All I Can Say About Jerry Seinfeld and Microsoft Is...

Nobody's asked for my comments on Jerry Seinfeld now shilling for Microsoft, but here they are anyway:

1. It's a better choice than Flooz.com made when it hired Whoopie Goldberg to represent it back in the 1990s.

2. It's a great short-term deal for Jerry, who's career has proven increasingly irrelevant in recent years, but it may wipe out whatever affection people still have for him.

3. It uncomfortably suggests that Vista -- despite the hundreds of millions of marketing dollars spent to promote it -- is "an operating system about nothing."

The End of Cyber-History (My Small Part Of It, Anyway)

I've been publishing Ghost Sites of the Web since the Summer of 1996, and it's been a great ride. But as live forces its changes upon us, we must adapt. This year, I've gone through two tragedies that have completely altered my life. Both my beloved mother and sister committed suicide earlier this year. I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to understand how this could happen, faulting myself for failing to prevent it. One can only try to move through such an experience on a day by day basis, and try to keep moving, because depression, it's said, "has a hard time hitting a moving target."

As I survey the range of my current online activities, and weigh the costs of carrying them forward against the benefits they have granted me, I have realized that I do not have the resources required to responsibly maintain all the various content areas of Ghost Sites, so I am moving the Museum of Interactive Failure, the Pathfinder Museum, and the Netslaves Archive off line to a ruggedized 1 Terabyte disk. I have made plans for these files to be donated to a historical institution sometime after my own death, which I hope is still many years away.

I will keep updating Ghost Sites, because I enjoy having a Blog wherein I can comment on contemporary developments on the Internet with an eye to their historical context, and I've met some good people here. Among the best of them is Morbus, whose unique talents have created the sprawling zone of "content for the discontented" that constitutes Disobey.com.

One in a blue moon, some of the historical data I've gathered might even make it back on the online. But I think it is time that I retire some of the old material, which will give me more time and mental space to stay in touch with joyful living in the real world, and less time facing the solemn issue of death in the virtual world, which I hope I've covered to the Internet's satisfaction for the past dozen years. If you'd like to check up on my current activities, please check out my other site, BrooklynParrots.com. I don't know how much you know about wild Quaker Parrots, but I've found that watching them is a sure fire cure for sadness, and I plan on spending as much of my free time with them as possible for the foreseeable future.

Of course, cleaning up the vast museum of historical cyber-flotsam I've compiled will take a bit of time, and this process might be messy. Please forgive any 404 "File Not Found" and/or broken image errors you might encounter here in the next few weeks.They will disappear soon enough, making this site a "clean, well lit place" again.

Who was it that said that "the only thing constant is change?" He or she was certainly correct. Thank you for your support for these many years. I hope to have informed you about the Web's early years, and hope these efforts have enhanced your own appreciation of this extraordinary medium.

Keep on Fetchin'! (for you youngsters who may not understand this statement, "fetchin'" was a popular synomym for FTP'ing back in the early 1990s).

Best,
Steve Baldwin
Editor, Ghost Sites of the Web

In Memory of Cal Chamberlain, AKA "Judge Cal," a Bona Fide Internet Video Pioneer

Updated 8/16/2008: We were very sad to read of the death of Judge Cal, AKA Cal Chamberlain, in today's New York Times.

Judge Cal only lived to age 40, but he led a full life and he left much behind in cyberspace by which he will be remembered. You can get a taste of his sensibilities by browsing his still active Flickr area, but the best way to experience what he brought to the Net is to watch his pre-Youtube videos made under contract to Pseudo.com. These videos were long offline, but have migrated to Youtube and can be enjoyed there.

Tonight there will be a gathering to remember Cal, a bona fide Internet pioneer, at the Theater for the New City.

(Original Article, posted to Ghost Sites on 7/26/2007):
=JUDGECAL'S= "High Weirdness" Returns to CyberSpace




Back in 2001, Netslaves' Bill Lessard wrote an article called "More Vintage Stupidity: =JUDGECAL'S= "High Weirdness" which discussed one of Pseudo.com's more infamous video series, calling it "a program that could be best described as Wayne's World meets the early 90s East Village on the way to having holes drilled in your skull."

While the links embedded in Bill's old article have drifted with time, I am pleased to note that several demo reels of =JUDGECAL'S= "High Weirdness" have made their way to YouTube. These are reels intended to sell this Pseudo.com property to the major networks. Unfortunately, the networks passed on the series, setting back Josh Harris' master plan of becoming "bigger than CBS" by at least a hundred years.

