Posts by: Byrne Hobart
Occupy Wall Street claims to operate by consensus: they’re only open to taking action or making a statement with unanimous consent. That’s part of why it’s so hard to get a coherent set of grievances out of them: if drum circle organizers, union apparatchiks, and Ron Paul fans can all agree on something, it’s probably…
Google Rolls Out Panda 2.5
SearchMetrics has the usual victim list. At this point, the results are pretty random. Google is probably identifying sitewide factors based on what predicts user behavior across all sites. Now that the obvious spammers have been hit, the traits Google identifies will be more superficially unrelated.
In other Google news,…
Imagine a portfolio that consisted of Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, and SecondMarket. That would be a spectacular portfolio, even if it included some later rounds. And it’s a portfolio you’d get if you invested solely in companies that cash out their founders. AirBNB just joined that group.
But in the process, they faced a barage of…
Meanwhile, at Google
Congress is trying to figure out whether or not Google is a monopoly. This is some kind of high water mark. They’re pushing Google+ harder than any product since search, and it isn’t working.
The basic argument is that Google has the power to make or break businesses, and they tend to…
Facebook is a profitable business, and it’s growing fast. But Facebook the business is just a day job—Facebook the product is where the action is. Facebook underscored that with their recent redesign and F8 announcements:
Their concurrent reading, watching, and listening features are almost certainly not what advertisers are clamoring for. But they are to…
In 1940, Fred Schwed could plausibly claim that “Wall Street” consisted of about ten thousand people. Now Goldman Sachs alone employs four times as many. Economists have struggled to explain the growth of the financial sector, especially in the US economy. The numbers are stark: finance was around 2% of GDP in the mid-40′s. It’s about…
Netflix Splits DVDs and Streaming
Netflix has split its DVD business from its streaming business, perhaps in anticipation of spinning off one or the other. In the announcement, Netflix’s CEO specifically calls out AOL, which is facing exactly what he wants to avoid: half of the business belongs in some kind of asset-stripping private equity…
In e-commerce, it’s common to think of an entire site as a “conversion funnel”: basically, the site is designed with the last user interaction first (i.e. the shopping cart process); the last thing designed is the first part users see—the landing pages. This is a good framework, because it produces purposeful sites: every single page…
We’ve already documented that Google hates scalable SEO strategies for economically sound reasons: their utopia is a world in which a CMO who doubles his digital spending has to do so through AdWords or DoubleClick—nothing else scales the same way. That explains a lot about Google: not just why they don’t like paid links, but also…
At a recent talk at International Search Summit, a Yandex representative summed up their basic algorithm: for a given query or category, they’ll pick an “archetype” site (or sites), and then they use machine learning to rank other sites based on their similarity to the first site.
In some ways, this elegantly disposes of gaming:…
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