I’ve Said Too Much

From Signal vs. Noise:

How the lack of constraints killed the quality of Star Wars: Constraints drive innovation and forces focus. They are to be embraced, not removed. That’s one of the points we’re pushing in the Building of Basecamp workshops. To explain the need of constraints, I’ve used the decline of quality in the Star Wars movies as an example.

Hear hear.

There is so much fantastic stuff in John Battelle’s piece “Are You Becoming Irrelevant To Your Customers” on AdAge.com that you really should read the whole thing, but his first point about intent needs to be stamped on my forehead:

1. Intent trumps content. The traditional model for marketing used to be that content companies made content, then advertisers attached themselves to that content in various ways. Content was a proxy for the audience, and the audience was what marketers were after.

But in the age of search, consumers are declaring their intent first through the mechanism of the search box. They are stating what they want. This is proving an irresistible attachment point for marketers, and hence we have the rise of paid search, with Google/Yahoo as its leaders. Content is what is found after intent is declared, and a new middleman — the search box — has created value by creating an attachment point where every marketer wants to be — at the point of intent. This doesn’t mean content is dead; far from it. Content is often what consumers want. But if your content is not found when the consumer’s intent is declared, well, you lose.

Registration required, which seems ironic, given what Battelle is saying about being part of the conversation!

The San Jose Mercury News mob have more details on Yahoo’s plans to incorporate job ads from other sites into their search. Essentially, Yahoo! is going to screenscrape employer websites to pull jobs down into the HotJobs search. It looks like an extreme move to remain relevant:

From siliconvalley.com:

MercuryNews.com | 07/12/2005 | Yahoo to `copy’ jobs to beef up its listings: Yahoo felt it needed to do the scraping for several reasons, according to General Manager Daniel J. Finnigan. By listing more jobs, HotJobs better serves users. And if more users come, employers are helped and are more likely to pay for other services.

It will also improve Yahoo’s core search offerings: Yahoo plans to offer a special “jobs” tab on its main search bar, planned for a Wednesday launch. Finally, more companies are posting jobs on their Web sites, and if Yahoo didn’t, its main competitors would also soon begin scraping. “By definition, that’s content that our job seekers are going to want access to,” he said. “We have to do it.”

Finnigan believes employers will continue to pay, especially on sites like HotJobs, which offers a depth of other services that the upstarts don’t.

For starters, HotJobs displays its paid listings separately from the free listings, and shows them higher on the results page. In addition, employers paying for listings with HotJobs can add, edit or delete postings whenever they want. They have more control, through their negotiated relationship with HotJobs, of how their jobs and their company’s branding are presented. And they earn the right to search HotJobs’ database of job seekers by various criteria, including keyword, experience level, job preference, salary and so on.

Though it’s odd to think of Yahoo! as being “desperate for audience” in any of its markets, in the U.S. jobs market it’s a distant third place behind Monster and CareerBuilder. So it is struggling for traction in this market.

I have personal views about screenscraping - it’s borderline legal/illegal, it’s certainly counter to the spirit of Web 2.0 if not the letter of the law, and it’s incredibly flaky technically - but what’s really interesting about this move is what it says about Web economics. Yahoo’s move shows that, as things stand with Web protocols, it’s always easy for any player to rip value out of any market by acting aggressively to maintain market share. It’s why record labels are angry with the BBC, for instance. If you’re big and bad enough, you can restate the laws of engagement with any area of Web activity, which is great for the consumer in the short term - but economically highly questionable in the long term.

And one cheeky question - how will Yahoo react when people start scraping their own site and turning it into a suite of RSS feeds which completely disintermediate Yahoo?

Yesterday was a truly exceptional day. Our editorial team slaved away, our systems team kept everything running, and everyone pitched in with help wherever they could. Needless to say, it was a record day for traffic, but one of the most poignant things I looked at on our stats platform was where the traffic came from by city. The biggest traffic source was London. The second biggest was New York. And the third biggest was…Madrid. Linked by atrocity, but linked nevertheless.

Craziness may be all around us, but the Guardian is staying focussed today. Our coverage has been amazing - either in blog or news form - and we’ve stayed available while traffic has gone through the roof. The reality of what’s happened won’t hit until tonight, probably. For now, it’s heads down and keep it running.

One of my very many current obsessions is ad targeting, and there’s no finer demonstration of its current shortcomings than this post by Micro Persuasion: NY was advertising its Olympic bid yesterday alongside a story than London had won.

The fact that this gives me a chance to crow about London’s winning bid is neither here nor there….

Fascinating stats on RSS readers in an article by Brian Livingston. Livingston got the numbers off Feedburner, and there’s some very interesting stuff in there. Here’s a summary:

• At first glance, My Yahoo! seems to take 60% share among feed readers. But remove the top 10 feeds which are installed in My Yahoo! by default (ie, the user hasn’t selected them), and My Yahoo! plunges to 6.68% and Bloglines takes the overall crown. Which suggests that people aren’t adding feeds to My Yahoo! to an extent that Yahoo! would like (which in turn suggests that, even now, Yahoo! hasn’t figured out how to make My Yahoo! usable by the average joe)
• iTunes is already at 9.53%, even though it only started attracting RSS attention (thanks to podcasts) just over a week ago. Amazing
• The daddy of clientside readers (excluding podcast readers and browser built-ins like Firefox Live Bookmarks) is NetNewsWire, which takes 10% of the audience. And remember - NetNewsWire is a Mac OSX client. That’s an extraordinary performance, and must say something about the percentage of Mac users who are also RSS users
• Podcasts are the new black. iPodder is the fifth reader in the amended list - ahead of My Yahoo!

The Independent has redesigned its site. I’m going to play with it and comment, but this comment from Robin Grant seems pretty, er, clear.