Internet Babel

The Australian and Swedish governments show themselves to be poodles of the American establishment, Australia by besmerching a citizen who hasn’t yet been charged with any related crime, and Sweden by resurrecting a once-dropped legal case surrounding unprotected consensual sex. 

Wikileaks acted as a distributor of information they have been supplied with, and following true journalistic principles, have protected their source. If there is a crime, it has not been carried out by wikileaks. You can argue about whether they should be more discriminating about what they have released but that is not illegal.

The released cables have been created, stored and inadequately protected by the American government. The fault lies with them for allowing them to be accessed and released. Indeed it may yet prove to  be an ‘inside job’.

The australian government’s behaviour so far in this shameful episode has been grubby and cowardly – sucking up to American popular opinion. Grow some balls, Australia, and defend a citizen who has done nothing but reveal the shabby truth about what is actually going on in global politics.

Google and an investment arm of the CIA are jointly backing a company working on real-time web monitoring and prediction.

Recorded Future uses real-time analysis of tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to identify relationships between people, organisations and events — both present and still-to-come.

The company says its temporal analytics engine looks at  ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same (or related) entities and events. The idea is to derive, for each event, who was involved and where/when it happened or might happen.  Recorded Future plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

This seems to be the first time that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA, but this is bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government.

Full story: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/

Support GetUp, Electronic Frontiers Australia and similar groups, lobby your MP – stop the Internet Filter.

There’s a lot of talk about BP being a purely British company. Actually, the ownership structure and control of the company is a lot more complex.

Some facts that have not been reported in the news:

1. 29% of BP is owned by JP Morgan and US companies own 39% of it total

2. Halliburton, one of the main contractors on the rig, is considered the party responsible for failing to cap the well properly. They moved their headquarters out of the US to Dubai recently.

3. The former CEO from 1997 to 2009 who was ousted by a sex scandal was also Chairman of Goldman Sachs. Goldman sold a massive amount of its BP holdings in early 2010 and one of its employees bragged in an e-mail in early April that they were “shorting” the Gulf and looking forward to huge profits from an environmental disaster there.

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