… a business-to-business product? What do you think, Seth? Or at least, perhaps that is where it starts. Because time literally is money, at least it is much better understood in the corporate environment versus in the consumer world. If you are reading this blog entry and have no idea what I’m talking about, just let me know by emailing me at rob at analystblog dawt cawm (with my best drawwwwl).

I guess my term for “attention” is “context” by the way - Seth is interviewed about this topic on Wallstrip, here’s the link from his blog to the vid.

It’s now all about search references, case in point: “that was a funny video. go to youtube and search for clinton” — as a way for me to find a specific piece of content my friend was referring to. Search has become context — which means that it is a big temptation for people to try to introduce themselves into this particular meme-stream and take advantage of the normal human mistakes as a way to grab a little piece of that attention for themselves.

I was going to write more about this but as it turned out when I did that very search right now I came across the following rather annoying image on YouTube. See? The magic search-context machine doesn’t always work out quite as expected….

I file this under the category of “context” for a number of different reasons. It’s one of my favorite areas — and I believe that it’s the key to providing useful services to consumers (online or offline). It just so happens there’s a lot of information available online we can access to learn and share about one another’s context points.

r0ml is Root’s chief scientist, and his blog makes for interesting reading, most specifically the ‘what do I do’ entry. I will opine on this plenty more in the coming months; when of course I have time away from actually making some of these things happen.

According to Claria’s press release, they’ve promoted Scott VanDeVelde to CEO and also promoted Scott Eagle. I don’t know Jeff McFadden very well, who departs as outgoing CEO, but I have had the chance to work with both Scott’s at Gator/Claria as former clients and have great respect for both of them. They are both very very smart and capable. Will be interesting to see how Claria’s business model transition continues, and I wish them the best of luck. Congratulations!

Every week seems to bring more and more news of a variety of wonderous new ‘meta-applications’ built on top of existing APIs, scraping thousands of sites all over the Web (and often called ‘vertical search’ sites) or pulling together data from disparate databases (sometimes without permission). Blogs and other new and more-accessible sources of information are magnifying our perceptions about how much is going on out there (we’re hearing about a lot more a lot more quickly than ever before) but even still, the pace is truly rapid and without precedent.

What’s missing? Customers. Users. I don’t mean the few hundred or thousand that, driven by the latest A-list blogger spilling the pre-release beans on the beta version, try out these apps. But real, meaningful adoption — meaningful, consumer adoption that doesn’t rely on being bought out by GOOG, YHOO, IACI, MSFT or similar. Partly these technologies are very much in their infancy, so that very few will be able to reach critical mass, but the real issue that I want to highlight here is that there are a few really powerful, sizeable Internet players that essentially hold the keys to the kingdom. This appeared to be the case several years ago in the “portal deal” phase of Internet 1.0, but it appears to be even more so the case now. I was looking back at the number of well-funded companies back in 98-2000 and the paths to exit (including as standalone) seemed numerous. Now, even $100mm in revenue with decent earnings doesn’t seem enough - there are just not that many sizeable online players around!

Google has added what it calls “autolinks” to the Google toolbar for the latest version. There have been a variety of responses to this in the blogosphere already, some negative and some positive… with people going on about comparing this to Microsoft SmartTags, the inevitable adware references and so on. Clearly this has been on Google’s minds all along (I recall discussing this with other analysts at Jupiter at least 2 years ago) and I don’t blame Google. It’s very powerful to have client software at your disposal to be able to leverage your network of search advertising, and bring the power of context to websites and better match advertising to those websites’ content (esp. without having to buy CPM space on those sites!).

I’ve spoken with other players before who have had this type of technology along with a substantial database of information to which they could map interesting links and wanted to deploy it, but have held back for fear of the backlash it would bring and the attendant copyright/trademark issues. That aside, from a user perspective it could be helpful; if it’s opt-in and expressly chosen by the user, AND the user has a choice of how aggressive to make the linking AND which preferred service providers she wants to popup (e.g. Amazon for books, or preferring NYTimes/AP for relevant news links) AND developers could have the chance to write apps for it. With some or all of these developments, I think it would be a net-positive addition to the ad/search space.

The problem is, however, that it won’t be consumer-controlled to the extent it needs to be nor will it immediately add enough value to get over the inevitable public opposition. I like to reality check things by asking more normal users than myself what they think about something like this and they tell me “it’s hard enough today to know what is advertising and what is not, and if it’s from the site I’m visiting or another site”. Without replacing some of the existing advertising out there with more targeted (contextually or behaviorally) stuff, I’m afraid that Google is just going to be adding to the ad-clutter.

Now imagine the outrage if Google were to announce a behavioral targeting toolbar advertising product based on information collected from the toolbar… but this is where real value could result for consumers AND advertisers! What’s the over/under on this one, do you think??

Claria has launched BehaviorLink, it’s new contextual advertising service which “expand[s] its behavioral targeting platform from a proprietary pop-up network to publisher-based network”. About time, guys — should be interesting to see how this works. I’ve said before that we need user behavior to truly get to context- that search keywords and online visitation patterns need to come together to target users effectively.

