Half-Geek

expatexposed: web 2.0 a double edged sword

The TVNZ Breakfast show has become a part of my daily wake-up ritual (apart from a short switch to TV3 sunrise). This mornings show was a great, if not obvious, show piece for the double edge sword of web 2.0.

As part of the standard Breakfast line-up each morning there are usually some general interest type pieces including live interviews. Todays show involved an interview with an ex-pat from the USA. This lady being interviewed was of Asian decent and was appearing on the show to promote/discuss her new website ex-pat exposed.

Ex-pat exposed is an online community for immigrants to New Zealand that have NOT had the most enjoyable inductions to the Land of the Long White Cloud. As the interview went on I could not help but think about how wonderful the double edge sword of web 2.0 really is.

Here we have what is essentially a minority group of people who are able to assemble and promote their disgust for the apparent lack of acceptance that some kiwis have for new, and often highly skilled, immigrants into our country. This could not happen without the internet and the introduction of software that enables non-technical people to create and manage a community online.

Online communities of the future will not always be created on the back of positive experiences..........

pay per posters pay big SEO price

Back in December 2006 I was introduced to the world of PayPerPost at the Chicago version of the Search Engine Strategies conference. For those half-geek readers who are not familiar, PayPerPost is a business that leverages the Blogosphere by giving businesses (advertisers) the opportunity to create online buzz for their product or service. PayPerPost to achieve bloggers (publishers) get paid for each post they publish on behalf of PayPerPost advertisers.

In the eyes of the worlds leading search engine Google, the PayPerPost business model is designed to achieve much more than just 'online buzz' for advertisers. The recent Google Page Rank update has now been clearly identified as a move by Google to punish websites that sell links with a clear intention to pass Page Rank value and Google believe that PayPerPost bloggers (publishers) are running websites that fit into this category.

In other words, Google is about to come down hard on bloggers who 'sell' posts and more importantly links as part of their commitment to the PayPerPost program by removing their Page rank completely. Just to make things clear, half-geek.com does not participate in the PayPerPost program. I have logged into the scheme, however, I have never accepted any offers to write promotional posts and get paid for them and the links that they would need to contain.

The whole idea of PayPerPost always seemed morally 'stretched' from my perspective. I hail from an up-bringing of 'white-hat' search engine marketing and it was immediately evident to me that PayPerPosts business model was not sustainable. PayPerPost are, in my eyes, link brokers.

Link Brokers are building businesses that go against the grain of the values of Google proprietary search algorithm. Read any business strategy book and it will not take you long before you learn about 'Driving Forces'.

Google is a 'driving force' in the online marketing industry. Link Brokers have , in my opinion, have not adequately identified this important factor as part of their business strategy. The result of this mistake will be catastrophic for them. The core product offering and ensuing customer benefit within their business model is based on something that could be taken away over night- and that's exactly what has happened.

Key lessons here:

• Don't sell links unless your core business model revolves around selling links
• If you do plan to sell links as a business, don't plan to be in business for long ;-)

facebook business solutions review

The strategy of facebook as a business is becoming a whole lot clearer now thanks to the launch of facebook business solutions. The business solutions offering also makes the benefit of using facebook as part of your businesses online strategy a lot clearer.

In this post I am going to review the main components of the new business solutions offering and talk a little bit about how you might apply these services as tactics in your overall online strategy. It's a long post so hang in there ;-)

This new offering from facebook integrates 6 main offerings from facebook into one simple interface on the main facebook website. It is important to recognise that (not surprisingly) the benefit of these services will be maximized when they are integrated as part of an overall 'facebook marketing strategy' for your business.

Lets take a closer look at the 6 main components and discuss how they might be applied the context of a Kiwi businesses online strategy.

facebook pages

facebook pages are now the solution for businesses that want to have a profile on facebook. The interface that is used to create a facebook page is very similar to that of the facebook group creation function with the exception of a 'publish' feature. This means that you can work away perfecting your facebook business page and save the work you have done without having to go publicly live until you are happy that you are ready to go.

Functionality offered as standard on your facebook page includes fans (a group for your page), photos, videos, events, a wall (for posting), discussion forum and review feature. The fans feature is important as your group of fans will essentially become your facebook mailing list. You are entitled to contact your group of fans, an important feature from a business perspective.

The other noteable addition that comes as a pert of the facebook pages offering is an additional function in the main left navigation of your facebook account called 'page manager'. Follow this link to manage pages that you have created as well as checking out some basic analytics for each of your pages.

Statistics for your page that are provided in graphical format include page views, unique visitors, fans, new fans, removed fans, wall posts, reviews and photo views.

