Bye Baidu, Google?

Did you really think there was going to be just one newspaper replacement for the web?

Nope, but they seemed to have a smokin' first mover advantage. They absolutely did. Viral, clean, elegant and great results. Like any great software institution, feature clutter, the continuous ebb and flow of fickle user interest, and people getting fat and happy off of their options gets the better of most of Silicon Valley's break aways over time. And Wall Street oh Wall Street, "do I no longer please you?" It happens to everyone, GOOG. What would financial markets be without new starlets all the time. Irrational exuberance and rational pragmatism - two cousins that hate each other, but absolutely can't live without one another.

Will Google be a big part of the web experience for some time? Sure they will. Will they be the gravitational center? Unlikely.

Take a look at this quick comparison of page views.

While there are hundreds of ways to poke at this, I am going to just keep it simple. Look at what has happened to Baidu and look at the other three. Clearly the concept of where and how you find content is changing. Search is adding context - friends, dating, maps, encyclopedia topics, video and a whole Yelp more. Google can certainly try to keep on top of all these trends, but it is a losing battle. No one company is going to own all or even most of the web search behavior of human beings because search as it turns out is actually just an attribute of other behaviors.

Google is a learning organization, however. They saw this coming years ago. Their strategy of offering advertisers a bundle of possible advertising methods is a winner and the next real battle front in web advertising. Microsoft clearly sees this. Anybody else? Baidu?

A Little Fun with Truth in Advertising

Just for fun....here's a few great examples of just how far Photoshop can stretch the truth....

http://www.bspcn.com/2008/02/12/top-40-photoshopped-images/

Espousing Pithiness

So you ask, what have you been doing? You haven’t written a blog entry in a long time? Well while living the dream of thinking big Marketing 2.0 thoughts and driving the corresponding actions, I started to question the value of a blog. Oh yes, it’s there, but I think the format of mine and others needs to change. We are all super time starved, and I think lengthy musings just don’t do it for folks. However, at the same time I was questioning the nature of business blogging, my small readership was coming out of the woodwork to question why I hadn’t written in a while. My most current opinion is that I need to keep it short for my sanity and yours. With that said, I am going to completely violate that today as I am going to show you right here a couple of the things I’ve been up to since the last post.

First of all, I’ve been working on a website that will be a companion piece to this blog (indeed the blog is embedded in it) to capture resource links and threads to the points we discuss here. In the next week or so, I’ll be transferring a lot of the Marketing 2.0 resources I assembled for an internal corporate audience to this public space.

Here’s what it looks like (built with the new beta release of Netvibes).

This next item is impossible to read and Blogger's upload converted me to a member of the Blue Man Group. So dear reader(s), if you are up on the latest file posting techniques for blogs, let me know. Google Docs wanted this in HTML and it looked pretty bad though not as bad as what you see below. It’s a paper a wrote that will appear in a publication called Perform that is published by the same folks that run the magazine, Revenue Today. Anyway – some thoughts on why I believe web 2.0 is actually supporting very old behaviors for how we buy and sell not new ones. If you are interested, e-mail me, and I’ll send you a copy.



All for this addition. Shorter and pithier next time. Promise.