Surfarama

Amongst all the handwringing and talk of Yahoo’s stock price plunge Jason Kottke makes a pretty salient observation…

On Jan 31, the day before Microsoft offered $31/share for Yahoo, YHOO was at $19.18/share (market cap: $26.4 billion) and MSFT was at $32.60/share (market cap: $303.6 billion). At the close of trading today, YHOO closed at $24.37/share (market cap: $33.5 billion) and MSFT was at $29.08/share (market cap: $270.8 billion). In other words, the Microsoft offer increased the value of Yahoo! Inc. by more than $7 billion and decreased the value of Microsoft Corporation by almost $33 billion.

Read the rest of Jason Kottke’s post, Yahoo stock plunges?.

Certainly Yahoo’s stock price wasn’t on fire before the Microsoft offer and Yahoo has issues, but personally I’m erring toward the don’t sell side of the fence. Not because I don’t like MS (I do and I use MS Products all day long), it’s more because I like the idea that there are three big guys competing in search, I really like lots of the Yahoo products, I think they’ve brought lots of great talent in many of their acquisitions, and I want to see them have a chance to pull it all together.

I have no skin in this fight and I have no real insight to most of the big issues here (eg. cultural fit, technology fit, people fit), but selling doesn’t feel good for the internet.

Check out this 10 year chart of YHOO stock prices. That sure puts the recent fluctuations in context.

When buying a car there are 3 basic parameters to consider:

1. Affordability
2. Reliability
3. Coolness

You can pick any two.

Of course affordability is relative and cool is subjective, but in my experience it simply isn’t possible to have all three.

UPDATE 05/05/08: I brought a new (used) car…a Skoda Fabia vRS, and I’m very happy with it.

It’s the best combination of affordability, reliability and coolness I could find. Skoda has a rather chequered history as a marque, but there’s no denying they are making really solid cars these days (2 of the top 5 in the Top Gear 2006 survey).

It’s a 1.9ltr Turbo Diesel so it gets great mileage, which at 4-5ltr/100km is down to hybrid territory. But of course that assumes very moderate driving, which is not necessarily a safe assumption…the turbo charged 1.9ltr engine delivers about 130bhp which is a hell of a lot for such a small car (based on the VW Polo platform), so it is fun to drive, and difficult to drive moderately :)

Yep, it is that time of year again…time for a quick rant about phonebooks. We had ours delivered the other day (all 4.6kgs of them) and I put them in the recycling today.

According to the 2006 census there are 2,724 occupied dwellings in our suburb (Kohimarama), which means approximately 12,530kg of phonebooks (not counting all the businesses).

Let’s imagine that 20% of those households could do without their dead tree versions of the phonebook… we could save 2.5 metric tonnes of printed paper in Kohi alone!

I know that they use recycled paper in the production but even if that is 60% or so we’re talking tonnes of institutionalized waste. Not to mention the waste of resources printing the things, and the solvents in the inks, blah blah blah…

For the love of God’s green planet please let me atleast opt out of receiving the bloody things. I don’t want them.

Photo by jonobacon.

Talk about funny, Battledecks is competitive improv for the biz/geek crowd…take a dozen or so rediculous powerpoint slides and improv a presentation within a set time limit. I guess the crowd chooses the winner.

That’s a recipe for comedy. Here’s some of the slides from the recent SXSWi Battledecks session:

| View | Upload your own

Via Ted (who tied for 2nd, sweet!)

[I'm going to SXSW next year if I have to swim]

I hate to blockquote so much of a great post, but if you have any interest in marketing and brand and business generally, you need to read this…

Quick – what’s the top brand in the world? Coca-Cola? Nope. IBM? Nope. One of GE’s stable of brands? Wrong again.
All these players are near the top. But the most powerful brand in the world today is, according to the gold standard of brand valuation, Millward Brown’s Brandz report, Google.

Now, that might seem superficially logical. But from a strategic point of view, it’s nothing short of astonishing. Why? Because every other player in the top ten has spent decades – if not literally centuries, as for P&G and Coke – investing billions in advertising to build a brand.

But where these players invest on the order of 5-10% of revenues on advertising, Google’s advertising expenditure is almost exactly zero.

Read the rest, it’s really good (and there’s a bonus video).

I’ve often reflected that pretty much everything we need to know about marketing was written back in 1999 when the Cluetrain Manifesto was published on the thesis that “markets are conversations”.

And this is what Umair is saying essentially, that the value of traditional brand equity is fast eroding as the cost of interaction amongst consumers drops and the value of that interaction grows…in other words ‘consumers’ (aka people) would much rather talk to other consumers than consume mass media from corporations…and they can do this much more efficiently than the corporations can carpet bomb them with media.

So at the very least we all better be listening to those conversations, if not actively being part of the conversation…which if you’re reading this probably comes second nature because you are already participating.

UPDATE: I posted this late last night and kinda ran out of steam, but went to sleeping thinking about it and there’s definitely more to say, particularly about the challenges that traditional businesses clearly have with participatiion…I mean it isn’t like the individuals within large traditional organizations are not participating (lots are), but often those organizations do seem to have to have some old school notions of brand and organizational blockers which prevent effective particpation, e.g. “blog writing isn’t on anyones job description!”.

Anyway, it also occurred to me that I should cross post this to Online Marketer (our new team blog) and continue the conversation there. The blog is just getting started, but if you are interested in online marketing I promise it will be worth subscribing to.

This post serves as a landing page for folks redirected from freetunes.co.nz, which I have decided to close down now that I’ve downsized to a very modest VPS and need to conserve my bandwidth.

Freetunes was a bit of an experiment I had been running in a very adhoc way for a while now…basically it mashed up the Google search API and some social features to make it easy to find and share stashes of MP3s on the web.

Y’all know about the advanced search queries you can use to find media files on Google directly. Freetunes just added a layer for users to give a thumbs up or down to results they viewed so that popular results always showed up first. Searching using the advanced parameters is always a bit hit and miss so Freetunes let everyone take advantage of the work done by others to hunt out the best results.

It mostly worked pretty well but I’m trying to simplify so there’s no room for it anymore.

A little over a year ago I discovered a Cold Fusion Q & A site, cfanswers.org (via Matt Haughey). I don’t know anything about CF, but I was totally taken by the way the site was put together…it was what Yahoo! Answers and the rest of them should be like. Beautifully simple and with just the right attention to UI to make it a pleasure to use. Stuff like having links to download .txt versions of particular answers, and nice ajax flourishes for rating answers etc. It was just really well done, so it’s sad to see that the site hasn’t survived and the domain now seems to be dead. [Read more →]

The whole Chuck Norris facts things is kinda over done, but I still get a kick out of it…and this one is pretty funny too:

1. Goto Google.com
2. Type in “find chuck norris” and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button
3. Chuckle

(via Shanti)

It’s World Data Privacy Day on Monday…

The U.S. and Canada have joined 27 European countries to celebrate Data Privacy Day 2008 this Monday, January 28th.

Official Google Blog: Celebrating data privacy.

Cool idea, and Google have put together some nice resources, including this booklet on how Google handles consumer privacy issues (PDF), and this slide deck for parents and educators about Teen Privacy Online (PDF). They’ve even got a whole YouTube channel dedicated to the issue, The Google Privacy Channel, and the latest video is a nice introduction to cookies…

I think privacy is going to be a theme this year.

I might get around to a proper post at some point. The short version is that I broke my ankle mountain biking at Woodhill last week, and am now sporting the following new hardware:

Oddly my ankle doesn’t actually hurt that much. I also bruised my ribs pretty badly and that is proving way more painful.