Microsoft has just offered to pay $44.6 billion to buy Yahoo, which, if it goes through, would be the biggest tech acquisition ever.
Yahoo stock skyrockets. Microsoft stock plummets. This basically means that Microsoft is saying “we tried to stay competitive online, and we failed”. If this deal goes through, expect a lot of Microsoft products-email,and possibly search, to go away.
Disclosure: I do some consulting work for Flix55.
IF you want get something out of your compulsive video watching, check out Flix55. You win points for watching videos, uploading videos that get a lot of views, commenting etc. More points mean cash prizes.Basically, you can do everything you can on YouTube, only you have a chance(as the site is small, a pretty good chance) to get a few bucks in your PayPal account. I’ve promoted a couple of the videos on Digg, and I have about a jillion points, so it can’t be that hard.
Ummm, what else, what else. There are only two things in life worth doing:
1. Visiting Flix55.com right now and uploading a video
2. Getting a consulting gig of any kind
If you get a chance to do both, you’re doing very well indeed.
/sellout
This video pretty much summarizes the Web 2.0 phenomenon:
Note that, aside from being of very high quality, it also has all of the elements of a viral video- it’s already got a good deal of views, and expect those views to explode in the days to come.
Oh and yes, I’ve become quite a bit more cynical about Web 2.0 over the past few months. If you want a powerful reality check, go work 14 hour days at a Web 2.0 startup for a few months 
I think the biggest problem with Web 2.0 is that most of these companies focus on changing the world/revolutionizing the industry, and not enough time focusing on running a business, which, at least in theory, even a Web 2.0 Internet startup is.
Imagine if someone asked you for a million dollars to start a small department store that doesn’t sell anything or produce any revenue, and whose business plan is to get bought by Wal-Mart.
Add a 2.0 and put it on the Internet, and you’ve got a promising startup.
The Internet is the Medium, not the Message.
Read that. Read it again. Remember it. The medium changes- book–>newspaper–>radio–>TV–>Internet.
Even when navigating new communication paradigms, the message remains the same, only transmitted along a slightly different medium.
So when building your awesome world-changing web application, don’t worry so much about the medium. Focus on the message, which remains very constant, and always will remain constant. I was reading “Scientific Advertising” a book written in 1923, and was struck by how much everything in it can be applied to modern Internet advertising. The similarities are incredible, and perplexing as they are at first, it all makes sense when you realize that even the medium hasn’t changed that much- unless you’re a video site, you’re still basically working with a print medium, not all too different from a newspaper.
You can take lessons about writing newspaper classified ads from the 1920s and apply them, almost verbatim, to writing Google AdWords ads. It’s the same format- three short 45-character lines to sell something, just on a different medium.
Focus on the message 
Today, Google has rolled out yet another PageRank update - or half of an update anyway. Google’s PageRank is a rough indicator of the worth and authority of a particular site- there are many factors in search results, but all other factors being equal, a site with higher PageRank will be higher in search results, attracting more traffic, than a site with lower PageRank. Although internal PageRank fluctuates constantly, Google pushes out updates to its visible PageRank every few months. Usually, some sites gain in PageRank and some lose. But this update is different.
In this update, PageRanks are going down, big time. Respected sites like Engadget are losing Pagerank, which will undoubtedly result in lower advertising revenue and search traffic. Why? All the evidence points to the fact that they have been smacked down by Google for excessive linking. Yeah, that’s right- they will be judged in the search engines not on their content or relevance to the visitor, but because they link too much to other sites in their network or their advertisers.
Frankly, I think this latest hit from Google is bullshit, and not because of anything it did to me(my own PageRank, unaffected by the update, remains at a solid 0). Read more »
I think I will be blogging with more discipline now. Everyone needs a break from constant writing, and I think I’m done with mine- I miss your comments Also, no more Adsense, it was only an annoyance.
Anyway, the most interesting news in the blogging/tech world today, delivered to me via my Wordpress dashboard (Wordpress is the software powering this and millions of other blogs), is that Automattic, the maintainers of the Wordpress project have acquired Gravatar, the simple tool popular on Wordpress blogs that creates a unified avatar image for you across blogs.
An acquistion of one small project by a startup is always interesting, but this one is particularly peculiar. Why Gravatar? The creator of Wordpress says it was “A good fit“. What does that mean? Sure, Gravatar integrates with Wordpress, but so do thousands of other plugins. Why this one? Read more »
This blog is not dead, just…hibernating. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the feed to be notified of my erratic updates through your browser. I will probably shift to a more sporadic, longer essay format soon. Until then, what have we missed in the Web 2 bubble world since my last post? Read more »
A piece of news that was recently overlooked(and overshadowed today by Apple’s announcement, no doubt) was Yahoo’s $300 million acquisition of advertising network BlueLithium. This is following their nearly $700 million acquisition of RightMedia only a few months ago. So, Yahoo has spent nearly a billion dollars buying up ad networks. Why? To compete with Google? Not quite. Read more »
Apologies for the lack of posts recently-I’ve been busy working on a political blog project and have been rather neglecting this little personal blog. It truly makes you appreciate how much effort it takes to maintain multiple blogs. So, like all lazy bloggers, I’ll simply give you some links from my feeds in the Web marketing field:
