Toluu

Jochem Prins

about search, Web2.0 and things I like

Leaving ilseAugust 31 2008

After 4,5 years at ilse media I have decided to leave the company and start with a new challenge. To be honest, it took me quite some time to make this decision. I’ve always loved working at ilse and I will definitively miss the atmosphere and my collegues around there. Nevertheless, I feel it’s time for a change. A short while ago, I read a blogpost by Charlene Li about the best career advice she ever got. She describes the various phases you go through while you’re on a job. Basically, her advice is to switch jobs every 18 months, be it within your current company or to another:

At a career management course for HBS alumni, I learned that a person typically gets sick of a job after 18 months. This is a natural cycle, as you go through the excitement of learning a new job, become expert at it, and then gradually, it gets routine. So the advice I got was to plan for job obsolescence every 18 months. This didn’t mean that I had to leave the company and go to a new place – it had more to do with redefining my current job first to incorporate new challenges.

I reflected this on my own situation and came to the conclusion that I indeed arrived in the phase were a lot of things become a routine. For my job, it’s crucial to stay creative and come up with new innovations so routine is often a bad thing.

So… what’

Yahoo opens upApril 25 2008

Yahoo’s new CTO, Ari Balogh, presented the new kind of Yahoo! at the Web2.0 expo in San Francisco. And I must say, I like it! In a nutshell, Yahoo is going to:

1) Open up their platform, enabling developers to build their own applications for various Yahoo! products like mail, my yahoo, search and even Yahoo’s frontpage on yahoo.com.

2) Unlock the social data that lives within Yahoo’s databases (like mail contacts, messenger contacts).

I think Yahoo gets it. They could have also kept all the data for themselves in an attempt to build a new social app. Instead, they completely open up which enables the developer community to build some brilliant applications on top of Yahoo’s platform and data. And, eventually, chances are good that Yahoo’s platform ends up as the place to be.

More on these developments on Yahoo’s blog and in the video below:

Googleabout - use google without advertisementsMay 14 2007

I’m not sure if Google appreciates this, but their turns out to be a way to use google without advertisements.
How? Very simple, just start your search at http://www.google.com/search?output=googleabout and you will see a nice and clean google.

Now, let’s see what happens when the blogosphere starts encouraging everybody to use this url. I think Google will disable this feature very soon…

New google layout, not an improvementMay 2 2007

Just noticed that Google has a new layout for the webresults, they moved the links to the search verticals (images, news etc.) and added a ‘more’ link which directs you to all other verticals of Google. Furthermore, the related searches seem to have a new location (click for larger image):

Personally, I don’t like both changes. The links to the various verticals used to be right on top of the searchbox. Right where you need them. I don’t really see the advantage of the new location. The related searches are moved to a location which I usually ignore (advertisements). I would suggest to display these just before the first result.

Ask to launch adsense competitorApril 26 2007

As a part of Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL), Ask will launch a new contextual advertising platform in the week of May 21st. This was confirmed by Paul Vallez, Director of Product Management. This looks like a serious attempt to compete with Google Adsense.

I think Ask perfectly understands the weak point of the adsense platform: transparancy. Many adsense publishers (like myself) will agree that Google is providing minimal information. Publishers have no insight in the revenue share, the performance of individual ads and the type of advertisers. Advertisers have to deal with pretty poor statistics regarding contextual advertising. Ask may have a strong selling point by providing better and transparent tools.

The ‘problem’ remains that publishers will not exchange adsense for ASL when that will decrease their revenue. Transparancy or not, it’s the $$ that count. It will be a challenge for Ask to achieve the same coverage and CPC as Google currently has. I certainly hope they will.