Yes, despite the purse debacle, I’m still venturing forth to conferences this week. Today it’s “Truth or Consequences,” put on by Consumer Reports WebWatch. Have already caught up briefly with Danny Sullivan, who will be speaking later. It’s being held in Berkeley’s Claremont Hotel & Resort, giving me an opportunity to check out more of my East Bay home turf. Anyway, look forward to the program and to seeing who else is here.
Search
How much does quality matter?
Fred Wilson offers a great post in which he compares/contrasts different methods of media consumption and creation, and concludes that connectivity trumps quality (of sound file, of image, etc.). I totally agree. I, too, find myself grabbing for my crappy quality cameraphone (which will hopefully be arriving shortly from the hotel via UPS) over my higher-quality Canon, just because I can easily send the photos to my blog or via e-mail or whatever. The Canon isn’t too far behind, in that I can take the storage card and slip it into our laptop, but it doesn’t work anywhere with any laptop, so I don’t use it as much.
(I was really mourning the loss of that cameraphone when I considered the expected upcoming excitement of baby pictures. Yes, I’ll post at least a couple here when the time comes.)
Search Engines On “Search Engine” Keyword
Nice to see Google, Yahoo! and MSN eating their own dog food, so to speak. I’m assuming the contextual ads I’m seeing on The-River.net are triggered by the words “search” or “search engine” because the ads at left are the ones currently appearing. Wonder if Google and MSN are advertising equally as aggressively on Yahoo!
Yahoo! Explores Searchers Mindsets
The Yahoo! Search Blog features a post by research director Bernard Mangold introducing Yahoo! Mindset. It’s a really interesting little project aimed at helping the company sort search results by commercial or informational content, depending on the user’s intent (or Mindset). This sort of gets to the whole issue of being able to target ads depending on where people are in the buying cycle — research mode or impulse buying mode. I need to check it out more, but it’s good to know this kind of experimentation is going on.
“My Google”
Since I was at the Googleplex yesterday, it’d be an omission not to at least mention Google’s new personalized home page test. It’s interesting in terms of what it says about Google’s strategy, but it’s so far behind what Yahoo! has been doing for years. Anyway, I’m going to be musing on subjects like these in next week’s ClickZ Experts column, so I’ll save it for then.
UPDATE: Jeremy Zawodny posts on the subject.
Mmmmm…
It’s true. The lunch food here at Google was amazing. Baby green salad, maple glazed salmon, and delectable mixed vegetables. There were other options (portobello wellington, steak), but those were my selections. I could really eat my vegetables every day if they tasted like these.
Separately, Seth Godin blogs about the famous former Grateful Dead chef.
About the “show.” So far it’s pretty rudimentary but there are interesting tidbits here and there. Will either be writing about it for ClickZ or might post later here if it doesn’t gel into something that’s right for that audience.