Yahoo Launches Womens Web Site "Shine"

Yahoo has launched a web site called Shine targeted at women between ages 25 and 54. The site brings together content from other smaller sections of Yahoo, with original content and syndication deals with the likes of Conde Nast, Hearst, Rodale, Time Inc and others. The content will be focused in nine specific categories: Fashion & Beauty, Food, Healthy Living, Work & Money, Love and Relationships, Parenting, At Home, Entertainment & Culture, and Astrology.

Yahoo reports 40 million women come to the their web site each month and Shine presents an opportunity to serve targeted content that is of interest to women and presents a lucrative opportunity for advertisers looking to connect with women.

Shine competes with site like of iVillage, Glam Media and Sugar Publishing among others.

Chinese Social Network Printing Money

While US social networks are waiting on advertisers to shifting their ad spending their way. Tencent, a Chinese internet portal which operates QQ.com is not banking on advertising. The company reported revenues of $523 million and an operating profit of $224 million. About 60% of the revenue came from services like games, virtual currency called QQ coin (which is fake currency paid for with real money), an additional 21% came from mobile services like ringtones and only 13% came from online advertising. QQ.com is reported to have over 300 million active accounts. Yes you heard that right. That is 8 times the size of Facebook or the same size as the US population.

Facebook on the other hand posted revenues of $150 million in revenue for 2007. The company has raised over $400 million and there is growing nervousness over its valuation and its ability to monetize its user base. Bebo, which was purchased by AOL for $850 million had revenues of just $5 million. MySpace purchased by News Corp. for $560 million is projected to haul in $1 billion this year.

Who's Spending On Social Networks?

US online social network ad spending is predicted to near $1.6 billion this year according to a survey by eMarketer. The figure includes all forms of advertising appearing on social network sites, including branded campaigns as well as search, video, local advertising and ads delivered via ad networks. According to the survey 29% planned to spend over $2 million, 11% planned to spend between $1 - $2 million, 26% planned to spend up to $1 million and 34% planned to spend less than $300,000.

Breakdown of Online Social Network Planned Marketing Spend by Marketers and Marketing Agencies - March 2008

Spending Amount               Percentage
$2,000,000 and over              29%
$1,000,000 - $2,000,000          11%
$300,000 - $999,999              26%
$300,000 and less                34%

"At those amounts, social network spending may still be categorized as experimental for many marketers. As in many other developing advertising markets, much of the spending on social networks is driven by leading-edge marketers who are willing to take risks," said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer.

Important News Will Not Find You

If the news is important, will it find you?

Two normally insightful web watchers - Matt Ingram who writes for the Toronto Globe and Mail and his own techology blog, and Mark Cuban who writes for the heck of it after making a billion or so during web bubble number one - suggest that the news will find them.

They are wrong, and this line of thought is both foolish and dangerous.

The notion is that in our globally networked and highly interconnected 24/7 information environment important items won't just drop off of the radar - rather these "need to know" news items will find their way to a reasonably alert person via emailings from friends, twitters or Facebook contacts, blog aggregation, or other methods. Matt and Mark think that just because they have broadband to the house and they've got some good social networking going on they are protected from ignorance. But they are not.

As much as we should appreciate the power the internet brings to the information table, it is imperative now more than ever that we identify the limits of that power. It would take a novel to illustrate all the examples of how our new information environment can distort and misdirect our short attention spans to the wrong stuff, but the ADD version of the story is that while the internet does a good job of helping us find specific information once we take the time to research a topic, the internet also leads to some very undesirable conditions with respect to news:

One challenge is the echo chamber effect. Aggregation sites like Google News, Technorati and TechMeme use various algorithms to determine how much "buzz" a news story has. This in turn lifts the most relevant sites on the topic to the top of the heap, which in turn creates stories based on that initial buzz. This feedback loop tends to create an over-examination of the buzz topic and ignore deeper, more complex issues that are hard to write about.

Another far more important challenge is our human and social tendency to interact with trivial but interesting news rather than heavy, important news. You can only view so much material per day, and if your social network is buzzing about the latest gadget or latest scandal you are more likely to encounter that news than an item about the ongoing genocide in Darfur, or the fact that expanding malaria programs and advances in oral rehydration therapy in the third world could save several thousand children per day. The latter are significant and changing items that only rarely make the news cut.

