Friday, April 02, 2004

Next big step in contextual advertising: ad-based decision support. Google-mail may be innovative if: it looks like Zoe. It may have a great business model if: the contextual advertising is smart too. Smart? Yes. I think the next big innovation in contextual advertising, now that we have this level of volume, is: Ad-based decision support tools. Simple, clear, branded, and well researched tools to help people to decide which product to buy. I led a team that built up a business to do this at Gomez (in 1998) and it grew from $0 to $1.8 m a quarter (in revenue), in less than 2 years. Of course, at this volume, it could generate several orders of magnitude more. I have to give Google credit with Froogle. It is a step along this road. Consumer reviews will probably be the next step. However, price comparison and consumer reviews are only two aspects of product evaluation. A suite of smart comparison tools will need to include these aspects and more (there is also some counter-intuitive ways to make money from this type of system that protects objectivity). If I was going to build a new business online today (a real company and not a publishing venture), I would build one that builds contextual advertising decision support tools. [John Robb's Weblog]

More RSS job listings. Responding to this earlier post about job listings by RSS feed, BoingBoing reader Javid says, "FlipDog (which is now part of Monster) has RSS job listings for each state now too." Still no word on whether or not my former paramour Jim Anchower used XML-syndicated help wanted ads to obtain his most recent gig at the Quad County Dragaway "takin' tickets and sweepin' up." Link to Flipdog [Boing Boing]

How to change your body's timezone. Great Seattle Times article on some peoples' natural propensity to be early risers and others' to be night owls, and hwo to change from a night-person to a day-person. Good, popularist brain-hacking for the Eastern Standard Tribe. In college, many people find their optimal rhythm and harness it. Larks join the crew team; owls discover they study best over the midnight oil. These morning folks may be asleep by the time the kegger is raring, but they will be vindicated when it's time to enter the real world. They show up before the boss and look like go-getters. Owls can either find a night-shift job, one with a flexible schedule or reset their body clock to join the 9-to-5-ers. A body-clock mismatch also can be hard on lovebirds. If she wakes up on New York time but his clock is set on Pacific, she'll view him as lazy, and he'll grow bored spending evenings alone. Link [Boing Boing]

If Quake were Zork. IF Quake is an adaptation of Quake for a Zork-like interactive-fiction engine. It's a really cool and perverse idea. Link (via /.) [Boing Boing]

Thoraxic cavity made of cake. This Hallowe'en cake is a replica of a Gray's Anatomy illustration of a complete thoraxic cavity. Swoon. The plan was for each organ to be made out of a different kind of cake and to secrete a different color of fluid when it was cut into. Previous heart cakes have bled fresh, homemade raspberry sauce. This year I made raspberry, strawberry, kiwi, mango, and blueberry sauces. Sadly, the organs didn't bleed as well as I had hoped when I cut the cake, as each organ was relatively small and couldn't hold much sauce. Also all the moving around after filling the organs made it hard to keep the sauce contained in the little cavities I hollowed out. The heart bled pretty well, but the other organ fluids weren't very dramatic. Link (Thanks, Michael!) [Boing Boing]

Spidering Word files for embarrassing metadata. A hacker spidered every English microsoft.com site and sucked down all the Word documents, then used a script to identify interesting erasures left behind by the revision-tracking feature. Some interesting stuff fell out of his investigation. A pointless idea came to my mind that instant: why not run a gentle web spider against all Microsoft sites in English, specifically looking for other instances of tracking data not removed from documents? I coded a bunch of scripts and let them run through the night, fetching approximately 10,000 unique documents; over 10% was identified as containing change tracking records. I decided to collect only those with deleted text still present, yielding a crop of over 5% of all documents. Quite impressive. Below, you will find a brief (and rest assured, incomplete) list of the most entertaining samples I've run into, along with some speculation (and only speculation) as to the reasons we see them. Link (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!) [Boing Boing]

Battelle on Google's S1 filing. John Battelle breask the news on Google's S1 filing, and digs up some interesting details. The employee stock option plan, long believed to be the impetus to a public filing, has been dumped in favor of a private shadow equity plan modeled after the Economist magazine. "It's the only magazine we read that hasn't put us on the cover," Page explained. "We kind of hoped this hat tip might change that." Link [Boing Boing]