Monthly Archives: February 2011

by eubie

Books in February 2011

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman — I expected to hear about the nuclear arms weapon plans. I was surprised to hear how advanced the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program was. Also the Soviet Union’s attitude during this period was to publicly deny they had broken treaties banning building biological weapons and they assumed the U.S. was lying too.

by eubie

What digital dimes from print dollars looks like

From Monday Note byFrédéric Filloux: The Publisher’s Dilemma

Let’s face it: the online advertising business model, when applied to the transformation of the newspaper industry, is largely failure. The reasons are well known:
– The profusion of free, news-related contents diluted the perceived value of editorial-rich “trusted brands”.
– More agile competitors, quite adept at using sophisticated audience-catching techniques (that are implemented at a fraction of the cost of a modern printing plant).
– The endless stream of pages with hundreds of URLs added each day ended up destroying any balance in the supply vs. demand mechanism.
– The resulting pressure on prices, as “premium” ad formats slowly yielded to bulk fire sales.
– An unreliable audience measurement system that rewards cheating instead of editorial quality or relevance.
– The advertising community’s inability to base their purchases on solid market analyses.

 

And on GigaOm by Mathew Ingram: Memo to Newspapers: Incremental Change is Not Helping, which buils on Filloux’s article:

Washington Post print and online revenue 2004-2010

 

 

 

That should keep both journalists and the business side of newspapers awake at night.

by eubie

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-02-26

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by eubie

Stephen Covey and big rocks

When I first heard Stephen Covey give the metaphor of the big rocks, it clearly illustrated the value of how important things can be blocked by the smaller things. I’ve never been able to re-tell the story very well. Now I’ll point them to this video clip instead.

by eubie

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-02-19

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by eubie

NY Times examines black-hat SEO by JC Penney

The New York Times story “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search” is describes the various ways JC Penney employed through a hired SEO company to get itself to prime places in Google search for phrases ranging “area rugs” to “dresses”.

Now that the results have been disclosed, Penney will pay a penalty. Google is not amused when its system has been tricked. Google seems more regal when portrayed in articles like Wired’s “Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web“, which was awe-inspiring in the attention given to search results and to make them as useful as it could. Oh to see Google’s results compared to its competitors. it’s easy to see why it continues to dominate over Yahoo and Bing.

But black-hat SEO companies mock Google. The techniques they use take Google’s efforts and ridicule them and use them against Google itself. The methods have been around for years, but it’s been mostly discussed in the tech circles. The NY Times articles just brought it to the general public and embarrasses Google more publicly.

Since the NY Times story, Penney has dismissed the SEO company, SearchDex, and other companies are expected to look over the SEO practices they use and hire. The reward of prominent Google listings is too much for some companies to rely on the vague and uncertainty of white-hat SEO efforts.

See

Scene from "Angel and the Badman"

by eubie

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-02-12

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