Category: Second Life

Geek dinner Gillmortastic

Why do I enjoy geek dinners so much? Because you can really get to know people and their ideas better. Scott Beale took a bunch of photos. I like the one he got of me a lot. I look sorta crusty. That’s what happens when I don’t shave.

Steve Gillmor and I snuck away after the dinner to a local coffee shop where we stayed until 1 a.m. I finally got what he has been trying to tell us all. But I need some sleep to let it all sink in so I can explain it all. Sorry, I am stuck with a 486 brain and Gillmor is throwing 64-bit ideas at me.

That said, I have two days this week where I’m going to be thinking of nothing but search, gestures, advertising, and other memes that Gillmor put in my head. I can’t tell you where I am, or what I’m doing, but let’s just put it this way: next to my bed is a bag with a multi-colored logo on it.

Visit to Monster Cable

Every once in a while I get an invite to talk to a company I wouldn’t otherwise have visited. Everytime I do this I learn a ton. Today was no exception. The company I visited today? Monster Cable.

See, they have a problem.

If you search Google or MSN for “Home Theater” you don’t find any manufacturers. Here’s that query on MSN. On Google. On Yahoo.

What do you see instead? Magazines, forums and blogs. They are realizing they better learn about the blogging world.

Even worse. Go to Technorati. Search on “Monster Cable.” There are more than 2,000 posts. You should have seen their eyes when they realized the world was talking about them and their products and they weren’t even watching. They are now.

Does this matter? They have 1,000 employees working away in Brisbane, CA, near Silicon Valley. What would happen if their sales went up or down by 10%?

And they do have a big opportunity staring them in the face: HDTV. Everyone who buys a new HDTV is going to need new cables.

Now, who are the most authoritative people about the home theater market? Well, let’s talk about Chris Greene. He’s an associate product category manager there. But he has owned his own laser disk store, and worked at Silicon Valley’s top home theater store (Century Stereo). He knows more about the home theater market than anyone else I know.

I’d love to read a blog by him, or other Monster employees. These guys live and breathe home theaters. They know all the big players in the industry. The latest trends (Chris was telling me about new remote controls coming soon that’ll let you control not just your AV system, but your entire house).

And they certainly know about cables and other audio/video accessories.

Share that expertise with us, and we’ll link and link often. Imagine what a link on Engadget is worth? It’s those links that’ll get them on the search result pages for “home theater.” And what’s that worth? Well, look at all the ads on that page and you’ll get your answer.

John Battelle analyzes why Google is running away from the crowd in the search space internet advertising space. Hey, I can tell you that one. I work for a Google competitor. We simply aren’t as good. Yet.

The word-of-mouth network around the world is so efficient now that you can NOT win if you don’t build the best of breed products and services. When I can honestly say that MSN is better than Google, you can bet I’ll be singing that from the rooftops. MSN +is+ getting better. I can see the improvement every month. The question is will we pass Google’s quality? Will we have an advertising engine that’s better than Google? I believe we can. But we’re not there yet (even the guys who make MSN’s search engine admit that). Until we are, Google will continue being rewarded by the market.

This reminds me of working on a magazine. See, Google isn’t a search company. It’s in the audience aggregation business. Get an audience together and then figure out how to serve advertising to that audience. Lots of people think Google is a search company. It’s not. This is why Google probably doesn’t care too much about newer search engines like Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket, Sphere, or Exalead (all of which have some search advantages over Google).

Google just wants to make sure they have the biggest audience (and smartest, and richest, and youngest).

Do you have a way to attract an audience on the Internet? That’s what the business types at the big companies are looking for. Do you have a way to serve better advertising to those audiences? That’s what they are looking for too. There’s business opportunities in those two places. The trick is, getting an audience is getting harder due to the choices we all have as to where to spend our time (and our money). The more choices there are, the harder it is to get any decent sized audience.

And on the advertising side, getting advertisers to feel comfortable spending money on your service will be hard. I remember when I helped run a camera store in Silicon Valley. We used to advertise in the Yellow Pages. Lots of other competitors would always pitch us on spending money with them. So we tried the alternative once. It didn’t work. So we went back to where the audience was.

You want to know where the money is in the internet advertising business? Follow the audience. That’s where it’s going to be.

