A Fuller View

Well, its another week or so since my last post and April was pretty low month for both the number of posts and the quality from A Fuller View. Lets see if the Arpil drought can bring some May sprouts…

Scanning around the blog-o-sphere here are some posts that I think are worth a read:

• On Screenwrek - Spot Runner just raised more money and this round included money from UK based Dail Mai Group (which is intersting).
• Buzz Machine - his Guardian column from last week. All about an interesting wine guy’s brand and what this means in the world of social media: “Your personal brand is now completely exposed to the world, 24/7. Everyone is media now.”
• AdViking - our sister site posts about the $300M deal for Adify. Wow that’s a lot offly paper.
• On Razorshine some intersting thoughts on Firefox 3 and much needed delicious plugin.
• RWW alot of traffic on myspace US. I wonder how much of that is search driven?

What else is on my mind? Well I need to finally blog about Venice - I have some notes stuck on my mobile Windows device that I can’t seem to easily get off (I am not a fan on Windows Mobile and my Palm Treo at the moment). I am aslo thinkming about the transient nature of instant messenger platform use and churn and what this might mean for socail media. But mainly, I am thinking about how nice it is that summer has arrived in London - at least for the moment.

I will be heading to the Venice Media Festival (which kicks off this Sunday night) and will be reporting back here and on AdViking next week with views, analysis and insight from what looks to be a very exciting industry conference.

Lost of good stuff to read over on AdViking:

• Note to Google: You Can’t Please Everyone!
• Microhoo or is it YahAOL?
• OpenX is Moving to Hollywood

The OpenX move is a surprse but probably makes them a more serious play now. The Yahoo deal is like a great Espionage thriller – I can’t wait to read the final chapter.

Couple of decent posts worth checking out over on sister blog AdViking:

• Post-Mobile World Congress Wrap Up - from Barcelona
• ISP Advertising Moves, Google Video Ad Push

Also, hoping that Simon expands on insight from this week’s Fast Forward search conference in Florida. I am guessing he’s got his silver card on BA by now with all this travel.

Well, that’s wrap for this working week. And here’s funnny one strip from xkcd - enjoy!

February is a short month - even in a leap year. So, I am going to use this as part of my excuse (ie, its a short month) as to why I am short of posts and generally doing shorter “meta posts” this month. I am also very busy with a new full-time work gig (more on that another time or better yet, if you’re interested lets do some real social networking at the pub and I can tell you all about it). Bring on spring!

Checkout this new blog - AdViking - that is an outlet for thoughts/comments etc as outlined below:

 … [we are] spending a lot of my day thinking about online advertising, including PPC, paid search, search marketing, display advertising, local search, etc, etc. and so this blog is to be an outlet for my thoughts as most people I meet don’t understand a word I’m talking about.

btw - I am one of the contributors, but this really brain wave of Simon Baptist. 

Well, its only the middle of the work week and there has been a lot of interesting stories and posts already. More stuff than I can keep up with. Here are some of the tidbits I think are interesting…

No, Google Won’t Buy the NYT. But Google.Org Could - I like this mini-post form John Battle’s search blog. I completely agree, lets put and keep the best news organizations in a trust. Living in the UK you sort of take it for granted, but I gotta say the BBC rocks and papers like The Irish Times and The Guardian also very cool and not run to make a profit for share holders.

Search Stocks & The Stock Crash: GOOG, YHOO & MSFT - this post is over on SEL. My opinion is all 3 of the majors are solid. I’ve got to think ad dollar$ continue to go into search during a down turn year, but that probably display gets hurt… This means Google could fair a bit better overall but they still have to finish the DoubleClick deal and they are still way over valued. I would sell GOOG short, hold YHOO or buy if it dips under $17 and buy MSFT all the way its cheap :-). Disclaimer: do NOT trust my stock tips. This is just fun.

The parent company of WordPress - Automattic - secures B round funding - this report from the NYT. Great news. I love WordPress! Related to this is a post by Greg Sterling - Harnessing Blogs for Local - this one has got me thinking about new micro-publishing mash-up business ideas… More on that after a few more beers.

Enteprise search provider Endeca closed funding from SAP and Intel - this over on TC. This interesting in light of the MSFT FAST deal and the Sun MySQL deal. Doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but lets see what happens with Endeca. I keep wondering when will someone do a “redhat” version of open source Lucene?

Internet Trumps Print Directories in Britain - this post again fro Mr Sterling based on a neat report from UK based welovelocal. I Love it, lets recycle all those print directories! Save the trees.

Publishers’ vertical search can rival Google, says AOP forum - not sure I agree, but I have to say job well done to my buddy Simon Baptist who gave one of the presentations. My sources tell me he did a great job. Nice one!

Here is a good challenge from Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog - nice post, worth a read. I am going take this challenge as part of my personal blog development for 2008. This fits in with of my blog goals to:

Improve the quality of my content with probably less posts but more depth when time allows

I often use my blog as an easy way to track and tag things of interest but it looks like I need to get more sophisticated on this front start to use a link blog or RSS reader to keep track of stuff. I need to find a clever way to print out key blog and news posts for consumption on the train/tube - maybe DailyMe, any other tools out there? This is why paper never goes way - totally portable, no juice required and you can recycle it. Now I just need to start noodling away and come up with some worthwhile ideas.

Just shaving these links to the nominees and award winners over at SEJ:

• Best Overall SEM Blog
• Research Blog
• Best Local Search Blog

First, off - Happy New Year! Second, thanks to all my readers - I will see all three of you down at the pub later this week…

So, what have I learned so far about blogging? Well, now that I’ve been at it with some degree of effort for the past 3 months and managed to rack up just over 100 posts here are my observations:

1. Blogging is harder than it looks. Harder in terms of doing it well, doing it regularly and still making sense.
2. Blogging takes effort and commitment. You need to be dedicated or getting paid.
3. There are a lot of very good blogs out there and in my industry sector (= tech, search, advertising and web 2.0) these blogs offer the best source of information, trends, analysis and comment. Now I just need to figure out the best way to personally aggregate this into my own “web zine.” Note: there are also lots of good blogs covering other topics (see comment 5 on potential impact.)
4. Some blogs are weak and there is spam. Plenty of dross out there, but its easy to spot the wheat from the chaff.
5. Blogging or more generically the ability for anyone to publisher globally in a fast, cheap, easy and with pretty good quality (in term of how it looks) is in the process of changing the media landscape forever! This is huge and monumental shift. The impact on “traditional” media organizations (newspapers, magazines, TV etc) is probably only half way through the shift. This topic alone is worthy of coverage for the next few years…
6. I’ve learned a little bit about how to drive and generate traffic. I am sure any good blog tip site or SEO would already know many of these things, but its interesting and fun to see it 1st hand. Being early on a “big” story, track backs, the detail of content, freshness and uniqueness all drive traffic. With out trying I have had some interesting spikes (from daily avg page impressions of 10-15 to above 100 for example).
7. Fun and addictive. Yes, blogging is fun and can be addictive.

I will continue to blog for the foreseeable future. My goals on this front for 2008 are:

• Improve the quality of my content with probably less posts but more depth when time allows
• Develop some better defined core areas to cover - but am still debating which ones
• Learn some proper journalism skills
• Figure out better ways to tag and aggregate other blog content
• Develop a monthly or bi-monthly summary piece

btw - being offline over most of the holiday was a good break. Now its time to catch up and put together some predictions for 2008…