From time to time, you’ll hear reports of the death of mainstream media. Newspapers are dying, radio is on the way out, network TV ratings have shrunk dramatically etc. In most studies we learn that people are spending more time online and less with the “old media”.

All of this is true, but only to a point. The power of television, in particular, to drive behavior is still quite stunning.

In 1981, MTV launched to very small audience with an old, not very popular song as their first video: “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. Record stores reported large numbers of customers asking for the song and ordered up records to meet their customer’s needs. Record company execs started calling MTV asking how to get their videos on. A hit was made.

Now, 27 years later, we have plenty of internet stories that–while not quite that large–show that the internet has the potential to do the same. e.g. Fall Out Boy clamored itself up through Myspace.

Something this week caught my eye. Hallelujah, a 14 year old song from the late Jeff Buckley has been the #1 seller on iTunes for a week. There’s been no promotion in the iTunes store. How?

Well, an American Idol contestant sang an adequate cover of the song. And then, Simon Cowell mentioned that Jeff Buckley’s 1994 version is one of his favorite songs. From nowhere to #1 overnight.

I have yet to see an example where the internet has had that kind of impact that quickly. If you know of one, be sure to let me know, but I don’t see it. I guess that mainstream media business has got some legs after all…

Now, the old people are arriving, and more specifically, everyone in my LinkedIn network is asking to be my facebook friend. (yes, I just called all of you old).

This has made me pause and ask “What do I want my Facebook network to be?”. I’m on a lot of services and I actually have different groupings of friends on each. I use one service for my long lost NYC friends. I use LinkedIn for my professional network, and what do I use facebook for?

So I just started doing the unimaginable, I’m turning down invitations from people I know well. I’m clicking “REJECT” to those professional contacts. I want my facebook to be my closest friends (professional and personal). I want it to be a fun place, I want to know what music they are listening to, what they are doing, restaurants, fun stuff. I’ll use a professional network for those professional contacts. I want to keep facebook fun! LinkedIN CEO Bill Nye unsurprisingly agrees.

Since I do want to be friends with you (I like you, trust you and want to keep in touch), I’ll kindly invite you to LinkedIn instead. So don’t be surprised to get a REJECT from Facebook and a INVITE from linked in.

I wonder if other people are feeling the same. What do you use Facebook for vs. linkedIN??

Related Reading:

While I’ve been thinking about the Valleywag phenomenon lately, I got an up close and personal reminder on my drive home yesterday. I was driving 280 north and a Silver Mercedes SL 55 passed me. I’m a fan of that car (actually, I lust after it), so I paid attention. Then I noticed the license plate was missing and in its place was a bar code. Hey, I read about that on Valleywag – everyone was stealing Steve Jobs plates, so they put a bar code on instead. Was that Steve Jobs? Well traffic changed and I was able to pass him and it was indeed Steve Jobs. If it wasn’t for valleywag, I probably wouldn’t have taken a second look, but well, Nick Denton has turned me into a valley-star-stalker.

P.S. SL 55’s must be the standard issue for valley execs, at least 4 high level execs at Yahoo drive them. Maybe one day…

I watch the Today show nearly every day, and I saw you on the Today Show today. A coup I’m sure to get onto America’s #1 morning show being interviewed by Meredith Viera. You even brought your mom and sister in tow. So kudos to your PR team for getting that setup.

But it stopped there. Why? Valleyspeak. It was clear that your PR team coached you in how to talk to the press, you got your “key messages” across. You brushed off the Yahoo acquisition rumors with aplomb. But it was all in that doublespeak that you only hear here in the valley (hell, I speak that way too). This wasn’t the business press you were talking to, this was a mass consumer audience. They don’t care about technology, or the technical challenges, or the “focus on your users”.

They want to hear why they should care. You were sandwiched between a segment on plush toys for 6 year old girls and a martha stewart segment. You needed to talk about the fun things people do on facebook. Examples of chance encounters, long lost friends meeting, how a group got someone a job and another saved a life. You needed to talk about the profound impact that Facebook has had on you as a user. You needed to answer Meredith’s most important question “Why would I use Facebook”. She ended your segment saying, “well I still don’t know why I’d use this thing”.

That’s your PR rep’s fault. They should have prepped you. When Good Morning America calls you next week, make sure they do.

–scott

P.S. It is obviously easier for me to comment as a viewer and I know how hard it is to deal with consumer press. But Facebook has a real opportunity, just take it and run!

Google hasn’t had a great history digesting acquisitions (neither has my company) and I was concerned that Google would screw this up. Also, while I saw potential in MeasureMap, I didn’t think it met the expectations that they set for themselves.

