New Blog location
To the 3 readers of this blog: this blog has been moved to http://www.raghusrinivasan.com/blog
See you there!
Add comment April 21st, 2006
Magic Quadrant for Blogs
My company was evaluating some vendors for some PM software. Multiple vendors came in to show their stuff off. What struck me was that they *all* showed off a Gartner’s Magic Quadrant chart which showed *them* as the leader - i.e. out as far North-East as possible.
How could this be? The vendors couldn’t have been lying or fabricating outright. And Gartner can’t be providing the same magic quadrant with different versions for different vendors. I think (but can’t be sure now: sleep strikes me during ppt presentations esp when someone says ‘Gartner’) that the only way this could have been was that the charts had different X/Y axis variables. Everybody is good at something so based on what axes Gartner chose, any vendor could be the Magic Quadrant leader.
I’ve decided to form a new company: Fartner ™. Our first study was a Magic Quadrant for Blogs. Here’s the result: you are reading the pre-eminent blog on the Web. Congratulations!
Disclaimer: please pay no more attention to the exact location of other blogs on this chart than you would to any other Gartner chart.
Add comment April 14th, 2006
Google Calendar
Google released their long awaited calendar today. At first blush it looks like a worthy contender to Yahoo calendar. Some initial thoughts:
1. AJAX interface for pretty much everything.
2. Simple English addition of events possible (”Party tomorrow at 7pm” will do it)
3. Sharing of calendars is nice
4. Dragging to extend the length of an appointment is cool
5. Multiple calendars can be created on your single a/c (Home, Work, Golf etc.)
6. iCAL/XML feeds
Would be nice to have:
1. Upload photos to an event. Maybe this needs Google Photos to happen first…?
2. Some to-do list with due dates integrated into the calendar
That’s what I can think of in the first 10 minutes…
Add comment April 12th, 2006
Sharing Google Adsense or YPN revenue with users
Is a way for sites which display Adsense or YPN ads next to their user generated/contributed content (ouch!, ouch! and ouch!) to share the ad revenue with these users?
Take for example, a site like Flickr: if I upload a bunch of photos to Flickr and Flickr displays ads next to them, is it greedy of me to expect that I get some fraction of the ad revenue generated from clicks on my user page?
Attention is irresistible alright but money isn’t too bad either.
Or am I already being compensated enough by the disk space and bandwidth that Flickr gives me for free? What if I upgraded to a Pro account? Rather than stop Flickr from showing ads, would it be a good idea to have an option where I say ‘Ok to display ads’ if I get a portion of the revenue?
Currently, even if Flickr wanted to do this, it is not easy to do so because of limits on the Adsense/YPN side. But what if Adsense/YPN gave the publisher the choice to do so? Today both programs let publishers figure out which pages/sections of their sites generate revenue by what are called Channels and Reporting URLs respectively.
Google’s Adsense code has a javascript variable called google_ad_channel that lets publishers report by channel. For example, a newspaper that runs Adsense might have one channel for Sports and one for Entertainment and be able to see which section provides more ad revenue for them. The rub is that
- there can be no more than 200 channels and
- worse, they have to be pre-defined.
If instead, Google allowed some publisher-defined javascript variables such as google_pub_1, google_pub_2 etc. that could be inserted into the adsense code and allowed reporting by those variables as well just as they do now by google_ad_channel. This will give publishers a way of having as many dynamic ‘channels’ as they want rather than restricting them to the 200, pre-defined ones as of today. (Ditto with YPN: ctxt_pub_1 and so on). Publishers gain visibility into which of their users (ouch!) is generating revenue for them.
Granted, this does not work on everything (Flickr’s pages by tag for example belong to multiple users) but it is a start. The publisher would be free to decide the split, it could be 10% or 50-50. It seems like people might be more willing to write reviews or upload photos or share their thoughts and ideas in any other fashion if they knew that the website’s publisher was able and willing to share some revenue back with them.
Just saying…
2 comments April 12th, 2006
Amusing Spam
Every now and then a spam mail is amusing. Here’s one where the spam-mer is more annoyed than the spam-me.
Really how many times do I need to repeat myself, If ur angry w/ur weight, check out how to change this at (site link removed)
had not advanced in rank he resigned from the army to pursue a career in. around 145 million people living in Brazil, most of them near the coast. The population is growing .
Clark
Seriously now, how many more spams before you get it and click on the link you dodo!?
Add comment April 12th, 2006
Tom Cruise purchases fetal heart monitor
Following up on their earlier purchase of an ultrasound machine, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have placed an order for a fetal heart monitor and other birthing supplies to prepare for the upcoming birth of their baby.
As paparazzi snapped up photos of the couple leaving L.A.’s ObGyns-R-Us store, concerned news reporters shouted questions to Tom Cruise asking if he wasn’t going too far? Mr. Cruise flashed his famous smile and cheerfully repeated a line from his interview to Parade Magazine : “Who’s to say what’s normal?” as he waved to fans.
