12 posts tagged “youtube”
I'm rapidly realising that that this is becoming a YouTube Blog, but I can't help myself ;-)
Human Tetris (absolutely freakin' awesome!)
What will we do without her?
Make sure you read the ticker too...
That's the Dead Dancing Parrot Sketch...
Yup, more YouTube (sorry!)...
Love the "You looked better on MySpace" t-shirt ;-)
Hello, my name is Stuart, and I am a YouTube-aholic...
Nah, not really... Contrary to public belief I do not spend my days surfing YouTube - I just find a lot of YouTube stuff hanging around out there on other blogs (I currently follow some 250 feeds on my homepage - that's almost as many as Philippa reads, honestly) and so sometimes think that your lives would be unmistakably brightened by the true gems that I bring to you...
After all, who couldn't forget the majesty of the acapella Facebook choir, the Get a Mac ads, the NicoBreeze smoke freshner and so on... Aghh, perhaps on reflection, that isn't such a life-affirming and majestic list! Sorry...
So, apart from spending my seconds minutes hours on YouTube, what have I been up to these past months?
Well, I've been kinda busy at work - having started a new job at a new company (Morpheus) back in June, we've been slaving away producing a brand new intranet site for a famous UK-based electrical retailer which has already been nominated for an award, which is great news. That site has just gone live this morning (hence my early start), so there are currently plenty of folks crossing their fingers and waiting until the users come in and start hitting the system for real. Not me, I know it will be fine... Anyway, I am looking forward (as I am sure the rest of the family are) to the end of the project so I can return to a more normal workload and focus more on the selling and "thought leadership" side of things rather than the day-to-day customer-paid work (though of course this is vital too).
The weekends have been pretty full too recently, with both the boys having football training and matches most weekends. I've had the pleasure of getting involved in training with Callum's U11s, playing in a match most Saturdays and running the odd small training session. It has been great fun and has done wonders for my fitness. Both the boys are improving apace, and Callum in particular has loved the feeling of success when the team plays well. However, last Sunday's match was played in an absolute deluge and bitterly cold wind, so I think we need to go buy some thermals!
As many of you are aware, the kitchen has been the DIY project of the quarter, and we are pretty much done with the tiling nearing completion, the cupboards on with handles, and the clutter utensils gradually returning... Life is getting back to normal!
So all in all, life is good, fun and very very busy as ever. Despite appearances, we do surface from our laptops now and then, and are feeling very much at home in the Cotswolds - this is where we're meant to be...
... but just a little scary for folks like me that get paid for putting in infrastructure and solutions.
Force.com (and SaaS gernerally) isn't completely there yet - things like browser security are still an issue - but it is getting better all the time.
Via vowe.net.
OK, now it's beginning to make sense...
Google is undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a "Universal Search" system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.
The new system officially rolls out today for anyone using Google.com and searching in English. Not everyone will see it at first, but over the course of the next several days, Universal Search should be more, well, universal. A new navigational interface has also been unveiled for Google and is covered more in the companion piece to this article, Google's New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide.
The move potentially should be a huge boon for searchers, while search marketers who have paid attention to the importance of specialized or vertical search will see new opportunities. To fully explain the importance to both groups, I'm going to work step-by-step through the concept of vertical search engines, how they're often ignored by searchers and search marketers alike, then how Google is going to make this content more visible through Universal Search.
Or as Robert Scoble puts it:
Ahh, now you all understand what I meant when I said YouTube is a moat, not a revenue generator. By putting YouTube results into Google’s main engine Google ensures it will have better searches than Yahoo and Microsoft (who were, truth be told, getting damn close to matching Google’s quality). And it does it in a way that Yahoo and Microsoft will not be willing to match. Seriously, can you see an executive at Microsoft advocating putting YouTube videos into Microsoft’s search results? I can’t. That’d be the equivilent of sending traffic to a competitor. It’d be what I advocate at this point, but that explains why I am a stupid blogger and not some multi-millionaire executive.
So it wasn't ever going to be about monetizing the YouTube service - instead by linking Google's already leading search services with the content that is on YouTube (and Google Video), Google can push their new Universal Search facilities way way beyond those of its competitors.
Robert also notes:
I love Google’s strategy. It continues to mess with Microsoft’s strategy. Microsoft still treats each team as something that must make money. Google doesn’t do that. They didn’t care one bit that YouTube didn’t have any revenues. They knew that there’s other ways to make money off of YouTube than to force YouTube to monetize on its own.
That is also a lesson that IBM needs to learn - not every business unit or product can (or should) necessarily be revenue-generatoring. Instead, by true collaboration and innovation between disparate teams new products, solutions and technologies can be developed that are truely unique in the marketplace.
In many ways, the Lotus Connections product is a perfect example of how software tools can harness this kind of next-generation cross-organisation collaboration.
