How Do They Do That?

Posted by Gregg at 05:04 PM

I find it truly astonishing that the wikipedia community can publish maintain a useful, mostly accurate reference work without a result like the LA Times experiment with its wikitorial. more

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Killing the Goose.

Posted by Gregg at 09:12 AM

When a story makes it above the fold in the Times Sunday Business Section it's a pretty good indication that critical mass has been reached. But Barbarians at the Digital Gate illustrates only the tip of the iceberg. O'Brien and Hansell write about the most well known of the spyware / adware companies - Claria, WhenU and Cool Web Search but the problem of malicious, non "virus" programs taking control of the desktop is much more prevalent than even they portray. As a sophisticated user, I've never been fooled into downloading a virus attached to an email and I read the box that appears before a download from a web site begins. But I and those of you reading this represent a very small percentage of internet users that have the knowledge and information to be cautious. The vast majority of users simply don't know what's suspicious and what's not. And they really shouldn't have to should they? It's just getting way too complicated to safely be on the Internet. At home and work I run ZoneLabs full security suite (anti virus and firewall), Window Washer and SpySweeper. The first time I ran SpySweeper the program detected 15 instances of Adware or Spyware - I only knew two of the programs on my system - and I'm careful! By contrast, I ran a sweep of my sister's computer and there were hundreds of programs running. No surprise she complained her year old computer barely worked. Ecommerce and internet advertising after only eight years is big business and continued impressive growth is forecast into the foreseeable future. That being said if the average consumer alienated by making the barriers to usage too high growth will slow. If the scammers get the upper hand for too long government will have step and regulate which guarantees the baby will be thrown out with the bath water. Everyone with a stake in the continued growth of the industry needs to be responsible for the effect malicious marketing has on the confidence of the user. Technology vendors, marketers, advertisers and publishers need to educate users and run the outlaws out of town – but till then download Firefox and SpySweeper. more

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Bottom of the Third

Posted by Gregg at 09:41 AM

Even though the internet has greatly accelerated the speed with which concepts are adopted it still take some time for enough users to adopt new technologies to make them relevant. Kevin Werbach writes ... "Jason Kottke thinks we should stop using the word "syndication" to describe what we do with RSS/Atom feeds. I disagree. He's right that what's happening now online is different than the classic print syndication model. But the concept of syndication has always been broader than that. As I wrote several years ago in the Harvard Business Review (and before that in Release 1.0), it's a perfect way to describe the emerging business model of the Internet economy. " more

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Close But No Cigar.

Posted by Gregg at 10:03 AM

I open my browser when my home page loads and I'm astonished to see a tower ad on my Yahoo home page advertising search tracking software for Executive Recruiters - hey, I'm a recruiter, this must be "it" - the targeted ad. Nine years of browsing pages and finally here it is - I click, yes an honest to goodness "click through" and instead of taking me the software company's site I end up at a search engine marketing company. I hit back thinking it must be a mistake - nope. I guess the advertiser is on to something but the logic is too circular to unravel. The holy grail of on line marketing is the targeted advertisement - the one you see and want to click on it. The promise of the ad showing up at just the right time to just right person is the reason for an estimated $7.2 billion being spent in 2003 on internet advertising. Excluding the revenue of all the ad serving, SEO Companies or creative fees to agencies. I still have yet to see one of those ads - the one for the car when I'm researching cars, the one for the computer when I'm buying a new one. You'd think if the monkey can type Hamlet by hitting random keys given enough time that after nine years with a browser I'd have seen at least one of these mythical targeted marketing messages. more

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The Dean Bubble

Posted by Gregg at 10:16 AM

Score another one for the Internet. Howard Dean became the early front runner but has since fizzled once we've had the chance to look under the covers. The internet creates instant buzz with the appearance of credibility because of its inherent ability to easily publish and reach a large number of people quickly. However, Dean's rise and now, all but complete, fall is reminiscent of other internet fueled memes. Remember eToys, WebVan, Jonathan Lebed and Razorfish - all beneficiaries of the speed and hype of the net but lacking the staying power required for the long haul. Watch out when the RNC wakes up! more

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Spam vs. Junk Mail

Posted by Gregg at 10:22 AM

I've always been a proponent for the commercial use of the internet. When Wired ran the first banner back in 95' I chuckled at the posts on The Well that equated internet advertising with the end of the world. Similarly, when I started getting UCE in my inbox I shrugged it off as easier to deal with than the junk mail delivered to my mailbox each day -- just hit delete and that was that. Well ... the scales have tipped. It's my opinion that the paper junk mail is now far less annoying, inconvenient and intrusive that the spam I receive each day. I get more legitimate email than the average person but the UCE I receive far exceeds the legitimate mail - even if I include email from companies I have a relationship with (even though I may not have asked them to email me) in the legitimate email total the amount of spam is still much greater. Overnight alone I receive about 80 spam messages - with a cable connection at home and a T1 at the office it take about 5 minutes to download it all. I've found no really effective client side solution. Filters in most email clients do a decent job but I've missed important messages from clients and candidates because of them so I end up having to browse through the "deleted" folder anyway. Just hitting "delete" is no longer practical. Pornographic or adult related ads showing up in my 10 year old's inbox in not acceptable. There needs to be some mechanism to hold the large scale spammers accountable and it better come from industry rather than government. Maybe the only way to get to the spammers is to go after their clients. Ultimately, some company is selling the products that the spammers peddle and someone is buying these products. Granted, the cost of sending an email is so cheap that a company doesn’t have to sell very much but they have to attract some buyers or they wouldn’t market this way. It seems as though the pressure point is the merchant – if the spammers won't change maybe the marketers will. more

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Making Sense of it All

Posted by Gregg at 11:38 AM

Lester Thurow in his new book "Fortune Favors the Bold" asserts that having a Chief Knowledge Officer is the key to divining trends in business models. more

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No Blackout for Spam

Posted by Gregg at 02:42 PM

Between 4:00 PM Thursday and 6:00 AM Friday I got 27 spam email messages. Considering that I live in NY and over 50,000,000 people were without power from Canada to New Jersey it's amazing that the barrage of spam didn't miss a beat. Do the utilities have something to learn from the email marketers? more

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Was it ever really AOL?

Posted by Gregg at 02:48 PM

There's been a lot of talk recently about AOL / TW changing it's name. Personally, I've always had a hard time getting AOL to cross my lips when describing the world’s largest media company. AOL made a brilliant move in merging with TW, they leveraged inflated stock to buy real assets across all media categories. more

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Why RSS is a Big Deal

Posted by Gregg at 01:55 PM

There’s so much really useful information on the web but how many of us really have the time to regularly read through the content on the 20 or more sites that would supply us with valuable information regarding our personal and professional interests. Not many, I’d bet. That’s the beauty of RSS feeds. Sites using the RSS protocol deliver summaries of a site’s articles into a news reader on the desk top. Remember the promise of push technology? RSS delivers on the promise. more

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Acxiom Hacked

Posted by Gregg at 02:56 PM

Managing large customer databases for consumer and B2B companies is a lucrative business but not without some risks. Some of Acxiom's customer databases were broken into last week by a former employee of one of their clients. It seems as though not much damage was done and the company dodged a PR nightmare and possibly real liability. more

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