A Data-driven Look at the Realtime Web Ecosystem

At Web 2.0 Expo SF Hilary Mason, lead scientist at URL shortener bit.ly, did an excellent presentation on the Realtime Web Ecosystem:

“I attempted to highlight some of the interesting facets of the bit.ly data set…”

I was surprised about the amount of data available to bit.ly and how it can be used. The examples all seem light and funny, but I’m convinced the people at bit.ly can derive a lot of insights from their data sets (just like the people at Twitter…). Maybe this should (or will) become the golden business model to monetize their services.

Here are Hilary’s slides:

And here is the video:

via

The $ 6 Google AdWords Job Experiment

Thousands of companies use Google AdWords to find candidates for their job vacancies, and it seems to work. But how about setting up a Google AdWords campaign to get the job of your dreams? Sounds impossible? Well, it isn’t…

Alec Brownstein wanted to work in a top advertising agency but couldn’t find a way to get an interview with the guys he wanted to work for. So he decided to turn to Google AdWords, set up a campaign using only the names of some of the top creative talents he wanted to work for and count on the fact they would Google themselves from time to time (aka “ego search“).

When top advertising creative directors Googled themselves, they got a message from me asking for a job.

Nobody else was advertising on their names, so he managed to get a CPC (cost-per-click) of $ 0.10. By the time his campaign had consumed the massive amount of $ 6, he got his job interviews and at this moment he is working at Y&R New York.

Innovative use of Google AdWords? Or just a lucky shot that will be copied in the months to come? I personally think it’s genius and that Alec has deserved his new job.

Happy fifth birthday for YouTube

Video sharing website YouTube turns 5 today. “Five years of YouTube, is that all?” was my first thought. After all it seems like YouTube has been around for a decade at least and we have to admit they revolutionized the internet as communication channel over the last few years.

On February 15, 2005 Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, former PayPal employees registered the domain name www.youtube.com. On April 23, 2005 the first video was posted showing Jawed at the San Diego Zoo.

Just one year later YouTube was amongst the 10 most visited websites in the world and by the end of 2006 Google acquired YouTube for the astonishing sum of 1,65 billion dollars.

And the rest is history:

I’m just curious how Google is ever going to monetize YouTube…