del.icio.us noise filter

del.icio.us/lightray I'm a little late to the game, but del.icio.us is the coolest web service I've found in a long time. It hold the promise of solving the "filter" problem for information overload. If you are reading this blog, then chances are you also read stuff that's of interest to me. bookmark your sites in del.icio.us and let me know your user name so I can link to your feed.

WSJ on eBay--clueless

WSJ.com - EBay Agrees to Acquire Shopping.com: "The following excerpt was from the WSJ on the eBay acquisition 'The acquisition is eBay's latest effort to reignite its growth, particularly in mature markets such as the U.S. and Germany.'

The authors had the data needed to understand the real reason for the acquitition when they said, 'Shopping.com, for example, relies on Google to place advertisements on its site. Those ads accounted for 44% of the Brisbane, Calif., company's revenue of $28.9 million in the first quarter, according to the company's quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. EBay officials declined to address the future of the relationship between Shopping.com and Google, which also declined to comment.' BUT THEY MISSED THE POINT. eBay is Google's largest customer, as they buy ads on Google to redirect traffic to their own auctions. Shopping.com competes with eBay for SUPPLY of words on Google. This competition drives up the price of words on Google, reducing the ROI on marketing spend for both companies. By acquiring Shopping.com, eBay will be able to reduce their marketing spend ($$ to Google) by paying less for ad words because they can integrate Shopping.com's demand rather than compete with it in an acution. eBay bought Shopping.com to reduce their cost and improve margins--the rationale for the acquisition was not motivated by growth.

The Wall Street analysts missed the point too, as the subsequent quotes in the article point out 'There appears to be a substantial amount of interest from buyers and sellers away from eBay,' said Derek Brown, an analyst at Pacific Growth Equities. 'It seems to be a way for eBay to reach a new pool of potential buyers and sellers.'

If the price of Google ad words goes down, Google's revenue growth rate will slow. Given the time it will take eBay to integrate the Shopping.com acquisition, look for this to happen around the time eBay's margins begin to expand late this year."

CNN.com - Sex offenders get Viagra paid for by Medicaid - May 23, 2005

CNN.com - Sex offenders get Viagra paid for by Medicaid - May 23, 2005: "This was just too wacky to not post. It's a good thing the breaucrat responsible for this is working for Medicaid rather than the DoD, otherwise, we'd be using foreign aid to subsidize weapon purchases for alQu'eda...oh, wait, that was a different breaucrat"

Today in History

Building Process Improvement into IT Operation

shun1015: Building Process Improvement into IT Operation Great Blog of a META research report that is actually comming to pass

podscope - I spoke too soon

podscope - your're listening. we're searching. Well, it looks like Podscope is taking a wack at the search engine for podcasts concept, but it's pretty ineffective so far.

iPodder.org , blogging without a keyboard

iPodder.org : Unlike most of my early adopter friends, it wasn't until Feb. that I bought my first Ipod--a 30 gig Photo iPod. At first, I thought I'd use it at the gym. I haven't been to the gym since I got it (so much for the new years resolution), but I've been using my iPod every day--in the car, and walking down the street to Starbucks. I use the iPod to listen to audio books that I downloaded from the iTunes store--not music as I would have expected. While I'm blessed with an 8 minute commute, I'm managed to consume three books in the past 2 months this way--three books I never had the time to read. This is important, because listening to a book is much slower than reading. However, I cant read while driving, and carrying a book to starbucks just doesn't happen.

As I reflected upon the new value that the iPod brought to my otherwise wasted time, I ran across iPodder.org and discoverd "podcasting". While Blogging is profoundly huge in its emerging impact on society, I think podcasting might be even bigger. Why? Because more people listen to the radio than read the newspaper. More people will end up getting a podcast feed via RSS to their portable mp3 player than people who really have the time to spend reading blogs like this. Finally, content producers will have an easier time cranking out audio content than trying to compose the written word--remember its much easier talking to your friends than writing a letter to them, at least for most people.

If after contemplating this potential and you figure out a slick idea for using voice recognition to drive a podcast search engine, let me know and we can talk about VC funding terms.