Well, I am happy to have been wrong. The new Google Analytics is truly a case of 1+1 > 2. Jeffrey Veen and the whole Analytics + MeasureMap team really came together and created a beautiful, functional, and useful analytics package.

I’ve long used Mint on my site, but I’ve recently started using GA along side it and I am fast becoming a fan. There is tons of info, tons of ways to slice and dice but yet it feels incredibly simple. One issue (but this was there with Urchin) is that there are still too many features, but they have done an amazing job of hiding the complexity from the average joe (or Scott).

My favorites:

• Beautiful graphs with comparison features (compare this period with some other period of time)
• World map shows where your visitors come from
• Click on any data point to drill down (Feedburner stats does this well too)
• Navigation Summary shows entry points and where users clicked next – a complex concept well executed.

So, Google, and Jeffrey, I take back my doubt. Acquisitions are good for companies when they produce these kind of results. Now, lets hope for DoubleClick’s, and Aquantive’s and Right Media’s sake that this turns into a trend.

He runs Diet.com, a great URL and a community site targeted at–you guessed it–dieters. The site has lots of features, from diet blogs, to reviews of diet products, recipes and diet tracking tools.

The most interesting thing he shared however was how he approached his new video feature on his site. His staff produces little videos (like this week’s “Kitchen Raiders” which helps you cut bad foods out of your house). They then take these videos and post them on YouTube. THEN, they embed them on their own video page and their own homepage.

So what? Well, first they don’t have to deal with the mess of hosting their own videos. Second, by posting it on their homepage for their millions of users, all of their videos end up in the youtube “most watched” list for that day. It’s a great free marketing tool for them – they produce high quality content that people want, they show it to their own very interested audience, and their audience makes it popular on YouTube, which introduces them to lots more interested people. It’s creative and really simple. I like it.

Oh, and here’s that video. Remember no costco size bags of transfatty foods.

However, I always find it hard to decide which ones to go to (I’m not one of those perennial conference-goers). So far, I’m heading to:

• Web 2.0 (in April in SF)
• EconSM (in April in LA)

And I’ve been thinking about Gel in NYC. Any others? later in the year? Which are you going to?

Since I took my new job, I’ve really stopped writing and I want to fix that. I’ve got a lot of saved up blog posts in my head, I just need to get them out.

What gave me the kick in the pants today, was that Don Loeb blogged that Feedburner’s Site Stats are now live. It didn’t take me but a minute to get it set up on this blog. I had been using Measure Map and had been pretty pleased, but I kinda stopped looking at the stats. It was kinda cool to know them, but not earth shattering (unless Dave Winer linked to me).

So I’ll give Feedburner a try now. At first blush, it looks really clean & straightforward (like everything those guys do)…

So hack day is on and I definately felt that spirit in the air. After a day of amazing sessions about our APIs and UI framework, everyone gathered in URLs (our cafe) to have pizza, meet each other and start hacking. I met lots of interesting people and the place was swarming with press and media (I didn’t expect that much press). Then the “surprise” entertainment was on. Beck performed an amazing one hour set on Yahoo’s lawn. He was backed by his full band and marionette versions of each band member. It was an awesome show – beyond just a simple concert. To cap it off, Beck’s puppets made a little video on our campus to celebrate hack day – very funny.

This afternoon we’ll have the hack presentations, and I don’t think anyone knows what we’ll get, but I hope that spirit continues.

P.S. I took tons of pictures, but there were so many people with much better pictures, I picked this one as one of my favorites.

The first I ever heard about a hack day was from Ken and the Jotspot guys. They had a hack day to have some fun and work on something that wasn’t on their normal “to-do list”. It was a great idea to innovate and give the team a breather from the day-to-day. As most people know by now, Yahoo took up the idea and now we’re sharing it with the world.

I sat in the audience for this last internal hack day. Of course I was impressed with all the amazing ideas and hacks I saw. Of course I saw tons of hacks that I thought could be integrated into real products. Of course some of these ideas showed real promise and could translate into real business value. But, I was much more amazed at the feeling in the air.

One of the best things that Chad, Caterina and Leonard have created is a feeling that everyone’s ideas have a place and everyone’s work deserves to be shared. Hack Day is a forum to share your ideas with a large audience and in front of Yahoo execs (this hack day was judged by Jerry Yang, a few SVPs, Sue Decker our CFO and a few other rockstar Yahoos). You could tell that all the people in the room were stoked to be sharing their ideas. But people in the room were also stoked to be seeing other Yahoos work. Everyone was supportive of their peers and I think everyone went back to their day jobs better off for it. The HAck Day team is making every Yahoo more innovative.

