Here is a thought provoking article from Bob Cringely wherein he argues that Google is sowing seeds to its eventual destruction. While I don't think that Google is anywhere close to its demise, the article has interesting pointers on the sustainability of business ideas generated by its employees in 20% of their work time.

Now, I work in an MNC and I know the pressures when you have to execute a new idea - Is it the right business? Is the timing right? What are the returns? So on and so forth... He hits the bulls eye when he talks about the number of ideas that Google can take to market and the hundreds of dissatisfied employees whose ideas, though top class, haven't seen the light of the day. And yeah, he might be off on numbers but not all ideas that Google took to market are great (as shown by usage in this survey) while some good ideas might have been missed altogether.

Touchgraph (the website has now got a facelift!) and the TG-GoogleBrowser was one of the early visualization products I played with to visualize sales data.

Here are some pictures that tell a thousand words...

• The search clock by Chris Harrison which looks at search trends from 1997 to 2000
• The Wikipedia power struggle by Bruce Herr and Todd on what's happening on Wikipedia
• Clusterball by Chris Harrison visualizing Wikipedia

Immediately after posting the previous post on the blog, I checked the blog to see how the post came in the layout (with the image in it!). Surprised to find the archive show vague names...


'toukokuu', 'huhtikuu', I assume are finnish names for months... Wonder why they came up in my English blog !

Spending money on Google AdWords, you sometimes wonder if the biggest influencer's of ad click are the placement, the creatives, the brand name, the relevance etc., I would like to add a different dimension - the eye movement of the viewer. My previous web trawling exercises for any research that throws light on what parts a viewer concentrates on when looking at a search results page, returned nothing.

So, I was pleasantly surprised today, to find this (Courtesy:PR web)...

"The key location on Google for visibility as determined by the eye activity in the study is a triangle that extends from the top of the results over to the top of the first result, then down to a point on the left side at the bottom of the “above the fold” visible results. This key area was looked at by 100 percent of the participants. In the study, this was referred to as the “Golden Triangle”. Generally, this area includes top sponsored, top organic results and Google’s alternative results, including shopping, news or local suggestions"


Hmm... Now, if I were Google, I would be having a model that charges on a CPM basis for the top sponsored results ("being seen by 80 to 100% of participants") and a CTR basis for the others.

eBay seems to be pretty open in telling its investors its revenue model. Was given a case based on this model and a little post work revealed that I could have been better prepared to tackle the case. Any way's here's the model copied from the eBay investor site...

Transaction Revenues = Total Sellers x Listing per Seller x Conversion Rate x Average Sale Price x Take Rate