Our interest in the trivial over the substantive creates a commercial challenge as well. Most online news now has a very strong commercial component and people are more likely to bring pageviews to Britney Spears head shaving incident than a report on the effectiveness of famine relief programs in Africa. I'm not blaming the internet for our ignorance, but I'm not going to credit it with bringing us much enlightenment either.

My point is that simply having our new and massive information gathering capability by no means guarantees we'll have the wisdom to pay attention to what really matters.

The internet has not let us off the hook by any means.

Important news will not find you.

Google And The Enterprise

Google has done an amazing job of capturing the imagination, and more importantly the search queries, of hundreds of millions of web surfers. Google has also turned that attention into a huge source of revenues with which they have built one of the world's great technology companies.

But if former Microsoft employee and veteran search watcher Robert Scoble is correct is his assessment which is the same as many other analysts, Google is now beginning a fairly aggressive push to go after the enterprise market - a market dominated by Microsoft products. Scoble thinks Google CEO Eric Schmidt is basically on a five year plan to take over from Microsoft as the enterprise software leader.

Google's strategy to take over the corporate enterprise space is intriguing because it is based on the idea of providing high quality, well engineered software along with a massive cloud computing network at little or no cost to companies. Although there are some small charges for a handful of Google applications most Google applications - such custom search, gmail, Google spreadsheets and documents, and blogging tools - are free for the taking. All of these can easily be scaled up and adapted to many enterprise computing tasks such as document collaboration.

The Power Of "I Don't Know"

How often do you answer important questions with "I don't know"?

Over at Red Eye VC Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital and the founder of the Half.com book selling franchise (which he sold to Ebay for $350,000,000), suggests that startups and entrepreneurs should recognize that they won't have the answer to every question and they certainly should not try to pretend they do.

Although Kopelman's point is more about establishing credibility than about the practical value of saying "I don't know", I think this approach should extend to many aspects business life whether you are in startup or large corporate environments.

I think we tend to learn the most when we are intellectually vulnerable - when we really don't know much about a topic and admit that to an "expert" with a plea to enlighten us. This attitude can be a challenge, especially at conferences or meetings where you are surrounded by bright and competitive people who may even want to "eat your lunch". However on balance I think openness and transparency lead to the best idea exchanges, and establish the personal and professional credibility that leads to quality business relationships.

UK Judge: Facebook Friends Are Not Real Friends

A judge in the UK has "settled" what many of us have wondered for some time - are Facebook friends real friends, even though you often don't really know the person?

No, said the judge in a case where a woman argued that she was being harrassed by her ex-boyfriend's friend requests on Facebook.

The Syndey Morning Herald noted:

... the magistrate accepted his argument that the contact was highly innocuous because being "Facebook friends" could not be defined as "friendship in the traditional sense".

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

The best Facebook advice I had was from Robert Scoble who suggested to me some time ago that a friend on a social networking site was whatever you wanted them to be. I loosened up my approval and invite process thanks to that invite and it has led to some excellent contacts I might not have made if I'd waited to actually meet all those "Friends" at a conference.

Several Major Websites Affected By Major IFrame Attack

A major internet hack attack is underway and has infected approximately a million web pages, many on very prominent websites like WalMart and USA Today.

Bulgarian security specialist Dancho Danchev reported on this problem about two weeks ago but it appears the attack is continuing and infecting more major websites, redirecting traffic in a complex way to a Russian system that is known for hosting criminal activity in the past.

Danchev says the following sites *may still be infected* with the poison IFrame that will redirect to malware sites:

USAToday.com, ABCNews.com, News.com, Target.com, Packard Bell.com, Walmart.com, Rediff.com, MiamiHerald.com, Bloomingdales.com, PatentStorm.us, WebShots.com, Sears.com, Forbes.com, Ugo.com, Bartleby.com, Linkedwords.com, Circuitcity.com, Allwords.com, Blogdigger.com, Epinions.com, Buyersindex.com, Jcpenney.com, Nakido.com, Uvm.edu, hobbes.nmsu.edu, jurist.law.pitt.edu, boisestate.edu.

Here is Infoworld's simpler and more readable account of what is going on with the IFrame attack, which in simple terms is a tactic where search queries at a website create new content that is able to redirect the user from a legitimate site to a bogus site that in turn may install malware or other malicious software on the users computer.

Does Your Phone Know Where You Are?

Many phones now come equipped with the ability to find their location pretty much anywhere in the country using one of two common geolocation methods. The first is to triangulate off of pings on cell towers - using the phone network itself to figure out where the phone is in relation to various towers.