Now, in just a few hours, we’re starting Open Hack Day. Hundreds of developers from all over are coming to camp out on Yahoo’s campus and to hack using Yahoo APIs from YDN. Just like our internal hack days, I expect to see lots of great hacks. But I’m most excited to see that feeling in the air. The day starts with sessions about how to use our APIs, then people get settled in, then awesome entertainment and the hacking begins. The presentations take place on Saturday afternoon and I look forward to seeing people from different companies (sometimes competitors of each other) creating that supportive space – that feeling in the air.

If you’ll be here, please come up to me and say hi, and happy hacking. Let’s make it a place where everyone gets to shine.

One of the perks of my new job is working with an amazing team of developers that live and work in Bangalore, India.

So, for the first time ever, I’ve traveled to Asia, I stopped in Singapore and I’m now in Bangalore.

Yahoo has a few offices in BLR (the one pictured is on MG Road) and there are lots and lots of people that work here. In fact, there are more Yahoos in Bangalore now than there were worldwide when I started with the company.

I’m learning a lot on this trip, building some great relationships and I’ve been inspired by the spirit of the folks here. Everyone here is excited, passionate and wanting to figure out how to get the best stuff done quickly. (especially the APG team here). And seeing different cultures firsthand is so much better than reading or being told about them.

I’ll post a little later about some of my key learnings about South East Asian markets…

As fate would have it, Jeff Weiner, SVP of Search at Yahoo! just spoke at PC Forum and gave the perfect quote: “Search is the tyranny of the Web master. The only people getting into search indices are those sophisticated enough to get into a search index–they only can generate relevancy by incoming links, and there are a number of people for whom that doesn’t apply.”.

For the last few months, I’ve been helping a small niche content/community site to get noticed in search engines. And Jeff’s statement is spot on. Search results today are largely (and sadly) ruled by people who know how to game the system. It is simply too hard for a new, but good quality, site to get noticed and the techniques that search engines use to combat the SEOs and sploggers work against the little guy.

During the process of getting this site up, I worked with them to do everything right: submitted site maps, got into Y! Directory, got a fair number of links from other sites/directories. And then we waited. And waited. And waited. And then I learned about the “Google Sandbox”. The “sandbox”–which Google officially denies–means that you will not show in the results of any popular/generic query for up to a year. Its been 9 months for this site, and it still doesn’t appear anywhere on popular searches on Google (not at all anywhere in the top 1000 results for relevant queries). Thankfully, it is getting good and relevant traction on Yahoo and MSN Search.

So who does appear on relevant queries? Well, the site in the #1 spot for most queries had keyword stuffed hyperlinks hidden on the page (white on white). The site that often appeared as #2 had two screen’s worth of ads before you scrolled all the way down to the content. And then there’s a ragtag bunch of semi-related sites. Now of course everyone thinks their site is the most relevant, but in this case, the site really is. The site that appears #1 most often is actually quite relevant and deserves its place, but they had to resort to Google trickery to get there. An honest, relevant site doesn’t seem to stand a chance.

In the end, I had to buy keywords on Google for this site. They’re paying about $140/month to get some attention. I guess that helps that google stock price, huh?

When I see all of this, its really clear that search has a long way to go. From a consumer perspective search is losing some of its usefulness as a way to find relevant info and from a small business perspective: forget it – unless you pay an SEO, you are not going to get noticed for a very, very long time. Small businesses need to focus elsewhere…

If you are there tonight, please come up and say hi.

One of my first PM jobs was at Reuters working on a system for doctor’s offices. I wanted to get a real feel of what a doctor and his/her staff go through on a daily basis and interviews & research weren’t cutting it. So, I took a week or so and went and sat in different doctors’ offices. I worked at the front desk alongside the staff and learned how utterly inefficient their day to day lives was. When you first visited, they had to call your insurance company to make sure your coverage was still valid, then if you got referred to a specialist, they had to call and wait on hold to get a verbal approval for the referral and find a doctor that was in your plan – and most doctors weren’t in more than a few plans. Then, after you left, they had to fill out tons of paperwork with each insurer offering a different form, different terms, different questions they needed answered. It was eye-opening to say the least and we ended up building an amazing solution that cut a lot of time out of these people’s days. The system was very well recieved.

Fast forward to today. At Yahoo! I have access to lots of survey research, customer feedback, blog posts, and focus groups. We also conduct “ethnographic research” where we visit people’s homes and follow them through their normal daily activities (some of which include the internet). And this research is truly fascinating. But it still isn’t enough.

So lately, I’ve been trying to get much closer to our customers. Actually, not closer, but I’ve been wanted to live in our customers shoes (like I did at Reuters).