These ancient videos, recorded in 1999 are instructive documents for all who seek to understand Web 1.0. Taped in Pseudo.com's multi-floor loft at the corner of West Broadway and Houston Street, they more accurately capture the zeitgeist of mid-1990's Silicon Valley than any scholarly documentary created by any university New Media Studies Department, providing primary source material for all who seek to understand New York's New Media Industry in its heyday (1995-2000).

Additionally, these important documents provide future historians with an indelible portrait of the sensibilities, morays, modes of speech and style preferences of that group of Americans known to demographers as "Generation X" as it bravely faced the New Millennium.

Off-Topic: In Praise of Paul Newman

I'm certainly not alone in being troubled by news that Paul Newman is gravely ill. Paul Newman is a great actor and more importantly, a great human being, who's given almost a quarter of a billion dollars to charity and has touched many lives with his kindness. To celebrate his life, I've been watching a lot of Paul Newman movies recently. Without further ado, here are my picks for the Top 10 Best Paul Newman Movies of all time. I've linked title text to Amazon in case you want to check out any of these works yourself and add them to your DVD library.

1. The Hustler (1962) This classic, atmospheric film has much more than electrifying performances from Newman, Piper Laurie, Jackie Gleason, and George C. Scott. It's a no holds-barred look at what it takes to succeed in America, and the supreme costs one must pay for doing so. If you only watch one Paul Newman film, this is the one to see.

2. Hud (1963) Newman's Hud is the unforgettable Texan anti-hero, an unprincipled man of absolute self-centered nastiness. This beautifully filmed (by James Wong Howe) tragic drama features unforgettable performances by Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, and Brandon De Wilde.

3. The Verdict (1982) Paul Newman's breathtaking performance as a 50-ish, washed-up alcoholic lawyer who realizes that his one path left open for redemption is through a trial by fire. Screenplay by David Mamet, direction by Sydney Lumet, with a stellar supporting performance by Jack Warden. This film is flawless and if The Hustler and Hud weren't such brilliant works, The Verdict would be #1 on this list.

4. Slap Shot (1977) Quite possibly the best, most hilariously endearing movie about sports ever made, with Newman, as coach Reggie Dunlop, attempting to coax one more championship from a doomed New York state hockey team filled with miscreants and misfits. A true classic that was way ahead of its time and still packs belly-laughs today.

5. Harper (1966) A New Age noir sleeper based on Ross Macdonald's "The Moving Target," Harper has it all: dysfunctional LA families, a shady mystic guru, fast fists, fillies, gunplay, and treachery. This film's score by Johnny Mandel is one of the best of the 1960s. An excellent cast is rounded out by Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, Robert Wagner, and Strother Martin.

6. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) The quintessential Western buddy film that was a monster hit when it was released and still charms, despite some creaky period music sequences. Too bad that Newman has to share so much screen time with "that other guy!"

7. Cool Hand Luke (1967) I suppose that Cool Hand Luke will be the film that Paul Newman will ultimately be remembered for, because the character of Luke so completely expresses the alienation and rebellion of the 1960s. Even though Luke isn't exactly a brainiac, Newman's intelligence shines through the part of the doomed work camp convict.

8. The Color of Money (1986) A sequel to The Hustler directed by Martin Scorcese, this film captures Fast Eddie Felton twenty years into his career, a sadder, wiser, but no less formidable man. I'm not a big Tom Cruise fan but Tom is great as a young pool hustler that Fast Eddie takes under his wing. If you've got the middle-age blues The Color of Money will cure ya!

9. Absence of Malice (1981) A terrific "message picture" that probes big questions about the responsibility of the media, and yet doesn't fail to thoroughly entertain. Another Sydney Pollack classic with a stellar cast, including Sally Field as an overzealous newspaper reporter.

10. The Drowning Pool (1975) A stylish, dark sequel to Harper, The Drowning Pool takes Lew Harper to Los Angeles, where he meets a qualitatively different sort of degradation and despair. Few sequels match the originals in quality: the Drowning Pool manages to be just as good as Harper. Joanne Woodward is excellent as Harper's doomed paramour.

Yeah, I know: I had to leave a bunch of great Paul Newman movies off this list, including Winning (the film that got Paul into car racing), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (a romp directed by John Huston), The Long Hot Summer (plenty of fireworks between Newman and Woodward), The Sting (a classic scam twister), Road to Perdition (Paul's last film), and lots of others that I haven't seen yet or seen recently enough to evaluate. Maybe a "top 10" list for Paul Newman doesn't do his work justice at all!

