Google gets funky in Taiwan

Today's logo in Google Taiwan

Update: Ha-ha! Said image is also now pretty much world wide! Thanks timezones.

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Icahn, CNet and Yahoo

You'll have read elsewhere that Icahn has popped onto Yahoo's radar. He's put some cards on the table - 3% of Yahoo's shares and a move to put his team onto the board.

Full marks go to Marketing Pilgrim and their lolcat inspired write up - Icahn Haz Yahoo Board!. (Picture Credit to Marketing Pilgrim too) This isn't a news blog so I'm not going to mull too much into the details except to say that the term corporate raider was pretty much invested for Icahn. Er, I mean, Mr Icahn.

In other news CBS bought CNET. Wow. Old schools swoops in and buys new school. Once again I'll let someone else explain why that's odd - how come CNET was sold for less than $2 billion when it was worth nearly $20 billion just a few years ago. This time it's Mr Arrington who's explaining why CNET isn't the one buying CBS.

Here's the thing... Icahn has had some involvement with CNET himself. I think it's an excellent illustration of what Yahoo now face (and a time when Microsoft is lurking somewhere in the shadows...).

In the States there is a law called the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. The Act means you've got to own up and say when you've bought more than 5% of someone's shares. Have you ever played cards with someone only to discover, all of a sudden, they've won the game... they've got rid of their last card and you didn't see it coming. You didn't see it coming because they kept their hand hidden under the table. The Hart-Scott-Rodino Act is designed to stop companies being bought in the same way! With the Act in place no single person can buy a dribble of shares here, a dribble of shares there and sneak into position of strength.

Although; it's worth noting that Icahn (Mr) has 3% of Yahoo and is still in a position of strength.

Given the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act you can imagine CNET's surprise when, all of a sudden, they worked out that someone had managed to sly a full %21 of their company!

No. Icahn didn't lead the charge but he was involved. It is possible for hedge funds to deal with one and other and buy shares for one another. For example, you might buy some Yahoo shares for me - and you'll own them. We'll sign a deal that at a pre-arranged time you'll sell them on to me. We'll work it so that no one looses out if the shares go up or down in value and in exchange I'll pay your a handling fee.

That's what happened to CNET. Mr Icahn was one of the players in the elaborate series of "phantom buyers" who bought shares in the snare the hedge funds circled around CNET.

The New York Times has a more thorough write up than I do.

So Yahoo... Mr Icahn holds %3 of your shares. I wonder how many of your shares his allies hold and have already signed over.

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Microsoft promotes Skull Worship

MSN's popular searches currently include one for Skull Worship.

Have the cannibals taken over at Microsoft?

No. Well; probably not. We may have a US game show that's asked a question about Skull Worship (ah, Indiana Jones - I think you're to blame for this one) and the MSN-using / game-show-watching demographic overlap has gone out and searched for the answer.

Or... it could be one of the search suggestions at Indy Search.



The suggested 'winning' searches may have been enough to move the needle on MSN's over all search volume. That would suggest that Indy Search is being a hit for MSN Live and for Lucas Films.

Of course, if you're cynical you might wonder if this is a 'paid for popular search' - but that honestly that seem unlikely. There's probably not a strong enough tie between skull worship results and the film's search positions in MSN yet.

As a PS; a good place to go look for the 'Big US Game Show Effect' is Google's Hot Trends.

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Pmog.com for digital marketing

PMOG launched today. As a gamer and a digital marketer it interests me greatly.

Very briefly, PMOG is a Firefox extension that follows you around the web and gives your virtual cash for visiting new pages (yeah; it's a tracking program...)

As a user you can mine pages to leave an unwelcome surprise for the next PMOGer to visit. You can also leave a crate with a pile of loot. It is also possible to leave a portal that connects one site to another.

Due to PMOG's event stream I can be pretty certain that when I leave a crate on a site that someone will turn up sharpish to investigate (in fact, I would question whether the event stream is helping the game aspect or not) ... but right now, if I want to bring someone to a newly launched site then I can lure them in with crates.

It took less than 10 minutes for someone to turn up and raid a crate I had left on Andy Beal's twitter profile. So far people have managed to avoid the mine I left on... oh, I'm not going to say who's profile I mined!

I can also build brand association between two sites (not to mention steal a dribble of traffic) via portals. I went to The Register today and found a PMOG portal from a player suggesting I visit SlashDot too. I did. First time in ages.

It's also possible to create 'missions'. Now, missions are just visiting a bunch of sites in order and reading the creator's commentary.

My first attempt was to make one of the pages in the mission a set of Yahoo search results but the PMOG commentary layer wouldn't activate so I had to take the page out of the mission. I don't know whether PMOG have excluded Yahoo on purpose or whether it's a 'feature'. It may be a good idea as people can try and game Yahoo Search Assist by creating artificially high query rates.

PMOG clearly does have something to say about search. The badge at the top of this post is the Indie and is awarded if you avoid Google for a day.

