All Things

Thanks to reading blogs such as Dave Winer’s old Scripting News, I learned pretty early on about Google, and was taken by the simplicity of their search page, which loaded fast. This was quite unlike most sites of the time (around 2000, I believe), which were smitten with portal mania, trying to serve up everything on their home page.

Google is still a mainstay for me, though it’s beginning to show its age, such as in the area of blog search. Another site that’s become a constant resource of late is Wikipedia which, despite its imperfections/potential inaccuracies, is often an even better place to start a search than Google. Unfortunately, sometimes their main page doesn’t load as quickly as I’d like, even at broadband speeds, so I began wondering if they, too, had a simple search page that could be bookmarked in place of the main page.

I didn’t see any obvious link to such a page on their main pages, but after experimenting a little came up with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=&fulltext=Search

This just gives you a simple page with an empty search box. Of course, I guess you could change the “en”at the beginning of the url to your language of choice, and see if that works, too.

Now my WP button on my Safari bookmark bar is set to this, so whenever I need to search Wikipedia, it’s right there.

I haven’t been blogging much this summer, been very busy with other stuff. What time I have had has been going mostly to AeroGo, which is slowly but steadily growing in traffic. In particular it’s been getting a lot of high-quality international traffic, so I’m hoping I’m on the right track with that. I’ve got a lot of ideas for AeroGo as well as many other things I want to do on the internet.

One of the things I’ve noticed about my blogs (four in total, so far) is that even though traffic is still modest, since early on they’ve gotten fairly good Google rankings. This makes me hopeful that I may in fact have a good sense for how to use the net to advantage, though it really took me several years to settle on a blogging approach. At first, when setting up and running a blog was more difficult, I figured I’d have to put everything into one blog, but I just never could see how that would work.

Though I don’t generally write about what I ate for breakfast, even in my personal blog Light Side, I thought it would be awfully presumptious to think folks would wade through personal stuff in order to find something they were interested in. The #1 issue in writing is to write to your audience, and with one blog it seemed impossible to define a target audience, at least for me. It wasn’t until last year that I resolved this dilemma of the one and the many, by deciding the solution was several, or possibly many, blogs, aimed at particular topics, with this blog All Things covering everything else.

I knew I was on the right track upon realizing that tightly-targeted blogs would get much better treatment by search engines. Moreover, several blogs linking to each other would raise the rankings of each, whereas one blog with many topics might actually hurt rankings

Right now this is how my blogs are targeted (maybe this will be helpful as an example):

• Light Side: Personal & Education
• AeroGo: Aerospace & Practical Engineering Management/Career Advice (targeted primarily at high school & college students)
• RealCurrents: Current Events/Issues/Politics
• All Things: My various other interests, especially Technology & Business, but also others that don’t fit elsewhere

Originally, I expected considerably more variation in the topics in All Things, but as it’s worked out, most posts are about technology and/or business. Perhaps this means there should be a separate blog for these topics, but I don’t have anything in mind for this yet.

Another thing I’ve noticed this summer, with my limited posting, has been that even when I wasn’t writing, traffic seemed to be slowly rising, except on my personal blog. While I actually cover quite a bit of stuff on Light Side, I haven’t really tried to drive traffic to it, at least yet (I still have some trepidations about that). Nevertheless, I’m contemplating starting a separate site to handle the type of personal/educational advice I occasionally write about there, which has garnered some interest but could be better organized on a separate site.

On the other sites, however, I wonder if I was starting to see a sort of slow-motion snowballing effect as traffic gradually grew even when not writing. The jury’s still out on this, since I was getting an increasing amount of comment spam until I made some changes, and so wonder if a lot of these hits are just spammers (though the large number of hits to my post about GM’s OnStar system - a prime spammer target - really declined after that).

I doubt much traffic growth would occur on its own for blogs filled with short entries, but when you write posts with a fair amount of depth (and several times as many resulting search words), it seems possible that a point of critical mass might be reached where links from other sites, search engine effects, etc., could combine to make traffic grow. It’s my hunch that’s the case for a well-targeted site, but even so it remains unclear whether the effect could be enough to be significant.

In my view the internet, at some level, is one big, giant, experiment. Actually it’s several: technical, business, and social experiments at least. As such, I’m trying to observe its behavior and learn how it works, insight that I’m sure will prove profitable in many ways. Of course, the internet is also a huge political experiment, as I expect we’ll discover, maybe not this time, but perhaps in two more years.

Google has been catching some criticism for its deal to pay $1 billion for a 5% stake in AOL, but I can see several reasons why it may make sense, at least for them.

First of all, the deal is a defensive move, in multiple ways. Google can afford the billion but doesn’t want to lose a substantial portion of its revenues and cash flow. As any experienced entrepreneur knows, managing cash is Job 1. Maybe Google is so big it could afford to be a bit sloppy in this area, but it’s good they are being disciplined about this and defending their revenue and cash flow first before worrying about maximizing return on investment.

Of course, it’s also defensive in that it locks Microsoft out, thereby sustaining Google’s online ad momentum while restraining Microsoft’s. Though some seem to view things differently, I think Google’s brand, on the net, is still way more valuable than Microsoft’s, and the brand must be defended.

Second, AOL’s valuation seems to be nearly completely a function of the perspective from which it is viewed. At the time of the merger (with Time-Warner), it was viewed as a top internet property/portal/brand that was key to driving traffic, and was given a sky-high valuation. Today it is viewed as just a dial-up ISP going the way of the dinosaurs.

A couple of weeks ago, I got another AOL disk in the mail (what does that make - about one a month for a decade?). This one, however, was different, and got me thinking. Instead of just trying to sign me up for AOL, the cover says, “Get Your Business Online”. This was such an obvious growth direction for AOL that I’m surprised I hadn’t thought of it before.

It seems to me that AOL’s members align pretty well with Sams Club shoppers, i.e. upper middle-class folks who often own their own businesses. Of course, these are all switching to broadband and AOL is no longer viewed as the premium ISP. As someone noted the other day, however, AOL’s core competency may really lie in getting newbies (or now their businesses) on the web.

Of course, AOL has a lot of work to do if it wants to make this really profitable, but considering that the local web is something that really hasn’t happened yet, at least most places, there’s still a lot of growth potential there for helping small business owners. Those who have been AOL customers and used to the web are likely smart enough to know there’s more their business could do online, if it was simple enough to implement.

Consequently, a third reason Google’s deal may make sense is that it solidifies its relationship with AOL, which has already proved to be a strong partner in generating ad revenue. Google hasn’t really tried to be a portal like Yahoo, Excite, or the others, but AOL could provide that part while Google drives development of new online services.

One opportunity I keep waiting for Google to tackle is local classifieds, which would capitalize on their compelling brand and near 100% user base. A single, strong brand for local classifieds seems so obvious (and needed), I don’t know why they haven’t been more aggressive about it. Maybe they’re just trying to be merciful to the print newspapers.

I enjoy reading about how Google is turning the business/venture capital world on its head. I use Google every day, and haven’t paid them a dime, yet they’re making billions. It’s interesting … fascinating!