Memeorandum gets more hype and new feature

TechCrunch has links to a new Wired article that hypes up Memeorandum and a new feature released today too. It deserves the hype. I, too, check it a lot of times per day. But, I do find that I’m falling into the Memeorandum trap: only thinking about stuff that shows up on Memeorandum. That’s one of the reasons I was light on blogging this week. I wanted to get outside of the Memeorandum world and find some new stuff.

Speaking of which, the latest builds of Windows Vista that are showing up are really getting me excited. New features are showing up with every build. This is a fun time to be a Microsoft employee. I just wish I had more time to play. Oh, and there’s a famous guitarist (I don’t know that it’s my place to give his name away) recording the sounds right now that will play on Windows Vista. They invited me over to film, but I have to run to the airport. Damn, damn, damn. Charles is headed over there instead.

MSN Search geeks on Channel 9

I just posted a frank talk with two of the geeks who are building MSN Search. It’s an hour long, and you’ll get a little look into how the geeks who build search engines think. If you’re interested in search, I think this one will be interesting to you. I was pretty hard on this team cause they are in the #3 spot. We talk about Google, noise, spam, and lots of other stuff.

I’m off to fly down to Silicon Valley. See ya tonight. I’ll be going to the TechCrunch Meetup, but will be there a bit late.

Cool new search engine

Wow, check out this search engine: Exalead. Gary Price sent that one over to me. It’s not perfect, but the UI shows that a lot more can be done than the big three have done with search.

For instance, I did a search for HDTV. Now look along the left side. You get related terms, related categories, can view Web sites by location, and get a good look at document types being served up. Neat icons of each result, too.

Sphere’s new search impresses, but not there yet

Tony Conrad, Sphere’s CEO, gave me a tour of Sphere.com today, a new blog search engine. He started out by saying that Mary Hodder is on their advisory board. That’s interesting because Mary has done some of the best thinking of the gestures that search engines could track.

They showed me what the engine is good for, what it doesn’t do, and where they are going. I’m intrigued, but don’t yet see that it’ll hold off Google or Technorati. But they are on the right track and might get there first. I’m holding out hope.

See, there are a few blog search types that I think most people will want to do:

1) Find the “big fish” in a specific blog community. This type of person is looking to join a new community and find some good blogs to read. Search a blog search engine for, say, “Scrapbooking,” and see what comes up. Most of the time it’s noise because most blog search engines just show you the latest 10 posts that were made with the word “Scrapbooking” on them. Watch, this post will show up on Feedster and Technorati and IceRocket within a few minutes. What you really want, though, isn’t a blog that rarely writes about Scrapbooking. No, you want a blog that ONLY writes about Scrapbooking. That’s where Mary’s social gestures come in. If a search engine was tracking all those gestures, it could find the most relevant results. Now, Sphere does do better than other engines, because it brings back blogs based on relevancy, rather than just who just published. The problem is they are only tracking links and title tags so far. Yes, it’s better than the other blog searches, but it’s not pure. I am still getting spam on some of my queries that I tried and it still doesn’t make you confident that you really are finding the “big fish” in the scrapbooking community.

2) Link search. It’s not intuitive, but one way we find blogs is if we find one that we like, it’s usually good to see who else is linking to it (and who that one blog is linking to). Sphere doesn’t do this kind of search, but most of the others do.

3) Time-based RSS query. This is where you want to see every blog that writes a certain word or phrase. For instance, I search on a number of engines for the word “Microsoft.” If you write “Microsoft” on your blog, I’ll probably see it because PubSub, Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket will watch for that, and will spit it into an RSS feed that I subscribe to. I couldn’t test the quality of this on Sphere because the pre-release version they gave me access to didn’t yet generate RSS feeds (Tony said it will by the time it’s released). What I did like is that I can do the search for “Microsoft” on Sphere two ways: once ranked by time (latest post at the top) and other ranked by relevance (what they sense is the most important post is at top). Oh, I just saw that Feedster now does the same thing. Hmm, did they just add that?

Anyway, the race is definitely on for who can do the best blog search engine. Sphere is definitely a step in the right direction. But the path ahead of us is long and we’re only partway there.