Blogging here has been great for me to not only meet all of my blogging goals but it has also allowed me to get the true feel of what its like for a professional blogger to get started (too difficult still). It’s also got me to learn some of the intracacies of YPN. I’ve made $15.17 so far, and I’ve been literally incented along the way to pay close attention to ad relevance and give that feedback to the YPN team.

Lately, I’ve been spending time trying to get a site listed in search engines and ensure that its “search engine optimized”. I used to run the search team here, so you think I could do it in my sleep, but it is really frustrating to get your site found in Google, Yahoo and MSN. Tomorrow I’ll write about SEO and my thoughts there, but again, I have a HUGE appreciation for small business owners trying to do a good job and get found on search engines. I feel first-hand the exasperation of dealing with search engines and the temptation to spend huge $$ on SEOs who know how to game the system. All those years that I ran search, I never fully appreciated how those folks felt, now by going back to the fundamentals, and living the customer, I get it.

All of my training as a PM taught me not design products as if I am the customer. But no one ever taught me to actually try to become the customer. It’s an eye opening process and one that I think makes a better product and makes me a better product manager.

I was lucky enough to meet the team there and get a very early alpha account to use on this very blog. It’s a beautiful product that demos well. Nice visual design, seemingly simple dashboard and like I said, it demos well.

But for me, that’s where it stopped. I found it hard to really grok all the info that they surfaced and I simply stopped using it except for the occasional check in after Jeremy or Dave linked to me. They promised that they would make this data meaningful to bloggers, but from where I stand, I can’t see it. Om said it “sucks wind” – its really not bad, its just kinda “ok”.

Now, they are a part of Google. It’s times like this that I’d love to hear what the real story is. I can’t imagine Google bought them because of the app itself. It hasn’t even launched (so scaleability is probably an issue) and its so micro-focused on blogs that it seems too limited (I don’t think Google cares about Blogger enough to buy it a stats package).

I’ve also been a user of urchin (not google analytics) and while it wasn’t amazing, I found it to be useful and it seems like they knew what data & functions mattered to folks.

So, if I were Google, I’d be taking the smart folks that made measure map and pair them with the smart folks that made Urchin (um, Analytics, I mean). And I hope that Google would say “ok, neither of these products was great, can you guys come up with a brand new thingy that does the trick?”. 0.25+0.75=2?

Like a lot of things in the space, it’ll be fun to watch. The whole idea of acquisitions is that “together we can do better than we could do apart”, for Google’s sake lets hope so…

I walked through the work my team has been doing around RSS, gave a demo of the new Yahoo! Mail beta, and talked a little bit about where this might all be going in the future.

In my blog comments, Rafael Sidi asked me to post my slides online and I thought that those of you who couldn’t attend would like to check them out.

A few things to note:

• Slide #2 – “That’s who I am who are you?” – was a note to myself to ask the audience if they were publishers, marketers, tech industry folks or bloggers. The room was, surpisingly, pretty equally split amongst those types with the largest group being people who didn’t want to raise their hands.
• 2005 Moving RSS beyond the start page – Even I was wowed when I put all of our RSS related launches onto one slide. So many launches! More than one RSS launch each month of 2005.
• Overall, I filled in a lot of points with talking, so it’ll be hard to completely tell what I was saying, I don’t know if someone recorded it, but if you know tell me and I’ll post it here.
• Important URLs mentioned: http://whatsnew.mail.yahoo.com/ , http://alerts.yahoo.com/ , http://podcasts.yahoo.com/, http://publisher.yahoo.com/ , http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide

Download it here:

The conversation got lively when someone stated “well, maybe we shouldn’t try to market via RSS, leave it alone” (I’m badly paraphrasing). Marketers and tool manufacturers defended their take and in the process I learned a lot about where this industry may go as marketers come on board.

I think I picked up a few key things:

1. No index flag. We need a way to mark an RSS feed as “OK to aggregate, but don’t show in search results”. For publishers who output a different feed per user, you don’t want to see 100 different feeds that are basically the same thing.
2. Truly Personalized Feeds could be cool – if you could get your own updates from your bank (lets ignore security for just a sec) via RSS that would be compelling. I think the whole industry wants that, but he who executes for real will be a leader here.
3. Tracking A lot of the tool companies say that they want personalized feeds, but really want tracking. The ability to get granular stats on who is reading their content, so they want to tie a user on their site to the RSS. I think sites can get there using tried and true methods (cookies/beacons, etc) so I hope the industry can work to realize that they don’t need to do #2 to accomplish their goals.