The second method is for the device to detect a wireless signals and send this back to the network computer which compares these to the signal's "IP and Mac addresses" and then uses a database of these locations to get an approximate location. Although most phones are not activated to do this the technology is here now and it's only a matter of time before you'll be able to locate your friends to within meters of their actual location.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on this trend.

Practical joke uses aside, this technology is very powerful in social applications where, for example, a Facebook profile could include the exact location of your travelling friends. Another exciting application of geolocation in devices will be cameras that tag the picture with the location automatically, making Flickr, Picasa, and other photo sharing websites much more robust as this will allow mapping photos to their locations around the world.

A major startup getting a major capital injection and lots of positive buzz is Loopt, which offers a great user interface with Dodgeball like capabilities for interacting with friends. However, at $4 per month I wonder if Loopt may have trouble gaining much traction as free offerings come on board quickly in the mobile space. $4 per month is a tiny fee, but people are increasingly sensitive to the nickel and diming of the mobile space. Google is likely to respond aggressively this fall with ad-supported mobile options and I think the "free services" model is very likely to prevail in location based services.

Is Word of Mouth the Great Local Search Disruptor?

Was reading this morning a great analysis by Mathew Ingram about a New York Times article describing the way "young people" get/read their political news. It's clearly more and more about word of mouth and your social graph.

As Mathew says: "It’s not that there is anything earth-shatteringly new in the piece, mind you. But I think it does a great job of describing how digital “word of mouth” — in other words, social networking of all kinds including Twitter, IM, Facebook and so on — has become a dominant means of news delivery for young people in a way that I’m not sure old geezers like myself quite grasp, no matter how often people describe it"

The Times sums it up: "In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one. (...) In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth."

What it means: I remember when I joined Yellow Pages Group in 1999 (called Bell ActiMedia at the time), old-timers used to tell me that the biggest "competitor" to directory publishers wasn't other directory publishers (or Google or other online directories), it was word of mouth. People have always asked their friends for recommendations and it has always represented a large volume of local search "queries".

Admittedly, news and local search are not totally the same. Local search information is usually more of a pull (i.e. someone looking for a product/service) than a push (i.e. someone broadcasting information about a new merchant they found). It's also more "evergreen" than news, i.e. unless you're a total local merchant junkie, you don't need to learn in a timely fashion about a new restaurant opening in your neighborhood. But there's the seed out there of future consumer behavior which could create a great disruption effect on local search. Who knows? It might become valuable to broadcast information about your favorite local merchants. As I estimated in this blog post, there's potentially 7 more times online local conversations than online directories searches currently. Anyone who successfully harness these conversations will create very valuable local search inventory.

Look How Rich and Thin We Are - The State of the RIA Market

I spoke yesterday with Michael Cote of Redmonk and Ryan Stewart of Adobe (the RIA blog is here, on ZDNet here podcast is here). What follows are some of the highlights of our discussion on the state of the RIA market.

Today, there are two ways to build your first Web 2.0 application:

1. Buy $300 worth of O'Reilly books and kiss the next few weekends goodbye


2. Download WaveMaker and follow the 15 minute tutorial

For anybody but the most hardcore or masochistic tech-heads, this seems like a no-brainer decision.

If Web 2.0 is about putting more power into the hands of end users, that message hasn't hit the Ajax world yet. In general, Rich Internet Applications toolkits from Dojo to Flex are well beyond the reach of anything but the most sophisticated developers (not that I am a particular fan of Flex).

WaveMaker is focused on lowering the price of admission for Web 2.0 application development. WaveMaker provides an easy on ramp to building web applications, allowing non-expert developers to build rich internet AJAX applications

How complicated an application can you build with a visual Ajax tool? Well, we built the WaveMaker studio using WaveMaker, so you can build a very complex application indeed using visual Ajax tools!

What kinds of applications are best for a visual Ajax tool like WaveMaker? We see our community building three kinds of applications:

1. Rich Internet Application prototyping. Business analysts


2. Rapid Application Development using database driven forms generation


3. Face of SOA applications. Assemble rich internet applications by combining web services and data services.

WaveMaker is the PowerBuilder for Web 2.0 - we make it easy for large community of people to get benefits of rich internet applications.

As usual, the bogeyman for all this Rich Internet goodness is Microsoft. The current fragmentation of the Ajax market and related squabbling between toolkits fanboys makes Microsoft's Silverlight solution a much simpler choice for developers.

