Chris Winfield in The LA Times: ‘Mahalo, Call it a search-engine curator’
May 31, 2007 by Chris Winfield | Press, Search Engines
Yesterday I spoke with Alex Pham from the Los Angeles Times for an article she was doing about Jason Calacanis’ new “search engine” called Mahalo. The article was published today and I am quoted in it:
Calacanis, a New York native who lives in Brentwood, said Mahalo didn’t have to keep up with everything — just things that most interest people.
“It will take some time to complete, but when it’s done, it will be glorious,” he said. “Until then, we invite people to compare our results with any search engine out there. For results that we do have, they’re going to be five to 10 times better because humans have thought about them.”
Mahalo faces other challenges. With editors behind each search, there’s the opportunity for bias, said Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a New York search-marketing firm.
Alex Pham’s full article online at the Los Angeles Times: Mahalo, Call it a search engine curator
My other thoughts on this:
For awhile I have heard rumors about Calacanis’ upcoming search engine. One thing that I will say about him is that he is excellent at drumming up publicity. Will that translate to a search engine that is going to change the world or even make a dent? I doubt it.
The new project launched in alpha yesterday and is called Mahalo. Originally I heard it described as a cross between Google and Wikipedia. On the surface it sounds like an interesting idea. Why? Because right now many people actually look at Google’s results as a cross between Google & Wikipedia due to how often a wiki entry comes up at the top of a Google search. Jason has experience with creating content networks (Weblogs Inc), with getting paid editors (Netscape) and now has the backing (Sequoia Capital, Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban and more) to do it.
The biggest hurdles? Google, Wikipedia & Man Power
After looking at it just doesn’t really seem like a search engine to me. As Allen Stern put it:
I am not sure I get why this is a “human search” when it really is more of a “human directory” – right? Or am I missing something? Either way, maintaining those pages will be an ultra-bitch. What happens when new “gossip” needs to be added about someone, how will those pages stay up-to-date?
It’s an interesting concept but can it scale? It seems to me that this project would be extremely labor intensive. Why do people love Google so much and rely on it so heavily? Not because it returns the best result for the most popular searches but because most of the time it returns really good results for the obscure phrases. If you take a look at Google’s recently released Hot Trends you’ll see that people are searching for obscure terms as much as they are searching for popular terms. So for a search engine to be truly effective, it has to be able to return those results (the long tail phrases) just as effectively as the popular ones. Can you imagine how labor intensive that would be? Right now Mahalo is only returning results for the top 4,000 search terms (as determined by them) and hopes to reach 10,000 by the end of the year.
Also when you have a human edited search engine, you have to worry about things such as: objectivity (skewing search results based on the editor’s belief), corruption (editors accepting bribes for better rankings, mentions, etc – DMOZ anyone?) and retaining talent (editors being taken by competitors much like Jason did with Netscape and Digg contributors).
One thing that we will see is a lot of publicity around it. Aside from the mainstream media coverage, an interesting event took place last night on Digg when co-founder Kevin Rose submitted the new search engine. When Kevin Rose submits a story it is basically guaranteed to hit the homepage of Digg. As my friend Muhammad Saleem pointed out in a comment on Digg:
Very interesting to see that Kevin Rose would submit Mahalo (of Calacanis, ex-Netscape boss). We all know that Kevin-submitted means 100% FP. Is there something more going on here behind the scenes?
But it is going to have to be something really special in order for people to take notice (after the initial hoopla) and possibly switch from their current search engine provider. But hey, as Don Dodge from Microsoft said recently, 1% of the search engine market share is worth over $1 billion. But then again as Aaron Wall points out, Mahalo could just be:
- About.com, without topical expert guides
- Del.icio.us, without popular votes
- Wikipedia, with paid editors and rarely updated guides
- only focused on popular crap
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StumbleUpon Gets Sold to eBay – Initial Community Reactions Aren’t Good
May 30, 2007 by Chris Winfield | Social Networks
The rumors have been confirmed – eBay has officially acquired StumbleUpon. This acquisition has been rumored since November and tonight StumbleUpon confirmed it on their blog:
StumbleUpon has officially joined eBay. We’re excited about this, and we hope you are too.
Looking to the future, we think that joining eBay is the right thing to do to help us to grow StumbleUpon to its full potential. We think eBay is a great fit for us because eBay and StumbleUpon share similar approaches – we’re both driven by our community of users, and we are both dedicated to connecting people.
