November 18, 2005

Online Classifieds

The Economist writes that “small ads are flooding away from newspapers and onto the internet.”

Search advertisingthe small text-ads that appear alongside Google and Yahoo! searchesaccount for 40% of the online ad market. Another 20% goes to display ads and 18% to classified advertising. But search advertising can also work like a small ad and will increasingly challenge print classifieds as websites develop localised and more elaborate services for online users.

Perhaps the most significant development came on November 16th, when Google started up a prototype service called Google Base. It offers a searchable database of free listings, including small ads which can be narrowed down to postal regions. Among its first offerings were used cars. In time, Google could challenge eBay, whose own auction listings now work much like a giant classified websiteespecially with its buy-it-now options. But eBay charges sellers. Even so, it sold more than 450m items in the three months to September 30th, for almost $11 billion.

Riya finds Pictures

Wired News writes:

Riya has developed software that can automatically recognize who is in a picture and tag it with their names.

Currently in alpha testing, the software has proven sensitive enough to tell the difference between twins and recognize members of the same family. It can even read street signs for clues about a picture’s location.

“We want to help make every photo in the world something you can find,” said CEO Munjal Shah. “We’re capturing every moment of our lives as human beings, and we can’t search it today. We’ll feel we’ve done our job when you can search every photo.”

Om Malik thinks Google may be acquiring Riya.

Intel and the New World

Tom Foremski writes:

Gates’ Copernicus-like revelation that we no longer live in a PC-centric world is late but significant for Microsoft. But has MSFT’s PC partner Intel realized the world has changed?

The last time I looked, Intel was quite happily promoting its latest and greatest PC microprocessors, vowing to make them ever more powerful and complex.

But with the Big Computer approach, for most tasks, you don’t need super-smart PC clients, because the Big Computer can do the processing far faster than the client.

You just need a client that can render video/graphic/audio bits really fast and needs only a little bit of local smarts. And there are plenty of chips out there than can do this, and that don’t cost several hundred dollars, as Intel’s top of the line PC chips and chipsets.

Yes, there are many professional tasks that require a powerful PC client system, but for most of us, the Big Computer in the Cloud will do just fine once we get ubiquitous broadband–which isn’t far away.

Trillion Dollar Web 2.0 Matrix

Nivi writes: “This article will describe where to find at least a trillion dollars of latent value on the Internet. The summary is: use user-generated content to determine the relevancy of search results, determine the media you consume, and determine the messages you receive. And use the right scope (e.g. personal, social, or world) for the job.”

MySpace’s Story

Wired writes how MySpace became the MTV for the Net generation.

MySpace [is] a community Web site that converts electronic word of mouth into the hottest marketing strategy since the advent of MTV. Massively popular, MySpace is nominally a social networking site like Friendster, but nearly 400,000 of the site’s roughly 30 million user pages belong to bands. The rest belong mostly to teens and twentysomethings who attend the groups’ shows, download their songs, read their blogs, send them fan mail, and enthusiastically spread the word.
…
By any measure, MySpace is one of the top sites on the Web. It racked up 9.4 billion pageviews in August – more than Google – and new users are signing up at a stunning rate of 3.5 million a month. But these aren’t the only numbers that drew the attention of Rupert Murdoch, chair and CEO of News Corp., which agreed to buy MySpace’s parent company in July for $580 million: The site hosts 12 percent of all ads on the Web, more than any other site. MySpace should gross $30 million to $40 million this year, says John Tinker, an analyst with ThinkEquity in New York. And with News Corp.’s sales force behind it, he estimates the company could double that figure in 2006.

To focus on corporate finances, though, is to miss a larger point. The real economic beneficiaries of MySpace are the ambitious young musicians in Pomona and around the country who are creating a new, life-size kind of stardom. Over the past couple years, MySpace and other community sites, like purevolume.com, have launched a number of acts: Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Relient K, and Silverstein, among others. Relient K, which plays earnest pop punk with an understated Christian message, has sold more than 500,000 albums in 12 months. My Chemical Romance’s last album sold more than 1 million copies.

TECH TALK: Good Books: On Dialogue

I was recommended a book On Dialogue on David Bohm by a colleague. It was in the context of a session we had organised for senior management of various companies to talk about some of the challenges they faced. While I have not yet got a copy of the book (it is on backorder at Amazon), I started reading about David Bohm and some of his work online.

David Bohm was a quantum physicist. But he also made contributions to a number of other fields. He developed a technique called Bohm Dialogue. According to Wikipedia:

Bohm Dialogue or Bohmian Dialogue is a form of free association conducted in groups, with no predefined purpose in mind besides mutual understanding and exploration of human thought. It aims to allow participants to examine their preconceptions, prejudices and patterns of thought. Bohm dialogue was developed by David Bohm, Donald Factor and Peter Garrett starting in 1983. Bohm published his views on dialogue in a series of papers between 1985 and 1991.

Bohm Dialogue (often referred to simply as Dialogue by its proponents) is conducted in groups of 20 to 40 people, who sit in a single circle. Participants “suspend” their thoughts, impulses and judgements instead of speaking from their usual point of view, they carefully analyse their thoughts. According to the proposal, Dialogue should not be confused with discussion or debate, which, says Bohm, suggests working towards a goal rather than simply exploring and learning.

David Bohm wrote:

in a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. everybody wins if anybody wins. there is a different sort of spirit to it. in a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. its a situation called win-win, whereas the other game is win-lose – if i win, you lose. but a dialogue is something more of a common participation, in which we are not playing a game against each other, but WITH each other. in dialogue, everybody wins
dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively.
…
in the dialogue group we are not going to decide what to do about anything. this is crucial. otherwise we are not free. we must have an empty space where we are not obliged to do anything, nor to come to any conclusions, nor to say anything or not say anything. its open and free. its an empty space. the word ‘leisure’ has that meaning of a kind of empty space. ‘occupied’ is the opposite of leisure; its full. so we have here a kind of empty space were anything may come in – and after we finish, we just empty it. we are not trying to accumulate anything. thats one of the points about a dialogue. as Krishnamurti used to say:”the cup has to be empty to hold something”

In today’s instant world where one’s attention span for a single activity is quite limited due to the barrage of interruptions, Bohm’s ideas on thought and dialogue are quite inspirational and worth looking at more closely, especially in the workplace.

Next Week: More Good Books

Continue reading TECH TALK: Good Books: On Dialogue