Keeping Up: Chronicling the Rapid Pace of Change Online

Domain Name Chaos Coming in 2010 - Guess Who Really Wins?

The internet domain name administrative body ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is planning what I consider to be one of the bigger events on the web in quite some time.  Based on the premise that the world is running out of available names for websites, in 2010, they are planning to open up domain names extensions to just about anything under the sun.  Next year, you could very well see the beginning of websites being named such oddities as Coca.Cola or DonaldTrump.Toupee.  This may be a little bit of an exaggeration but not by much. I think Robert Mitchell at PCWorld describes it creatively saying "Top level domains could soon be as common as vanity license plates."  With these coming changes to domain names, fat fingering may take on a whole new meaning.  Watch out what you type into your browser bar!  You name it, it will be an extension at some point. I am sure some some hair-brained "entrepreneur" with dreams of riches will start buying every conceivable domain name like with the word Obama in it (that may be pretty smart actually).  The famous whitehouse.com (my advice - DO NOT type whitehouse.com into your browser) versus whitehouse.gov website confusion will become ancient history.

It doesn't seem hard to figure out who really benefits from this. Search, search, search. Google, Google, Google.  Search (and by extension and its sheer dominance, Google) is a behavior heavily engrained in our web pysche in 2009.  It seems impossible to think that this could be entrenched even further than it already is.  With the creature comfort of using ".com" gone and the heightened fear of punching something very very wrong in your browser address bar, search engines are sure to become the absolute first place to start any session on the web.  Web navigation through search emerged as somewhat of an unexpected browsing behavior in the early days of Google.  The question was often asked for instance, "Why would someone go to Google to type in "CNN.com?"  With their lightning fast response times, Google made it very easy to use them as a proxy for actually typing an address out. If the user's mind then becomes overwhelmed with uncertainty and the question then becomes "is it CNN.com or is it CNN.News or CNN.Headlines....", search becomes anchored permanently as the first step in any web session and this makes the folks in Mountain View, CA smile.

United Airlines Stock nosedives 75% driven by machines

Those who know me think I am nuts when I always laughingly refer to the movie Terminator and Skynet, the self-realizing computer network that eventually triggers Doomsday. I often say that the concept is not that far off from reality.  The other day, I came across the first indicator that the concept of machines triggering/driving events without human intervention is not completely a figment of Hollywood's imagination and my paranoia.

To summarize, a massive 75% nosedive in United Airlines stock on September 10th, 2008 was driven by the Google News crawler.  To quote the author's summary of the events:

"Let's recap... An automated system added an old link to a dynamic Web page. An automated system detected the link as a new story and cataloged it as a current event. Enter a human for the only part of this tale: an analyst picks up the story and passes it on, not realizing that it is old news. Automated trading systems start a massive stock self off based on the old headline...

Call us doomsayers, but perhaps we've just witnessed the birth of Skynet. "

I don't feel so crazy anymore.

Google Cloud or the SciFi Channel?

Back from the Holidays and ready to post again (!).....the December 13th, 2007 issue of Business Week showed up in my mailbox and is one of the few issues that I immediately sat down to read.  The cover story for this issue was "Google and the Wisdom of Clouds". Its your typical mainstream press peek into the inner workings of Google by a non-techie type and documents discussions with senior software engineer Chris Bisciglia who is championing the idea of cloud computing at the company.  What is the "wisdom of the clouds" you may ask?  To quote directly from the article:

"It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing."  (Business Week Dec. 13, 2007  "Google and the Wisdom of Clouds")

Google's brand and reputation were built on exceptional technology and vision through an enormous grid computing structure.  The Google grid - aka the cloud - is what makes Google so fast in crunching enormous amounts of data.  What piques my attention though is the last sentence where Google's system is described as almost like a living entity - The "cloud regenerates as it grows".   Fascinating. Now that relies on human intervention to constantly upgrade so its not so bad. It gets more sci-fi further on when the article says:

"...Google keeps much under cover. This immense computer, after all, runs the company. It automatically handles search, places ads, churns through e-mails. The computer does the work, and thousands of Google engineers, including Bisciglia, merely service the machine."

