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YouTube’s Unnamed Challenger at Least Names CEO

posted on June 29, 2007

The supposed YouTube challenger being built by NBC and News Corp has yet to be named, it has however named a CEO.  Jason Kilar, a former Amazon.com exec, has been tapped for the role.

Kilar, 36, was key executive at Amazon.com for nearly a decade until leaving the online retailer last year, NBC Universal and News Corp. said in a statement.

“We are very pleased to have an executive of Jason’s caliber take the reins of our groundbreaking joint venture,” NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker said in a statement. NBC Universal is a unit of General Electric Co. (GE).

In honor of the new CEO, maybe they should name it YouTubeKilar! ;-)

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Blog Success is Not Always About Page Views

posted on June 29, 2007

CNET recaps a presentation given by blog research Paul Gillin where he shared some interesting blog stats but always suggested that blogging is not always a numbers game.

Despite some very successful blogs…

Phillip Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped gets 8 million page views per month.

Adrants, a blog by former ad-agency employee Steve Hall that covers bad and good advertising, gets about 30,000 visits per day.

Drew Curtis’s Fark.com, a link blog in which Curtis comments on what other people have written and links to them, gets 40 million page views per month.

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Google Maps Gets Another "Wow" Factor

posted on June 29, 2007

When Google first launched Google Maps I immediately fell in love with the whole “grab and move” concept of navigation – as opposed to the click “north” or “east” to see more approach.

Google’s upped the ante again with a new feature that lets you pick you start and end destination by simply clicking on the map. In addition, once your route is shown, you can drag and drop the “blue line” to switch the roads chosen – handy for when you know a certain road is always busy or is under repair.

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Pretty slick! Maybe they’ll add a feature to let you navigate to the exact spot where they took the photo of someone breaking into a house. ;-)

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Supreme Court Decision Makes Huge Impact on E-tail

posted on June 28, 2007

Today’s Supreme Court ruling allowing manufacturers to set minimum retail prices is a very big deal, and has huge ramifications for many internet retail businesses.

To understand what could happen as a result of this decision, you must first understand the impact that the Internet has made on retail. In a nutshell, it has created a consumer-friendly environment in which both online and offline retailers engage in suicidal price-cutting wars. The reason for this is simple–instead of consumers having maybe only one or two choices of where to buy specific merchandise, they now have thousands of options, and retailers have to fight furiously for their piece of the pie.

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Forbes Goes Negative on SEO

posted on June 28, 2007

It’s not what you think: today Forbes wrote about “negative SEO.” While we all know the benefits of “positive SEO,” Forbes interviews Brendon Scott to find out more about changing your competitors’ rankings (because, hey, if you can’t beat them, beat them up).

As Forbes puts it:

But for the most morally flexible, there’s an even shorter path to edging out competitors online: a wide spectrum of sabotage techniques, some of which cross the boundaries of good taste–and the law.

(To Scott’s credit, he specifically says that probably the mildest technique listed below, Google bowling, “tests his ethical limits, he says, and its beneficial competitive effects don’t usually last long.”)

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Are Enough Users Generating Content?

posted on June 28, 2007

It looks like eMarketer is afraid of the impending UGC creator shortage. That, or they’re crying wolf. And they’d never do something like that. Why, the very idea!

Anyway, eMarketer starts off by asking the all-important UGC question, “Are enough people recording their cats?” Their answer is, “Apparently not,” because UGC users outnumber creators. With 69.1 million users last year in the US and 128 million users worldwide, and “only” 63.7 million US creators (117.9 million worldwide), they seem to think we’ll be running out of videos of cats playing the piano.

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FTC: We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Net Neutrality

posted on June 28, 2007

Yesterday, Ars Technica (man, I love cool Latin blog names!) covered a report on Net Neutrality by the Federal Trade Commission’s Internet Access Task Force. The report, “Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy,” minimizes the debate, noting that there are few current problems in the area.

In a statement, FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said:

This report recommends that policy makers proceed with caution in the evolving, dynamic industry of broadband Internet access, which generally is moving toward more – not less – competition. In the absence of significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area.