Is Google’s Knol A Wiki Basher?

Google has announced that they are trialling a new free tool, currently called knol with the aim to

encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.

It’s only open by invitation at the moment by the way.

To me, this smacks of an attempt to produce their own (adsensed of course) version of the all ranking wikipedia. Actually, there’ll be optional revenue sharing…

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

So whilst I wait for it to open to the public at large I’m going to draft a few insightful articles on offset mortgages, unsecured personal loans and fully comp car insurance!

As articles can include links to additional information I wonder if nofollow will be used? You’ll recall of course that wikipedia introduced nofollow on their outbound links earlier this year, denying webmasters of some decent strength link juice.

I bet this vacuum reseller in The Netherlands has seen a surge in traffic over the last 24 hours!

Tesco & Spice Girls Ad

New Tesco ad features The Spice Girls. Or …

The Spice Girls ad features Tesco. You decide!

Entrepeneur Magazine

Managed to stumble upon En The Web this morning, a magazine for entrepeneurs everywhere but with a North West slant. There are some interesting articles about businesses from various sectors. Currently there’s news about Just Search.

A couple of quick bits I’d do if En The Web was my site:

• Offer an RSS feed (even though you offer paid-for hard copy mags)
• Resolve the duplicate content issue with http://www.entheweb.co.uk and http://www.entheweb.co.uk/news/
• Include email details on the contact page default view

Paid Content Is A Good Thing. Apparently.

A week or so ago I posted about free content being a good thing. But today I’m posting about an opposing view.

As many of us visit or subscribe to the same blogs you may well have caught sight of the new Brian Clarke (of copyblogger fame) site teachingsells.com? But if you haven’t, I recommend that you simply subscribe to the site and get a copy of the free pdf document. I didn’t bother until one of my favourite bloggers, Aaron Wall, gave it the nod today. It’s well worth the 15-20 minute first read.

There’s some obvious link bait headlining and content in it (suppose I’ve fallen for it of course by blogging about it!) but there is also some great thought provoking content too. Brian suggests that his reason for blogging is as an attraction strategy - I like that phrase and it’s why I started blogging about search marketing myself last year. As an aside, my own initial aims for publishing this blog (it used to be here) were to:

• attract the attention of other blogging affiliates and search marketers
• join the community - to both share and learn useful information
• promote our search marketing company
• and a bit of me too, I blog

It isn’t my intention to make marginally significant money from this blog. Though as Brian says in his pitch:

To make money online, you’re always selling something—even if it’s just space on the
page.

That’s certainly true of course and what we’re all about on our commercial sites. Typically, on a site or page that includes content but no affiliate links I’d obviously consider monetising the page with adsense. Brian suggests that this method is flawed and is promoting his own view that you should charge for your content. I’m not in total agreement with his comment:

The people who do manage to make money with niche content and AdSense have to
be quite ruthless about getting people to click away as soon and as often as possible.
Beyond aggressive positioning of ad units that obscure the actual content, there is no
motivation to make the content engaging or even useful.

If you’re using adsense for commercial gain you do need people to click away but I’d argue that there is motivation to still publish content that is engaging or useful. But hands-up, on reflection I could do better on the engaging content front!

Don’t forget that Brian is concentrating on content that he believes can be paid for. He isn’t concentrating on earning money from things like credit cards, DVD rentals or mobile phones. My understanding that his proposed new platform is focusing on charging for information or intellectual knowledge. Free content or paid content aside, you still need eyes on pages …or at least eyes on your content. The latter is what Brian seems to be aiming at when he says:

When you have something to sell, you have leverage. You don’t necessarily need
traffic, because you can borrow someone else’s audience as long as you can offer that
publisher a compelling deal.

Knowledge is power perhaps.

Take a look at teachingsells and feel free to comment.

Rucku

I’ve developed a sort of compulsive disorder whereby I’m forever ripping snippets of articles from newspapers and magazines to keep as reminders for web ideas/research.

