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Google's Sergey Brin gave a talk to students at Cal-Berkeley last October on "Search Engines, Technology and Business." The lecture is now available on Google Video.

[gv data="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=7137075178977335350&hl=en"][/gv]

This is one of those weeks where I've got more material than time.  So here are some quick thoughts on some things that have been floating around my browser this week.

(1) A new startup launched this week called Grand Central.  According to Life Hacker, Grand Central "lets you consolidate all of your phone numbers into one number, meaning someone can call you on your GrandCentral phone number and all of your phones (cell phone, work phone, home phone) will ring."  That's just sort of the starting point with this service too.  Sounds awesome.  Looking forward to giving it a try. 

(2) There is an interesting post on Forever Geek that debunks the Myspace claim to have 100 million users.  It puts the number of actual users at around 43 million.  Not sure about the methodology, but there is no doubt in my mind that that 100 million number is bogus.

(3) Saw an interesting post entitled 10 Things that will Make or Break Your Website.  Best advice comes in the first bullet: "EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program."

(4) The Wall Street Journal published a fascinating article on the email overload problem that afflicts most of us.  Great read for anyone that feels like a slave to their inbox most days. 

(5) Michael Kinsley wrote a great article for Time Magazine this week called Do Newspapers Have a Future?  Money quote: "Newspapers on paper are on the way out. Whether newspaper companies are on the way out too depends."  IMO, the key to survival is figuring out how to use the Internet properly.  We'll continue to beat that particular drum. 

(6) Mark Warner got a lot of attention for appearing in Second Life a few months back.  We wrote about it.  The appearance was short and he didn't take any quesitons from the audience, saying he would come back for a full townhall in late September/early October.  Did they ever schedule this?  I haven't heard a peep about it since the initial burst of coverage.

It's no secret that I think that Consumerist does a huge favor to the general public in pointing out what's fishy about the latest bridge on the market. Editor Ben Popken has now taken Consumerist readers into a conversation Edelman PR's Wal-Mart advocate Mike Krempasky attempted to have with Ben.  

If Ben is being entirely truthful and transparent, then the question that was posed to Editor Ben by Krempasky will make your stomach sink. According to Consumerist, Krempasky, representing both Edelman and Wal-Mart, asked, "What can we do to get you to stop writing about our companies?"

Sort of Godfather, no? (more…)

I understand the appeal of the big online social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, etc.) conceptually but have never really embraced them personally.  I just don't use them. 

Part of it is that I'm too old for most of them.  But mostly I find them  uninteresting. 

So I'm sort of surprised by my own interest in the social networking site Vox.   What makes Vox intriguing to me is that it isn't really a social networking site – it is a hybrid social networking site/ blogging platform.  Like Livejournal and MSN Spaces, the focus with Vox is on writing and sharing stuff (photos, videos, books) as opposed to creating some sort of oversized online persona.  It is refreshing.  So with that, here's a quick review of the service. (more…)

PoliticsOnline and World e-Gov Forum have announced this year's list of nominees who are competing for the title of Top Politics and Internet World Changer of 2006. I thought I'd just encourage you to cast a vote. I must admit that I don't know a lot of the nominees apart from what I've seen online, but I support the promotion of those who make it their mission to encourage civic engagement and participation in politics using the Internet as a major medium. The Internet represents a truly democratic venue for discussion (unless you think about all of the people who do not have access to the Internet and therefore are unable to participate) and the objectives of many of these nominees are pretty interesting.

The nominees are as follows*:

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Here's a riddle for you: What do the Internet and the real estate market have in common? 

Answer: they're both eking all they can out of "Web 2.0" hysteria. 

Recently, we've written many entries explaining the Web 2.0 craze and how it has affected everything from social groups to newspapers to politics.  What we haven't discussed yet is how the Web is affecting the US real estate market and the way everyday people buy their homes.

As in many other industries, the Web is helping home buyers and sellers alike cut out the filter of the media and other top-down information and marketing services.  With the emergence of real estate websites and blogs, home buyers and sellers can throw away the classified and real estate sections of their newspapers.  They can forget the phone number of the local real estate agent.  And most of all, they can take an active role in finding the home of their dreams by themselves. 

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Anyone conducting keyword ad campaigns on sites like Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Engine Marketing should check out these two recent articles on click fraud:

• Click Fraud is Growing on the Web – New York Times
• Click Fraud: The Dark Side of Online Advertising – Business Week

Via Rough Type and Micro Persuasion.

The last year has seen the rise of social news sites that give users editorial control of the sites' homepage by voting on their favorite stories.   Users submit stories which are then voted on by other users, with the most popular stories appearing most prominently on the sites.  The key to this concept is users spending time reading through submissions to find the most compelling stories.  The three most prominent social news sites that I know of are Digg, Reddit and Netscape.   

Recently, Erin's rant about Facebook was submitted to Digg by a random Digg user.  As an experiment (and in an effort to promote Erin's post), I then submitted the same story to Reddit and Netscape as well just to see what would happen. 

Erin's post failed to make it to the homepage of any of the three sites.  But what I found interesting was the number of people who visited our blog based on the submissions and the number of votes the story received on each site (I voted for each story myself).  Below is a breakdown:

Digg

• 13 diggs
• 20 visitors

Reddit

• 3 points
• 128 visitors

Netscape

• 1 vote
• 1 visitor

These results surprised me.  I was surprised that the Reddit submission produced more visitors than Digg even though Digg is the 800 pound guerilla in this site genre (see chart).  I was surprised by the lack of visitors from the Netscape submission.  Anyway, here's what I learned/think I learned: (more…)