The Critical Path - Words, Thoughts and Musings of Nii A. Ahene winning the search rankings for the term ‘Nii’. It’s vain I know and I have a lot of competition from organizations like National Institute of Immunology in India, but I think I can get onto the first SERP (Currently on the the 5th) it by this time next year.
We shall see.
-Nii
I really don’t want subjugate you to this kind of neglect but I’ve been really busy lately. Between work, consulting, and fleshing out new ideas, I haven’t had much time to write good, quality entries.
I’ll try to update once a week, with if nothing else some links to news stories or articles that I’ve found interesting.
-Nii
I’m going to save my saliva on this one. If you haven’t heard YOU are Time’s person of the year because UGC has done so much to change the world this year (Iraq? Lebanon? Palestine? China? India? Definitely nothing going on there). Dominic Knight of the Radar sums it up best:
This strikes me as another one of those lamo attempts by an old-media publication to show that it’s oh-so hip to the Digital Revolution. Mmm, yeah, YouTube and MySpace. Incredible. Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, Friendster, Second Life, blogging, yada yada yada. There hasn’t been this much hype around the internet since the bubble burst five years ago. And most of that hype isn’t user-generated. It’s magazines like TIME flailing to pretend that they’re staying abreast of changes that their own hype says will threaten their very existence.
I would link you to the full TIME article, but I don’t think they deserve my Page Rank vote, let alone my massive traffic. Google Person of the Year and if a Time Warner link pops up under paid search ads, make sure you click those instead of the natural search listings for good measure. Good attempt at link bait though, I hope the entire blogosphere NOFOLLOW’s your incoming links for the next decade.
That would be pretty funny.
I’m a casual writer, frequent reader of the heel press, here are my thoughts on the changes:
While the old writing base may be alienated by the changes to the format, the fact remains that the old format was not stickiest… The new model lowers barriers to entry. Not everyone can be a writer, but almost anyone can take a camera, point and shoot. Heel 2.0 is a shift to a multi-format content base opens the door to all sorts of a content submissions. What’s more, writing attracts a certain type of user… you’re likely to cast a wider net by appealing to a larger cacophony of senses. Additionally the multi-format nature of the heel 2.0 opens the door to ultimately providing support for both music and video submissions.
At the end of the day I see heel 2.0 as a clearinghouse for the college creativa, a place where artists of different disciplines can share their work with one another across the nation. In order to succeed in this regard the heel needs to take an active roll marketing and attracting the attention of creative college aged individuals by leveraging their existing audience as a selling point as why they should publish their work on the heel.
Nii Ahene (2:28:41 PM): well they were founded during the first .com boom
Nii Ahene (2:28:49 PM): so i see how they were able to pull that off
Rick (2:28:54 PM): yeah
Rick (2:29:02 PM): that helped them to blow up
Nii Ahene (2:29:05 PM): though things are feeling boomish again now
Rick (2:29:13 PM): a little bit
Rick (2:29:19 PM): except this time
Rick (2:29:22 PM): with actual value
Rick (2:29:28 PM): not perceived value
Nii Ahene (2:30:02 PM): =) that’s what we all keep telling ourselves
From the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business On-line Application essay prompt.
“As reported by the New York Times in the June 11, 2006 article, For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Resume, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook.com, where college students often post risqué photographs and provocative comments in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy. Should employers not access this information using their personal alumni accounts?
Or, should students not post photographs or text that may be inappropriate to show to their potential employers? What ethical, privacy, and/or technological issues should be considered and why? What solution do you propose?”
Ridiculously long tailed, Bruinpied seeded New York Times article rears its head again. So apparently Haas is using an issue I brought to the forefront of public consciousness (Yes, the article’s Tien Nguyen IS BRUINPI) to weed out business school candidates this year after rejecting from that very school 2 years ago.
Just too bad Alan Finder’s editor stripped out the link to bruinpied.com. This article has turned up not only at my university but my high school… one could imagine the traffic this seemingly ever green article would have sent to BP.com =/.
Maybe I should offer consulting advice to prospective Haas candidates. Lets throw up some facebook ads and see what sticks.