While I dearly hope that all the rumors about Paul's health are false, we're all mortals, and Paul has left us so much in his films and in his life that he'll be with us for a long long time: as long, anyway, as there are intelligent people willing to create, as well as watch, intelligent movies.

New Mediapost Article: Social Media: Its More Than Facebook

I've written a new article on Social Media for Mediapost; please check it out. My thesis is that far too many marketers get hung up on trying to reach people in Facebook, Myspace, etc., when they should be focusing on reaching people where the real action is: on product-focused bulletin boards and forum areas.

Raiders of the Lost Kozmo.com Files (Updated)

(Update 8/4/2008: the links to these rare Kozmo.com artifacts have drifted over the years, so I've updated them so that the assets remain visible).

No history of Silicon Alley is complete without discussing Kozmo.com. On November 11, 2003, our skeleton crew of researchers, while digging through another midden heap of cybergarbage, discovered a rare and extraordinary find of images, sounds, and movie files developed to promote Kozmo.com - a star-crossed Internet project that was well known to New Yorkers and San Franciscans in the late 1990s. This find, we believe, significantly expands the supply of first-generation digital artifacts associated with Kozmo.com.

Before discussing the gems found within the 11/11/03 Find, let's look at the Kozmo.com digital artifacts that are known to exist today, and the gaps in the historical collection. First, it should be noted that the Internet Archive does appear to contain a fair collection of Kozmo.com, a list of which can be viewed by going to http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.kozmo.com.

Unfortunately, much of Kozmo.com did not survive the WayBack Machine's data collection process. None of the examples from 1998 appears to have been preserved intact, and only one recorded example from 1999 survives - the one archived on October 13. The reasons for this seem to be associated with the CGI scripting that Kozmo.com used in this period, which seems to have thrwarted Archive.org's Web-whacking efforts.

Of the 33 efforts the WayBack Machine made to archive the site in 2000 and early 2001, the results are slightly better. One can clearly make out the Kozmo logo and some of its product offerings. Unfortunately, only the home page was preserved in these passes - what was once inside Kozmo is invisible. The last image that survives of Kozmo.com in its pre-failure mode is from March 31, 2000. Ghost Sites made its sole screen grab shortly after this time. So Kozmo isn't very well preserved, which is sad for those who grew to love this service.

Here is where the Ghost Sites Find of 11/11/03 serves to fill some of these gaps, so let's take a quick tour. All of these artifacts were recovered from the Web site of DiMassino, the ad agency that sought to make Kozmo.com a household word in the late 1990's.

On the agency's main Kozmo page, you'll see a quick overview of some extremely strange Kozmo offline branding objects, including a Kozmo Metrocard, a Kozmo business card, the uniform of one of its messengers, and one of its phone booth ads. It's interesting to note that Kozmo.com actually went so far as to trademark the phrase "We'll Be Right Over" (which means that you might want to refrain from ever saying or writing these words unless you're prepared to be sued by whichever liquidator wound up owning the Kozmo.com corporate assets!).

Unfortunately, you can't see much more by clicking anywhere on this page - the really interesting stuff is buried deep within unlinked areas of the agency site that our skeleton crew had to find by resorting to a set of sneaky and stealthy means passed directly to us by Indiana Jones.

So without further ado, here is a list of precious, historically significant digital matter that very few people outside of DiMassimo's tight circle of brand identity experts have likely ever seen:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20031209132744/www.dimassimo.com/site/work/kozmo/kozmo_work1.html
  A close-up of the Kozmo "Dirk Diggler and Fresh Samantha" phone booth ad.



• http://web.archive.org/web/20031209132744/www.dimassimo.com/site/work/kozmo/kozmo_work2.html
  A high resolution image of a different phone booth campaign ("12 Monkeys and 1 Banana Smoothie")



• http://web.archive.org/web/20031209132744/www.dimassimo.com/site/work/kozmo/kozmo_work3.html
  A rare 640 x 60 Web banner ad - "Dirk Diggler and Fresh Samantha"



• http://web.archive.org/web/20031209132744/www.dimassimo.com/site/work/kozmo/kozmo_work4.html
  An even rarer photo of a bus ad - "Dr. Evil and Dr. Pepper"



• http://web.archive.org/web/20031209132744/www.dimassimo.com/site/work/kozmo/kozmo_work5.html
  A Kozmo print ad - "He Got Game. Sony Dreamcast"
  

Now here is where the real fun begins - the next two pages are embedded with Quicktime movies - the first, the "Kozmo Challenge" starring Lee Majors - the famous "6 million dollar man". The second, more obscure TV spot, in black and white, plays on the Lucy and Rickie theme. Unfortunately, there appears to be no way to save these two movies - the Javascript forbids their capture.