In short, facebook pages is the starting point for businesses who want to use facebook as a genuine tactic in their online marketing strategy.

Go ahead join the half-geek solutions fan club on my newly created facebook page.

facebook social ads

facebook social ads can, in a lot of ways, be considered as facebooks answer to Google's contextual advertising network (adsense). These advertisements can be targeted in a number of ways when you integrate them with you facebook page or in conjunction with your facebook beacon ( beacons are reviewed next).

As an example, you may choose to show your advertisement to users whose friends have recently engaged with your facebook page. When used in conjunction with the facebook beacon you will be able to target users (and their friend networks) who have engaged with your external website.

You can choose to display your advertisements as part of users news feed or in the more traditional spot below the left hand navigation where facebook flyers used to appear. Ads can also be placed in news stories. The ads can be set up on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis.

The theory behind the targeting of these ads is that users are more likely to notice your advertisements when they are relevant to the contacts they have in the friend networks. E.g. If I buy a particular album online, that online music store can use facebook ads to target my friends who are likely to like the same music as I.

facebook beacon

facebook beacon is the core technology that drives your ability to create a social interaction interface between your website and users of facebook. By placing a few lines of code on your site you will be able to help your customers publish actions that they take on your website to their facebook profile and therefore facebook friends.

Actions that can trigger a request for your website visitor to publish their engagement with your website include but are not limited to purchasing a product, signing up for a service or adding an item to a wish list.

Users are, of course, asked for permission before details of the specific action that they took on your site are published to their facebook profile and news feed.

Facebook beacon should be considered as a tool to enable a viral "web 2.0 word of mouth" type of effect. All online strategies should contain tactics that promote your site visitors recommending your site to others and facebook beacon is a tactic that sits perfectly into this category.

facebook polls

facebook polls have actually been available for some time. However, when integrated as part of an overall facebook marketing strategy these polls should become a crucial tool for businesses interested in using faceboiok business solutions.

Facebook polls can be targeted by gender, age, location, interests, and other demographic data. Your poll will only be shown to the people who meet your criteria.These polls can therefore be used to define your target audience very specifically before you charge ahead with other facebook business solutions such as an investment in facebook social ads.

Results from your facebook poll can be viewed via facebook poll insights in real time. The real time set-up and measurement of facebook polls is a true benefit for online marketers as it allows us to truly target interest in a specific topic, product or service quickly and deploy targeted campaigns on the facebook network with a high level of confidence that a specific result should occur based on poll data.

facebook platform

Similarly to facebook polls, facebook platform is actually an existing offering from facebook that has now been integrated as part of facebooks overall business solutions offering. The facebook platform is a developer tool that is used to create a facebook apllication or 'app'.

As we all know, facebook apps have been a smash hit since they were launched earlier this year when facebook opened their platform to developers. Integrating facebook apps using the platform will now be a crucial part of your overall facebook strategy. Applications that you build can be integrated with your facebook page as well as being readily available for facebook users to engage with using the facebook app directory.

An effective facebook app will make your facebook page more sticky and therefore recommendation worthy to facebook users.

facebook insights

facebook insights is the underlying metrics that businesses will use to measure the performance of their facebook marketing strategy. Authentic demographic data can generated using facebook insights.

In short facebook insights is your web analytics tool for facebook. It's that simple really.

Summary

As I wrote this post it became more and more obvious to me that the initial predictions that facebook intended to be a serious web platform are set to be proven right. The launch of facebook business solutions reminds me a lot of the launch of Google adwords.

When Google first started and were focused on there natural search engine there was a lot of speculation about how this new player intended to leverage their massive growth and turn it into revenue. Then one day we all woke up and adwords had arrived. The rest is history.

To me, the launch of facebook business solutions rings a similar bell. Everyone has been going on about how facebook have not made any real money yet. Well, certainly not enough to justify the radical value predictions that have been suggested.

I have a feeling that facebook are about to cash in on their growth in the same way that google did when they launched adwords. Only time will tell....

online travel new zealand

Not a whole lot of time to post about the bleeding edge 2.0 news today, I have started my new job and I'm in the throws of that steep learning curve that any new recruit goes through. Whilst time has not been on my side of late, I have noticed a couple of additions to New Zealand's most active online vertical- travel.

It seems that expedia have finally kicked off their New Zealand effort. To be honest, I have to say that the website looks like what it is, expedia as we knew it in the .com form- just with a .co.nz domain. I suppose that what I am trying to say is that I would have thought that these guys may have tried to get a bit more 'kiwiana' jammed in their new kiwi offering.

