I love tools that give good recommendations! As both in “The Long Tail” and in “From Niches to Riches” when more products are available, it is hard for consumers to locate the product they are interested in. I wish I could find some other examples rather than books (cause they talked about amazon.com so much already), but I was playing with UT library site the other day and under a book I searched for, I saw tags (labels) showing up. It is supported by Library Thing.
I went to Library Thing website. It is a website that you can search for books. Each book is tagged by website members and you can see there are “members” of the book. I haven’t registered yet, but am guessing anyone can become a member of a book? You can see the list of members and each member has a profile and his/her own library. Pretty interesting site.
The problem is google is probably not enough (I like delicious.com, but it is still not enough). Googlezon in epic2014 is probably ideal for consumers. When you find a web page, there’s gonna be a recommendation says: people who like this page also like……
If someone can beat google on that part and use that search engine on every website, is google gonna die? (or become the second yahoo?)
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
cooking ideas and reputation, is it enough?
In our hypothetical tribe, however, people give what they have into the pot with no guarantee that they’re getting a fair exchange, which smacks of altruism……. But on the Net, a cooking-pot market is far from altruistic…… Your effort is limited to creating one – the original – copy of your product…… but millions of unique goods made by others!
I guess the cooking pot markets make sense to me in that this is what I see on the Internet, especially through my everyday life. The model makes sense, but probably not enough for media companies who wish to make money, or cash in reputation. Each individual on the Internet might be producing their work for fun, only asking for ideas in exchange or gain some reputation, but media firms want to find a fast way to convert bits and bytes into real world currency. Subscription model does not work and online advertising is increasing, but uncertain where it is going.
Google creates new ways for ad methods, such as AdSense, with complicated equations, but what else? Cumulating reputation and then cash in the reputation is similar to your cash return credit card: before you reach a certain amount of credit (reputation), it cannot be cashed in (maybe a little with advertising). But if you cumulate enough reputation, one day you can cash in whatever you have at hand for millions or billions, if lucky enough.
So media companies buy Web sites that already have a good reputation and a good audience base, such as Google bought YouTube. In addition to this, after investing in a Web site and since nothing can be cashed in immediately, how can media companies survive if the cash flow keeps being negative? Media companies cannot just do it for fun, can they? (so far I guess only Google say they do?)
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
online news and relevant advertising
I was thinking how news Web sites can make the advertising showing up on their Web pages relevant to their users.
It is hard. When we see an (full screen) ad on a news Web site like the other day in class, what we did was to look for the x button. We do not like being interrupted by advertising, especially irrelevant ones. But making advertising relevant to a specific user requires sufficient knowledge of that specific user. We rarely give out adequate/true information to news Web sites. This is where portal sites such as Yahoo, AOL, and especially Google can gain a great chunk of the pie. They profile their users.
Here is a post describing with google phone, how google will profile each individual user precisely. Another thing not in the post but I saw on another youtube video is (unverified info) when a user use google phone to take a photo and with 3g network, the phone tags the current location to the photo automatically.
It is hard. When we see an (full screen) ad on a news Web site like the other day in class, what we did was to look for the x button. We do not like being interrupted by advertising, especially irrelevant ones. But making advertising relevant to a specific user requires sufficient knowledge of that specific user. We rarely give out adequate/true information to news Web sites. This is where portal sites such as Yahoo, AOL, and especially Google can gain a great chunk of the pie. They profile their users.
Here is a post describing with google phone, how google will profile each individual user precisely. Another thing not in the post but I saw on another youtube video is (unverified info) when a user use google phone to take a photo and with 3g network, the phone tags the current location to the photo automatically.
Anyway, as we see in class on Monday, google devotes 70% of its effort to search and advertising, 20% to something and 10% to the rest. No wonder google news does not have a user friendly interface, yet. It's probably not yet on the to-do list. As we see google plans to start digitizing print newspapers, I do think google has an interest in news, or an interest in constantly updated information. With it devotes 70% of its effort to search and advertising, when they profile each individuals precisely, would the combination of the three make most users use google news and make most advertisers reluctant to spend money on any other news Web sites?
Google does not produce any news products. Will there be new business models or partnership between google and a news organization? similar to the partnership between google and t-mobile for the google phone?