Oct 26th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Not surprisingly, America is the world’s biggest music market, with retail sales of $4.9 billion in the first half of the year. However, Britain, Japan and Norway, which is only the 19th-biggest market, buy more music per person. Rich does not necessarily mean big: Brazil, with sales of $163m, Mexico, with $162m, and South Africa, with $98m, all make the top 20 by absolute size.
Just wanted to share this, but I don’t feel too compelled to write out and publish my thoughts concisely.
Apparently no one could comment on my entries because of security errors. They’ve been fixed, meaning that you can shower me with adulation now. =).
I wrote the following as a response to a question posed to me on facebook. I’ve decided to make my response public because it reads more like a blog entry than anything else:
I’m predicting a fumble largely because I don’t think Google and Youtube can co-exist together in happy matrimony. Sort of like the couple that you never thought could ever date getting hitched after a matter of months, from my vantage there seems to be too many issues that will prevent a synergistic relationship from emerging smoothly from the acquisition.
At it’s core Google is a company run by engineers and highly technical people. Youtube is run by business people (Paypal/eBay Refugees)… the corporate DNA of the two companies is different, just look at the way the two business developed and established themselves in their respective niches. Google owns search (and the monies derived from its monetization) because of its brutally exacting ever evolving algorithm while Youtube owns video due to excellent timing (right place at the right time never hurt anyone) and understanding of who their core customer is. These two philosophies ultimately led to success for each of the firms individually, but I don’t see the business side of the equation fitting neatly under the fold of the engineering hierarchy without some sort of attrition amongst the individuals who lead the charge in hoisting Youtube to the top of the online video market.
On the Google side, think back. Google Video was started nearly a half a year before Youtube. The engineers, developers, and project managers involved with the product now have to come to terms with clear message that management sent through their acquisition, “Your product sucked, and we bringing people in who can do the the job correctly.” From what I’ve heard from colleagues at Google projects really die and resource aren’t really reallocated after the company deprioritized them. So this entire team that put together google’s video product is now going to have to deal with the fact that they’re playing second fiddle to people they once looked at as the enemy.
As evidenced by Time Warner/AOL, HP/Compaq, and to lesser extent eBay/Paypal tech companies seem to have a hard time with blockbuster mergers. If you take a look back at Google acquisitions over the last 9 years, you’ll notice that google has never spent over 100 million let alone 1 billion dollars on any one purchase. Google has already said that Youtube will be run as its own division separate from the rest of the company which suggests that management has acknowledged it’d be suicidal to rip and rebrand youtube has Google Video v. 2.0…
I’m just extending that concern by suggesting the true cost of the Youtube acquisition has the potential of costing significantly more than the 1.65 billion dollars of stock warrants they traded for control of company…
Oh, and I also agree with the bulk of the ‘Youtube as litigious DCRM honey pot’ issues Mark Cuban has raised on his blog, check him out he’s more obsessed than I am: blogmaverick.com
Well that didn’t take long did it. According to the Wall Street Journal:
“Over the weekend, News Corp. executives expressed their displeasure with the deal to Google and threatened to remove any links to YouTube videos placed by users on their MySpace blog pages, according to a person close to the situation.
Google’s Mr. Schmidt and Advertising Sales Vice President Tim Armstrong are scheduled to meet this week in Los Angeles with News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, President Peter Chernin and Ross Levinsohn, head of its Fox Interactive Media online unit, to discuss the matter.”
I’d like to link to the full article but you need a subscription to read it all. Does this really come as a surprize to anyone. It shouldn’t and that’s not just because I alluded to it in my last post. Myspace has tried to block Youtube twice in the past (only to revert the decision due to user outrage), Google purchasing Youtube just gives myspace all that much reason to shut off the spigot for good. In fact if I can borrow the words of News Corp COO, “If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket…almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace, there’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business.””
The 900 million reasons Google gave to News Corp to be friends August no longer appear to be enough. The world has changed, this should be good.
*Grabs lawnchair*
Please write all about you here ;)