More importantly, before the introduction of WaveMaker's visual Ajax studio, Microsoft's visual studio was winning over the novice developers by default. It's time for the open source world to provide a compelling and CIO-safe alternative to Silverlight and WaveMaker is just the company to do it!

Cybersquatter Problems? Dial WIPO at the United Nations

The United Nation's World Intellectual Property Organization had a total of 2,156 complaints alleging "abusive registration of trademarks on the Internet" in 2007, a number 18% higher than in the previous year.

According to Reuters the WIPO reported that the disputes included a diverse list of complainants including:

Airbus's A380 jet, the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Harvard Business School, Lance Armstrong's Livestrong foundation, talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, and television show The Simpsons.

According to the percentages given by Reuters approximately 540 of the cases were settled without a WIPO decision. In about 1375 cases WIPO transferred the domain names to the complainant, and in about 243 cases the panel ordered no change of the site registration.

TorrentSpy, Copyright, Sex, Lies, and Videotape

Over at TechDirt Mike Masnick is reporting on the closure of TorrentSpy after an adverse court ruling made the site increasingly non-viable as a file sharing community.

Masnick notes that: The saga between TorrentSpy and MPAA will certainly be declared a "win" (if not a "significant blow") by the MPAA, but it's really more of a sad statement on the way the entertainment industry goes about its business. He also suggests that the TorrentSpy closure has little to do with the complex copyright issues, many of which remain unresolved or even undefined with respect to file sharing websites.



Issues in the TorrentSpy court case and business model are representative of one of the great ironies of the evolving online landscape. As the success of YouTube and Myspace and others clearly indicate, websites are generally rewarded for creating a lot of online activity even if this activity includes a lot of copyrighted material. However it appears that the recording and film industries are going to fight file sharing sites far more aggressively than other social networking environments, and given current copyright law they are likely to continue to win the battles until the laws are changed to reflect the rapidly changing online conditions of file sharing.

Will You Listen To Your Apple iPod If It Is Saying You Are Overweight?

A series of patents filed by Apple Computer today, and uncovered by Apple Insider, suggest that Apple is working on enhancements to the iPod to make is a "lifestyle" companion. Based on the patents Apple appears to be working on ways to have the iPod monitor the health and exercise of the user via new programming and new peripheral monitoring devices that may attach to the body or use motion detection to keep track of walking and other exercise routines.

Although lifestyle contraptions are nothing new, Apple appears to have some clever social networking ideas up it's virtual sleeve as well. For example one module will allow users to challenge others to competitions:

"A rewards system of the present invention also can permit a user to challenge one or more users to a competition. Based on data about the competitors' activities and user-defined allocation parameters, the rewards system can automatically distribute rewards to the user account(s) of victorious competitor(s)."

This social networking aspect of the new Apple system could be a milestone in using online social networking for health purposes, though it remains to be seen if building online health relationships will really lead most to health and happiness.

Adobe Photoshop Express Free and Online

Adobe launched today the public beta of it long anticipated Adobe® Photoshop® Express. The free, online version of the popular photo editing software is now available on the web. Express will allow users to store up to 2 gigs of images online for free, make edits online, share photos, and up- and download photos from social networking sites.

Photoshop is a desktop software. What this SaaS-y move signals is a realization on the part of Adobe of the power of the Web's penchant for free, anytime/anywhere access versus the portability limitations of pricey software tied to a single computer. Another driver might be that many photo sharing sites already offer similar image editing capabilites. The online version of Photoshop will not have the full feature set of the traditional offline version. Will this cannibalize their desktop version? Not likely as they are targeted to different audiences - Express is to more the casual, connected end-user and Photoshop to the more serious professional. The web-based version is necessary for the company to keep up and evolve the software as well as another marketing opportunity and medium to exploit.

World of Warcraft Lawsuit: No Bots Allowed!

In an ironic virtual world twist the makers of one of the world's most popular and lucrative massively multiplayer games, World of Warcraft, are suing a programmer for creating a "bot" that automates many game playing skills.

Issues like this will become more common as more time and money flow into the virtual world, and it is not clear how courts will interpret old 'static media' rules within the context of the many supercharged, dynamic, and very financially lucrative online environments.