The Claria release is full of interesting bits and pieces, such as “Claria is currently buying media from publishers at a rate exceeding $25 million annually to promote its software, and expects this spending rate to eclipse $100 million within BehaviorLink’s first year of operation.” Sounds like fun - let us watch and see how it goes!

Looks like Forbes is dropping its paid green double-underline links… it was the first company to start working with Vibrant Media and now it looks like appearance of editorial integrity is set to sink their ship…

Gary Stein of Jupiter (disclosure: friend and former colleague) mentions Infospace talking more about the evolution of search being toward getting search results distributed across other sites rather than/in addition to driving more users to a single destination for search. This seems obvious; but in the high-media-profile (it’s now mainstream) battle between the likes of Yahoo! and Google in the search arena, it is easy to lose sight of the point.

The point is finding relevant content from among an unholy mass of information and data on the ‘net. Syndicating search listings to every corner of the Web is a big part of that - use the context provided to you by the information that exists and treat it as an implicit search. It’s automating the manual process of ‘relevant links’ we used to put on our web pages in the early days. I’ve frequently blogged about context here, but content alone cannot give us a complete picture of user context.

The technology to look at a page and decide what listings fit there, and how these listings should look remains a big challenge, and there are also big problems mostly revolving around a loss of editorial and economic control that these potential end points (sites) experience. Especially looking at news content, it’s hard to figure out how you would generate good advertising based simply on story content about war in Iraq or the latest Administration gaffe (”W” flightsuit dolls?) without occasionally ‘cheating’ by slipping in a few juicy words (”mortgage”?).

Demographics are of course used in advertising to act as a surrogate for a user’s interests, often a poor one. To deliver on the promise of context distribution/worthwhile distribution of search content, either some of these approximations will be necessary and/or widespread user-profiling will be required… and technology will have to figure the blend between explicit and implicit user context in order to display these distributed search results. From my vantage point, user-profiling unfortunately seems like the key to context distribution. Another ironic clue, a search for user profiling on Google bring up an ad to work at Google as a computer scientist or software developer!

I’m continuing to enjoy some of the debates about “contextual advertising applications”, aka spyware, adware, and so on… I coined the term “sneakyware” four years ago to refer to these types of applications. At the time I specifically mentioned eZula’s TopText, Gator (now Claria) with their wallet application and some others. It seems that these types of contextual advertising are seen by many as the second cousin to SPAM…

But the biggest thorn in the sides of the naysayers is that these services *actually work*. Claria can charge advertisers the equivalent of a $200 CPM and still have the economics work out for them since they’re getting a 5 to 10% clickthrough rate for many of their targeted placements.

Contextual advertising is the promise, the holy grail, of online marketing — no matter how the software gets to the desktop the point is that once there it can (in the near term) provide tremendous value to advertiser and consumer alike: as long as some of us are getting marketed to and others of us are seeing less marketing messages that we’re not interested in –> just think how much happier you’d be if you had a way to tell the TV network putting on that sports game that you’re NOT in the market for an SUV and instead advertise something else that you might actually be interested in… or forego the ads altogether and instead promote programs that you’ll be interested in at a later date..

Imagine that! But unfortunately, as long as we’re stuck in a “context-challenged” demographics-addicted marketing environment, the entities who are potential context providers will continue the struggle to have their message be heard.

I wrote a report for Jupiter in 2000 about what I called “meta networks”… intermediaries that add value by providing additional information or context to consumers, in order to help them make a buying decision. Thanks to the power of Google I was honored to find a presentation that Mohan Sawhney gave at MSN that quoted my report regarding contextual marketing/commerce online. His term for meta networks was “consumer metamediaries”. I continue to believe in the meta network value proposition, and it is one of the reasons I’m excited to be working with the type of firm that I am right now:

Meta Networks add value by helping consumers decide what products or services to buy and where to buy them. As online commerce businesses struggle to reach consumers and build long-term relationships, Meta Networks will soon replace merchants and general portals as the starting point for online commerce.

The reason it is a “network” is because it encompasses not just the front-end site (the “metamediary” or “intermediary”) but also the linkage (compensation/ redirect link or referral) between this site and the merchant ~ thus creating a network.

I read with interest some of the stories about Louis Borders’ new company, KeepMedia.

The idea is that for a $5 fee per month you can keep a digital locker of sorts of interesting articles you found in various magazines and newspapers (Economist, Variety, Psychology Today, U.S. News & World Report, Esquire, Foreign Policy, the Miami Herald and the San Jose Mercury News says the Washington Post’s good article). A few thoughts:

1) not having the current stories available is said to address the cannibalization issue (why would I pay $5 for a single copy of the Economist when I can just cherry-pick the articles I want). I think this is silly and requires further analysis (e.g. depending on the brand’s reader profile, single-copy impulse sales might be less affected, say me buying the Economist at the airport). Strange though: many magazine websites charge you a markup for previous articles

2) One of the key applications for something like this will be passalong to friends/colleagues, “did you see that article in the WSJ today?”. Building a context system and infrastructure around media articles and information is part of what blogging is all about - can this translate into the physical/offline world?

Context is king — what’s missing is a way to extend this across traditional and electronic media.