derek abdinor

No time to Digg or Muti or Reddit:
Heinz writes with an article in Forbes on how [0]advertising in techmedia is drying up and going — where else? — into specialist blogs andGoogle. “Silicon Valley is booming again. But if you work in tech media,there’s blood on the floor. Take Red Herring. It hung onto its officesafter getting the eviction notice earlier this month. But gossip siteValleywag is breaking story after story not just on its beat — but aboutits woes. Meanwhile, bigger publications are hurting too: Time Warner’sBusiness 2.0 saw ad pages drop 21.8% through March from the same period ayear ago; PC Magazine’s editor in chief walked out the door after adpages fell 38.8% over the same period; and one-time online powerhouseCNET is reporting growing losses even as the companies it coversflourish. It may be happening in tech first, but there’s no reason thesame thing won’t happen, eventually, in every media niche.”Discuss this story at: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/07/17/0110256Links: 0. http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/07/16/redherring-print-blogs-tech-media-cx_bc_0716techmedia.html

Fitting I should have stumbled upon this article about Open Source Business Models while waiting to board for the Balkans.

Recent strike action reminds me of a game we made up years ago. Elan and I were studying a politics course, and realised that in South Africa the following holds true:

• Business trumps Labour through wages and restructuring
• Labour trumps Government through strikes, unions and the threat of the electorate
• Government trumps Business through regulation, taxation and transformation

Know them by their signals
Business: air squiggle (as in Waiter, I’ll have my bill now)
Labour: clenched fist salute
Government: admonishing stiff index finger

The air squiggle is difficult to do, the fist can be changed to a winning Gov hand with deftness on the downward “reveal”, and arguments about its accuracy in power politics will rage well into the second helping of Nachos con Pollo. We toyed with Media being a player bought and employed as an impact force, as it adapts well to fight any cause and is great at muddying the waters of any conflict.

Essentially the game teaches one about the intricacies of the South African playground market, in stores this Christmas. Chong Chah is gaining recognition through World Champs and an established study of ways to cheat.

Warning! This game is not supported outside the borders of South Africa. In the US you may experience a rigid finger from the temptation of over-utilising the all-powerful Government player. In China, the non-existence of organised Labour allows one to replace with the Bitter Lover: offering or witholding access to Chinese Government-needed raw materials for gifts.

In a seminal article recently released, the H1 was: “Why 1% of search market share is worth over $1 Billion”. Further actuarial information followed which is of great importance for SEO. The big numbers always tend to to lose me, but commentary to the article by Jakob Nielsen, made things hit home, he analysed:

The value per page view on a content site tends to be about 0.1 cents. Thus, pointing people to content is more than 100 times as profitable as actually writing that content.

In days of halycon yore (1999), some sage said in a Business 2.0 article something along the lines of:

the people who made money during the Yukon Gold Rush in the 19th century and who are still represented today were not the diggers or panners of gold, but the people who sold them the shovels, revolvers, coaches, clothing

So a single search in the US is worth 12 cents. In retrospect, did Dewey (of library cataloging fame) ever make 12 cents from his indexing system?