In one of the weirdest looks at people’s thinking, let’s ask the audience first what does “Don’t be evil” mean to you. Did you immediately think of Microsoft, RIAA, and Big Oil? The Hillary Obama issues. Republicans? What did you think of, odds are highly likely you might have also thought of Google’s famous tag line. In an interview reported by Yahoo News comes along this tasty tidbit:
In an on-stage interview with writer Ken Auletta of the New Yorker magazine, Schmidt said “Don’t be evil” is meant to provoke internal debate over what constitutes ethical corporate behavior, rather than representing an absolute moral position.
“We don’t have an ‘Evilmeter’ we can sort of apply — you know — what is good and what is evil,” Schmidt said before an audience of media industry professionals at an event sponsored by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School in San Francisco. Source: Yahoo news
There is a sense of humor here, ethical corporate practices aside, how you feel about the latest round of political hoo-ha, or just about anything else, the idea of “Don’t be Evil” has many connotations, and is interpretable by just about anyone in any case as something different. “Don’t be evil” sounds good, but it is also just a sound bite. It obviously has nothing to do with what we thought it meant when Google started using it.
As Google wins, grows, takes more market share, the stunningly wonderful thing that no one thinks of is that as Google gets bigger, its corporate size will get bigger. Eventually they will end up being the Microsoft of their day, or the IBM of their day, or the Kodak, or the GM, Ford, or other companies that seem to get to a certain size and then implode under the weight of best corporate practices, middle management political games, and the host of other things that will start degrading the ability of a company to keep on doing good things.
Google might not be there today, but eventually they will get there, and they will have to deal with some young upstart that has a better mouse trap. For some this day can not be too soon, for others, it will happen when it happens, and for the rest, they hope that the day will never come.
In the mean time plug in your “evilmeter” and “Don’t be evil”. There is a sense of irony here.
Tags: google, tag line, don’t be evil, growth, atrophy, examples, ibm, Microsoft, ford, GM, startup, money, adventure, fun
Ad Age is running an article on selling ads on your self created YouTube videos, and given the content that I have the sales of advertising is something that I am loath to do. Not because the videos are bad, I am actively seeking a sponsor, but that because most of my videos are about information security, and just how trivial easy it is to break into things using Google or other search engines, ad sales should be restricted to companies that provide a solution in that space.
The only problem, no one offers any kind of technology against what is in the Google search engine when it comes to finding flaws in people’s web sites.
Although the advertising campaign could be interesting “Don’t do this to yourself you mind numbing…” add what ever politically correct salesy statement works there.
Or just poor programming practices like in this video.
How do you sell ads when your primary video blog is all about showing how crazy some people are when it comes to security? As in, the idea of Security is something only for other folks, not for us. What kind of advertising works here?
The other question, is given the nature of youtube fandom, what kind of advertising works best for dancing babies, or people getting hit in the crotch by a ball, bat, golf club, choose instrument of pain here. Then what about advertising for stuff that is pulled off the networks (the Viacomm lawsuit still lingers) that the person pulling the video off the air is selling advertising on someone else’s work. Mashups, media, advertising, fluid copyright, weird videos, disaster looms.
Marcelo posted a note that Adam MacBeth has been building a Google map of all the software companies in Seattle. It is self service, if you own a software company, then you can pin it on the map. It makes an interesting contrast to the map of Silicon Valley that we are all so familiar with.
Seattle Software Companies . This is a map of companies in Seattle that do software work. It is not limited to companies headquartered in Seattle, but includes any company with a development office in the area. I’ve tried to keep companies off the map that are out of business or not yet viable, but please let me know if there is something that needs to be removed or edited. Source: Adam MacBeth
It is a neat map, then Adam’s blog is also interesting, in the longer run though, use the map, it is at least very interesting to see where companies are clustering.
66 University of Washington tech workers are going to be hitting the streets on the 30th of June 2008 due to a “perfect storm of events” that has lead to the largest layoff at the University in near a decade. The scary part is that this is a two part issue, one financial, one technological. On the technology side, a state run institution is finding that they can not compete against the likes of free services provided because web 2.0 is so very effective in delivering commodity services. Even some of the homeless in Seattle have e-mail, it is not surprising then that UW Technology Vice President Ron Johnson would state:
UW Technology Vice President Ron Johnson said the increasing availability of free or low-cost services on the Web through companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com are rendering some UW services — such as e-mail and document sharing — obsolete. He said annual revenue has dropped by $10 million, to $40 million Source: Seattle Times
The problem with commodity services is that they do what they do very well, provide an excellent service for a very low cost. The advent of Google Docs, and their competitors like Zoho means that the collaboration spaces are not needed for students, students will use their Google mail over the WebPine system that the university uses internally. As the university was unable to afford or find an alternative to the primitive WebPine system, their service infrastructure was doomed. The other perfect event according to Ron was:
Johnson said a “perfect storm” of events meant he wasn’t aware of the dire revenue situation until late February or early March, about six months after the problems began. That perfect storm included a restructuring of the financial reporting process and some key people who were “not on top of the situation in the way we would have liked,” Johnson said. A couple of people have resigned or retired as a result, he added. “There was a lot of denial going on in this,” Johnson said. “Everybody wanted to assume the rosy scenario, not the bad case.” Source: Seattle Times
Financial systems, they need those, but also explains many other issues within the university of Washington system. While the university has little room to grow because the state cannot subsidize them to a level that would allow them to grow, money had to come from somewhere. If the cross over to a new financial system caused a major disruption of the budget, then the easiest way to recoup money is to lay off people. This is money that can be gotten quickly, but the real tragedy is that many of the people coming out of the University of Washington system are going to have a very hard time competing with the modern systems that many other companies use.