This cutting was taken from a copy of yesterdays Times that a previous train traveller had kindly left for me to read on my way to Liverpool for a couple of beers. Anyway this one was to remind me to look at Will Carling’s social networking site for rugby fans (not that I’m a big fan of the game) - subtly named rucku.com . There’s going to be a social networking site for just about every like-minded interest group that you can think of sooner or later. Each and everyone no doubt attempting to fund themselves with supporting ads.

Anyway my Guinness induced idea for a similar site for hockey enthusiasts - pucku.com - has fallen flat due to the domain being already registered and me not being prepared to offer a bid for it!

£30 For A Blog Post?

I was contacted yesterday by a London based digital marketing company yesterday offering me £30 to blog about their (major brand name) clients new viral marketing promotion. You might have been contacted yourself?

It wasn’t mentioned if the post could no-follow the link out but that would be my preference if I wanted to publish the post and take the cash (you know of course that paid for links and google don’t go together!). Aside from that link juice issue it’s not what I want to do with this blog. Whilst I’m interested in branding and marketing issues and I have blogged about related topics in the past (on my old blogger blog) I think it shows when someone is publishing a paid for post. That’s not what I’m after on this blog.

Is Free Content A Good Thing? Ask radiohead

Recently in the UK one of my favourite recording artists Prince gave away his latest album for free by fixing the cd to the front of The Mail On Sunday. Okay, it wasn’t one of his best albums in my opinion, but that’s not really the point. Last weekend the Scottish group Travis did a similar thing with a compilation CD that included their new single.

Now, Radiohead are receiving a lot of attention by allowing you to download their new album In Rainbows ( site seems to be having problems though) and you can choose to pay as much or (more likely) as little as you want. Actually, you may not get it completely free as there will probably be a credit card handling fee. I hope the album is another OK Computer.

Whilst I’m presuming Radiohead are still planning on making money from their new album (or at least generate publicity and raise sales from the back catalogue), it highlights how damaging for traditional recording and media industries it can be when the artist becomes the publisher too, bypassing the traditional route to market but still being completely in touch with the target consumer via websites and blogs. It must be hell being a music publishing company nowadays.

Over 40 And Past It. Or Maybe Not

I’ve been reading various reports that appear to be contradictory.

One report commissioned by PayPal suggests that at the tender age of 42, Britons become technological dunces - I best make my fortunes bloody quick then! Allegedly, once the average Briton hits their early 40s, people increasingly turn to their children or younger relatives for help with video and dvd players, computers, MP3 players and mobiles. Not me …. though I confess I’m not big on mobiles, especially predictive texting.

Other reports suggest that it’s the silver surfers that are keeping online trading alive. This poorly named, aged 55+ proportion of the UK population are time rich, cash rich and looking to enjoy life. Apparently they spend more money online than other age groups.

But doesn’t this contradict the PayPal report? Silver surfers are more than old enough to be technophobes - so how are they managing to even get on the internet, never mind spend oodles of cash at a wide range of web sites?

Don’t you suspect that some of these surveys are just plain old statistical nonsense?

Search Marketing statistics

A BBC2 Makeover

I’ve posted about BBC ident revamps before and now (a little belatedly) I’ll mention the BBC2 revamp.

Another £700,000 of licence payers money has paid for 14 new idents, all featuring the number 2 in various settings. Filmed in locations like South Africa these latest idents (very short, channel related film clips between programmes) supposedly convey that the channel has become a window on the world. There’s a new logo too, in deep aqua and a more comtemporary font. I like this cappucciono image pictured here.

Read what the BBC press office has to say on the matter.

I thought the idents used in the 1990’s were quite good.

Television BBC 2

Google Will Be Highest UK Advertising Earner

The Telegraph reported this week that Google is on track to overtake ITV as the UKs highest advertising earner in about 2 years time. I’d posted back in November that Google was expected to surpass channel 4 - it now has.

Googles filed accounts show it generated £10.6bn in total ad revenues last year with 60% of that generated from US sources. The UK was the second-biggest individual source of ad spending. While reports suggest that the figures indicate a rapid shift away from traditional forms of advertising to the internet it should not be forgotten that google is widely reported to be turning its attention to radio ads and newspaper ads too. I can only assume that if google provide the same quality of ad performance data for more traditional ad media, that too will be a raging success.

Google Advertising

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