Google Reader – new version

A new version of Google Reader is up. The Google reader team blog has some detail over it here:

“First, we’ve added some things you’ve been asking for, such as unread counts and “mark all as read.” Folder-based navigation makes it easier to organize your subscriptions, and the new expanded view lets you quickly scan over several items at once. And we’ve made sharing much easier – with a single click of the “shared” icon, you can publish an interesting item on your public sharing page for your friends to see.”

Look what others have to say about it.

Techcrunch really liked the product and describes some new features:

“Changes include a whole new look and feel, folder navigation, unread item counts and the ability to mark items as read or unread. There’s a “river of news” view (click all feeds, view settings, sort by auto) and one click item sharing with friends. The new expanded view lets you scan down lots of items all at once.”

Niall Kennedy:

“The coolest new feature is Google Reader’s continuous scroll of feed items combined with automatically selecting each feed item as you move around the news flow. You’ll find a lot more access keys in the new Reader, mapped to the common Gmail commands for massage navigation and actions. I like the Gmail-style unread count displayed in the page title, allowing me to glance at my row of tabs to see if I have anything new in my feed inbox.”

Rohit Aggarwal

Social Networks are overvalued

I completely agree with Daniel Gross of Slate. Social Networks are overvalued and companies may loose big money in the process; however, the fall would be less severe than that during dot-com bubble time.

Here are few interesting stats from the same article:

“The “social-networking” gold rush continues. Last year, MySpace was acquired by News Corp. for $580 million in cash. Now the other big social-networking sites are the subject of rumors, deals, and transactions. Yahoo! was interested in acquiring Facebook for $1 billion, but the company’s youthful founders are holding out for more. Warner Music earlier this month cut a revenue-sharing deal with YouTube. In August, Google and MySpace struck a $900-million agreement for Google to sell ads on MySpace.”

Rohit Aggarwal

My Paper in WITS 2006

Today my paper (Blog, Blogger and the Firm: An Analysis of Employee Incentives and Firm Policies) got accepted in WITS’06.

In this paper from the real world data, I find a functional form to predict hits to an employee blog from the inbound linkings to the posts and the types of posts (positive or negative for the firm). Using the functional form, I analytically illustrate: negative posts can benefit firms by getting more net positive traffic.

Speaking loosely, few negative posts may act as a catalyst to increase the web traffic/hits to a blog and if most of the other posts are positive then the readers may leave the employee’s blog with positive opinion about the firm. Implication of this result is that under conditions firms can do better by letting their employees to blog at their will, instead of restricting them to no negative blogging policy.

Before this, my solo author paper got accepted in AMCIS. I know all this is not a big deal. After all these are just conference publications, but hey, I made some start. This reminds me a famous quote of Abraham Lincoln, “I am a slow walker, but I never walk backwards“. BTW this is also the shibboleth of Johnnie Walker.  🙂

Update: If you are reading this post, then probably you have searched for “WITS 2006” on Google. This corroborates the motivation of my study- Blogs are ranked high on search engines and hence can reach (potentially influence) a large audience.

Rohit Aggarwal

Internet advertising stats

IAB:

“NEW YORK, NY (September 25, 2006) – Today, during the MIXX Conference and Expo, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released Internet Advertising Revenues covering Q2 and the first six months of 2006. Internet advertising revenues (U.S.) for the first six months of 2006 were approximately $7.9 billion, a new record and a 37% increase over the first half of 2005. Internet advertising revenue totaled nearly $4.1billion for the second quarter of 2006, exceeding the $4 billion mark, representing a 36% increase over same period 2005. Q2 2006 revenues represent a 5.5% increase over Q1 2006.”

Rohit Aggarwal

Tehmeme’s new advertising model

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch:

“TechMeme is focused on technology news. It, along with sister sites Memeorandum (politics), WeSmirch (celebrity gossip) and BallBug (baseball news), is one of the more important technical innovations that has come out of the new web.

Tonight Gabe Rivera, the founder of TechMeme, just invented something else – advertisements delivered via RSS. NOT advertisements embedded withing RSS feeds, but actually using RSS as the delivery mechanism.

Advertisers send the ad to Techmeme via RSS (typically this would come from a blog, but any content would work). If the advertiser wants to change the ad, they simply change the RSS content.”

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine:

“Gabe is charging $4,500, $3,500, and $3,000 respectively for the three month-long spots (I’ll save you the cipherin’… that’s $132,000 per year). For the advertiser, that works out to a $5-8 CPM, which is good. I’m not sure there’s much difference in the first versus third position. And I think there is an opportunity to put more advertisers in the box (cookie me and show me different advertisers’ blog posts on different visits). But I think this works“

Rohit Aggarwal

Wallop – social network

Rafe Neeleman writes on CNet:

“The “important” social network I mentioned in my post about Piczo is launching at DemoFall on Tuesday, and going into limited beta tonight. It’s called Wallop.