Dan reports at CNET

Politics - Viral Video Style

Earlier this week Daya Baran discussed the amazing difference in the online advertising strategies of the Clinton and Obama campaigns, with Obama spending one million dollars on Google advertising in February, Clinton a paltry $67,000

Today, Brian Stelter at the New York Times is noting another example of how "tuned in" the Obama campaign appears to be to social media. In the this article Stelter follows the success of a video posted online of an Obama speech that got marginal mainstream coverage, but was a huge online success as it was passed along, linked to, and viewed by millions of mostly young voters. He makes this important observation about the impact of social media:

In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth.

Although the internet has always been more about people than about technology, the new simplicity and ubiquity of social networking tools is allowing everybody to participate where in the fairly recent past only a relative handful of the technologically adept or adventurous dared to actively engage with others online. This flood of new online socializers has led to the launch of hundreds of companies - many of which are likely to fail, but some of which have already brought untold riches to the creators.

Obama's campaign immediately recognized and leveraged the power of the new media where it is not clear yet that the Clinton campaign really understands this social networking aspect of the political landscape. Perhaps Clinton thinks that because the demographic match is not as tight as with Obama's younger crowd their marketing money is better spent offline, but this decision to ignore the legions of voters who socialize online may come at a very high cost.

Google Advertising: A Leap Year Problem Is Just The Beginning

Comscore will soon release their report of Google advertising activity for February and Silicon Alley Insider says they already have the numbers that show Google with 515 million US paid clicks in February, up 3% year over year. Unfortunately for Google a gain of only 3% is not very impressive on the surface and is also somewhat misleading because we had 29 days in February this year, which means that ad clicks at Google were flat on a year to year comparison.

The market did not take this click report very well, and Google has fallen over 3% in after hours trading, though tomorrow's trades will tell the full tale of how this information will be incorporated into Google's share price which will open at about $444 tomorrow due to the after hours trading corrections to the close today at $458. This is not as low as the $412 Google has traded at recently but well off Google's 52 week high of $747.

Lacking from these reports however are the revenues obtained from these clicks. Better optimization can yield higher revenues from the same number of clicks, and major changes recently were implemented by Google, effectively elimating many ads that Google felt did not meet their new "quality scores" which reflected higher advertising standards. Thus it is possible that this new approach could actually lead to a "better than expected" revenue outcome for Q1 without more clicks. That said, if the advertising market as a whole is flattening out, Google will be very hard pressed to continue their amazing revenue growth. It is not clear if the current stock price on GOOG fully reflects the pessimism many analysts have expressed about online advertising in the next few years.

CNET Cuts 120 Jobs During Restructuring

CNET will cut 120 jobs soon according to an internal memo obtained by PaidContent. In perhaps a testimony to many of the challenges facing CNET they did not even get the privilege of breaking their own big news today. CNET was effectively scooped on the very story it has been writing for some time.

CNET remains one of the internet's top news websites, and has been one of technologies most recognizable and respected brands for many years, and continues to maintain the high respect of the technology community. Their technology writing and analysis is recognized as some of the best in the business and CNETs reputation for editorial and quality control is unsurpassed in the industry.

Yet investors are worried because CNET has seen significant earnings declines in the past year. Zacks analysis suggests a modest profit downturn in the coming year.

A key challenge for CNET as well as other media outlets with online divisions is that writers cost money. Good writers, collectively, cost a lot of money. Blogging and the social media revolution have led to an online environment that creates a tidal wave of quality tech-focused content every day at very low average cost per article.

Also, although online news remains fairly current, it simply cannot always compete with the 24/7/365 blogging community that is posting (and increasingly scooping) CNET and other media outlets when technology news breaks.

Editorial standards force CNET to delay where bloggers and online journals will report first and ask questions later. The practice is questionable from a journalism point of view, but usually it is just fine for advertisers and certainly helps with traffic generation as the early reports often garner the most page views.

Even after the layoffs, it is likely that management will continue to place pressure on the company to cut costs and increase monetization for content.

CNET Linkage:
JANA Board Fight: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080107/20080107005660.html?.v=1
Zacks YHOO summary:http://biz.yahoo.com/zacks/080222/11619.html?.v=1

Barack Spends $1 Million On Google

Barack Obama's campaign spent $1 million on Google for the month of February 2008 versus $67,000 for Hillary Clinton, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

Barack's also outspent Clinton on social networking sites and other web properties. Barack spent more on new media than Clinton who spent heavily on old media. Barack raised $45 million online in February versus $30 million for Clinton. Here is a break down of their media related expenditure for 2008 up to today from the best available public sources.