One interesting aspect to this sale is the immediate feedback from the StumbleUpon community. The page was immediately ‘stumbled‘ and the community immediately started voicing their opinion. So far the majority of the feedback has been negative and against the deal. Here are just a few of the comments so far (many can’t be printed here):
* Yuck. There goes the neighborhood.
* SU officially auctioned off.
* Surprise, surprise. “Rumors” indeed. Holy drama, look at the negative reviews flood in. I’m relatively proud of you worthless a%&holes right now.
* NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
One of the great things about social media is the immediate feedback from your users. Whether good or bad, its important to know what people are thinking so that you can be better prepared to address it. The most important thing that StumbleUpon can do is prove to their users that this is the truth:
We also want you to know that not much will change around here. We’ll be running StumbleUpon separately within eBay Inc., and we’ll still be focused on developing features based on your feedback.
Early feedback indicates that people don’t think this will be the case…
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Mobile Web Usage is on the Rise – What it Means for Your Business
May 30, 2007 by Jake Matthews | Business
Mobile web usage is on a steep curve northward and everyone from major corporations and small companies continue to push mobile device web usage for good reason – more eyeballs with more time on websites will yield better sales and hopefully better revenues. In a recent study Comscore points out that 30 million Americans accessed the Internet from a mobile device in January 2007.
There is nothing more convenient than traveling and being able to find what you need while on your mobile device or to get your personal chores or business affairs in order on your mobile while you are commuting from place to place. For and end-user, mobile web access is a great convenience and a big time saver. For a business owner, it is the difference between gaining or losing a sale or enriching that ever so valuable client relationship to extract more lifetime revenue. For major corporations, it’s about retaining existing relationships in increasingly competitive business environments. In an economy dominated by services, to be competitive, you must offer better services, and mobile web is one way companies are reaching out.
Mobile device web access + mobile search = Sales.
It’s true: while on a recent vacation, I pulled up Google.com web search on my mobile device. After typing in a specific local query: restaurant + town + state (to find a restaurant), there was a result. A local restaurant’s phone number was readily available right in the search result and I booked dinner for two immediately. The restaurant got my business because they were available through a mobile web search and because they had a clearly defined search result with relevant business information.
Major corporations are reaching out too. In today’s New York Post, Citibank has a full page add on page 13 (New York Late City Final Edition), prompting mobile phone access to their website stating “not caring what time the bank closes” – such that with their mobile website access, all of your banking problems are solved day or night, wherever you are. Now, you don’t even have to have your laptop with you!
Here is a preview of what they are offering through mobile access:
Citi Mobile gives you the convenience of banking virtually any time, anywhere. You can use it to pay bills, transfer money, see your balances and activity, find a Financial Center or ATM and get Customer Service-right on your cell phone.
Web access from wireless phones and PDA’s is really reaching new levels and the major handheld producers are reaching out with the major service providers. Even the most basic of telephones are now showing standard features of access to mobile web and email. There are various “browser” versions, but all of the major providers are striving to provide advanced equipment and services at affordable prices.
Here is a brief sampling of some that are out there and I can tell you that consumers are hot to trot and pick up these devices and services and utilize them:
Verizon Wireless pushes mobile web access dubbed “Mobile Web 2.0”
Mobile Media
- Mobile Web 2.0
- Get It Now®
- Picture and Text Messaging
- Email, Mobile IM, Mobile Chat
Cingular (The New AT&T 
) offers MEdia Net:
Q. What is MEdia Net?
A. MEdia Net gives you access to all the cool things you can do with your wireless phone-email, Web sites, games, and more. It is wireless Internet access for your wireless device.
- Mail & Messaging: Check your Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail and chat with friends with Yahoo! Messenger and Upoc.
- Sports: Get the latest scores from CBS SportsLine and ESPN.
- Ringtones, Games, and Graphics: Personalize your phone by downloading your favorites.
- News & Finance: Stay informed with round-the-clock headlines from CNN.
- Entertainment: Get local movie times and reviews, dining recommendations, and more.
- Weather & Travel: Check your forecast from The Weather Channel, get flight times, and traffic reports.
So how do you make sense of the mobile web as a business owner?
The mobile web and the access that consumers have to it will take many forms. Some wireless providers only have “skeleton” networks, while others have full fledged World Wide Web access with normal HTML browsers (albeit with smaller screens). But as people go mobile in any form, there should be more eyeballs on your brand and more opportunities to reach out to existing and new clients. The better prepared you are for mobile devices and these networks, the better positioned you are to succeed at capturing new customers and communicating with your current customers. Users will be in MEdia Net and Verizon’s Mobile Web 2.0 – it’s inevitable, it’s well beyond 1st adopters and “mavens” as Gladwell would have it.
Search Marketing Sidenote to Citibank: A Google search for “Citibank Mobile” does not bring up the site in Google organically and not even a paid search result! If this is a new ad campaign, I would not neccassarily expect an organic result, but certainly I would buy some sponsored ads around it. I’m sure Citibank is spending tons on banners and other portions of the campaign, so why not cover yourself with a couple of paid keywords?
Citibank is not taking advantage of the dot-mobi extension: http://www.citibank.mobi/ that page comes up as “server not found”. Why don’t they just register this top level domain and forward it to the area that they want people to go to? I covered some of the benefits of this strategy in another recent dot-mobi post.
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ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is character encoding based on the english alphabet. ASCII art refers to the way that graphics were created by using text only…its old school so to speak. The most basic form of this would be the smiley face ; )
Some people have created some amazing images with just text characters- now you can be one of those people.
Photo2text.com is a cool simple to use application to convert your photos to ASCII art in 3 steps. So you don’t have to do all that intense typing and spacing!
Simply upload a photo with a maximum file size of 200 kb. When uploaded, enter a nickname for the picture.
Then when your file is ready you can adjust the brightness of the image- which changes what is picked up by the text. You can also choose what kind of character set you would like your image to be displayed in. You can have your own personal link for your photo.
You can even do a Matrix style conversion in all binary 1’s and 0’s.
Some great examples of ASCII art can be found here by Valkyrie. Some more here.
(via: photojojo)
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I haven’t done one of these round-up posts in awhile but there’s just too much good stuff lately to not share it:
Social: Lyndon illustrates the Tao of Linkbait Method – the art of hitting your target audience by aiming at a completely different audience. This post is inspired by a great movie and a really good idea.
Links: Joe Whyte shows you how to get hundreds of free links from .edu’s ethically and for free (you will rarely ever see .edu links | ethically | free together in the same sentence).
SEO: Eric Enge gives us 17 poor quality signals that your site might be sending. Some might be obvious (too large a percentage of your links are reciprocal) but others not so obvious (web server downtime too high).
Productivity: Something that always plagues me in my over-crowded inbox, luckily there were two great posts recently to help me out. First we had Stoney DeGyter’s post showing me how to manage my “inbox tasks” and then this quick video interview with Robert Scoble showing how he absorbs 10,000+ emails.
Creativity: Before he left for his Disney World vacation, Graywolf showed a quick example of why its important to experiment with new things. In the brave new Google world – this is extremely important.
Competition: Basically anytime Todd has time to write a complete post, it’s a must read. The Competitive Webmaster’s Guide to Understanding the Dynamics of Top Rankings is no exception.
Usability: Even though I couldn’t submit this to Digg because of the increased scrutiny lately, Kim’s post on 10 reminders for usability web design was still a must read.
Simplicity: Sometimes it’s the shortest posts that smack you in the face….
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Over the weekend I did an interview with Neil Patel for his new blog titled: The Secrets of Public Relations Revealed. Neil asked some great questions and I tried to cover as many of the things that have helped me get coverage in places like The New York Times, USA Today, Entreprenuer Magazine and over 100 other major media publications.
In the interview I share the following:
* How I first got major media coverage
* Practical steps that you can take to get coverage (without paying a PR firm)
* How I have used PR to brand myself
* What can be done to speed up the PR process and get coverage quicker
* And many other secrets that you can read over at Neil’s great new blog Quick Sprout.
Would 10e20 readers be interested in more coverage here of how to get press and use it? If so please let me know either in the comments or through email (cwinfield [at] 10e20.com).
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Chris Winfield in Investor’s Business Daily: ‘AOL the First in Google Search…’
May 24, 2007 by Chris Winfield | Press
Back in early April, I spoke to Pete Barlas about the deal AOL had struck with Google to give advertisers a white label version of AdWords. This new arrangement was significant because it would allow advertisers to target only AOL audience members. The article titled, AOL The First In Google Search Ad Network Allowed To Sell Own Ads, ran yesterday in Investor’s Business Daily and here is one of my quotes:
Following up on a deal struck in 2005, AOL last month began selling AOL-branded versions of Google’s search ads, giving advertisers an opportunity they never had before. It’s an opportunity many appear be eager to take, says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, which helps companies place ads online.
