The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Pamela Parker

Testing YPN

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I’ve been invited to participate in the beta for the nascent Yahoo! Publisher Network, so those of you who read this on the site will see the YPN ads to the right. (They seem to get cut off a bit in Firefox, at least, so need to work on the formatting.) The most interesting thing, thus far, is that you have the option of choose what categories of ads appear on your site, so categories are taken into account as well as (or maybe instead of) the context of the page. I chose the professional services/advertising-marketing category, but so far only ads for lowermybills.com and Vonage are showing up. They did say it might take a while. One other thing I found different from Google — if you’re both a YPN publisher and a YSM advertiser, you can take your publisher earnings and transfer them directly into your advertiser account.

I’ll keep you posted if I learn more as things go on.

The Base of Operations

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I agree with Gary when he agrees with David Card and Charlene Li. When I wrote about Google Base yesterday for ClickZ, I focused on the classifieds- and eBay-threatening aspects of the initiative (because we write about advertising), but those are only small pieces of the larger picture. This is about Google getting into structured data. And because it’s Google, and it has the power to direct lots and lots of traffic, people will submit their structured data.

I talked a while at the Web 2.0 conference with Bob Wyman, CTO of PubSub, about Structured Blogging. The idea behind it is that people should publish (blog) in certain formats, basically tagging their posts to indicate whether it’s, say, a movie review or an event announcement. A movie review has certain standard parts — the name of the movie, the rating (# of stars), the review text. A structured movie review can have those parts labelled as such. An event announcement also has standard features — date, start time, end time, description, venue, etc. If people publish things in the proper formats, with posts and their component parts labelled as such (via tags), all of the data becomes much much easier to parse and deal with (even break apart and reassemble).

It’s that conversation with Bob that I’ve applied in my thinking about GoogleBase. They’ve got all of these standard types of things they suggest you submit — housing, products, reviews, services, travel, vehicles and want ads — which presumably all have standard component parts. If people and businesses are willing to format it the right way — and, as I’ve said, because it’s Google, they will — one could do an incredible variety of things with that data. Classifieds and eBay-style solutions would just be one option.

UPDATE: Charlene Li’s post is attracting a lot of interesting comments.

UPDATE: Sergey Brin in the NY Times this weekend: “Google Base is as much about classified as it is about zoology.”

Spam prediction

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The product for the next great wave of spam (if it hasn’t already happened already): Tamiflu. Or Tamiflu-copycats.

UPDATE: Yup.

“Spammers are registering hundreds of domain names to market and sell bird flu medication,” said Mark Adams, Technical Support Director for SpamStopsHere. “At one point we were blocking over 150,000 bird flu related spam emails per day. We expect that as media coverage and public concern increases, the bird flu spam problem will get much worse before it gets better.”

Web 2.0 Conference

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I’m going to be at the Web 2.0 Conference later this week, and am really looking forward to it. It looks to be a little more technology-centric than marketing-centric, but somewhere in all these new gee-whiz gadgets there’ve got to be some ad-supported business models or ad-enabling technologies. Look forward to meeting people, etc. It’s my first conference post birth-of-baby, so I might force folks I know to look at pictures or videos of the little one on my camera phone. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Drop me a line and let me know to look out for you if you’ll be there.

Consumer Adoption Anecdotes

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Two little anecdotes, involving my retirement-age aunts, illustrate the mainstreaming of new technologies.

Aunt #1 instant messages me. She needs to know contact information for a certain realtor in a certain Central Texas town. Instinctively, she knows she can find this information online, but she’s not sure where to start. I recommend local.yahoo.com or local.google.com. She’s got her answer within seconds. First result, too.

Aunt #2 is preparing for the approach of Hurricane Rita. Her son has told her she needs to investigate this thing called text messaging, because he’s heard texting worked when voice cell phone calls didn’t, post-Katrina. Without too much trouble, she noses around the menu of her mobile phone and manages to send a message. Receiving was a little more difficult. She heard the beeping but didn’t know where to look for the message. By the next day, she’s figured that out, too, and is texting with confidence while stuck in traffic fleeing the storm. (BTW, she and the rest of my family weathered the storm just fine. Everyone in my clan has even got electricity back, I believe.)