Andrew Busey: My Musings

Microsoft (MSFT) desperately needs to acquire Yahoo (YHOO) to gain a significant foothold in the media world. To me, at least, this is very clear. Yahoo also needs Microsoft, although I’m not sure they know it yet. I think the merger force a level of clarity to both companies that they both sorely need.

Microsoft should restructure into four divisions:

* OS
* Office
* Media and Advertising (Yahoo! and Live)
* Entertainment (Xbox 360, games)

I’m not sure where TV should go, probably Media.

Anyway, they should then appoint Susan Decker from Yahoo! to run the media group. I think they can turn that into a wildly profitable business by combining Yahoo!’s sprawling empire with the many good, but underutilized Microsoft web properties.

If they are really smart they’ll also figure out how to unlock the value of Flicker, delicious, and the various other web 2.0 properties that seem to get lost in the Yahoo! shuffle. In my opinion, this largely arises from trying to hard to tie everything together. I personally think a more loose confederation - both in terms of management/teams and actual presentation to users - could dramatically increase the value of a myriad of smaller Yahoo and Microsoft web properties.

Maybe they’ll also figure out how to unconfuse this giant Live initiative that Microsoft has going. I mean, who names something “Microsoft Office Word Live 2008″ …. the rate they are going it will be “Microsoft Office System Word Live 2009″ or something. It’s confusing and makes no sense. Maybe Microsoft Word and Microsoft Word Live might work - where one is a license and the other is free with ads or subscription.

Anyway, I could see how this merger could fall into the “putting two rocks together just sinks them faster” category, but I don’t think that is the case. I actually think it could force clarity in a way that creates compelling outcomes. Of course, that requires someone with a strong force of will to run these divisions and make them successful. But at least, divided up this way it’s pretty clear who the competitors are for each group and, in my opinion, a relatively clear direction for each group.

Good luck to them both - I hope they figure it out.

(Disclosure: I own Yahoo shares. So yes, I hope they go up either through a Microsoft acquisition or through something else. I think an AOL deal might be interesting too if they could actually figure it out - but the Microsoft deal is far better.)

This is good: The Whitewater Proxy

I recommend reading it. Especially if you support Hillary.

I just upgraded to a new version of Wordpress (2.3.3) from a really old one (2.0.x). Mostly because the old one was giving me issues embedding a flash app for Duels Defense. It’s mostly been good. I only have two issues:

• It randomly inserted  all over my old posts. What’s up with that? Can anyone tell me how to get rid of this because it makes all my old posts look like crap and it would take forever to go back and edit them.
• The new interface isn’t quite as good as the old one for writing posts. They should check out confluence - it’s awesome. (It’s an enterprise wiki - we use for all our internal stuff at Challenge Games.)

So my apologizes for the weird stuff in the old posts. Although if people are reading them they are probably deep linked or Google search results anyway, so they won’t see this. Ah well.

So a long time ago I worked on a movie. Today I went to see my IMDB entry, thinking maybe I might up my coolness factor by adding my IMDB link to my blog. So it turns out that my star meter is up 134% in the last week! When I click “find out why” it turns out I have to be an IMDB member… alas. I will wildly speculate that it has something to do with pageviews on that particular page (at least that might be how I would do it if I ran IMDB) or some aggregate mentions in some kind of press tracking thing (which would be harder).

Anyway, check out The Cooler (IMDB) if you haven’t already!

Well, I’ve fallen off the wagon again.  I’ve been posting sporadically on the Duels Blog but I’m not even keeping up with that particularly well.  I’ve been pretty underwater working on Duels.  I really need to post about my Mac/Windows experiences.  I’ll try to get around to that soon.   This really isn’t a particularly interesting post, but at least it confirms that I’m alive.  ;-) 

Finally, you can get your gmail with IMAP.  This makes using gmail so much easier with an iphone.  Well maybe not easier, but a lot better.  Now if I could just get a 3G iphone this might be great.

This is my first 100% iPhone written blog entry and so far typing this much is not bad. The predictive keyboard is pretty impressive.

I am in a restaurant on the basic free wifi they have. I will give it a shot on edge next. I think once I get fully used to this keyboard that it will rock. I can definitely see what they mean when they say trust it. I am already sewing improvement.

No patch today.

It looks like Patch 2.1 will go live on Tuesday May 22nd.

Check out MMO Champion for the latest updates on equipment changes, new bosses, etc.

Should be a big update.

I think shock jocks are kind of dumb.  I can’t say I’ve every been into any of them.  I would generally prefer it if the radio just played music I like.  But then I don’t really listen to the radio that much at all so they, rightfully so, shouldn’t care much about what I think. 

This article from CNN/Money:  XM suspends Opie and Anthony is interesting.

In light of the Imus stuff (I mean he really seems like he’s just a racist idiot), this doesn’t surprise me at all. 

But, let’s evaluate this:

WHY SHOULD ANYONE BE SHOCKED THAT A SHOCK JOCK SAYS SOMETHING SHOCKING!

I mean these guys are getting paid millions of dollars a year to be jackass and push the edge of acceptable content.  And they attract very large audiences because of this.

There is bad taste on every one of these shows.  It appears the Opie and Andy thing is all about bad taste.  I don’t see how they can be punished for doing what they are paid to do.  But hey polictical correctness and whiners define common sense every day.

BTW, I think being a racist idiot is different from being a jackass with bad taste.  I think racist idiots should get some sense smacked into them. 

 

I’m really not sure what success is in blogging.  I guess it is somewhat contextual.  Many blogs are probably cathartic and success is measured by how the blogger feels after righting.  Some are even more basic, diaries made public (or kept private), and offer similar psychological benefits.  Many are for friends and family - an easy way, ergo a place, to share goings on in words and pictures.  Still more likely find there basis in ego gratification and, therefore, presumably, numbers matter.  And some are for business or profit.

This one is primarily for business, with a dash of the friends and family component.  Many people ask me what I’m up to.  I have many irons in the fire right now:

• A complete book, tenatively titled Accidental Gods, that I need to polish up and sell.
• Plerts, a web 2.0 experiment that I will discuss soon.
• And, number one on the agenda, Oxygen Games - my new game company

At the time of this writing those links go no where.  But they will, just like the projects.

Anyway, that wasn’t so much the point.  The point is, I’ve started this blog to cover those things and to discuss things I’m interested in which are usually relevant to the projects listed above.

What I can’t figure out is how successful I am right now.  Does 20 visits a day constitute a successful blog?  200?  2000?  200k?  Somewhere in there the blog could likely be monetized, but again, when?

Why am I asking?  Two reasons:

1. I’m curious.  Both as a web entrepreneur and as a blogger I wonder what makes a blog successful in a business / traffic sense.  IE:  what qualitative metrics (probably measured in unique vistors or page views) must be achieved to be successful?  It’s hard to be successful when you don’t know what to target.  And since most blogs (not all) aren’t run as much like businesses as other sites, it’s hard to set goals, much less meet them.  I’m not out marketing this site and don’t really have any “value of a customer” model even remotely in mind.
2. I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments recently.  That must mean something.  I’m sure there are bots posting blog spam now, but they have to be finding me somehow.  So maybe I’m a little successful in some way since I’m attracting these spam bots. 

Anyway, who knows.  I just wanted to air this.  It was carthartic.  Or something like that.  Anyway, any thoughts on metrics in non-spam comments would be appreciated.  I wonder what other bloggers see trafficwise or if they even track it.

So in the interest of openness here is the quick summary on my blog (as of this post 3/21):

I use Google Analytics and Wordpress.  I’m getting 20-30 unique visitors a day right now, of which about 25-35% are repeat vistors.