“It’s really exciting for advertisers to be able to advertise directly with AOL because the quality of traffic the quality of the conversions there is much higher than in other places,” he said.
I go on to give some other thoughts and Pete does a nice job of giving a good overview of the deal, what it means for advertisers, investors and what other types of sites are in Google’s network. The article also quotes Danny Sullivan, Chris Zaharias from Efficient Frontier and others. Click here to see the full version of the article online.
The product is called the AOL Search Marketplace and you can get a good graphical overview by clicking on the image below (pop-up courtesy of AOL). In addition, Chris Sherman has a good write-up here about the details.
I knew that Technorati was making some major updates today. But I was bit surprised to see that ShoeMoney had taken over control of all of the recent blogs that had linked to 10e20:
According to Technorati, ShoeMoney (Jeremy Schoemaker) not only runs his own blog but also melange, Neil Patel’s new blog and even Bruce Clay’s…. 
Update: This looks to be a bug with all of the images in the first 5 listings for all blog posts. For example, look at what Technorati is showing for Bruce Clay’s recent links:
According to Technorati, I now control all of those blogs. What it normally would show is the picture of the person (or whatever icon they chose) who originally claimed the blog and verified it, along with their name (or whatever they chose). But what’s happening is that it it is taking the info from whomever the last site to link to them and displaying that instead.
Oh, if you’re curious about the title, click here.
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Yesterday I wrote a post titled What part of a graduate’s costume gave the cordon bleu cooking school its name? No, I’m not trying to compete with Yahoo! Answers and launching a new service. That strange phrase (without the question mark) was actually the hottest term in Google’s new Hot Trends service at the time of writing. Personally I was a bit perplexed at how something that random could be so popular yesterday. Luckily some commenters were able to fill me in on a few things I had completely overlooked:
- Radio trivia contests
- Crossword puzzles
The purpose of my post was to see if anyone really was searching for that term:
How can you benefit from this service as a marketer? One way would be to see what the most popular trends of the day are and if they match your topics, write blog posts or news articles about them. That way when someone clicks through your article could be there. We’ll see how that works out with this post….
Soon after I wrote that, my post was on the Google Trends Page for the term under Blog Searches:
This started sending traffic right away and wound up sending close to 1,200 visitors from that Trends page alone. Even more interesting was how quickly I was ranking #1 for the term in Google (now it’s ranking #2 behind Google Trends). That was something I hadn’t even thought of. Granted there was basically zero competition for that term at the time other then other blogs curious about the term. But interestingly enough there were about 3,300 visitors from Google for that term alone yesterday.
Now for the most part, that is useless traffic because that question really has nothing to do with the subjects we cover here but there are sites that it could be. How could you use this info? If you have a blog, scan the top terms each day and see if there are any that are close to your niche. If so, write a post using that term that seeks to give people what they are looking for (and then possibly lead them wherever you want them to go). Just make sure you are in Google Blog Search.
The interesting part about this to me was the fact that the trends data isn’t all fluff. It will be even more interesting to try this again in the next couple of months because I am sure that many of the searches yesterday were also people curious about that wierd term being so searched for…
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Yesterday I spoke with Holly Sanders from The New York Post and appear in her article in today’s paper called Ad & Subtract. The article is all about the recent emails that Google sent out to many AdSense publishers informing them that their accounts would be disabled on June 1st.
Search experts said Google routinely cuts off publishers who run afoul of AdSense rules, but they believe this latest round of notices was a more widespread effort to clean up its ad network.
“I don’t really remember where this many people reported it at one time,” said Chris Winfield, president of Internet search marketing firm 10e20.
Google confirmed that it had sent out notices, but characterized it as part of an ongoing review.
Just my $.02 on this whole thing. This was not an all & out attack on arbitragers or even everyone running MFA sites. Out of all the people I know running AdSense only one got the letter. This was more of a move on Google’s part to bring attention to this matter, they knew that as soon as a few people got the letter that a threads would start at Webmaster World, DigitalPoint, etc and it would get everyone all riled up. By doing this they are doing two things:
- Letting advertisers know that they are addressing the problems with their content network
- Scaring a lot of the publishers who didn’t get the letter (and who are toeing the line) into possibly changing their biz models
All of this without ever making an official statement. If you’re interested in more information on this, I would recommend checking out this video post from Shoemoney or this short discussion on ThreadWatch which raises some other interesting points.
Check out the full online version of the NY Post article here.
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