JOHN SUMSER,
S P O N S O R S Find out more
Hall Of Fame8 Corners of ECommerceTypes
of Links
Red Herring
The advertising industry is on the verge of being shattered into a thousand fragments due to the knowledge explosion and the proliferation of new technologies. There are no more grand theories that hold sway over the entire industry. Michael Strangelove
Advertising is
Reality
The System
It's better to
All material on this
|
... |
Click OK to receive our occasional Newsletter
According to Dave Werthheimer of Paramount Digital Entertainment, the
Internet is destined to become a forum for entertainment as opposed a
technological medium.
Speaking at an Adtech trade show last week he
commented, "Once technical issues are worked out, talking about Net
technology will be about as interesting as talking about the Yellow Pages".
Werthheimer went on to say that current developments in infrastructure and
general technological improvements for the commercial Internet are laying
the path for the Internet to become a medium for entertainment.
And this from one of the people who brought us "Titanic", which can accurately be described as "entertainment of the Lowest Common Denominator".
The sheer cultural arrogance of that statement gasted our collective flabber.
Obviously, Dave has never ventured beyond the shores of this sceptered continent. Had he so done, he would have realized that the inhabitants of the "land of the brave" comprise a mere 250 million of a planetary population of some 6 billion.
Now, we are not suggesting by any means that the 'Net will continue to be primarily a "technological medium".
What we are suggesting, however. is that, once people who use a different alphabet (for example) start taking to this medium in substantial numbers, we (in this country) will be forced to rethink our assumptions about what is essentially a US medium.
We have no idea where the New Medium will take us. What we are certain of, however, is that the fatuous opinions of such as Dave Werthheimer have no place in our vision.
It has been brought to our attention that a sentence in our recent piece "How to Create a Deadly Website" contained a grammatical error.
Viz:
This was intentional.
It has been brought to our attention that a sentence in our recent piece "How to Create a Deadly Website" contained a grammatical error.
Viz:
This was intentional.
We check into "The Times" (we eschew the "of London" bit, as it seems almost superfluous, despite the esteemed organ being simply another mouthpiece for the Murdoch "empire") on a pretty regular basis. It uploads at 1:00 AM UK time, so you can get tomorrow's news today...
We were a bit surprised to click on to The Moscow Times and find ourselves at an almost identical site. Well, of course, the content was different (despite El Niño, we don't think the good burghers of London will be going around getting rid of icicles on the eaves of buildings because they could fall on - and kill - innocent strollers-by...).
What we liked was the fact that they'd taken The Times' layout and stolen it wholesale. Hey! If it works for Murdoch, why shouldn't it work for them?
We particulartly liked the "Jobs Page", which is written in remarkably good English.
We wonder how many US-based (or simply non-Russian, for that matter) recruiters could write as good job descriptions in Russian.
The Web, after all, is "World Wide"...
SiteMetrics Corporation
released the results of their first Enterprise Web Content Survey.
The survey examined content on the home pages of 25,000
enterprise Web sites ranging from small ($10 to 50 million in
annual revenues) to very large (more than $1 billion) enterprises
in 14 different industries.
Overall, the survey found that while more than 96% of the sites
surveyed use the common TITLE tag, only 31% include the
META Keyword tag used by most of the largest search engines
to catalog the Web site. Just 28% of the sites were found to
include a META Description tag used by many of the search
engines to create the summary description.
The TITLE tag is used by every major search engines to catalog
that page in its index. The META Keyword tag helps to improve
the cataloging of the page in several of the major search engines
including Alta Vista, Lycos, Infoseek, HotBot, Open Text,
Northern Light and WebCrawler. Most of these search engines
also use the information in the META Description to create the
summary for the page.
The study found significant variation between the 14 industries
surveyed. The Travel industry leads with nearly 40% of Web sites
using META keywords. The Consulting, Industrial Technology
and Manufacturing industries cluster slightly ahead of the overall
mean with nearly 33% using the META keywords. Computers
and Consumer Products trail the mean with just 27% using the
tags. The lowest adoption rates were found in the Education
(23%) and Utilities (21%) industries.
Take a look at the Archives. We've indexed all the past issues with topic pointers.
All material on this site is © 1995, 1996 by IBN (The Internet Business Network), Mill Valley, CA 94941 |