ad-revenue-up-106
Some points that arise from this article:

• Given that Search showed such a healthy increase in spend, this didn’t seem to be reflected in Adsense publisher’s incomes. This is anecdotal evidence of course, and there are always some publishers/sites who can show good growth but from looking around on the forums it certainly seems that the increase didn’t generally make it through to Adsense publishers’s wallets.
• It could well be that the increased spend was spread more thinly over the ever increasing amount of Web Real Estate, or inventory. More sites, more advertsing spots, more spend but distributed across an ever increasing pool of publishers.
• If that is the case, then will there be a ’saturation point’ where the amount of available Web Inventory becomes just too big? Will the growth in advertising outstrip the growth in available traffic, and returns start to flatten out naturally?
• If the online spend is being spread ever thinner, that only goes to highlight the importance of providing something different, regular site reviews, updates & changes (unlike this site recently – haha) and effective SEO to make a site stand out.
• Is it going to be better to run loads of sites to try and catch some of that thinly spread advertsing spend, or concentrate on a few key names that you can really push – and sell off the rest of your stable?
• Publishers should look more and more into ‘direct’ advertising (something that IM/MMO Bloggers in particular do anyway). Advertisers like PR and content, and the knowledge that traffic will be targetted, so activley pursue direct advertsing/sponsorship opportunities for all your sites.
• Only park domains when you have to. Parking can be good as a holding option, but you’re getting an even smaller slice of that spend when you do it. Review your parked domains, pick the best potential ones (through keyword analysis, seacrh temrs, parking stats etc) and stick a minsite on them, with a combination of static and RSS/Video type feeds. Throw Adsense, Adbrite or whatever floats your boat on there – you’ll see an increase over parking revenue, the chance of gaining some PR and backlinks, a growth in organic/search traffic – and open up the potential for adding direct advertising or selling the developed site on at a profit.

Just some thoughts.

Nice to be back

A few months back, Google announced that they would be releasing a product that would allow easy integration of Social Networking features within websites and Blogs.

As of 4th December the Beta release of FriendConnect has been unveiled – and Google are accepting signups (to go on a wait-List i believe) for a phased roll out of the product.

What is FriendConnect?

Using OpenID, FriendConnect will allow you to add a range of social interactivity tools onto your website, in just the same way that you ad Adsense or analytics code. This will allow people to sign-up as Members of your site, post messages, reviews and ratings plus expected features such as sharing of apps, videos and pictures. 

Benefits and How-To:

Members wil also be able to invite others to join, so the potential for spreading the word about your site is obvious. There may also be tools to allow easy communication between Friend Connect and other social apps such as Facebook and Hi5.

As with other Google tools, you will need to sign up under your Google account and apply to join the program, but after that it seems that adding the Social features to your site really will be just the same as adsense – i.e. generating and pasting the required code into your site/template.

FriendConnect will of course be competing against a number of established players, but I’d be very surprised if they don’t grab a large chunk of the market with this – and they will almost certainly be adding a host of media and application type features into it.

It certainly opens up new possiblilities for smaller sites and new developers who would like to integrate social/membership type features into their sites.

Here’s a handy little video about Google Friend Connect (from CampFire one):

Of course, Facebook have also launched a Friend Connect tool so let battle commence

See more at: http://www.google.com/friendconnect

A new WP exploit has been reported- and a new release (2.6.5) issued to address it:

“The system does not properly filter HTML code from user-supplied input in the ‘HTTP_HOST’ header parameter before displaying the input. A remote user can submit a specially value to cause arbitrary scripting code to be executed by the target user’s browser. The code will originate from the site running the WordPress software and will run in the security context of that site. As a result, the code will be able to access the target user’s cookies (including authentication cookies), if any, associated with the site, access data recently submitted by the target user via web form to the site, or take actions on the site acting as the target user.

The vulnerability resides in ‘wp-includes/feed.php’ and ‘wp-includes/version.php’.

Only systems running on IP-based virtual servers with Apache 2.x are affected.

Jeremias Reith reported this vulnerability.

Impact:  A remote user can access the target user’s cookies (including authentication cookies), if any, associated with the site running the WordPress software, access data recently submitted by the target user via web form to the site, or take actions on the site acting as the target user.”

Recommend that you upgrade your installations of WP.

Talks over Facebook’s $500m stock offer for Twitter have broken down, partly because Facebook’s ‘paper value’ has probably dropped considerably in recent downturn. For the time being  at least, any deal appears to be dead.

Twitter is the current Web darling, and there is a spate of third-party development going on to produce Twitter related apps and tools. Twitter’s owners probably believe that their tool has a mass of unexploited potential  growth in it yet, and would be unwilling to hand that potential goldine on to someone else.

Having said that, Twitter still suffers from technical issues due to its rapid growth so don’t be surprised if a more ‘hands-off’ type deal is reached with soemone other than Facebook – the big G would almost certainly be interested in adding Twitter to their world domination stable.

For all of you trying and failing to get onto DP Forums the last few days, it appears to be under a concerted flood attack.

It’s basically been down for me for the last 3-4 days – sometimes I can get in but never for more than a minute or two. 

From the chatter on this interweb thingy, it seems that DP is being subjected to a pretty huge bot posting attack, and the server is getting clogged up at a faster rate than DP can clean up the bad posts. From the chatter I’ve seen it is supposedly coming from a disgruntled user who was banned, but not I’m sure how true that is.

Anyway – it’s obviously a pretty big deal – and would appear to be the reason we can’t get onto DP at the moment. Just have to content myself with NamePros for the time being. 

UPDATE: DP appears to be running a bit smoother now (25th Nov 14:30 GMT) – I guess they finally stopped new registrations long enough to put a fix in  

OK – here’s an idea to throw out to the masses, and something I reckon could take off quite nicely as a widget or whatever.

Could somebody please write a Spam analyzer (’spamalyzer’/’spamalytics’ etc).

I think a little league table of hot spam topics might be a cool little tool. It should be easy enough to write something to trawl through the comments in your akismet queue and do some kind of keyword frequency breakdown.

You could extend it to geo-breakdown the originating IP to see what kind of spam comes from where, and produce daily/weekly charts of hot spam keywords, or perhaps analyse the originating email addresses and names. There’s a heap of variations out there - you might need to censor some of the keywords when outputting the information, but I reckon it’d make a cool little tool.

I could probably knock one up meself but I haven’t got the time – so if anyone out there wants to pick up on the idea and build one just let us know.

I don’t think there’s anything like it out there at the moment – I could be wrong of course but i had a quick search and couldn’t see anything that did this.

Over to you…