I suspect I'm going to keep PMOG installed for a while and see how the site grows. It seems like an ideal place to launch virals and win the attention of online gamers (who are typically very savvy and often adept at ignoring advertising).

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Live Blogging - good, bad or what you make it?

There's been a bit of banter today on Twitter about live blogging and conferences. One side of the line argues that live blogging is a threat to speakers - all of a sudden the speaker is sharing their IP with a wider audience than just the conference attendees. The other side of the line points out that the speaker is putting their information in public anyway - conferences often make the presentations available online, anyway.

I'm interested in this topic for two reasons, 2) conferences are no longer a place to go if you're already in the industry and are hoping to learn and 1) live bloggers can decide the fate of products.

At an event like E3 there is a lot of live blogging and micro-blogging. Manufacturers have to make a good first impression on the the live bloggers or risk FAIL messages zooming around the internet. I'd say that bloggers could make or break some products within seconds of their launch. Seconds.

That's a scary thought, huh? How long before we see digital marketing agencies / search / social marketing agencies lining up to offer stage and presentation advice? Here's how to launch your product during this expo and in such a way as to encourage positive live blogging.

By the way, I tried live blogging SES New York this year. It's hard work! I managed to do a few sessions. I took notes, re-wrote and published during the breaks. I was exhausted. I've no idea how people like Lisa Barone have the stamina and typing accuracy to make it through the three (plus) days!

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Share with Google Reader

I'm already a big fan of the 'Share a Page' Google Reader Bookmarklet.

Sure people can fake out what the page actually says by re-writing the summary of the page but aren't these people supposed to be your friends? Try that once on me and you're dumped.

I share discoveries a lot by RSS. It is simply wonderful to be able to share single pages; suddently my daily Mixx summary is worth twice as much as it was worth before.

I also have a diverse group of friends. What I'd really like from Google Reader is a tag/label based share system. I want to be able to share some content with people and mark it 'search' so it only goes to the people interested in 'search'. I'd like to be able to share different content with people and mark it 'gaming' so it only goes to my geeky RPGamer buddies!

Increasingly Google Reader is the centre of my universal. My web comes to me in RSS streams and I manage all that via Google Reader. I love the way I can handle the incoming data - I just want more control on my outgoing data!

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CPC determined by visit history

I seem to be having a t-shirt flavoured Gmail AdWords week. This is Google's targetting system; I clicked on one and so now their system is tempting me with more t-shirt goodness.

This could be my favourite AdWord of all time.


The site in question can be found selling Engrish t-shirts here. Don't go clicking on the poor site's AdWords campaigns.

The ad reads:

Engrish.com can help you with our pleasure. Let's shopping t-shirts!

The t-shirt AdWord which first caught my attention this week was for Torso Pants. I liked the site so much that I bookmarked it using my Google toolbar. I'll buy something later.

Here's a thought; I bookmarked Torso Pants via Google. Google continues to show me AdWords for Torso Pants. If more people actually used Google's bookmarking feature then I, as an advertiser, would want an AdWords option which let me decide whether or not to show my ads to people who had already bookmarked me.

I might decide - they know about my niche store already; I don't want to ad serve them.
I might decide - I want to remind them that I'm here; I do want to ad serve them.

In fact, you can take that concept and simply throw away the Google bookmarking feature. Wouldn't it be a good idea if you could set CPC based on whether the searcher had been on your site recently, some time in the past or never before?

Disclaimer: I'm heavily NDA'd by Google but, at the time of this post, I've never talked to them about CPCs determined by visit history. If I had knowledge of CPC/visit history features then I wouldn't be blogging this!

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Twhirl or Alert Thingy

I'm a Twhirl user. I'm in two minds as to whether I like the way they've integrated FriendFeed support. Why the two windows? Why not one?

Using Twist to measure Twitter chat suggests that the battle between the two applications is going to be a close one.

If you don't see a graph here then that means Twist's embed feature is borked again.

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Google cleans up Next Blog >> Presses

Back in January 2007 I did a study on next blog button pushes on blogger and blogspot. Google puts a bar across blogpost hosted blogs which lets users, well, log in, post, search or randomly reach another blog. It's really an advert for the service.

I counted how many button pushes it took for me to reach 100 English language non-spam blogs. It took 241 button pushes. I also discovered a lot of spam; in particular redirects to porn sites.

I've repeated this exercise this week and can say that the random button never once took me to porn at all. On a few occasions it took me to a hard sell site that was essentially a spam landing page.

Google's cleaned up the button. So, it is better? Ah... last year it took me 241 button pushes to find 100 English language sites. This year it took 309.

The difference is in non-English blogs. They've doubled from last year. There are a few reasons for this; Wordpress and SixApart are likely to be clawing market share away from Blogger in the UK, Canada and the USA. The Next Button isn't entirely random it; it's reciprocal and some geographic areas (thus languages) may be more likely to press the button than others.

My chart for 2007 looked like this:



The chart for 2008 looks like this:

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