Wallop is different from other social networks in two important ways. First, it’s all based on Flash (another reason it could never be a Microsoft product). That is both a blessing and a curse. Like Flash-based desktop suites DesktopTwo and Glide Effortless, it’s beautiful.

The other big difference is the business model behind Wallop: If you can program in Flash or ActionScript, you can create widgets, or “mods,” and sell them to other users; Wallop takes a cut of these transactions. For example, if somebody has a gizmo that automatically displays airfares to your hometown, you can’t just pop it onto your Wallop page without buying it. You also can’t use the growing library of HTML-based widgets like you can on a typical social net such as MySpace.”

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch says:

“Wallop is a Flash based social network that will compete with Myspace, Facebook and others that I mentioned in a post yesterday. It includes free unlimited storage for people to upload photos, videos and music.

Unlike the other social networks, Wallop CEO Karl Jacob says he has no plans to ever put advertising on the site. It just lessens the user experience, he says. Instead, Wallop wants a piece of the $3 trillion per year U.S. market for self expression items (clothes, furniture, beauty supplies, etc.). As sites like Cyworld have shown, people are willing to spend money for online expression items, too (Cyworld brings in a reported $300,000 per day in microtransactions to its users).”

Rohit Aggarwal

Who is influential in social media- BuzzLogic

Dan Farber on Zdnet covers the story:

“BuzzLogic hopes to solve one of the riddles of the Web–who is influential within the millions of conversations taking place in social Web, especially blogs….

It indexes 7,300 mainstream media sources, social media sites and corporate site as a basis for its applying its algorithms, said Robert Schettino, BuzzLogic chief marketer.  BuzzLogic has a “reach” calculation, which shows how many sites a blog relevantly reaches on a specific subject. “By calculating influence on the fly and who merits attention, advertising support can be directed at any given moment based on relative influence,” Schettino said. “It’s also a way for bloggers to monetize their content.” 

BuzzLogic an influencer is defined as a “post or publisher generating a significant volume of relevant inbound links and comments about a particular topic or conversation, within a specific timeframe.””

Rohit Aggarwal

Launch of video ad network for social networks

Eggnetwork was launched few days back.

The service they provide is: “The Eggnetwork was created to connect advertisers with the top social networks and vertical communities and delivers on four critical promises. Users first: give viewers a choice about which ads they want to watch. Reach: advertisers should reach the largest social networks with a single call. Targeting & accountability: leverage profile data to target video ads in powerful new ways. Safety: make user content safe for advertisers. Have real people review each video.”

Rohit Aggarwal

Soapbox vs. YouTube

Microsoft launches a new service named Soapbox on its video site MSN Video to compete with YouTube.

Microsoft’s press release:

“Soapbox on MSN Video utilizes powerful Web 2.0 technologies to provide a dynamic, fun and entertaining experience and offers these benefits:

•Easy uploading and sharing of video creations. By providing single-step uploading, background server-side video processing and acceptance of all major digital video formats, Soapbox makes uploading videos a snap.

•Finding and discovering the most entertaining videos. Viewers can search, browse through 15 categories, find related videos, subscribe to RSS feeds, and share their favorites with their friends — all without interrupting whatever video they are watching.

•Participation in the Soapbox community. Soapbox users can rate, comment on and tag the videos they view, share links with their friends via e-mail, and include the embeddable Soapbox player directly on their Web site or blog. “

 

CNET :

“Soapbox on MSN Video, code-named Warhol, will eventually be integrated with Windows Live Messenger to allow people to embed links to videos in instant messages and with Windows Live Spaces so people can include videos on their blogs. (To read a first impression of Soapbox from CNET Reviews’ Rafe Needleman, click here.)”

Rohit Aggarwal

Launch of Adobe 8

Key highlights of Adobe 8 as declared by Adobe:

“Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today introduced Adobe® Acrobat® 8 software to provide knowledge workers innovative tools for communicating and collaborating with confidence across the boundaries of operating systems, applications and firewalls. With Acrobat 8, business professionals can now more effectively engage with the rich, high-value information in PDF documents and forms, and more reliably and securely drive their work to completion leveraging the ubiquitous, free Adobe Reader® software.

The ability to start common activities – such as combining, signing and protecting PDF files, interacting with PDF forms, reviewing and collaborating on documents, or launching a real-time web conference – is now as simple as a single click.”

Rohit Aggarwal