Overall, I always like events where I can see things from a different perspective than my own and I’m glad people are talking about all of this early. I look forward to the next steps: actually getting to work to look more critically at this and at least do #1 to start. And for those looking for #3 above, I encourage you all to come together to think through this creatively and at the same time recognize when you are & when you are not doing #2.

UPDATE: Rok (the host of the event) has a much better writeup on his blog.

Fast forward to today, there are millions of people using RSS, companies are joining the RSS fray everyday and these conferences are usually packed with people.   Its gratifying to see this kind of growth and consumers are clearly benefiting from all the innovation that’s happening.

I’ll be giving a keynote on Wednesday.  As with any conference like this, I want to make sure I’m addressing the audience – be it publishers or industry types – so I’ll be paying close attention to the people in attendance tomorrow and the questions they raise.   Currently, I’m planning to walk through how we’ve gotten from those early days to where we are today, some successful examples of using RSS and where I think this might all be heading.

If you are attending, please be sure to drop by and say hello. 

If you have never used Yahoo! Alerts, its a service that allow you to get real-time updates sent to your mobile phone, email or Yahoo! Messenger with triggers you specify like: Stock prices go above/below a limit, your favorite sports team wins/loses a game, the snow at your favorite Ski resort is perfect, etc…

So it made a lot of sense to want this feature: “send me an alert whenever this RSS feed updates”.    And that’s what we launched yesterday.   It works with ANY RSS/Atom/RDF feed so that means you can get notified of pretty much whatever you want.

So there are lot of cool ways to use Feed Alerts, but I’ll share with you how I’ve been using the service (I’ve been testing it for about a month now):

• Blogs that update infrequently – I don’t like to clutter up My Yahoo! with feeds that don’t update too often, so I subscribe to an email alert for those feeds.   If that feed only updates once every few weeks, I’ll get it by email when it does.  
• Stuff I need to know right away – like a Craigslist search for something I’ve been hunting around for a while or today’s sale on Woot!.
• My own blog’s comment feed – ok so maybe I’m a little too new at this, but I love to know when I have comments, send it right to my phone please!

How will you use it?  Let me know in the comments. 

Also, since it was popular on the mail post, here are some screen shots, be sure to go check it out at http://alerts.yahoo.com/ …

Yahoo! Alerts Home Page
(see the Feed/Blog BETA option)

 The Signup Screen
(you can enter the feed URL, or pick from your MyY! choices, also note you can pick the delivery options like “as it happens” and email, messenger, mobile)

Yahoo! Messenger Alert

(for a Yahoo! News RSS feed)

Alert via Email
(this one is a daily digest of all updates from RotoWire’s RSS feed

So anyway, take a look. After a few days using it, I think you’ll find yourself moving some feeds out of your aggregator and into alerts.

Also, stay tuned, we’re working on an integration of the Add to My Yahoo button and alerts, so you can get your users to signup for alerts right from your site.

Enter Yahoo! Mail. Tonight we are launching a full post rss reader in the new Yahoo Mail beta. If you are in the beta, you’ll automatically get the new features.

RSS in mail makes perfect sense for a few reasons: 1) people already spend a lot of time in their Mail experience, why shouldn’t personally relevant content be there too 2) While you read RSS you are probably gonna want to forward good stuff you find 3) Hundreds of millions of users use Yahoo Mail, so if we want to reach the masses, we need to go where they are.

And, its cool to realize that we are the first major webmail service to offer an RSS reader integrated into the experience.

If you are in the beta check it out, if you are not yet I think they are planning on adding more users soon, so be sure that you are on the waiting list.

In the mean time though, I thought I’d share some screenshots of what it looks like.

The New Yahoo! Mail Interface – email view

The folder area on the new Yahoo Mail, showing the new RSS Feeds
(it uses the same subscriptions you’ve set up on My Yahoo! or if you don’t use My, you can add feeds here, also notice the little gleam next to a feed if there’s new content since you last checked)

A view of how Scripting News looks in the RSS reader
(notice the full posts, and notice how it realizes the first post is new and the others are marked as “Previously Viewed Posts” with a subtle grey color)

After clicking on an engadget post, I hit forward, and it forwards a post as an email, even uses my addressbook with autocomplete.

I can also drag and drop a post into one of my folders to save for later

We’ve been working on this for a long time, and its finally nice to share it with you. Overall, its another great step in bringing RSS to the masses. We already have a list of things we want to do next, but I can’t wait for the feedback to start coming in from the beta testers.

(BTW, it uses the same RSS backend as My Yahoo, so if you are already pinging us and if you feed is already in My Yahoo, it’ll work just fine in Mail.)

UPDATE: Be sure to read my post about the new Yahoo! Alerts RSS integration, which we also launched.