Funny Collaborative Filtering

Our family friend Morty L sent this along. It is an email he received from Amazon!

"We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors by Bernice Eisenstein have also purchased How to Raise a Jewish Dog by Rabbis of Boca Raton Theological Seminary. For this reason, you might like to know that How to Raise a Jewish Dog will be released on September 5, 2007. You can pre-order yours at a savings of $2.60 by following the link below."

I wonder if the dog puts on Tefillin?

In-Video Ads - How Do You Define Relevance?

Scott Carp has a thoughtful post over on his excellent Publishing 2.0 blog about Google's roll out of in-video ads on YouTube.

"The InVideo ad format is undoubtedly less annoying than pre-roll videos — and that’s a considerable achievement. But it’s nowhere near the kind of breakthrough that search advertising was.

Not being interruptive is the very LEAST that online advertising needs to do in order to thrive — what it really needs to do is be RELEVANT.

The beauty of search advertising is that the format and the relevancy of the ad are PERFECTLY aligned with that of the “editorial” content, through the miracle of search keywords.

That will surely be the case in some instances of InVideo ads, but in many if not most instances, the ads will have nothing to do with the editorial content — and the relevancy to any individual viewer, unlike keyword targeted search ads, will be hit or miss.

And there’s a BIG problem with low relevancy — advertisers only pay if someone views the ads."

I think the comparison to Ad Words and using the metric of contextual placement as in text ads might prove off base. It seems to me that much like contextual text ads superseded regular banners when Google crashed the party, a new form of advertising will supersede contextual ads in the video world. Current contextual ads as Scott points out are driven by keywords, or in other terms, the content on the page.

However, we need to remember that much of Youtube's growth was powered by MySpace and video embeds in personal pages and that is still where much video content is consumed. That itself implies a context beyond the content of the video. Moreover, that context is not understandable from within the video (this may be what Scott is getting at in paragraph 4 above). The context is a social one and relies on friending or recommendations of posters to their communities.

I think Scott is correct that contextual relevancy in video is much harder, i just wonder whether it is the context of the content as he seems to imply or the context of the interaction that will determine that relevance.

Compete.com Vs. Alexa

Continuing my posts on mini-research projects in social networking etc...I have been checking with a number of my companies over the last month and asking them to compare their internal statistics with compete.com. I can categorically say that Compete is way more accurate than Alexa, both absolutely and directionally. While they do not get the #s 100% right, it is close enough and perfect for charting trends. Alexa's correlation is pretty happenstance in my checking.

Web 3.0

I offered my own suggestions on what Web 3.0 in this post a couple of months back. Here is Eric Schmidt with his. you can Compare and contrast (thanks to Orli for grabbing the video from YouTube).

Sarbannes Oxley Turns 5

My good friend Shai over at Vintage Filings passed along this cute video on Sarbanes Oxley turning 5! Here's hoping SOX does not live to see its 6th birthday!