Google PhD engineers with super expensive degrees and massive brain power and all they do is "merely service the machine"?  So is Google a computer run by people or is Google people run by a computer? Was the Matrix filmed in Mountain View, CA by chance?

Now obviously Google is pursuing cloud computing technology as a way to deliver superior service to its users.  But where does this go and why? The article answers that question too:

"It would eventually lead to an ambitious partnership with IBM, announced in October 2007, to plug universities around the world into Google-like computing clouds. As this concept spreads, it promises to expand Google's footprint in industry far beyond search, media, and advertising, leading the giant into scientific research and perhaps into new businesses. In the process Google could become, in a sense, the world's primary computer."

This blog is about innovation and the future of web technology.  I can't think of anything more important to watch over the next 5-10 years than this!

Google makes content network more transparent

For those advertising on Google or running campaigns on Google, there is a new report available now finally allowing you to see what sites in the content network are driving clicks.  I recommend immediately running this report for any of your campaigns driving content network clicks and examine the sites that show up. You will likely find tons of "domain Ad" and "error page ad" designations driving the most volume.  These are the domain squatter type AdSense spam sites you see on the web that often infect machines from download sites like LimeWire and BearShare.  If you identify a site that looks like garbage, and I am sure you will, go in to the "excluded sites" link in AdWords and add that domain.  Save some money!

Then go take that money saved....spend it on the sites that are showing in the network that are useful.  A typical optimization step in any good campaign is finally now possible in the Google Content Network.

Google innovation and Google Web History

I was reading the most recent Google Friends newsletter this morning and its clear that many of the items popping up in the monthly updates are coming from Google's commitment to innovation.  Google has been widely publicized for encouraging and expecting employees to spend up to 30% of their time doing things that may not have any bearing on the business - the 70/20/10 model.  Google seems to on a daily basis add features that make you say "How cool is that?" and overwhelm you with new items to ask yourself "how can I apply this to my daily life?"  The release of Google Street View last week was the latest and greatest but its already old news in what could be called "GoogleSpeed". 

A feature that has slowly evolved over time and is worth everyone's time to investigate is Google's web history function. I encourage everyone to look at this latest application because it is a major technology move for Google and ever increases the privacy question that gets nothing but bigger on the web every single day.  Here is what I recommend to educate yourself about this issue and dont skip a step!

1) read directly about it at Google: Google Web History
2) See if you can find it in your own Goole account by logging in with your gmail account
3) read this very thorough and informative post by Danny Sullivan who many of you know is the sage of the search marketing world....read Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History at SearchEngineLand.  Note that even Danny is showing signs of concern. I guess that means I am not as paranoid as I sometimes think I am about this issue.

Google has made innovation so commonplace that it almost feels too much. But that innovation has propelled them to more than 50% market share and a huge stock price.  I write this blog to chronicle this wave of innovation on the web.  Keeping up with that change is how I try to maintain a competitive edge in the web marketing business. I hope it works!

Wikia - The Google Killer?

Lots of people have talked in recent weeks about Wikia - Jimmy Wales' (from Wikipedia) next big project. I have mentioned this in conversations over the last several weeks with many colleagues as well. Why? This idea has legs. On first inspection, I love the idea of using the collective knowledge of millions to develop a search engine platform.  I honestly was thinking it has a chance to be the next big innovation. If you think about it, Google's algorithm was built in the late 90's (and of course tweaked a bazillion times since) to mimic votes of millions based on the premise of popularity.  A link pointing to a site counted as a "vote".  If you could get first-hand input from millions instantaneously rather than have to crawl links all day and file site crawls in terabytes and terabytes of data, why not take the easier path?

On further inspection though, I started having second thoughts. Several people in the industry have given me reason to think with Alan Rimm-Kaufman's post being the first to get me thinking differently.  Also try this article at Money to read more.  I find our current period in web innovation fascinating and I wish I was able to see only even 6 months in to the future.  I would be a very very rich man.

On further inspection though, I started having second thoughts. Several people in the industry have given me reason to think with Alan Rimm-Kaufman's post being the first to get me thinking differently.  Also try this article at Money to read more.  I find our current period in web innovation fascinating and I wish I was able to see only even 6 months in to the future.  I would be a very very rich man.