mahalo – Techdirt (original) (raw)

A Look Back On Andrew Keen's Failed Predictions

from the oh-look-at-that... dept

In writing my recent post about the failure of Google’s Knol, I went back to look at what I had written previously about it and I dug up a post from October of 2008, in which I discussed a series of predictions from Andrew Keen that struck me as particularly shortsighted and wrong. It was right after the latest economic crisis had shifted into overdrive and Keen had predicted that this economic change would lead to the end of “open source” and “free” business models because people would have to actually start making money. He also predicted that things like Facebook and Twitter would collapse in the economic realities of 2009:

The altruistic ideal of giving away one’s labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom when social-media startups hung from trees, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, and VCs queued up to fund revenue-less “businesses” like Twitter. But as we contemplate the world post-bailout, when economic reality once again bites, only Silicon Valley’s wealthiest technologists can even consider the luxury of donating their labor to the latest fashionable, online, open-source project.

How’s that prediction looking today? Right. (Update: For those who missed it, there’s a sarcmark around that “Right”)

In that article, he predicted the success of a bunch of websites and how they’d beat the “free” or “open” competitors. I picked out a series of those that I thought were particularly unlikely to happen and asked Andrew if he’d like to put some money behind his predictions — with the bet being decided by who was right in October 2010 (I didn’t choose all of Keen’s predictions, because some of them were nonsensical and did not involve actual competitors). Here’s what I wrote:

I’d like to make a bet. While there are different estimates as to how long any recession might be, the general consensus is that we should hopefully start pulling out by the end of 2009 or early 2010. So, let’s pick a few of these that we can measure, and I’ll bet Andrew Keen $100 (really money, Andrew) that in two years, on October 22, 2010, Wikipedia still gets more traffic than Knol, that Google is still much, much, much bigger than Mahalo (if they’re even considered competitors any more), and that YouTube gets more traffic than Hulu.

If any one of those is untrue, I’ll write him a check.

Tragically, when October 22, 2010 came around, I had forgotten about this original post. Also, Keen never responded to the bet, either because he was unaware of it or because he didn’t really believe his own predictions. Either way, it looks like he made the right decision, whether on purpose or not, because every one of the predictions I made were correct compared to his predictions. Knol didn’t beat Wikipedia. Mahalo did not beat Google. Hulu did not beat YouTube (though, Hulu is doing well for now).

I had never met Keen when I wrote that original article, though I have had some fun conversations with him in the past year, so I’m interested to see if he’s willing to revisit his original predictions and to admit that perhaps he was wrong with his analysis of how “free” and “open source” would be knocked out by the economic crisis.

Filed Under: andrew keen, predictions
Companies: google, hulu, knol, mahalo, wikipedia, youtube

Mark Cuban Tells Newspapers To Pull Out Of Google… As He Invests In Competitors?

from the hypocrisy-in-action dept

Over the last few months my post about all the aggregator sites owned by Rupert Murdoch as he was complaining about aggregators “stealing” his traffic has received a fair bit of attention. Yet it hasn’t stopped similar hypocrisy from Murdoch and others. This week, Mark Cuban got a ton of attention for his silly claims that Google is a vampire and media publications should all opt-out. Cuban is a smart guy and has to know that this is so wrong that it’s laughable, leading some people to wonder if he’s pulling some sort of trick on these media publications.

Danny Sullivan comes to the rescue by pointing out that while Cuban is telling sites that Google traffic is worthless, he’s invested in Mahalo, an aggregator site that lives off of Google traffic and still tries to do some similar aggregation efforts, such as IceRocket.com (which is a direct competitor to Google News… though no one uses it). Meanwhile, an old interview dug up by Michael Arrington has Cuban talking about how much he’d like to invest in TechMeme — a similar aggregator. Clearly, Cuban is playing some sort of trick on media companies.

The thing that I can’t figure out is what sort of trick he’s playing. He’s simply wrong about Google traffic being worth nothing. While much of Google traffic might not convert to regular users, enough of them do to matter. But, even more to the point, we’ve found that the ads shown on archive articles (i.e., those found via Google searches) tend to get a much higher number of clicks than those shown on front page articles. And it’s pretty obvious why once you think about it. People coming from Google are searching for something — and so they’ll look around your whole page, meaning that they don’t suffer from the same sort of ad blindness that regular visitors do.

Sullivan posits a conspiracy theory that even he doesn’t believe in, that by getting news publishers to pull out of Google News it could help Cuban’s investments, but even he admits that seems pretty far-fetched. So is Cuban just really really confused or is he playing at some game?

Filed Under: aggregators, hypocrisy, mark cuban, vampires
Companies: google, icerocket, mahalo, techmeme

Google Decides Organizing The World's Information Is Easier If That Info Is Online

from the so,-please,-put-your-info-online dept

Google has always stated that its mission is to “organize the world’s information.” Of course, the problem with that is not all of the world’s information is online, meaning that Google has needed to reach out and try to pull more information online. That explains some of what it’s done with Google Maps/Local as well as Google’s various book scanning projects. Now Google has announced another initiative, perhaps aimed at that same goal: it wants people to contribute static pages of information, which Google is calling “knols,” short for a “unit of knowledge.” It’s certainly not a unique idea. In many ways it sounds quite similar to projects like Squidoo or Mahalo — both of which involve getting people to create “pages” of information. Of course, both Squidoo and Mahalo (whether they intend to or not) really come off as Google arbitrage plays. They seek to create static pages that will rank high in Google in order to bring in traffic… which is then monetized by Google AdSense. The goal is that if you get ranked high enough, the cost of acquisition is lower than the income from the ads. Unfortunately, when you set up that type of incentive system, what you tend to get is borderline (or, in some cases, not so borderline) search engine spam.

Squidoo has been around for quite some time without getting much traction and Mahalo is too early to call. So, it’s certainly reasonable to question whether or not knols will really take off beyond spammers (which, Google insists it will keep out). If it were any other company doing this, it would make sense to be quite skeptical of how well it would catch on, but you have to provide Google at least the benefit of the doubt in terms of being able to leverage its brand to make this take off in some form or another. Certainly, Google has had its fair share of failed projects — and I’m not yet convinced that people really want to create pages of info just for the hell of it. However, of any company trying this sort of thing, Google probably has the greatest chance to make it work.

Of course, no discussion on Google’s knol project would be complete without comparing it to Wikipedia (as many smart commentators are noting). However, in looking over the details, this doesn’t seem to be a Wikipedia “competitor” so much as another reference for static information. It seems that the goals of this project are quite different than Wikipedia’s — which is focused on narrowing in on a clear, factual description of something. The idea of knols is almost completely antithetical to that concept. It’s about recognizing a single individual’s perspective on things, and allowing multiple people to put forth their perspective. Google is even hoping that people will create knols based on opinion, rather than trying to create factual pages. That’s quite different. Neither approach is necessarily “better” — they just serve different purposes, and assuming these knols catch on, what may be most interesting is to see how useful the combination of knols and Wikipedia are together. I’ve always believed that a Wikipedia-type approach works well for factual information, where you have to zoom in on a single point — but it runs into trouble when you want opinion, insight and analysis, where you want multiple separate opinions rather than a merged one. That, at least is the theory behind our business as well, so it’s nice to see Google appears to have a similar perspective. However, much of the work that we’ve done with the Techdirt Insight Community has been in aligning various incentives for people to provide useful analysis and insights (rather than useless or meaningless ones) — and it will be interesting to see how much Google has thought through the various incentives at play.

Filed Under: information, knol
Companies: google, mahalo, squidoo, wikipedia