In cooperation with Google the Berlin start up Absolventa is organizing the Google Online Marketing Challenge 2009 in Germany. As a web company you had the chance to apply for the contest. For the challenge you get a Google AdSense AdWords budget and a team of students is planing and executing your Google AdSense AdWords campaign. Absolventa recruited the student teams and also the web companies. Nice idea! And of course we applied – but weren’t selected. However, the good news is: we will get a voucher worth 100 € for testing Google AdSense AdWords :) I never used Google AdSense AdWords before, but I’m excited to learn how it works and performs. I’ll let you know.

Addendum: I shouldn’t write blog posts at 1:30 pm – I confused AdSense and AdWords.

If something is going wrong it is and it always was popular to blame a technology for it (mostly because a technology can not response to it). The church did it for example when printing was invented and Andrew Keen is doing so in his blog post The Great Seduction: Confessions of an Internet iconoclast. He is blaming the Web 2.0 for destroying our culture and business. He is right in his analysis, but wrong in his conclusions:

The biggest financial problem is that the supposedly new media economy of blogs and YouTube videos isn’t making the content creators much money. That’s because today’s digital technology has made almost all content free, thereby undermining media’s historically successful business model of selling content to consumers. [...] The greatest losers, then, in this great cultural transformation are our traditional creative class – professional musicians, journalists, film-makers, photographers and animators — who are now struggling to monetize their talent in an advertising saturated economy where all the serious cash is being channeled to technology providers like Google, YouTube and MySpace.

Yes, people are not willing to pay for content, because the content does not provide an added value to them! In the past, information was restricted. It provided a competitive advantage or it gave you social status. In the Internet age, information is available everywhere and everytime. Thus our old business models fail and companies that relied on these old business models will fail too! That’s economy. That’s evolution. Don’t blame technology for it!

I do not agree with Andrew Keen that the creative class is suffering from these changes. The opposite is true. Never in history there have been such possibilities for creative persons to show and to monetize their work without the need of large corporations. The Internet democratizes the media distribution. Thus more people will profit, but in less quantity. It’s bad for a few, but good for many.

I agree with Andrew Keen that technology providers like Google, YouTube and MySpace profit most from the new business paradigm, but only because the existing market players are not willing to invest in new market ideas. The media companies have to overcome their fear and to reconquer their markets. They know better how to serve the consumers’ needs than a technology provider like Google. They have the content that consumers are urging for, but they have to unclose their content.

So take the risks and have a good time!

Martin

Is Google calling itself a data octopus? This search results suggests yes:

Oh shit:

What seems to be happening is that Google has finally realized that they are competing for developers’ time, even those that they are not employing. After seeing thousands of Facebook developers build over 26,000 applications in a year, it’s no wonder that the company has become heavily invested in the fight for developer attention.

From Google Opens to Futher the “Platform Wars” – Covering All That’s Social On the Web

Microsoft had realized this two centuries before: the developers (= producers) are the key to the success for every platform! Microsoft did a great job in the past years to build strong developer communities and they spend a lot of money to build and extend these communities and so does Facebook, but not Google …

Bye bye portability … I’m wondering how Google will react on this:

Facebook is all about openness and data portability, as long as that doesn’t involve openness or portability of data, it seems.

Today they wrote a long 7 paragraph blog post to get a single point across: Facebook has banned Google’s Friend Connect access to the Facebook API:

Read on: The Social Network Wars Begin In Earnest: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect

I know I’m late (because I’m on a trip through Germany; next stop Bochum), but this is really important (to us and to most of our readers, I guess):

Google today made an announcement that could prove to be not only important to the evolution of OpenSocial and iGoogle, but also to the social networking sector itself. Google announced a new developer sandbox for iGoogle that includes support for their OpenSocial APIs. Essentially, Google is working toward turning their start page property into a social network, though they haven’t overtly said so. Google’s move makes this officially the start of a trend we’re seeing in start pages to get more social, and an idea we’ve been pushing at RWW for the past year.

Read on: Start Pages: The Next Social Networks – ReadWriteWeb