GigaOM

Yahoo, should have been the king of online advertising, it is not. It should have owned the market now dominated by Google’s Ad Sense. It does not, but has now launched a comprehensive plans to compete with Google in the market place. Search Engine Blog has an indepth look at the new Panama Platform, which points out that the new platform will start going live in the third quarter and fourth quarter.

There’s no timeline on when rankings themselves will shift to being more Google-like, where ads will show ranked based on a combination of clickthrough rate, the amount being bid and other factors.

Last week, Microsoft decided to jump into the fray and launched its Ad Center offerings. Since Microsoft and Yahoo have search engines, it makes sense for them to monetize them more effectively.

Ultimately, as long as there is more demand than search inventory to go around (as is largely the case today), anyone with a major unique ad network is going to be successful. It only becomes a more zero sum game when there is more inventory than demand.

But lets look at world beyond search. Google’s got a big cash machine going with its adsense program. It is only a matter of time before Yahoo and Microsoft try and muscle in on this business.

On paper, this should be welcome news for publishers, after all we have been told competition is a good thing. Publishers should theoretically get bigger cut of the advertising revenues, and advertisers should be able to get better keyword pricing. But… okay now this is a big but… The problem is that if three companies are chasing the same advertising dollars, the keyword prices would go down, which theoretically means, the publisher cut of the revenues are going to go down. Ergo… problems down the line. Will this mean end of the eyeball boom 2.0?

What are your thoughts?

_By Jackson West_

At around four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, Six Apart and their properties Typepad, Typekey and LiveJournal all went dark after a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that spokesperson Jane Anderson described as “very sophisticated.” ZDNet suspected that it was a DNS level attack. Q Daily News suggests that the problem arose when a Six Apart customer, Blue Security, rerouted an attack from their own domain to their TypePad-hosted blog. The problem persisted until at least midnight, and was officially resolved by noon on Wednesday.

“We’re not going into details. But obviously it was a criminal act,” said Anderson. “We’ve spoken to law enforcement as a result.” The Six Apart legal team has notified the FBI in the case, and Six Apart is apparently continuing to investigate the problem on their own — presumably to help defend itself against future attacks, as well as provide necessary details to the authorities. Of course, Blue Security themselves have come under fire for their anti-spam technology, which some say amounts to issuing DDoS attacks in retaliation against spammers.

Here is a blow-by-blow of the events of the past week, with BlueSecurity implicating a company called PharmaMaster.

Continue »

My previous post on MuniFi woes resulted in a torrent of private email from many folks in the “business.” Actually most reminded me of the point I was trying to make - its about how the network is designed and architect and not about WiFi, the technology.

Someone emailed me a nice PDF of which shows that the St. Cloud, Florida situation is not bad. In fact is quite the opposite. For instance, nearly 40% of the city, or about 4,072 households have signed up for the city wide wireless service, and nearly spent 257,000 total (usage) hours on the network. The highest number of simultaneous users at any given time topped out at 660.

In addition, the areas which have spotty coverage are technically part of the larger county, and not the St. Cloud community which has paid for the network. Meanwhile, sources (including those inside) Google have told me that this increased access point deployment is to get wifi coverage to non laptop devices such as handhelds, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

I will be following up, but not for next couple of days. I am out of pocket - taking a much needed break from blogging, technology and what not. I will be in New York over the weekend, and am open for a meet-up on Saturday around 3 pm. Drop me a note. Somewhere close to the Union Square!

The changing pieces on the great telecom chess board has brought the grand old name, AT&T, into the lime light again. SBC, which had acquired AT&T quickly renamed itself AT&T. Now post BellSouth merger, even Cingular is going to go with AT&T brand name. Wow… Cingular brand name cost nearly $4 billion to build-up, and it could be gone… just like that, just like those dumb Clemens-Johnson ads! A lot of people think it is a dumb idea, and well would make the phone company… seem like the phone company!

To give up Cingular is a mistake,” especially in favor of AT&T, “my father’s brand of telephony,” said Jonathan Asher, president, Dragon Rouge USA, a branding and design consultancy. “I’m not sure how much value or what AT&T brings to the party.”

