In a move to monetize its site traffic, Yahoo has announced it’s going to start making its own short clips. In a reversal of its prior strategy, Yahoo is making original video content to appeal to segments of its audience that represent its biggest users, e.g. mothers. It is getting “famous” hosts to anchor these […]

Yahoo just agreed to store peoples’ search histories for only 90 days. Google had slashed its time to 9 months. And Microsoft says it will reduce theirs to 6 months if Google does too. If these search engines were using data retention as a way to compete for consumers concerned about their privacy I’d be […]

A recent WSJ article, Google Gears Down for Tougher Times explains that their mantra has always been to put long term projects ahead of the short term interests of shareholders but not anymore.
Like many other companies, the focus needs to be on the here and now, (survival mode to be more dramatic) which has […]

Ten years after its founding, the search giant has not one, but three books, that are nicely reviewed in last weekend’s Financial Times. Randall Stross has the business history which according to the review nicely describes the evolution of the company and benefits from “rare insider access.” Then there’s another one by a French intellectual—the […]

Michael Arrington has a good review of MySpace’s MyAd’s platform. It looks pretty smart: display ads sold on a cost-per-click basis that can be targeted based on 1200 categories of users MySpace has developed based on user behavior on the site. As Arrington mentions, if you are looking for California women between 25-30 who like […]

In celebration of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we’ve teamed up with Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Citi to raise awareness for a cause that affects countless Americans every year. We’ve re-launched a new and improved Pink Ribbon on MySpace and Facebook that gives users tons of easy ways to show their […]

Underestimating Google can be disastrous, says Don Reisinger on CNET recently, especially if you are a mobile carrier. I’ve been saying this for a while too but I’d like to play devil’s advocate for a minute and suggest that overestimating Google can lead to a waste of money and focus even if it isn’t […]

I’m looking forward to reading Bill Tancer’s book Click which is supposed to show how analyzing massive amounts of click data, correlated with other data, can tell us what consumers want and predict the economic future. Of course hype sells and this book may have its share. But my guess is, he’s right. Hitwise, […]

So Google’s a Zen Master in addition to not being evil according to a column by the NYTimes Steve Lohr today . Here’s Lohr’s thesis - Microsoft was the master practitioner of network effects. It realized that more users led to more applications which led to more users and that users and […]

Is Google Making Us Stupid? asks Nicholas Carr in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Carr dances around the question so in the hand we don’t know whether he is just being provocative or whether he really believes it.
The fact that it begins and ends with a doomsday scenario of computers taking […]