For anyone unfamiliar with the term, ‘avatars’ are those graphical computer representations of users you find around the net.  You’ve definitely seen them by now.  Some people try to make them as realistic as possible, while others make them as fantastical as they can.  Some avatars are static, two-dimensional images, and some are animated 3D.  Mine (on Yahoo, at least), is an angry version of myself with a weiner dog and a fishbowl:

Avatars can have a number of uses.  Some of the most common places you will see them applied are:

• in Video games
• on Internet forums
• as a part of Internet chat (including instant messenger programs)
• on Blogs (although, I don’t use them here)

In the early days of the internet, it seemed possible that everyone would have their own avatar, which would travel with them as they navigated around the web (ever see Tron or The Lawnmower Man?).  In many ways, it made a lot of sense.  Creating a digital representation of the real world (a la Second Life) provides many possible benefits, and maybe some new and interesting opportunities for monetization of non-ecommerce websites. 

But, that isn’t the way that things have evolved.  Instead of a bunch of Max Headroom’s surfing through pages of the net, the primary method of navigation has become search engines.  While it is a more utilitarian way to get around, and certainly much more anonymous, it may be a little more boring compared to what else is possible. 

Finally, however, there seems to be a resurgence in some of the ideas that may lead us further in the futuristic-direction of avatar-based web navigation.  Google has now launched a new beta, named Lively.   

Lively looks to be pretty cool stuff.  It not only lets users create their own avatar, but allows them to build a “space” for them to “exist” within.  That space can include links to other “rooms” containing videos, photos, even games.  Avatars visiting these rooms can interact through chat or IM.

Right now, it doesn’t really look like all that much more than a scaled-back version of Second Life.  But, there’s a reason that Google has chosen to get involved in the avatar game— and, it is possible that they see the potential for evolving the foundation of internet navigation, and are not just looking to get more into the internet chat pickup scene.

Imagine, if you will, each space containing all of the internet properties associated with a particular user.  My own space would contain rooms for my photographs, videos of my baby girl, each of my other websites, IM programs I use, my social networking pages on other sites, and even this blog.  Some rooms would be available by invitation only, and some would be open to the public to browse.  My space would be linked to other spaces, much like hyperlinked navigation works today.  Heck, my space might even include ads for products and services I promote (yeah, come to think of it, it probably would).  People would find my space because it would be linked to other people’s spaces with similar topics, ideas, or themes.  Popular spaces would be easiest to happen upon, while unpopular spaces would be obscure. 

Doesn’t seem so far-fetched, does it?  In fact, it sounds quite a bit like the way PageRank works today.

Well, the future all starts with an avatar.  I guess I’ll build mine on Lively when I get the chance, and while it is still free.

This morning, while catching up on reading everything I missed over the 4th of July weekend, I happened upon an interesting story about gas prices across the country.  A site (certainly appearing to be a MFA (’made for Adsense’) appeared on Digg because it had mapped gas prices by US county, and put up a cool heatmap illustrating the range of prices:

This got me to thinking.  It did strike me that this map seemed remarkably similar (swapping red with blue) to another color map we have all seen (over and over again) this election season.  You know the one, red states and blue states:

On first glance, this looks like grounds for a conspiracy theory.  Blue states, on average, have higher gas prices.  But, there is sure to be a lot more to it.  Blue states are: typically higher in population density, have more of the country’s larger cities, might impose larger taxes on gas stations, and are generally located on the coasts and not in the center of the country.  These are all factors that could account for the prevalence of red and orange on the gas-prices heatmap in so many of the “blue” states.  There are certainly a few things that don’t make any sense at all— Illinois (blue) is Orange on the heatmap, while neighboring states like Indiana (red) is Yellow, and Missouri (red) is Green. 

Take that for what you will.  I’m going to leave it to the political blogs (for either party) to argue if there’s an issue there or not.  That’s not what we’re here for, we’re here to discuss internet marketing.

So, I decided to see if there were any noticeable similarities in the price of clicks for keywords associated with “gas prices”.  I loaded Google’s Traffic Estimator with the same geoqualified keywords (gas prices, gas stations, etc) for each of the 50 states and District of Columbia.  I analyzed the results in Excel, and found some interesting things. 

I assigned estimated CPCs of $0.00-$0.25 a score of 1 (for low), CPCs of $0.25-$0.50 a score of 2, CPCs of $0.50-$1.00 a score of 3, and CPCs over $1.00 a score of 4.  That gave me the opportunity to make my very own fancy map (thanks to tamu.edu for the utility), a heatmap of Gas Prices CPCs in Google.  There were some surprises, like the high competition in Georgia and Texas:

 
Then, I gave Gas Prices from the heatmap similar scores: Green got a 1, Yellow got a 2, Orange a 3, and Red got a score of 4.

Lastly, I averaged the scores for Blue states and Red states to see if there were any noticeable trends:

In conclusion, it appears that there isn’t much ground for a conspiracy theory, afterall.  Both the average CPC scores and average Gas Price scores that I calculated seem pretty consistent when viewed in aggregate.  There are aberrations, but they don’t favor either the red states or blue states, and virtually cancel each other out when viewed in total.

So, I guess in the end we are all in it together.  We’ve got high gas prices, and internet marketers in both red states and blue states are paying for the increased competition they create. 

On June 30th, Google announced that it is “retiring” its Adsense referral program.

As posted on the Adsense Blog (and also sent in an email to all users of the referral program):

“We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August.”

