ok, given the medium i use for publishing, perhaps not that strange that i would report on articles that the blogosphere can have greater influence than traditional press.
but the slant of the whitepaper is on the affect that one consumer had on the reputation of dell computers. also interesting is the citation analysis technique market sentinel uses to measure online PR - doesn’t seem to be a million miles away from google’s PageRank algo.
you can read the full pdf report here.
btw, market sentinel has loads of useful information on the state of blogging.
at the risk of sounding like i’m getting on the microsoft whinge wagon, this story does smell of doo-gooder PR.
“Bill Gates made news this month when he said Microsoft’s MSN search engine might give away cash or software to get people to use the site.”
umm, a year after an ad-campaign across the us and europe that failed to cement any decent increase in market share, comes the announcement that the money msn gets from paid ads could go to charity. or at least some of it.
an act of selfless charity, or a cynical move by the number 3 in search to try and maintain a more sizeable market share? if it is the latter, many thought that the longhorn OS could embed search and help sew up this app. longhorn’s late and in the meantime google apps continue to proliferate making the big g more and more indispensible.
so, google used to have a deal where it supplied ads to aol. now it’s tied up the reciprocal. looks like google will own a share of aol (5%) and in return google will start displaying aol ads. so much for google concentrating on doing deals with the little man (say, through google adwords). it’s decided to jump into a bigger league.
For me though, this is the crux:
“Though Google is only seven years old, its lucrative search advertising business and its technical prowess could enable it to offer consumers free software and services that would directly attack Microsoft’s core software business.”
it’s getting to the point where almost all software is seen as media. software - in the old days thought of as a commodity. and as with any media model, there is the possibility for an additional revenue stream - advertising. so where the ms office suite costs almost as much as a pc, it’s thought likely that google will start offering a web-based office suite for free.
just an aside, but one of the things that has struck me on the technological side, is some wiki evangelisation that is going on here. the idea being that the web is a perfect platform for sharing information, and so should be utilised in large corporations. the idea being you move away from static documents (eg. Word) and create fluid web-based ones.
all in all, could well mean the end of the MS Office corporate dominance.
aside #2… funny how things go full circle. when the corporate world first embraced the web, the emphasis on presentation and design meant that the initial academic principles of creating a platform for sharing ideas were largely usurped.
now it’s the large-scale corp world that could push the web back in this direction. albeit with the addition of one facet - rather than publishing html documents, it’s more along the lines of opening a forum.
enter the period of open source search… Alexa has started offering its index for a minimal price.
what does this mean? any entrepreneur that spots a hole in a vertical search market can plug that gap by sectioning a part of alexa and branding it up. stick some adsense (or any other ad program) on there and you could have a viable business model.
potential problems?
- apparently this has been done before (prior to the dot com fallout) and last time round it didn’t work out.
- the alexa index, at 4 billion pages, isn’t all that.
should get an idea over the next year or so what the take-up rate is.