Essentially, given knowledge of the systems in place, and not knowing anything else, those that are laid off will have an extraordinarily hard time being employed somewhere else. That is the real tragedy, not a perfect storm of events, but out dated technology skills in a super hot market, with no one wanting to buy them.
Tags: university of Washington, Ron Johnson, technology, layoff, sad, skills, unhappy
You can get to the podcast right here, and there is a lot of humor here. Really if you want a laugh, you gotta listen to this.
Go screaming to minute 45 to get to the fun bit, it is great hearing pundits swear on a pod cast about “hiding behind a shroud of privacy while pushing their business forward” when it comes to Facebook agreeing to play in Google’s playground on the whole open ID single sign on hoopla that is infecting the tech elite this morning. There is some humor here listening to Robert Scoble and others go at it.
So what this centers around is the idea that Facebook and Google are working on the whole Friend Connect program allowing anyone to take their friends along to any social network. The main argument centers around plaxo which is now part of comcast, and the reputation really of the social network that your friends are trying to get you involved with.
While Robert really likes plaxo, given their checkered history, many people use LinkedIn rather than Plaxo. So as people in the podcast really start getting into the whole idea of friendship portability, what they don’t get and what is not mentioned in the process is that when someone takes your contact information and dumps it into some other social network, it does not mean you have to accept that.
Many friends have tried to get me involved in plaxo, and some other weird reputation system, and it is really easy to just ignore them, dump them into the spam directory and not sweat it.
A good question is the Facebook privacy standards too protective? Do you really have to follow your friends around especially amongst the tech elite that tend to way early adopt any shiny new system just because they can. If you look at what happens fairly frequently, a large herd of people will follow along when the technical literati talk about something, but then actually using the system months later is fairly rare.
The initial boost in traffic is good, the follow through is fairly bad. Friend Connect and other systems are really designed to ensure that systems can work on one ID. The idea of having users allow their data to be ported to other systems, other networks, we don’t have that yet, but it is a good idea in the longer run to have something like this. The reason that I won’t use a lot of Facebook games or apps is because the data access that they have. I seriously doubt that based on my past behavioral patterns, that if my friends try to rope me into some other system, that I’ll just blindly go along with it.
In the mean time, go to minute 45, have a laugh, and then wonder what happens when your friends try to bring you into every other social network on the planet. Do you really have the time to beboMyspaceFacebookLinkedIn and the rest of them?
Tags: humor, Sam Whitmore, Marc Canter, Dana Gardner, Mike Arrington, Mike Vizard, and Robert Scoble Potty Mouth extravaganza, podcast
As we struggle through being labeled by Google as a malware site, we are having a crash course in what to do when the Google Gods of search think you are dangerous. Now there is an even bigger problem, as we work on the web site, and write cool stuff, there are things that people need to do to get the Google Gods to bless you again.
Asking for a review via the Web Master Tools is just the beginning, the problem intensifies itself when you need to figure out that Google is going to take its own sweet team cleaning up the disaster in their index.
It does not matter how fast you clean it up…what matters is how fast Google can clear an erroneous flag in their database.
Struggling through the whole Google banning malware issue has been interesting. It took less than five hours for Google to work out and effectively kill the site in the Google search results. We figured it out in about another five hours and got the whole thing cleaned up in conjunction with the hosting company.
Now Google comes up with this friendly message in their web master tools.
Two weeks, for what took hours on our part to clean up, it will take a minimum of two weeks for Google to get the site killing malware link down.
Quick to damn, slow to fix, that is an issue for any one who runs a web site or blog, or anything else that gets dinged by the almighty gods of Google.
For someone who is extremely quick to fix things, Google should be as timely as well, since they essentially hold the keys to the kingdom for sending traffic your way, if the site is doing due diligence, then they should be as well. No one should have to wait two weeks with a false representation of their web site, blog, or otherwise.
Killer, wrong, and dead wrong. Come on Google, if you are going to kill off a web site, at least have the courtesy to respond at Internet speed. Taking two weeks to check to see if we are “ok” is absolutely unacceptable, especially when it takes less than 5 minutes to come visit the site and clear the flag.
Keywords: Google, malware, label, site, web master tools, messages, stopbadware.org, due diligence, Internet
There is a lot of humor here, 24 hours after Louis Gray posts the “Smaller Blogs do not deserve any ad revenue” you would have thought that there would be a firestorm, link bait is link bait, and starting something off with a title like that even we got into the act. With some humorous words from Louis himself on the blog.
50,700 links later in Google (here), you can get a great feel for what was going on yesterday when the world erupted and the Internet was consumed with the idea of why little bloggers in the food chain need or want to have advertising revenue.
There is a matter of expectation though that people really do need to think about. Get rich quick schemes hardly ever work, adsense is no different. While people bring up startups, and exceptions to the idea that people do not need/want ad revenue, realistically exceptions are going to exist, and depending on where you are in the process, ad revenue can sometimes go a long way in helping defray costs, but there is no reasonable expectation of buying a Ferrari tomorrow.
He does hit on a point, but as the day moves on, it looks a lot like link bait, which is good, and the Google stats shows that at least 50K opinions or aggregation feeds on the article. In the longer run, it was better for Louis and his non-advertising polluted blog.
If he had been a member of adsense, he could have made a fortune yesterday.
Keywords: humor, louis gray, advertising, revenue, google, link love, link bait, firestorm
66 University of Washington tech workers are going to be hitting the streets on the 30th of June 2008 due to a “perfect storm of events” that has lead to the largest layoff at the University in near a decade. The scary part is that this is a two part issue, one financial, one technological. On the technology side, a state run institution is finding that they can not compete against the likes of free services provided because web 2.0 is so very effective in delivering commodity services. Even some of the homeless in Seattle have e-mail, it is not surprising then that UW Technology Vice President Ron Johnson would state:
