A bicycle built for failure

March 11, 2010March 11, 2010 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Google’s new bike-friendly option on GoogleMaps (GoogleBike?) came just in time for DC. Your Nation’s Capital will connect the Capitol and the White House with a bike path – right down the middle of the road, removing traffic lanes. Luckily, DC doesn’t have a traffic problem or anything.

DC’s bike commuters doubled in the past decade or so, going from 1% of the commuting population to over 2%. Meanwhile, Metro’s ridership has only risen about 25% in a similar time period – to a total of 726,000. One out of five commuters use Metro, which has its share of well-documented safety issues.

A bike path sounds like a great idea.

Googlevision

March 9, 2010March 9, 2010 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

This week, Google announced a partnership with Dish Network to launch a TV search service. It’s not the first time Google has found its way into the living room – they’ve been working with TiVo to figure out what shows you watch and serve you ads when you pause a live show and measure ad performance.

Google is wise to move into TV advertising. It may sound like they’re taking a step back; that they’re an internet company going back to traditional media. But the line between various entertainment channels gets blurrier every day. Online video and television video are no longer all that different. If Google wants to be the gatekeeper for all the world’s information (and you can be sure they do), they have to watch your remote control as closely as they do your laptop keyboard.

We should have been ready – Jim Carrey predicted all this 14 years ago…

This week’s buzz about Google

February 12, 2010 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

I joined Google Buzz this week. It was easy – I didn’t have to do anything except log in to GMail. Google had transformed my private email – including my contact list (which it automatically populates based on my email traffic) into a social networking experience, a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter. After several privacy complaints, Google made opting out of certain features a bit easier. It’s still a little creepy.

Tellingly, Buzz allows you to integrate your Twitter feed but not for Facebook profile – another sign of the coming Armageddon between Google and Facebook, which Google will likely get to right after their fight with Apple and possibly after their fight with Microsoft.

How big is Google? There were three separate stories about Google which made headlines this week. That’s not three articles – but three separate issues which made news independent of each other. First was the aforementioned Google Buzz; second was Google’s plan to become an internet service provider; and now comes news that Google is butting heads with the Department of Justice over intellectual property rights of authors as part of their ongoing effort to become a latter-day, digital Library of Alexandria.

That these are all separate issues leads to them becoming one issue. Google is seeking to define how you get to the internet, how you communicate with others, and what information/content you receive. If this scenario continues on the same logical course, Google would become to the internet what AT&T was to the telephone networks before it was broken up by a federal antitrust suit in 1984.

Is Google at risk of an anti-trust lawsuit? Possibly, but they have certainly done their best to make inroads with the government that would prevent that from happening. The relationship between Google and the current administration is well-documented.

And if you believe the balance of power in Washington will tip back to Republicans in 2010 or 2012, Google is ready for that to – they are sponsoring TechRepublican’s Digital Boot Camp at CPAC this year.

Google: booking it out of China?

January 13, 2010January 13, 2010 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The big technology news today is that Google is threatening to leave China, leading to a wave of speculation on what that may mean for both the gatekeeper of internet information and the Chinese economy.

On the surface, Google has said this is about human rights and cyber attacks – which are likely, at least, factors in their decision. But this isn’t the first time Google’s China operation has been in the news in the last few weeks. Recall that Google’s efforts to make all books available online has run afoul of copyright holders in China (as it has here in the States) and even spawned a lawsuit. Negotiations on what Google would pay the authors of the works it scanned and made available to search users were subsequently put on hold.

While Google’s exit strategy is a good way to draw attention to human rights, in the end it may be a way to beat the Library Cops.

(Disclosure: I have worked in a minor role on projects involving Google’s book settlement in the past, although I do not now.)

Taxing creatively to subsidize creativity

January 7, 2010January 7, 2010 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

A government report in France has proposed taxing internet advertising to subsidize creativity:

France could start taxing Internet advertising revenues from online giants such as Google, using the funds to support creative industries that have been hit by the digital revolution, a newspaper reported on Thursday… The levy, which would also apply to other operators such as MSN and Yahoo, would put an end to “enrichment without any limit or compensation,” newspaper Liberation quoted Guillaume Cerutti, one of the authors of the report, as saying.

