Tuesday Links: And Then There Were Four
|
Written By Reprise Media | August 1, 2006 | Share This
|
|
Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp is now out with its revised Q2 earnings, so that takes care off all the Big 4 engines (or the parent compnaies thereof). Revenues are up 18 percent over last year’s Q2, says ClickZ, and the Street is smiling favorably on IAC stock. Diller says that the company will continue to invest aggressively in Ask.com, and work on integrating popular Citysearch info into the engine’s local results. So invest in Ask and ye shall receive…you get the idea. Onward:
Google Stealth Ads? Jen Slegg says that Google’s been spotted testing out a couple of new AdSense ad formats. One is slight variation of the Vertical Image ads we told you about in June; the other is an Unbranded ad that doesn’t identify itself as advertising - good for some publishers, as it can increase clicks, and bad for some advertisers, because the additional clicks might not be good traffic. One more thing about the ads, says Slegg: “neither of them can be controlled by the publisher.”
Attack of the ‘Wikiality’-based community At its best, Wikipedia exemplifies the wisdom of crowds. At its worst, the tyranny of mob rule. Case in point: in a segment from the satirical Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert urged viewers to bring “democracy to knowledge” by descending on the online encyclopedia’s entry for elephants and changing it to include the ‘fact’ that the population of those “noble beasts” had tripled in the last six months. Predictably, says Techdirt, the throngs of Colberites briefly knocked Wikipedia offline and had moderators scrambling to lock elephant-related entries from from further editing. All in good fun, and it exposes a potentially critical Wikipedia flaw: if the viewers of a basic cable show can do that for a lark, imagine the damage that could be wrought by an organization with lots of manpower and less than noble intentions.
Pizza party at Google’s place! Say you’re a start-up people “may have already heard of” (but probably not) with ten thousand clams burning a hole in your pocket. How do you get folks to take notice of you? Well, you could…sneak a thousand pizzas onto Google’s campus with a camera in tow. That bit of guerrilla PR comes courtesy of the now slightly-more-famous Cambrian House, whose website features a nine minute-plus video of the deed, an episode neatly concluded when angry Google chefs put calls in to security. The Cambrian folks were sufficiently mocked already by Valleywag, so we’ll just say to look for: a slavish, incongruous recreation of a scene from Old School, the most timid use of a bullhorn we’ve ever seen, and a blooper reel that hearkens back to the comedic cinema of 1997.
From our Last Week’s News Dept. We didn’t have a chance to cover this, but felt it was worth a mention: Yahoo!’s latest ‘Weather Report’ brought word of a brand new search crawler named “Slurp.” This leaner searchbot makes faster rounds of the ‘net and takes up 25% less bandwidth when it visits a site. If you feel that the little guy is mucking things up a bit while it settles into its routine, Yahoo! has a FAQ for further reading and a feedback form.
All your bridge Public works planners: when in doubt, DON’T farm out your responsibilities to web surfers. That was the mistake made by the Economy Ministry of Hungary, says News.com, when it invited the internet to name a new bridge. When the votes were last tallied, ‘net meme hero Chuck Norris was in the lead. It could be worse, though. Hungary could find itself building Star Wars Kid Bridge if they’re not careful.
Topics: Search: News |