You can argue against the decision, but from the triple-play perspective, and the sole reason why SBC has been gobbling up the rivals, it makes absolute sense. AT&T as a unified brand - for wireless and wireline service - makes absolute sense. I have always maintained the brand alone was a reason for SBC to buy. But looks like I am in minority here.

Karl Barnhart, managing director, CoreBrand, New York, a former AT&T agency, agreed that changing the Cingular name “doesn’t make sense.” Cingular’s brand is “relevant for the younger audience; it’s a fun, hip, interesting, dynamic—everything you don’t think about AT&T.”

Clearly, AT&T would have to do a better job of marketing, designing their logo and image. The current logo and symbol of AT&T is just old and boring, and dowdy. What do you think? This AT&T-Cingular swap a good idea? Love to get your thoughts on this issue.

It was only a couple of days back we heard that there were some problems with the coverage in St. Cloud, Florida. And now comes word that Google’s Mountain View Network might need more access points in order to get decent coverage. And that might mean delays from the proposed launch date of June 2006. (Google is being optimistic that it will meet the self-imposed deadline.)

Google’s begun testing the network and, in so doing, has discovered it might need to add more Wi-Fi transmitters than originally thought to deliver the coverage and service quality it promised, according to Ellis Burns, the city’s economic development manager.

Now the other day I was talking to Dewayne Hendricks who is helping build a county-wide wifi network, (not a town or city wide network) in New Mexico using off the shelf components and white label gear. He is having no problems whatsoever, and well, most of these networks are seeing re-configuration, to put it politely.

Maybe its just me, but maybe it has something to do with network planning and the gear which is resulting in dead spots, and spotty coverage. Esme thinks so too, and has a cheat sheet of what to do and what not to do when it comes to MuniFi.

“While the phone companies are only just starting to dig up your yard, cable is already in your house,” Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner laying down the smack on the phone companies. He has a point…

On the data side, phone companies added 1.513 million broadband connections, while cable companies added 909,000 connections so far, with Cox and Cablevision yet to weigh in .. my guess is that the quarter will be a tie for the two companies.But cable companies are hitting phone guys where it hurts the most…the voice business.

* BellSouth - total access line declined 6.1% (238,000), residential lines declined 8.8% (120,000) to bring down the total access lines were 19.8 million.
* AT&T saw 6% (600,000) drop in access lines to bring down the total to 48.8 million
* Verizon lost 7% (830,000) access lines to bring the total down to 47.97 million
* Qwest lost 5.2% of total access lines.

That works out to about nearly 1.75 million lines. I suspect some portion of it is going to wireless providers (which are mostly Bells without wires…) because people just want a cell phone. Still, in comparison to phone companies, cable guys added 550,000 voice customers. Cox/Cablevision are yet to report.

* Time Warner Cable added 270,000 VoIP customers.
* Comcast added 211,000 (lost about 70,000 old voice connections bringing the total net new adds is 141,000)
* Charter added about 69,600 Voice customers.
* Vonage added 283,000 new customers.

Hat Tip, Keith

Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web, so to speak, weighs in on Net Neutrality.

When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone’s permission. [3]. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against particular types of data.

The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy.

More than anyone, I think it is time for start-ups and their backers to take stock of what the loss of network neutrality would mean to their business. Win or lose, this one has business implications, more so for many of the smaller corporate citizens.

How does a start-up know that it has made it big? Google and Yahoo both want to buy them… right. That is sooooo… 2005. Apparently, when your service is brought down by a massive distributed denial of service attack, you know you have joined a weird kind of hall of fame. Six Apart, the fine folks behind TypePad, Moveable Type, and Live Journal, came under massive DDoS attack, that took down their entire infrastructure. For latest status reports click here.

Since approximately 4:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time, Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack. This has affected all of Six Apart’s sites, causing intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com. Our network operations staff is working around the clock with our Internet access providers to resolve the issue. We appreciate your patience and support, and will provide updates as we have them.