The reasoning, apparently, is that internet giants provide a bridge between users and free content – reaping rewards through advertising dollars while content creators are left out in the cold. While those content creators should have the right to control access to their products, this scheme doesn’t come close to doing that; it does, however, limit internet platforms that more creative artists might use to gain exposure.

Google has it’s problems, but no one can debate that their business model is creative. Google monetizes free stuff – from search to email and calendar applications to information tracking – by collecting information at every step of the way and using it to fuel a highly targeted and personalized advertising platform.

The ill-conceived subsidy outlined in the report, on the other hand, taxes that money to funnel money to the music industry. In other words, the report lays out a system that rewards content generators who aren’t creative enough to figure out a way to monetize their product.

Two campaign tools you don’t have to pay for

January 5, 2010January 5, 2010 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Google Wave is still a mystery to many folks – I have to confess, I haven’t spend a considerable amount of time pondering its potential yet. But Wes Donehue of TechRepublican has, and he shares some ways to use this new tool for a cause or campaign:

Also at TechRepublican today: Jeff Vreeland has a good idea about using Facebook as a email match program. Amassing email addresses has become a basic function of any organized effort, but an email address alone is worth little. Using that information as a springboard for connecting on other platforms can help draw potential volunteers and donors into the fold.

The Year in Google

December 3, 2009December 3, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Google has released their 2009 Zeitgeist report – a summary of popular search trends along various topics. Lists like this are usually predictable – the most-searched-for baseball team was the Yankees; the alphabet soup of AIG, GM, and TARP led bailout-related searches.

But search results can also give a good concept of popular thinking on key news topics. For instance, the top term used in healthcare-related searches is “Obama.” That seems to indicate that, for better or worse, people are closely identifying the President with the health care reform issue. Also interesting is that the Heritage Foundation was the #5 search term in this category – which could mean that Americans are open to hearing alternatives to what has been circulating on Capitol Hill.

Google also looks at localized search topics for several major cities. Movie theaters and school websites dominated the results, especially colleges. In DC, the top term was “fcps blackboard” – the portal for the Fairfax County public school system. This actually says a lot about the Washington, DC workforce and commuting patterns. (I knew I had company on my daily commutes into and out of Your Nation’s Capital from Merrifield, but had no idea it was enough to alter search results; Metro clearly needs more trains.)

That education websites are so popular also notes another trend. Around the Thanksgiving table this year, my soon-to-be brother and sister in law commented that they hadn’t seen their daughter’s recent report card, despite the marking period having ended. They explained that they just check her grades online.

Pollsters can call voters, ask questions, track answers, and get a pretty good idea of what folks are thinking. Still, there’s an element of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in that method – that the very act of measuring could affect the responses to poll questions. Internet searches are somewhat anonymous.

As the old saying goes, you are who you are when no one is watching.

One BILLION hits… per day

October 9, 2009October 9, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

On the third anniversary of its acquisition by Google, YouTube is celebrating that it now averages a billion views each day.

There’s another way to measure their success, though: The term “YouTube video” has also entered the cultural lexicon to define short, viral, online video – the same way “Xerox” was used for years as a synonym for photocopies. YouTube isn’t just on your computer screen, it’s in your head.

Twitter might actually make money!

October 8, 2009October 8, 2009 ~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

On the heels of the Associated Press floating the idea of charging search engines for its bulldog edition content comes the news that Twitter is in talks with both Microsoft and Google to include tweets in their search results. This may be a business model that actually works.

Search engines are, by nature, aggregators of content and serve as the doorway to the internet. With two search engines competing for market share, that means each must be on the top of their game. For sites like Twitter, that means their large user base (which generates relevant, in-demand content) is pretty valuable to someone conducting a search query.

These deals would also be the first answers the question of how Twitter will actually monetize that content. This arrangement would allow Twitter users to take advantage of a still-free service and actually help them attract traffic; it would mean a stream of revenue for Twitter that doesn’t involve someone saying, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, so I’ll write a check until you figure out how it makes money”; and it gives Microsoft and Google a way to provide better search results to increase their market share (which attracts advertisers.

It’s a good model, and like the AP’s plan, it takes advantage of the fact that, for the first time in a while, there is legitimate competition among search engines. This doesn’t work on an internet where one search engine is clearly dominant. And even though Google is the clear leader in search engine market share right now, Microsoft has the resources to stay in the game for a long time.