There is no doubt in my mind that expedia are 'the goods' as far as as online travel service is concerned, I just think that its going to take a bit more effort on their part to really get kiwis talking about how great expedia is. Mind you, given the fact that success in online travel is in a large part driven by price, it's safe to say that these guys should pick up a piece of the market with relative ease. But how big will that piece be?

Big positives for expedia in New Zealand will be their understanding of what it takes to run an online travel booking engine successfully. I have already posted about trademe and their new site travelbug which seems to lack a certain element of human interaction. Expedia.co.nz seem to have a higher level of customer service offering with an 0800 customer service number. It would be nice to see a real commitment with live help though.

From a web 2.0 perspective, expedia is so-so. They do offer the mandatory Delicious-Digg-Reddit-RSS feeds at the bottom of their site page template, however, the integration of these features seems a little half-baked.

The other newby on the web 2.0 travel scene in New Zealand that I have noticed of late is a start-up that derives from House of Travel- it's called TripStar.

As they say, "it's the thought that counts", and I do like the fact that House of travel are haveing a genuine go at 2.0 with TripStar. The site is pitched to the user as travel community site and sports some classic web 2.0 features such as voting polls and Tag clouds.

The TripStar site is lacking content due to low numbers in the current cointributing community which stands at a little over 1800. Today, for example, there has been no new threads posted and only 3 new posts.

In summary I think its great that we are starting to see some serious players move into the online space in New Zealand. Expedia is a massive international e-commerce player and kiwi's will benefit from their presence. TripStar is a clear stab at a web 2.0 strategy by House of Travel which is also a good thing as this type of strategy is quite new to the average kiwi business. Everything starts somewhere and its good to see an existing online business move in the web 2.0 direction.

venture capital not a prob in USA

There has been quite a bit of speculation, mostly in the USA, that we are on the brink of another 'bubble burst' similar to that of the dot com bubble burst in the late 1990's.

Venture capital is flowing freely out of the pockets of multiple high flying US millionaires as they look to get a piece of the next big thing. Purposely designed conferences for Venture Capitalists such as the Tech Crunch 20 are expanding (its now the Tech Crunch 40) in order to meet the demand of both web 2.0 start-ups and the deep pockets that look to fund them.

As Om Malik over at GigaOm points out, US VC's are breaking new ground with their spending habits in 2007. VC funding from the United States also has no boundaries as Om's research suggests.

Whilst this VC spending spree may seem like a green light for all of those people with the next 'big internet business idea', I would suggest that the atmosphere up in the Valley would be super cut-throat with NDA's being passed around like napkins at a spare rib restaurant.

In my opinion, we are definitely enjoying the start of what seems to be a big business boom on the back of the web 2.0 revolution. The question is, can the new breed of online investors make good on these massive investments in web 2.0 start-ups? The business model of the majority of these new start-ups, even the massive hits like facebook, are not at all clear.

In a number of instances the strategy seems to be, 'buy a big, sticky and successfully growing community based site and worry about the actual monetization of the website later'. From this perspective one can not be frowned upon for making comparisons to the crazy days of the first dot com boom and resulting bust.

Do you think that our new web 2.0 bubble will burst?

Caterpillar: web 2.0 benefactor

Over the course of my adult life (which my girlfriend will argue has not started) I have been involved in a couple of conversations with people about the idea of somehow getting into the industry of energy to become wealthy.

A well respected mate of mine who now lives in Sydney (you know who you are) who I really enjoy having long conversations about business once said to me, "James, I want to own a powerstation- that's how I am going to get rich." Now at this point most people would think, dreamer. However, I have a lot of respect for this guy and I reckon he's on the way. If you are reading this mate, keep going as it seems that you dont need to own a power station to bling it on the back of electrical energy these days...

The big thing about web 2.0 businesses like facebook, flickr and bebo that 99% of their communities do not appreciate (nor should they have to) is the amount of data that these businesses are storing. We are talking huge amounts of data here.

I recall a post from Doug Beaver at facebook who suggested that the social network would be storing over a petabyte of images by April 2008. Thats 1024 terabytes! Thats 1,048,576 gig!

The other day I was reading an extremely insightful post by Nicholas Carr talking about how Caterpillar are doing extremely well these days. Caterpillar sell diesel generators. You see, all that facebook data has to be stored somewhere on a whole big bunch of grunty servers. Those servers need power, constant power. Moreover, those servers need a backup power source- enter Caterpillar diesel generators.

