The changing landscape of (blog) search

Steve Rubel writes about the changing landscape of blog search. Google killed it, he claims, and it seems plausible.

For one, there is good reason why the attractiveness of search engines like technorati has faltered:

The improvements are nice, but I have to admit that I don’t use Technorati nearly as much as I used to. Link authority was a good metric a year ago, but it’s not nearly as worthwhile today when you consider all of the centers of influence one may wish to search and track. Link authority doesn’t tell me who’s an influencer on Facebook or which video artists are rising on YouTube. It was great in 2005, ok in 2006 and really has faded from relevance in 2007. […] While we still use vertical search engines today to dig through news, blogs, video, etc., their days are numbered. The lines are blurrier. Google News, for example, has lots of blogs. More importantly, the big web search engines are going becoming sophisticated enough to make an educated guess as to what information you’re seeking. It won’t care if it comes from the live or static web. It will serve up relevance and soon time-stamped sorting.

Is there anything that will put an end to Google’s dominance? Probably not. But it was never within their own fields that big monolithic companies were beat. IBM still offers some of the best servers. Microsoft is still a quasi-Monopoly in PC OS.

Whoever „beats“ Google will have find a totally new field of activity.

By the way, I love to take sneak preview of what Google is toying with

Digital Visionaries Videointerviews at Focus.de

Something for the German readers of this blog. German weekly magazine „Focus“ shows video interviews with celebrities of the digital world. I suppose these videos were made during this years DLD conference.

marissa.jpg

You can find names like Marissa Mayer, Lars Hinrichs, Arianna Huffington, Caterina Fake, John Naisbitt, Bruce Sterling, etc. Well worth watching, they’re short enough, only a few minutes each.

Defend your reputation

Interesting – someone launched a start up that takes care of your online reputation, called reputation defender.

Or so they claim. A good Idea, I think, since many people will most likely have been careless with what they do online, before they found out that this data will always be visible…

I do it, headhunters do it, journalists do it. Once you get to know a new person, you ask Google about the digital trail of this person. So it would be embarrassing, if there were videos or photos of that person being utterly wasted at some college party…

Reputation defender apparently helps in this situation by „cleaning“ the web from your embarrassing videos, photos, etc. All against a small fee, of course.

He charges $9.95 per month to $15.95 per month, depending on how long a customer signs up for the service. The company will then crawl the Web looking for comments or material that refelect negatively on you, and charge an extra $29.95 for each attempt to get the material removed, whether or not is successful.

I just wonder, how helpful this really will be, since

Presumably, only comments considered “libelous, slanderous, defamatory or invasive can” legally be forced off the Web.

And there isn’t even any guarantee attached to it!

What the Twitter?

Sometimes things hit you with several punches at once.

I was listening to an episode of the „six pixels of separation“ podcast by Mitch Joel, and just before I came home he praised twitter. Half an hour later, on his blog, I found a post about twitter, and then, later while going through my feeds, I found another post by Adpulp about twitter.

So what is it? As Mitch Joel writes, …

It’s being called a micro-Blogging platform. […] Simply put you can send a text message (SMS length) either through a website, instant messenger or mobile device to your own customized Twitter page.

There are many people now, who constantly update twitter (and with twitter-widgets, this also appears on their blogs). I am not sure why peole would do that. But Mitch has some thoughts on this:

As consumers take more control of the media, these individuals are building tremendous personal brands and the people who are connected to these personal brands want more connections and information. Twitter takes this idea and brings it down to the core: what is that person doing right now. Imagine how many millions of people buy magazines to read about their favorite celebrity. Now imagine if those celebrities were using Twitter. Micro-chunks of information that keeps everybody in their loop.

And then, again not much later, I find that Meish muses about twitter and classifies some profiles of twitterers (is that what they’re called?)

  • The Briefers, who provide only bulletins relating to current location or status. Example: Waiting for the bus. Cold.
  • The Detailers, who use Twitter to give an insight into what they’re thinking, eating, listening to, looking forward to, planning, and so on. Example: Wondering what to have for tea tonight. Pasta, maybe.
  • The Kitchen Sinkers, who use Twitter as a new form of blogging, recording thoughts and links and opinions and ideas, addressed to no-one in particular. Example: Traffic lights broken at the corner of high street. Phoned work and told them I’ll be late. That’s the fourth time this week. Sigh.
  • The Pongers, who respond publically to other users whose updates they are receiving via Twitter (so called because they return each IM ping with a pong). Example: @Jim: Hahaha! Yes!

But it’s not just for people. Technorati and Google News also have twitter channels.

As if blogs, MySpace profiles, videos on YouTube, podcasts and everything else is not enough already. Now we can let the whole world know what we’re doing – every minute of the day.

I like blogs, and I publish some of my photos on flickr. But that’s about as far as I would go. Not sure why I would want to tell everyone about my whereabouts all the time…

Google will distribute videos with adverts

Google has partnered with Sony BMG, Condé Nast and Dow Jones & Company to distribute video content to third party sites. At the same time, these videos will show adverts. Here is a short description how it would work, found on the NY Times Website:

On the financial news site StreetInsider.com, for example, videos from The Wall Street Journal, a Dow Jones property, are running within ads on the site. In one, Emily Friedlander, a Wall Street Journal reporter, narrates a video feature on the TKTS booth in Times Square; Sam Schechner of The Journal speaks about marriage in TV shows; and Jonathan Welsh visits a motorcycle show.

After the three videos, a commercial from Pantene Pro-V, a hair conditioner, appears. In that case, Google shares the ad revenue with StreetInsider.com and Dow Jones.

This is a step of Google to move away from pure text and image based advertising to the segment of big money: TV adverts. And quite possibly, a first test of acceptance since they’re probably still working on all sorts of ways of how to monetise YouTube.

Founded as a text-based search company, Google’s early advertisers were smaller companies and advertisers who bought ads to generate direct sales rather than to build brand recognition.

Large brand advertisers still spend the bulk of their money on television advertising, but Google sees potential for them to spend more online through the use of video ads.

(via here and here)