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Media firms' financial indicators
This NYTimes article compares Google and Microsoft across several indicators:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/google-at-age-10/
A recent article on how Tribune Co. measured journalist productivity:
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4594
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/google-at-age-10/
A recent article on how Tribune Co. measured journalist productivity:
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4594
financial health indicators
As we see in the reading that there are indicators for economic health and financial health (Picard, p.230), I think it is harder for me to identify financial health indicators now. The numbers are very overwhelming. Here's why I started looking at GOOG's balance sheet:
In Business Week's Best Brands of 2008, Google ranks the 10th, a huge jump from the 20th of 2007 ranking.The brand value is $25.6 billion, which is a 43% increase from 2007. After reading the chapters, I want to know what does this $25.6 billion mean, so I started looking through GOOG's balance sheet.
For me, economic indicators seem to be more straightforward. For example, for economic health, when ComScore reported that google's search engine share increased from 61.9% to 63% within a month, it seems to me to be a growth in market share: an indicator for economic growth.
Picard's chapters are helpful in terms of explaining financial indicators, such as the definitions of assets, liabilities, and debt, but applying those to real world is difficult.
The table is obtained from Google Finance. As you can see for GOOG, there are total current assets and total assets. I am not exactly sure which one to look at when or which one is more important when deciding if a company is financially healthy. There are some ups and downs for total current assets and the total assets grow constantly. I think overall it looks pretty good? But I still did not find where the $25.6 billion (in Business Week) come from......
In Business Week's Best Brands of 2008, Google ranks the 10th, a huge jump from the 20th of 2007 ranking.The brand value is $25.6 billion, which is a 43% increase from 2007. After reading the chapters, I want to know what does this $25.6 billion mean, so I started looking through GOOG's balance sheet.
For me, economic indicators seem to be more straightforward. For example, for economic health, when ComScore reported that google's search engine share increased from 61.9% to 63% within a month, it seems to me to be a growth in market share: an indicator for economic growth.
Picard's chapters are helpful in terms of explaining financial indicators, such as the definitions of assets, liabilities, and debt, but applying those to real world is difficult.
| In Millions of USD | As of 2008-06-30 | As of 2008-03-31 | As of 2007-12-31 | As of 2007-09-30 | As of 2007-06-30 |
| Total Current Assets | 16,316.84 | 15,464.93 | 17,289.14 | 15,733.76 | 14,857.52 |
| Total Assets | 29,179.79 | 27,604.98 | 25,335.81 | 23,340.65 | 21,423.88 |
The table is obtained from Google Finance. As you can see for GOOG, there are total current assets and total assets. I am not exactly sure which one to look at when or which one is more important when deciding if a company is financially healthy. There are some ups and downs for total current assets and the total assets grow constantly. I think overall it looks pretty good? But I still did not find where the $25.6 billion (in Business Week) come from......
Monday, September 15, 2008
Is Google a monopoly?
It's a question worth considering this week as we examine market structures, and consider where media companies and products fit in the context of the theory of the firm. Jeff Jarvis takes this up in a blog post titled "Google: Monopoly or Marketplace?"
In his Guardian column on the subject, Jarvis writes:
In other words, Google has become a monopoly of sorts, and remains that way, because consumers and advertisers have made it that way (e.g., newspaper companies spend big money and time optimizing headlines and keywords to win the SEO wars). ... Just something for us to chew on during class.
... the issue isn't that Google is a monopoly. It’s that Google has become the marketplace. It where we all go for information. It’s where advertisers go for us.
It’s no different from a newspaper. Even when there were two papers in towns, one of them was the marketplace for homes, cars and jobs. That allowed the paper to set rates as high as the market could bear, which was very high. Google would say the difference is that it doesn’t set rates, the market does in auctions for keywords. Except in this case, by punishing Sourcetool, Google did set the rate. And it has the power to do that.
craigslist is also no different, except that Craig Newmark set most rates at zero. He’s the marketplace now and now that he has us by the neck, he could raise rates — as eBay did once it dominated the marketplace it created (though that invited competition from Amazon, Etsy, et al).
In his Guardian column on the subject, Jarvis writes:
But the problem with going after Google is that - unlike typical monopolies - it didn't steal its booty like a pirate in the night. It didn't win by being closed and proprietary. Google won by being open and distributed - which is not the image of the monopolist. The rest of the marketing universe, from media companies to advertising agencies, handed Google its dominance on a silver platter.
In other words, Google has become a monopoly of sorts, and remains that way, because consumers and advertisers have made it that way (e.g., newspaper companies spend big money and time optimizing headlines and keywords to win the SEO wars). ... Just something for us to chew on during class.
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