The free traffic ranking tool Alexa has made some improvements to their system: Addition of geography of users. A site’s traffic rank in other countries. Modification to their ‘reach’ data.
Author: Dan Blank
Working for Free: User-Generated Media
As user-generated media becomes a prime force in the cultural and business worlds, Time asks ‘how much work will people will do for free?’ The power of volunteer-generated media has hit some important milestones: “Argue about its inaccuracies all you want, but the volunteer-authored online encyclopedia is on its way to becoming (if it isn’t… Continue reading Working for Free: User-Generated Media
Where New Ideas Come From
Robert Scoble has an interesting post about how innovation happens. His theory, is that it doens’t happen much within established companies – that they prefer to have others test it and establish it’s value first. “Big companies (even ones like Google) will rarely execute on totally novel new ideas. Why? Committees and not invented here… Continue reading Where New Ideas Come From
Meet the New Media Moguls
The Wall Street Journal profiles the “users” behind sites such as Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon, who help decide what is popular online. “The opinions of these key users have implications for advertisers shelling out money for Internet ads, trend watchers trying to understand what’s cool among young people, and companies whose products or services… Continue reading Meet the New Media Moguls
Sooner Than You Thought: The Death of Print
IDG is no longer a print media company. The state of things, according to IDG SVP of Online Colin Crawford: “The brutal reality that we’re facing today is the costly process of dismantling and replacing legacy operations and cultures and business models with ones with new and yet to be fully proven business models. However,… Continue reading Sooner Than You Thought: The Death of Print
Becoming the Internet
Seth Godin has a fascinating piece on the evolution of the web, focusing on the idea of the semantic web. To quote Tim Berners-Lee: “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A… Continue reading Becoming the Internet
News Should be Free!
Variety dropped its pay wall! Thought that was cool. I’m not the only one.
The New York Times Focuses Online
Haaretz.com has a fascinating interview with New York Times owner, chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger. The most interesting quote: “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.” Some predictions from The New York Times’ futurist-in-residence Michael Rogers: An explosion of mobile devices… Continue reading The New York Times Focuses Online
Personalization: Now More Personal Than Before
BusinessWeek looks at some new personalization and recommendation tools that are on the horizon. “The goal of the new generation of recommendation tools is to encourage visitors to stay as long as possible on particular sites and, in the process, deliver as many ads as possible to users—without alienating them.”
The Next Generation of Search
There has been a lot of chatter online about natural language search. All eyes are on Powerset and Xerox, who hope that their technology “will be the basis of a new search engine that allows users to type queries in plain English, rather than using keywords.” Google’s Marissa Meyer has been quoted as saying that… Continue reading The Next Generation of Search