Spending Category        Barack Obama       Hillary Clinton
Google                     $1,000,000               $67,000
Yahoo Web Ads                 $99,341                $9,186
Yahoo Search Ads              $58,000                    $0
Facebook                       $4,900                    $0
Web Consultants               $93,162                    $0
Ad Consultant                     n/a              $997,000
Media Consultant                  n/a            $2,540,000

Social Media Application Smackdown

This excellent article over at Internet Duct Tape has reviewed data from the explosively popular social sharing application Friendfeed to determine the most popular Social Media applications. Although this Friendfeed sample has some challenges this is probably a great snapshot of social media application use among many early adopters in the US technology crowd, and thus offers a lot of insight into what is hot and what is not in terms of social media:

Two interesting findings:

90% of the Friend Feed participation comes from the top 8 services (Twitter, Blog, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, YouTube, StumbleUpon). 46% of that comes from Twitter. It’s not surprising that Twitter leads the pack, because the nature of the service makes it easy to update many times a day.

The bottom 12 services (not include the ones added this week) can’t even manage to scrape 1% of the total between them (Pandora, Ma.gnolia, Upcoming, Picasa, iLike, Google Shared, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Furl, Yelp, Zooomr, SmugMug).

The author suggests that the maximum number of social media applications a person will use is about six, and that the consolidation of social applications provided by Friendfeed make it a very powerful application.

I'd suggest we are still in a very transitory mode with social media, where the holy grail has yet to be found that will provide simple, broad, fast, and efficient social and data networking across almost all applications and hardware platforms.

Personal Blogs, Corporate Lawsuits

Cisco is facing a lawsuit after an employee - who happend to be in charge of Cisco's Intellectual Property Division - criticized other companies on his personal blog. The companies that came under fire are now suing the company, claiming the employee should have disclosed his Cisco affiliation.

Anne at CNET wonders today if a new spate of blog lawsuits may be coming as employees are increasingly given, and taking, the freedom to discuss company issues. My guess is that companies have little to worry about. Several prominent bloggers have been talking about their companies for years with few detrimental effects and many positive ones. Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo has both complimented and criticized Yahoo many times in his long blogging career.

Rather than hurting the company this level of transparency arguably helps with credibility and gives readers the kind of "reality check" that official corporate blogs cannot provide. Other prominent personal bloggers who became something of the de-facto company bloggers are Matt Cutts at Google and Jeff Barr of Amazon, though more recently the companies have established their own blogs, Google on a very large number of Google related topics.

Corporate blogging advocate Robert Scoble in his book with Shel Israel called "Naked Conversations", argues that companies should encourage personal blogging as well as establish corporate blogs as part of their media strategy to engage with customers on a more personal and more detailed level than simple advertising will provide. I think this is the best advice for the long term, and that lawsuits will be few and far between.

Stanford Website Redesign Coming June'08

Stanford University is working on the redesign of their website. The project which started last Nov 15 will take 7 months with an expected launch date of June 15 '08. Codenamed "Project 8180" which refers to the total acreage of the Stanford campus, the redesign will be the third of the site since its inception. The site has not undergone a redesign in about 5 years.

The goals of the redesign are to create a more consistent and updated look and feel across Stanford sites, focus the global navigation by decreasing the number of menu items from 8 to 5, to surface and provide a more holistic view of what the university has to offer, and to better market it. What is interesting to note are the following:
-the page has a lot more content
-it is now more of a portal or gateway page
-front and foremost use of rich media i.e. videos (very web 2.0-esque)
-use of lots of imagery
-timely and current news section
-multiple rss feed subscriptions (very web 2.0-esque)
-jump links to the most popular content areas
-what looks like in-page quick links versus a link to another page (very web 2.0-esque)
-events calendars
-scrollable in-page view of other stanford sites (very web 2.0-esque)
-international program section surfaced

MOCKUP OF REDESIGN:

Video Ads Appearing On Google Homepage

Google has finally figured out a way to pay for the YouTube acquisition. Video ads, have started appearing on Google's search results page according to a report from Digital Inspiration. Video ads from AT&T appeared on the Google search page for the keyword “phone” - the video clip remains hidden until you click the “Watch Commercial” link. You then get to see the video in a neat drop-down video player. Google is possibly charging higher rates for the video ads since it is served only on-demand when requested by the user. Though these video ads appear with other CPC ads on Google search results, the advertiser will pay when users click to see the video, even if they never click through to the advertiser’s site.