The change is set to go into affect at the end of August, 2008.

For those unfamiliar with the program, Adsense publishers had the option to select from a list of advertisers and choose specific ads (text, as well as varying banner sizes) to display on their site.  Included among these ads, and probably the most popular, were advertisements for Google’s own services:

Unlike Adsense content-matched advertising, or searchthis feature gave the advertiser control over which ads showed on their site— basically, acting like affiliate advertising.  Payouts varied by the advertiser, usually paid as a flat fee based on a selected action. 

In fact, it was the purchase of affiliate manager Doubleclick that ultimately led to the program’s demise:

“We are currently reevaluating the Google Referrals program to ensure that it is providing the best possible monetization opportunity for our publishers as well as meeting the needs of Google. At this time, we have suspended the Google Referrals program.”

This change should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick/Performics.  The industry has expected Google to incorporate Doubleclick’s affiliate management system into their own, to expand their content network (beyond text-based PPC ads, where the majority of usership has always been) and move towards a more action-driven model.  It remains unclear what Google intends to do with the rest of Doubleclick/Perfomics, namely the account-management side— which, Google has always stated represents something of a conflict of interests.  It also remains to be seen if Google will choose to advertise their own products on the system, including Adsense or Adwords (these products are not yet appearing on Doubleclick).  Perhaps the investment is no longer worth it, with Google being the defacto search advertising solution for such a broad usership.  Maybe it isn’t a cheap source of leads any more.

As everyone in the world surely knows by now, June 27th was Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft. 

With 100s of books and 100,000s of blog posts detailing every known second of his controversial career, I won’t waste words saying what has already been said over and over again.  Surely, Bill Gates was a ruthless businessman.  He did not become the world’s richest man by befriending the competition.  Surely, Bill Gates was arrogant.  He didn’t withstand the most relentless antitrust litigation in US history (with his company virtually unscathed) by yielding to the prosecution. 

But, whatever you choose to think or say about Bill Gates, it is hard not to admire him for what he has already accomplished, what he continues to accomplish, and what he has contibuted to the world.  There aren’t many people who can make a legitimate claim to have had the impact on society that Bill Gates has had.  Whether the ideas were his own or stolen doesn’t really matter in the end.  Great leaders act on behalf of their advisors, their consituencies, and even their competition.  In national politics, “leaning over the isle” is considered a positive trait.  Whether Gates ran Microsoft ethically or not is largely irrelevant, and I challenge anyone to show me a large corporation that doesn’t do whatever it can to make more money for its leaders and shareholders.

Like him or not, Bill Gates wielded a tremendous amount of power at the helm of Microsoft, at least up until the last years.  At the end of his reign, I think we are all in a better place than we were when he started.  We have the internet.  We have cheap desktop computers.  Regardless of his ruthless business practices, his brutal treatment of the competition, or his arrogance against congress, he leaves the techno-world in a better place than he found it.  Few US presidents can say the same thing of their terms in office. 

Whatever your opinion of the man might be, we were all fortunate to have had Bill Gates to hold the reigns of the world of technology for a while.

Idée Inc, a Toronto-based company, has announced that it has built a new search engine that employs true image recognition.  Currently in private beta, Idée claims:

“TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web—even if it has been modified.

Just as you are familiar with entering text in a regular search engine such as Google to find web pages that contain that text, TinEye lets you submit an image to find web pages that contain that image.”

The company released a widget that demonstrates some of the algorithm’s findings:

While I am excited to see progress being made toward moving search algorithms beyond text, I question the utility of such an application.  TinEye relies on images as its search query.  When a user uploads a picture, the program creates a digital “fingerprint” for it.  Then, it compares this fingerprint against its index (said to be rapidly growing).  The results, in theory, are exact or near-matches of the searched image.

Image to image search isn’t new.  I worked for a company in 2000-2001 doing the same thing (never publicly released as a search engine), and not just for images (also video and audio).  The problem this company will have is the same as our problem was then— the application, while cool and novel, has no real practical purpose beyond copyright protection.  According to the company, uses for TinEye include:

Find out where and how an image appears online

Research products using a product photo

Find modified versions of unmodified images or vice versa

Research the usage of editorial or stock images

Get international, multilingual websites in your search results

Research corporate imagery or brand usage online

Use a webcam to digitize any image and search for it on the web

Search for your images to see where they are being used

Yes, copyright protection is important and valuable, even if less so for images than for other media (movies, music).  So, maybe they stand a chance serving a relatively niche market.  But, other than being interesting to try once, this doesn’t solve the bigger issue of providing a useful new feature for mass audiences to adopt.

How can a company create a truly useful utility out of recognition-based image search, you ask?

Build a method for generating, validating, and maintaining textual data to accurately describe each “fingerprint”.  Only then can the search query move beyond uploading an image, and starting to use words instead.  Only then will the mass public find it appealing, and adoption of the new technology can begin.  Google’s started on this using their Image Labeler game.  But, with millions upon millions of images on the web, this method of collecting meta data isn’t scalable or effective.  Perhaps the best bet is using meta data collected from image collection management software/services, such as Picasa or Flickr.  But, without validation (something Image Labeler is successful in achieving), such a process would certainly be plagued with bad data and prone to manipulation. 

Either way, I wish Idée Inc the best of luck and really hope they succeed.  We are definitely overdue to start thinking about how search can move past text-text, and on to other useful applications like text-image or text-video.