Following the lead of the Society of Diagnostic Medical Sonography (SDMS), who thought it fit to take time out to express concern following Mr. Cruise’s purchase of the ultrasound machine (available online as a pdf no less!), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, ACOG, has also decided to come out with a scathing press release protesting Mr. Cruise’s actions.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has gone one step further and decided to come up with a *pre-emptive* criticism of Mr. Cruise. Said the AAP’s spokesman Mr. Gunther Johnson “We fully expect Mr. Cruise to not take his baby to a qualified pediatrician. I mean, this guy is nuts. Or will be.”
A spokesman for ObGyns-R-Us (Motto: You can go to jail, we can help ™ ) declined comment.
Add comment April 9th, 2006
Google will advertise on TV?
The 2nd most popular prediction on twocrowds.com, a social predicting website, is that Google will advertise on TV.
And guess what, Google is looking!
Hmm, maybe there is something to the concept of the wisdom of crowds after all.
Add comment March 30th, 2006
Google Adsense vs Yahoo Publisher Network
Background: I ran Adsense on this site for over 2 years before trying out YPN for the past 6 months or so. Here are some preliminary observations and a suggestion or two.
Ad Relevancy/Targetting: Google is way, way ahead. Pretty much every page on this site gets relevant ads. Yahoo on the other hand lags behind but is catching up. Perhaps this is direcly tied into which is a ‘better’ search engine i.e. has a better ’sense’ of what a page is about?
Cost-per-click: Yahoo’s CPC is substantially higher than Google’s. Google routinely had clicks coming in at 3c a click. It isn’t unusual for Yahoo to do over 50c a click.
Clickthrough rate: Google’s CTR is about double of Yahoo’s. But Yahoo’s CPC is so far ahead that net $ are still about 2X-3X of Google’s.
Ads: For some reason, Google’s Adsense ads are written much better - perhaps a result of better documentation on their Adwords site. Yahoo’s ads tend to be somewhat less well-written - to the point that a cursory look makes them look less relevant that G’s ads. This is a good area for Yahoo to look at improving.
Reporting: No comparison. Google is miles ahead both in terms of reporting flexibility as well as real time reporting. In addition, Google’s channels seem to me to be an easier way to get a grip on which pages make more $ compared to Yahoo’s Reporting URLs. Plus the fact that you can only look at Y’s reporting URLs one at a time is annoying. Yahoo has easy wins here as well.
Payments: Both Y and G send you a check 30 days after your month-end balance reaches $100. G offers direct deposit to your bank a/c which is nice compared to Y’s check-only by mail.
Availability: Google is a worldwide wheras YPN is limited to US publishers only (and I have heard, to sites with a majority-US readership).
AdBlocking: pretty much even.
RSS: I don’t have a ton of first hand experience here. Yahoo is ready today with RSS feeds while Google is still in beta for RSS ads, but then again YPN itself is entirely in invitation-only beta!
Overall winner: YPN by a 60-40 margin.
Add comment March 29th, 2006
Why aren’t there more appliances from Yahoo and Google?
Google’s Search Appliance was a good way for them to monetize their technology beyond Adsense. Granted only about 1% of their revenue comes from the GSA, but it brings up some interesting questions:
1. What can Yahoo do?
2. What else can Google/Yahoo do to appliance-out their technology?
The GSA is a heavily modified Linux box running their proprietary file system and starts at about $3000 and includes 1-2 years of human support and lifetime access to online support. This is an unbeatable deal! An empty server from Dell costs a good chunk of that $3K. Add on an OS and some database and you are in the GSA price range and we aren’t even talking world-changing search technology yet. Google’s essential costs are the hardware and the IP. I estimate their profit margins are in the 30-50% range especially in the higher end GSAs. I am sure there is a good reason that Yahoo isn’t making a Search Appliance but I don’t know what it is.
It would also seem logical for Google (and Yahoo especially) to expand the appliance offering to other areas - such as IM or Groups or Mail. No company in the world could aspire to have as many employees as the number of users Y/G support. Wouldn’t it be a great business idea for Y/G to throw in more features in this black-box ‘appliance’ and let companies have out-of-the-box company-branded capabilities for:
a) email
b) secure scalable EIM
c) collaboration through groups
d) search, of course
e) portals?
I know that I, for one, would find takers in my company. Am I missing something obvious?
Add comment March 27th, 2006
How to revamp Yahoo! Groups?
Jeremy Zawodny asks: How to revamp Yahoo Groups? Here are some ways:
- Ask *every* public YG’s moderator if they are ok with Y! including results from their group on Yahoo Search. There’s *so* much valuable info on some of these groups but search engines are blind to it. Moderators should be able to toggle on and off when they want to be included in Y Search.
- Stop skimping on storage. If someone sends a good video to the grp, YG does not store the video. If you choose to get an email you get it as an attachment but if your delivery preferences are to read on the YG site, you never get to see it. That’s annoying. At least store attachments for a year.
- Along with Individual Emails, Daily Digest and Read-the-website, offer an RSS feed for the group as a delivery mechanism. This offers a simple way to integrate YG (as an RSS feed) with My Yahoo.
- Offer a way to filter the RSS feed. Say that I am a member of heavily-posted-to yws-search-general and I am interested only in posts that mention the word “perl”.
- It would be valuable to see all the posts made by a certain poster. If there’s a safe way to do this across Y groups, even better.
Add comment March 27th, 2006