Well, it looks like Ask.com is going to mothball Teoma and start using Google as their search engine.  I'm thinking that Search Engine Strategies, later this month in New York City, is going to be more interesting this year due to all the changes going on in the Search Industry - there will be a lot to talk about.

TechCrunch reported Ask.com May Dump Teoma For Google, Layoff 100 People and I created a post about what that means (to me) - Ask.com getting rid of Teoma and moving to Google?

Here's the problem - if everyone except Google and Yahoo give up on Search we'll end up with Google being even more of what it already is -  a monopoly.

History has shown us Monopoly is not conducive to growth - we need competition in order to grow - but if everyone throws in the towel and lets Google run everything -it'll mirror very much what's happened in the world stage where United States was/is the only remaining Superpower.  

And you know how that worked out so far.  That's why Ask.com should not get rid of Teoma and be moving to Google and why it'll be interesting to see who ends up owning Yahoo, Microsoft or someone else. 

You know, I used to go into this Starbucks all the time, it's right near my old office at IBM.com.

But it's title, The Starbucks Conspiracy, doesn't sound quite right - it's more like the Conspiracy at Starbucks.   

Well, at least this video is more entertaining than the one I wrote about yesterday in Social Riots titled SQUEEGEES - a real Social Riot

Found an interesting article in the New York Times titled - Facing Default, Some Walk Out on New Homes - about the rise of home mortgage forclosures that is being made easier by a new company called You Walk Away.

"..In a declining housing market, he owed more than the house was worth, and his mortgage payments, even on an interest-only loan, had shot up to $2,600, more than he could afford. “I was terrified,” said Mr. Zulueta, who services automated teller machines for an armored car company in the San Francisco area.

Then in January he learned about a new company in San Diego called You Walk Away that does just what its name says. For $995, it helps people walk away from their homes, ceding them to the banks in foreclosure.

Last week he moved into a three-bedroom rental home for $1,200 a month, less than half the cost of his mortgage. The old house is now the lender’s problem. “They took the negativity out of my life,” Mr. Zulueta said of You Walk Away. “I was stressing over nothing.”

 

 I tried doing a Compete.com search on You Walk Away but didn't find much - must have just launched in the last few months:

And here's the keywords driving traffic to You Walk Away, according to Compete.com

By the way,  i met with Jay Meattle of Compete.com yesterday for lunch - and there's some pretty interesting stuff coming up from Compete.com, but I can't talk about it yet.

Interesting - Wikia Open Sources Social Networking - Focused Networking Now Open to All - as written up in Read/WriteWeb

"…More generally, though, it could impact the social news and networking economy overall. We wrote earlier this week that the big social news aggregator model (Digg, Yahoo! Buzz) is vulnerable to market share erosion at the hands of niche social news sites. The same can be said for the big, general interest social networking sites. While most users will probably always want some presence on big sites, the potential is there to have the majority of communication online occur in a targeted niche community of people interested in and informed about the specific topics that an individual is interested in."

I would not shed a tear if Digg were negatively impacted by Wikia though I doubt that'll happen. In fact, just because you have Social Networking tools doesn't mean visitors will use them - posted about it in MediaWiki’s Social Profile extends White Label Social Networking.

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Last year when I was elected to the Board of Directors of the Web Analytics Association (Social Media Committee Director) my newly formed committee started with a few missions, one to draft Social Media Standards (right now Social Media and Standards Committee are working on this jointly).

Met with Gary Angel soon after, and in New York City (where I live) I made this movie which records one of the moments we spoke about drafting standards (but how - with what?)

Even as the Social  Media Committee at the Web Analytics Association is building a Social Network called WAASOCIAL, I'm aware that by promising too much, we could lose more than we gain because Social Networks haven't matured yet - and expectations often exceed what it's capable of (yet).

For example, I'd like to see the Kickapps platform have a recommendations engine to match up members of WAASOCIAL by skills, but it doesn't have that capability.

Social Networks are a good way to create and seed user generated content - the messaging is superior because you can keep in touch with you friends effortlessly, create personalized news feeds, and end up at events that you'd never know about without the medium of a Social Network.

On the other hand, Social Networks that promise more than they deliver are going to end up losing more than they gain - and I wrote about Going.com's issues in detail over at The Analytics Guru.

I  think the better strategy is to promise less from Social Networks but over deliver.  How Going.com would do it - create filters so I don't have to see the events I'm complaining about in my post on Social Networks that promise more than they deliver.

When a friend drew my attention to this email whose image I show you below (you probably got a copy too) I had to laugh about antics that I've more or less ignored. 

See anything disturbing here?  Why?

I have my own feelings about it.

Maybe the community ought to weigh in on this.   What do you think? 

It's kinda fun thinking about Widgets the way we think about things what we grab and you can Grab Widgets (and measure them too) according to WidgetGirl who authors Widget Analytics in the Wild blog.

 “…People love these phrases - “grab my widget”, “he grabbed my widget”, “they grabbed the widget”….or any derivation thereof. This is why I am thinking we need to just take the term “placements” (which will still have it’s place in the Clearspring lexicon) and call them “Grabs” when it denotes a visitor performing an action to create a new placement of a widget. It is a verb, right? Once those placements (or Grabs) are being actively viewed by visitors, we can then defer back to just calling them “placements.”

Now, all we need is for someone to create a business card with a link to a customized Widget for that person and a byline "Please grab my Widget".  Or, what you do with my widget once you grab it is you own business.

It seems to me every time I grab the code to embed a widget it's measured and it's probably the single most important engagement metric for widgets - because that says someone is committed enough to copy the code and hopefully place it somewhere.  

I was at the FLASHMashMeet last Saturday and had photo of me splashed all over Mashable.  Can't say I'm wild about the photo but the gathering was fun and it's nice to be where it's "happening".

See Caught in the act -by Mashable! at FLASHMashMeet at ArtNewYorkCity.com for more details of the FLSHMashMeet event on Saturday night. 

Pete Cashmore (right) and Marshall Sponder from The Analytics Guru, who is also a very talented painter.

Eric Peterson and Michael Berger wrote a new white paper on measuring online video - you can get details about the paper in Measuring Multimedia White Paper by Eric Peterson & Michael Berger over at The Analytics Guru.

Now, I picked out some good stuff (it's all good stuff in the paper) from the paper that I keyed in on such as the definitions of Online Video mentioned in the paper:

 

Playlist
A selection of files (called clips) that contain audio or video content and can be played in a web-based media player.

Program
One or more “branded” audio or video streams that may contain series of episodes.
Episode
Additional information about the programme, such as the name, number, and date, consisting of one or more clips in a playlist.

Clip
The portion of the audio and video file streaming in a media player. One or more clips create an episode.

Unique Multimedia Event
A specific, measurable event associated with a distinct playlist counted a single time based on interaction with the playlist.

Views and Viewers
While “views” and “viewers” sound very much like page views and visitors, in the context of online video there is an important distinction given that video is often designed to be viewed outside of the creator’s web site. Given this, site operators cannot necessarily rely on traditional measures of page view and visitors (although when the views happen on the web site, viewers and visitors are directly analogous.)

It also reminds me a lot of the discussion I had with Gary Angel last summer that started me on the path to Engagement Metrics and Online Video Metrics: