Confronting insurmountable opportunities

Yahoo Mindset

The race to deliver relevancy in Search has been on for some time. Obviously this was what the big was about w/ Page Rank. However, this time, the Search co's are understanding that, no matter how good your algorithm is, you won't be able to deliver very good results if you don't understand the question. Thus:

Become.com (SEW, SiliconBeat)
Yahoo Mindset (announcement)
Google Personalized Search

Is any of this stuff any good? Will users really want it? Greg Linden at Findory has a good take:

More knobs, more buttons, more complexity. With less than 1% of users even bothering with the existing advanced search options on search engines, are more controls really what people need? Most searchers just want the right thing to happen. They want it to just work.

I agree with Greg that the the experience isn't there yet. In fact, I'll go a bit further to say that I don't think Search is the be-all, end-all for finding. I think we'll eventually gravitate towards different interfaces for different types of queries. Search is going to be good at some things, and not so good at others. Will this "intent driven searching" get better? Absolutely. Will it the be "silver bullet" for the problem of unstructure queries. No way.

Knight Ridder stops charging for classifieds

How big is this move? Not clear. According to the AP story:

Online classifieds in most other categories, including real estate, automotive and help wanted, will continue to cost money to display. As part of the pricing shift, Knight Ridder will start charging for classified ads featuring pets - a category that had been free under a test program introduced in November.

My take is that this is just the beginning. Merchandise classifieds are a lost category. Between eBay and CraigsList, who would pay to list in the paper any more? It's later to market and costs more.

The point, according to Rafat over at PaidContent.org, is to:

[put] Knight Ridder on a more equal footing with Craigslist and other free-ad sites, especially in larger markets, and [allow] the papers to develop new audiences

Given that Tribune's already been experimenting here, and that neither Tribune nor Knight Ridder have really figured out how to use their strength in multiple media to radically alter the value proposition for classifies, it's likely this move won't do much to help KR.

Great post by Chris Anderson

Really fantastic - not sure if other's feel that there's anything new in Chris' post, but new or not, I feel that he's posited the ideas in a great way.

Yes, the far end of the tail is an emerging area of grassroots production and liberated archives that will someday be a marketplace of millions. But in the near term, the greatest potential is in the middle, which is full of existing commercial goods that simply haven't found ways to tap all the latent demand that's out there.

Interesting to see this articulated the way Chris writes it. Very good depiction, I think. Also interesting to see his description of the type of "content creators" out there:

At the head, they've given up their day job. In the middle they're looking for a better day job or building the one they've got. And the bottom it's not work at all (at least not yet).

So what does hat mean - do we need start looking at platforms in two parts?

Those that help:
- People at the tail determine whether or not they should invest to move to the middle
versus
- People in the middle to find distribution and move to the head

Interesting...can Google be all things to all people?

Wanna see where video is heading (part I)

Check out podcasting and documentary films:

These posts by Seth Godin explain some of the issues facing podcasting, but also some of the ramifications of podcasting. Here's an exerpt from his second post (the first one I linked):

"What would have happened to radio if a. it was really cheap to start a station and b. the dial could hold a million stations, not forty? We certainly wouldn't see the huge profits and high production values of radio today, would we? If there were thousands and thousands of stations to compete with, it would be an amateur medium, with nobody making enough to invest.

Podcasting feels a little like that. There will be millions of listeners... and there might be millions of podcasts."

And this article - at least the beginning - talks about the effect of digital technology on film-making

Digital technology has made filmmaking so cheap and easy that now almost anyone can point a camera at a difficult father or a wicked stepmother and call it a movie. And more of them are making it into theaters. Nielsen EDI, which tracks box-office data, found that 50 documentaries were released in 2002 and 53 in 2003 - a number that jumped to 80 last year (a rapidly growing chunk of the 500 or so films typically released each year).

So, what are relevant strategies in this environment? One thing that might be interesting is to be a clearing-house for this type of stuff, to be a tastemaker / to shape tastes and help determine A-lists. That's the strategy, at some level, that Google and Yahoo have embarked upon, though they would claim for the moment that they're merely providing objective search.

NYT on TV Video moving to the web

Interesting article As TV Moves to the Web, Marketers Follow . This falls directly in line w/ the mantra of "original programming" / hard to find video and advertiser demand that's been in the air. Whether viewers will follow is unclear. As you'll note, no viewer numbers are given at all - for any of the video programming. However, potential audience sizes are given (broadband homes) as well as some statistics about engagement...