Caterpillar's diesel generator sales have jumped up by 33% in the past year, all thanks to web 2.0. To my friend in Sydney: Our ideas converge mate!

google unveils youtube plan

When Google acquired youtube in October last year they sent a clear signal that they were not happy with dominating text based online advertising alone. As of today the New York Times has reported that Google are now finally unveiling their first real strategy that involves heavy use of their investment youtube.

Google intends to offer video content to websites from youtube:

“We are creating incremental distribution for our content providers,” said Christian Oestlien, product manager for AdSense. Mr. Oestlien said the system would also allow publishers to make their Web sites more compelling and give advertisers a new way to reach customers.

While many Web sites already embed YouTube clips in their pages, this system would allow them to make money from the clips. They would not, however, have the same level of control over what clip gets embedded.

Source: New York Times

Rich media advertising has to date been no where near as cost effective as Google's wildly successful adwords. However, in the back of everyones mind was the realization that rich media could also be as targeted and cost effective as search engine advertising tactics like adwords.

Rich media advertising can indeed be as cost effective a tactic as adwords, so long as it is offered for sale on the same basis. In my opinion the responsibility for the success of adwords (from Googles perspective) lies equally, if not more, with the model on which they chose to sell the small text based ads, not just the advertisement management system itself.

Google are so smart.........

Yahoo! Mash

The inevitability of Yahoo! attempting social networking will not escape anyone intrested in web 2.0. On the back of the success that facebook has enjoyed there was always going to be a number of competing offerings from those that can afford to take them on, and Yahoo! are one of the few in this small category.

I was fortunate enough to get an invite to the new Yahoo! Mash, maybe fortunate is not the best word. I had a feeling that I would find a bit of laugh and Yahoo! did not dissapoint.

The person who invited me to Mash actually created my profile. When I accepted his invitation I was taken straight to the profile that he created for me. Mash then asked me if I wanted to keep the profile or accept the invitation and create a new one. Quite a nice touch by Yahoo!, however, the creativity ended here.

My main problem with mash is that the interface has been almost over simplified. While web 2.0 design has brought a lot of white space into websites, I think that Mash has pretty much proven that you can have too much white space. Navigating my way around the interface may have been simple but it was also very un-interesting.

I do admit that facebook also has a very simple white dominated interface, however, there is enough color to make one want to engage in the first place. With Mash I couldn't help but think, "I can't be bothered".

I suppose the fact Mash really is just another facebook was always going to hurt their potential to impress me off the bat. I mean, how many more social network profiles does one need? I left Mash glad only that I had managed to secure a nice relevant profile name and URL in case the social networking site became massively popular (a long shot IMO).

Social networking aggregators will surely become popular in coming years. There are not many social network mash-ups at the moment. I did review one called intuuch for rev2 the other day, but it was mostly in German and focused on mashing up micro blogging profiles like twitter which are not that popular down-under just yet (tanks to mobile phone costs).

Has anyone else had a play on mash?

Rev2 and facebook data storage scoop

Recently I reached an agreement with a leading international web 2.0 blog rev2.org. I will be posting on rev2 each weekday mostly around the topics of international web 2.0 start-ups and/or new feature launches by popular existing international web 2.0 businesses.

Rev2 is all about profiling the web 2.0 revolution. Launched in 2005 by a fellow kiwi Sid Yadav (Queenstown) the site has a number of prominent authors from around the globe posting each day. The subsrciber base of rev2 has more than a few zero's, with great penetration into 'The Valley' in San Fransisco.

One of my latest posts on rev2 scooped the news around facebook offering data storage. At last check the post had been dugg nearly 700 times as well as being mentioned on major sites such as mashable, venturebeat, webware, read/write web and techmeme. Permalink to techmeme post is also here. Suffice to say Im pretty stoked.

It's great to know that my work is of interest to the wider international web 2.0 community. Would have been nice to get a half-geek post dugg like that (god knows I have tried), however, this is not too realistic with my mostly 'down-under' niche content.

While I will have a bit more writing to do, this change won't impact on half-geek.com. In fact I think this will be really positive for this blog as I really want to keep half-geek loaded with relevant content to those of us parked down-under in NZ and Australia. The goal with half-geek.com is to talk about web 2.0 stuff that we can all benefit from here in the context of our local (and little) markets. There's not a lot of point talking about myspace in NZ, when everyone here uses bebo and facebook, you get my drift.....

Of course if you want you can always check out all the posts I have made on rev2 at any time by going here.

some weekend video fun

Web Alert is a video blog that I subscribe to and watch most days. I found this particular episode quite amusing: