HitWise took a stab at the Google - YouTube merger rumors.  I think everyone is wondering if this is actually a real deal or just a unsubstantiated rumor. 

Perhaps Google is buying YouTube to kill it - because they could build the same features into Google Video.  It would not be the first time companies are bought more for their strategic value than their financial worth.

Pew put out a new study on Riding the Waves of "Web 2.0"  which I found out about from Micro Persuasion.  Took a look at the study and found it refreshing.

For one thing, there’s no line that separates a Web 1.0 application from a Web 2.0 application and the destinctions that exist depend more in our defination than any specific change in internet technologies.

I don’t recall seeing HitWise charts in other PEW studies that I’ve viewed recently but Riding the Waves of "Web 2.0"  does have a couple of charts from HitWise that show success of sites based on Web 2.0 concepts vs. those based on Web 1.0 concepts.

The Riding the Waves of "Web 2.0"  is only a couple of pages and an easy read, much different than some of the other PEW studies I have read.

Two more things - to tie up tonight’s loose ends - my Interview with Fred Stonehouse just was posted tonight on  www.artNewYorkCity.com is getting linked to a lot and some more news on Google Radio Advertising, which I wrote about this summer.

About Google Radio: Google CEO Eric Schmidt encapsulated the company’s multi-billion dollar non-search advertising diversification strategy in a few broad statements. Below are Schimdt’s remarks to the press, as reported by Forbes.com:

Schmidt said that more than 1,000 people will ultimately work on Google’s efforts in radio advertising, which will someday sell radio ads over a modified version of its current AdWords placement service.

‘We’re trying to get a simplified AdWords interface where the advertiser gets multiple channels,’ Schmidt said. The idea: Let a marketer allocate an ad budget across multiple platforms, either in an automated manner or by targeting times and regions.

The initiative to put ads in newspapers, ongoing since January, now has almost 100 newspapers, Schmidt said.

Google is also quoted as saying it will have an “easy to use tool for advertisers to easily place ads on radio, newspapers, magazines, online video and Web pages.”

There’s actually a lot to Google Radio Advertising - I think it will change Radio Advertising once it comes online - in 5 years the landscape for advertising on the radio will be entirely different than it is today.

Fun!  MyYahoo! wants everyone to export OPML files and read them into MyYahoo! but they don’t want to have you do the reverse - read out MyYahoo! feeds and read them into Google Reader.  You’ll notice there are no instructions for that….

I tried a tip from Jeremy Zawodny’s blog - but it’s an old post and did not really work too well.  At least Jeremy Zawodny gets it….too bad Yahoo! doesn’t  "get it". 

It’s not about MyYahoo!  It’s about US - MyYahoo! gets demoted, in my opinion because it’s one way communication - Yahoo! wants your eyeballs - they don’t care one bit about the visitor.   Well, MyYahoo! just lost my vote.  You get my respect when I can both import feed to MyYahoo! and export them….allow me to decide where I’m going to read my data - don’t try to lock me into a bind - that’s why Yahoo! does not "get it".

Reminds me, while I’m on the subject.   Google’s management style has been criticized quite a bit for being too loose, too fly by the hip.  Yet, compared to Yahoo! and to other places I know of, there’s wisdom in being a little disorganized, if you want to call it that.

For example - so many companies spend time on "fall plans" and justifying every drop of money - fighting like a bunch of monkeys over scraps - and this happens every year - and meanwhile - while all this is going on - important work can’t be done as well because each part of a company is fighting for the scraps.   The companies fall behind to the competitors. 

Sure, I understand "green" money needs to find it’s way to the right projects - but in the process of haggling over every cent more is lost than gained.  I think Google has it right.  Rather than spending all their energy fighting over which project to fund - they make some basic decisions and let the rest just "happen".  But look at where Google is today…..if they spent all their energy fighting over every cent each department, group and project gets - they’d be much less left over to innovate - which is the engine of growth.

First carry away from this - Yahoo - make MyYahoo! feeds exportable - stop playing the game of luring people to use MyYahoo! then trapping them there - they should know better than this.

Second carry away - it’s better to be too loose in your management style than to be too tight - yearly budget haggling might actually cost more than it saves.  And I bet all of this haggling is to convince investors that company is healthy - the net outcome might be to make a company less healthy, less competitive.

Ok, I get it.  Be daring and innovative, and even though it’s risky, your actually 50 times less likely to be fired than if your just conventional and don’t make waves.  Did I get that right?  I think that’s what Seth Godin is saying in his latest post on the 50:1 rule.

"At least once a day, I get mail from people worrying that if they are too remarkable, too edgy, too willing to cause change and growth… they’re risking getting fired. I almost never get mail from people who figure that if they keep doing the same boring thing day in and day out at their fading company that they’re going to lose their jobs in a layoff."

"…..50 employees lose their jobs because the business just faded away for every one who is singled out and fired for violating a silly policy and taking care of a customer first."

What I get out of this - follow your dream - even if takes you to the unemployment line - because your actually less likely to end up there (and stay on that line) if you follow your dream than if you play it safe - 50 times less.

Just to keep readers of WebMetricsGuru.com up to date, I’m working on several high power interviews of well known individuals in Marketing including Drew Ianni,  the new ad:tech chair and host of ad:tech next week - in connection with coverage of Ad-Tech NY).  I know this is an interview Lee Odden wanted to do and I’ll try to live up to his standard of quality (Lee’s got one of the best blogs for internet marketing - i read it all the time).

I’m also working on an Interview of June Li who will be speaking at the EMetrics Summit in 10 days.  I should have both interviews posted here by midweek.

And while we’re at it, talking about interviews, I have done one hell of an Interview with Fred Stonehouse, over at www.ArtNewYorkCity.com; I’m told by friend, Amy Crehore, that this interview of Fred Stonehouse made Art History.  I hope so. 

One standard I have it to try to find out something about the person I’m interviewing that has not appeared anywhere else.  I did that with Joe Coleman’s interview in ArtNewYorkCity.com when I asked him what role the Internet played in Joe Coleman’s work - no one else ever asked him that. 

Keep an eye out for both interviews, Drew Ianni and June Li, next week - here at WebMetricsGuru.com

I would expect something like this from Google.  Looks like Google bought YouTube.  My fellow KMM author, Robyn Tippins is the source of this information.

"It’s being reported that YouTube is in talks with Google about a possible $1.6M purchase.  This was reported earlier by Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch as an unsubstantiated rumor.  However, it appears, according to the Wall St. Journal and BusinessWeek, that the talks are indeed ongoing (via ValleyWag).

If I recall correctly, last week the 1.6B number was being tossed around, perhaps even by Mark Cuban (but I’m not sure) - I know I did read that YouTube, if it were sold, would be worth about 1.6 Billion dollars.  Actually, that seems cheap and a low number - but when you consider the company was started less than two years ago - maybe that 1.6 Billion dollars goes into a couple of pockets.

A couple of things - 1) What happens to Google Video if Google now owns YouTube?  2)Is Google going to fight off all the copyright suits that appear to be in YouTube’s future?

One thing that makes a lot of sense - Google’s investment in high bandwidth Internet - it’s been rumored that Google is going to become a high speed Internet provider on top of everything else.  If you couple Google’s low overhead (because it would be the provider and therefore, delivery of high bandwidth video would be close to free) and extensive distribution network….that could make Google the entertainment company of the future along with the king of search.

Take that Yahoo! 

Google is staying ahead in search share because other search engines have not been able to create a product that’s better and different enough from than what Google supplies.  Many search engines may actually be better in some aspects, than Google, as a recent Businessweek article contents.

"Indeed, neither do analysts. Many say that despite the ease of switching to a new search engine, the new technologies are not different enough to draw users away from Google. "People don’t just go to Google because they can get the best search results," says Safa Rashtchy, a managing director at Piper Jaffray (PJC). "They also go there because they trust it. The technology would have to be massively more useful than the existing one to get people to switch. Theoretically it is possible, but realistically it is unlikely."

Just how much more useful would search need to be to unseat Google?   Well, Google, for all it’s power, is still text based in it’s algorithms.  If a company could create a Superior visual search engine that understood Rich Media and text, plus gave you a way to customize how you display the information - and did it quickly enough - it might have a shot of unseating Google.

But, realizing that, Google would probably build that capability before anyone else - further cementing their foothold into Search.   In short, at this time, it’s next to impossible to unseat Google.

Speculation about Powerset is growing in the Blogosphere - but until I see it in action I won’t have an opinion, one way or the other, it it has any chance to unseating Google.  Right now, all I have heard is hype.

I don’t know that everything I measure for corporate clients is Web 2.0 - yet I’m finding the web analytics tools currently available to me are often not up to the job of answering the questions clients really want to know.  Eric Perterson addressed the Web 2.0 tracking issue in his recent interview with E-Consultancy.  Here’s part of the interview with Eric Peterson and any comments I may have are going to be in blue.

"In a nutshell, what are the challenges associated with measuring Web 2.0 traffic?

A lot of what is really important is happening either a) off the ‘website’ proper, such as RSS or b) below the level of the ‘page view’.

The former creates a challenge because, well, it’s hard to measure stuff that is out of your control. The latter because so many of the web analytics applications out there treat the page view as canonical.

Ask yourself: what about AJAX applications allowing multiple user ‘events’ without a page reload? What about podcast ‘listens’? What about people who are tremendously loyal to your content but never visit your web site? What about mash-ups like Google Maps? The list of challenges Web 2.0 is creating for us is long, to be sure.

Right, with content syndication of podcasts and RSS feeds, you don’t get the actual amount of traffic or exposure since much of it is no longer happening on your site.   And while Flash is not, by itself, a Web 2.0 application, I throw the Rich Media tracking issues into the mix with AJAX and Subscriber tracking and call it one big tracking problem, a problem that’s only getting worse as more content is being syndicated, more podcasts downloaded and more AJAX and Flash are being used as part of webpages.

"Do you feel there’s an urgent need for this to be sorted?

Absolutely. Because if, as an industry, we don’t, we’ll be in exactly the same space two years from now that we are today bickering about the definition of a ‘unique visitor’.

Look at the recent complaints big advertisers have expressed about Comscore and Nielsen measurements. Listen to any big site gripe about differences in numbers different systems are reporting.

Then think about the inherent complexity involved in measuring all this stuff that happens off our sites or below our pages that is becoming more and more critical to our businesses? Yeah, this needs to be worked out now, not later. "

A couple of things.  I’d like to see FeedBurner’s tracking integrated into all the major Web Analytics Platforms - that would be a start.  Sure, it’s not perfect but it’s the best tracking available now for Syndication unless you want to create a custom url for every subscriber - and I don’t think you want to go there.

Also, Podcast and VidCast Tracking ought to be a standard part of every analytics package yet I see so few even attempting to do this - am I missing something or do the analytics vendors fail to "get it".    Making it easy to include the Podcast/Vidcasts into the analytics and then track it would be a beginning - even if it’s not the whole answer.

Flash and Ajax tracking is problematic - I’d like it to be easier to attach hooks into Flash without actually getting the programmer involved and right now that’s impossible.  I’d like Web Analytics platforms to read the Flash movie in and keep track of it without me having to do anything and that’s probably a long way off, not withstanding Omniture’s attempt to do it.

What are the implications for online ad buyers?

Well, what if your favourite site to advertise on went all AJAX? What if all the sudden instead of getting 100,000 impressions daily AJAX was handling the interactions and page loads were cut down by 50%? What would that mean to your ability to reach your preferred audience?

I have reported on issues such as the lousy programming of MySpace and how it inflates pageviews.  What about if it was the other way around - what if AJAX cut down the number of pageviews all over the place because it will be used more …that happens to impressions?   It goes down.   AJAX kills Online Advertising?

Clearly, that’s not going to happen - Eric is right to bring it up though - and I’m surprised that I don’t hear more from Web Analytics Vendors on RSS, Rich Media Tracking, Podcast tracking, etc.