John Battelle has a very nice article entitled Thinking About Google and The Turning Point and I can relate. I still remember when Microsoft came out with Passport and what all the rage was. Now we are a lot more quiet and it is getting weird what kind of stuff I happily have on Google. Google tracks my web site (not for long, as it’s not good for a blog, more on that another time), handles my ads, does my eMail, is my search, runs small adwords campaigns for me (did run very big ones at my previous job and will likely again), has my account at Google Answers (and even gave me a blanket for being a researcher from the start 
), a bit of my network in Orkut, tracks me wherever there are AdSense ads, … the list could go on. Remember DoubleClick? When they bought a company that would potentially connect their clickstreams to personal identifiable data, all hell broke loose. HELLLOOOOOOO!!! Google has AdSense, the biggest advertising network ever invented, because it is a sales network and because its integrated effortless and works to a good degree.
Whenever they you see a Google ad, they know what it should be about, what the time of day is, what your country and provider is, what kind of conversion some of the ads have in the ad, what you search for when not surfing around, that you get lots of eMails (they likely don’t “know” what you get as eMail), and lots more stuff. So all in all Google is really approaching a size that makes it sound like the player out there but hey, you can switch. Go somewhere else. Things are hotting up out there and it will only get more interesting.
Technorati Tags: AdSense, AdWords, Clickstream, Google, Doubleclick, Battelle
Monthly Archives: November 2005
Is Google Approaching the U-Turn?
People searching already
We haven’t really announced our company yet, and already people searched for the company on OpenBC. I got somebody on my profile from Quotatis via a search for “Ormigo”, the name of the new company. Quotatis is a french site that allows individuals to get offers from 3 different merchants on a given subject allowing you to choose the best one. Congratulations for the 2 Million in funding. Also, Henning got called already by another entrepreneur to ask what we are doing based on his blog post. (Update: 2 people 
)
Ormigo is the name of our company we are currently setting up by the way, but you probably have guessed that already.
(Update: That person seems to have searched for some subjects, probably dropped by one of Henning’s posts, then searched on OpenBC, found the company name, … )
Technorati Tags: OpenBC, Ormigo, Quotatis
Searching Across Corante Web Hub Members
Corante has put together a great gang with their different hubs and I am still baffled that I am part of it. But if you want to know what the hub members have to say on a certain subject you can search directly on web.corante.com or check out this Rollyo search which covers everything Yahoo! has in their index.
Technorati Tags: Corante, Corante Web Hub, puppy
Firefox Referrals Available Internationally
The AdSense Blogs reports that you can now send Firefox referrals their way and get $1 even if you are not in the US and have an international account/site. I still use Safari I have to admit and I haven’t found out why I really need to switch yet, but Google seems to really be pushing their Toolbar with full force and that Firefox is part of the mix cannot be a coincidence. Some people already wondered whether Google has bought Firefox, with lots of Firefox developers now working at Google and if you believe the GoogleOS myths to be true, then having a good foot in the door in terms of future browser development and strategy is a good thing.
And as I posted some time ago, and now with Google’s Shipping Container, having the Toolbar everywhere would be a really good way to track everything and slowly but surely build their own Internet Backbone, knowing what users browse, search, read, and what their navigational paths across the web are. And as Seth has posted on Transparent Bundles, Clickstreams are gold to be mined.
So now go make me some money
Technorati Tags: AdSense, Advertising, Attention Trust, Firefox, Google, Google Toolbar, puppy, Root Markets
Playing with Amazon AWS
I have been playing a bit with Yahoo! Shoposphere which I posted about recently. I really like the concept, but sadly there is no revenue share yet and no way to attach my contact data to my shopping list. It’s also actually geared to putting things in there that are already in your hands, that you tested. But I wanted to look at using something like that in relation to AdSense.
AdSense allows you to add a default ad that would be shown instead of the public service announcements that come there if Google does not find anything to link to your site. But what to add? There are some services that tailor to this system but I always felt you would have to do something that is very personal to yourself. Enter Amazon’s Wishlist and the Amazon WebService, AWS in short.
There you can register and get your developer ID and actually build a nice REST query that will give you back your Wishlist. It currently only seems to do that for a US wishlist but who cares. I set one up and the query is easy to set up, especially with the help of AWS Zone.
Here is my query:
http://xml-us.amznxslt.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService &Version=2005-03-23 &Operation=ListLookup &Style=http%3A%2F%2Fthylmann.net%2Fmy-wishlist%2Famazon.xslt &ContentType=text%2Fhtml &SubscriptionId=hidden &ListId=UOV88WC3Q1WF &ListType=WishList &Condition=All &DeliveryMethod=Ship &ResponseGroup=Images%2CSmall &Sort=LastUpdated
That gives me a lookup of a specific wishlist, returning text/html, including images and a description, ordered by last updated. It would be nice to be ordering by rating but that did not seem to be there.
You see one interesting item in there, which is Style. There another URL can be found:
http://thylmann.net/my-wishlist/amazon.xslt
This is a relatively simple XSLT file that turn the output I get into anything I want, server side, by AWS. Very handy indeed. These together already give me a small box in the standard size of an AdSense ad, configurable in design, with the 4 items I have in my Wishlist over there.
Next comes PHP, which mangles what comes out of there a bit, because what I really need is an output in kind of Javascript. One thing that is important is that the output HTML needs to be all in one line, without ‘ or it will not return anything.
? print "document.write('";
$string = fopen("the above url", "r");
// now I replace both linebreaks and '
while (!feof($string)) {
$buffer = fgets($string, 4096);
$say = ereg_replace("n","",$buffer);
$say2 = ereg_replace("'"," ",$say);
echo $say2;
}
fclose($string);
print "');";
?
What does that give me? It produces the following output, which I can theoretically add as my default AdSense ad, built from my Wishlist, configurable in CSS, and with the stuff automatically going to the right address if somebody chooses to send them around.
Comment: The Sigma Lense and Lowepro is already communicated to other people, so I am very sorry for my readers that they will only be able to give me the other two items if they are so inclined
Technorati Tags: AdSense, Advertising, Amazon, AWS, XSLT
Welcome Corante Hubs – Where Great Minds Come Together
Today Corante launched their Hubs concept. The idea is to build hubs around certain subjects like media, law, technology, and the like, and then assemble some “top-notch” (their words ) bloggers to become the basis of the site through aggregation of their posts. These people do not become writers that write on another blog than their own, but simply deliver more or less focussed content in one subject through the aggregation of their feeds. Add to this an editor that cherry picks the posts from these contributors and you have a large resource that is very focussed on that specific subject, linking some very good people together. As Corante says: Where Great Minds Come Together.
Some time ago I received a message from Francois Gossieaux, who is partner, investor and head of sales and marketing at Corante. He introduced me to the general concept and the longer term idea of the Hubs concept and I really liked it. The nice thing was that his next question was whether I would want to join their Technology/Web Hub. Nice of him to ask, not that there was a great chance of me saying no, especially as I wouldn’t be posting on another blog but rather just have my content syndicated to a bigger audience and be part of a kick ass group. I would be a “top-notch” and “Great Minds” person.
So as of today, you will also see stuff from me on the Corante Web Hub. For the launch there is also a Corante Media Hub and a Corante Marketing Hub.
You can check out who is part of the Web Hub (Comment: I wrote Web Hug before ) right here at the Bio Page. Some very interesting people and I am happy to be part of the crowd. Looking forward to building up what network will be about.
Technorati Tags: blog, Corante, Corante Web Hub
The Gollum Browser – Wikipedia Ajax Love
A new browser has appeared and this one is doing something very specific. It accesses Wikipedia, that’s it. The Browser is called Gollum, the Wikipedia Browser and is written in Ajax, with PHP5 driving the code behind it. This really means that you can very simply include the browser as a popup.
function gollum(q, l, wl)
{
var wikiwin = window.open(“http://gollum.easycp.de/gollum/gollum.php?a=core&l=”+((l)?l:”)+”&wl=”+((wl)?wl:”)+”&q=”+((q)?q:”), “WIKI_ENVIRONMENT”, “height=580, width=780, top=0, left=0, menubar=0, location=0, resizable=1, status=1″);
wikiwin.focus();
}
Having the required script in this post, would allow me to simple link Germany and clicking the word would end up opening the browser with the Wikipedia Definition on it. I could of course simply link, but this would be only half as cool, wouldn’t it?
{Web 2.0, Gollum, Ajax, Wikipedia}
Google tests “Click to Call”
Searchenginewatch is reporting that Google is testing “Click-to-Call” advertising, something some of you might know from Ingenio, who are handling what they call Pay Per Call for sites like AOL. More about the Google implementation can be found on Greg Yardley’s blog, including some screenshots. The very good side of all of this, which is something I think eBay will copy a bit with Skype, is that Google connects the call automatically and pays the bill. If they get all their merchants to have a VoIP account, they might even be able to make them pay the bill very easily.
This is really the thing with eBays buy of Skype. They have full access to the backend now to do lots of little nice things with it. For example, a system similar to what Google now did in that the user enters a phone number, the backbone calls that number for the advertiser (or merchant that has his or her product on eBay in this case) and the advertiser pays for the call. Or you just provide it free for all, as Google knows that once the call is placed the advertiser will have to pay his $10 for the call anyway and at 1 cent a minute globally via VoIP, they can let them have a few minutes of discussion. Who will do that for more than 10 or 30 minutes anyway.
The amount of things Google is doing is starting to get a little bit scary, but hey, they are enabling a lot of nice things there and building a market that will be bigger than they are in the end. Good for all of us.
{Advertising, Google, Ingenio, Pay per Call, Click-to-Call}