The next two pages present examples of Kozmo's attitudinally-driven rest-room advertising (a method also used by Half.com, which placed its ads at the bottom of urinals in the well-trafficked mens room at New York's Grand Central Terminal).

One such ad is "He's Such a Loser - Why Don't You Go Home and Rent a Movie", and a similar one from the male point of view - "That Girl's a Bitch - Why Don't You Go Home and Rent a Movie". Each speaks far more eloquently about American sexual attitudes in the late 1990's than you'd ever find in a skidload of sociological texts borrowed from your local university library.

http://web.archive.org/web/20031209132744/www.dimassimo.com/site/work/kozmo/kozmo_work11.html and http://web.archive.org/web/20031209132744/www.dimassimo.com/site/work/kozmo/kozmo_work12.html contain Kozmo.com screenshots that neither Archive.org nor Ghostsites.com was able to capture. They are perhaps less interesting than the other examples here, but do serve to illustrate what the site actually looked like during its brief sojourn on the Web.

The next two pages in the Lost Kozmo.com Archive contain fascinating radio spots, the first of which is a fake testimonial from one of Kozmo's messengers; the next a curiously homoerotic interview between a customer and a video store owner that was targeted for use in San Francisco.

The Ghost Sites Find of 11/11/03 presents an extraordinary look at the life - both internal and external - of a legendary dotcom that time and memory have not been kind to. Unfortunately, this view - one of the greatest surprises to Web historians since the discovery of the Lost Pathfinder Archive - may not last for very long. Although the GIFs and JPEGs can be saved by historians, neither the Quicktime movies nor the radio spots - the richest data forms in this collection, can be captured for posterity, and DeMassino may have have wanted it this way. In the flick of a switch, we will lose these few remaining pieces of Kozmo's history and it could happen tonight or tomorrow.

The pages on DeMassino's servers provide a rare look into the past that illustrate much more about our time than even its brand identity gurus could have ever intended. One might hope that DeMassino donates some of this material to one or another of the Internet's many data depositories, but this is unlikely. Commercials, in radio, TV, print, or hypermedia, rarely survive more than a few years before they are destroyed completely, and I doubt that Kozmo will provide any exception to this immutable rule.

Note: on November 16, I heard from someone who states that the Kozmo .MOV and audio files that I said "could not be saved" can in fact be saved, and that he has saved them. This is very good news and I hope to have more information about this soon.

For more on Kozmo.com, follow this link).

Does Anybody Remember the Following Doomed NY Tech Companies?

Over the past week or so, I've been contributing articles for Fred Wilson's timeline of Silicon Alley project. I don't know Fred personally but I'm glad that somebody is working on a project to immortalize the glory and disaster of New York's tech economy. Anyway, I've been coming across a bunch of companies that glowed like diamonds when they launched but are barely remembered today.

Most of us who were active in the industry at the time remember the big NY-based disasters (Pseudo.com, Pathfinder.com, IGuide, Kozmo.com, Flooz.com, Beenz.com, SiliconAlleyReporter.com, etc.). But there were plenty of smaller failures that few remember: here are some of them that might jog some ancient brain cells.

ToggleThis: A games developer that briefly worked on animating Bugs Bunny for Warner Brothers, thus validating the notion that "Silicon Alley" had arrived). Unfortunately, one dancing bunny doth not an industry make.

MethodFive: Talk about a forgotten interactive service agency! I don't know a soul who remembers MethodFive, but it was once the talk of the town.

IFusion.com: One of an ugly gaggle of push technology vendors that (very briefly) seemed poise to ban Web surfing forever.

Comet Systems: Does anybody out there remember the infamous and incredibly annoying Comet Cursor? Well, it was born in Manhattan.

N2K.com: Truly a forgotten dotcom. But at one point it seemed to be ready to take on Amazon.com.

iTurf.com: Another blast from the past. When it did its IPO in April of 1999, some claimed that this 25-person teen portal was worth more than $1 billion!

Interworld: Another huge NY-based player (e-commerce) that few remember today.

Big Star Entertainment: Lots of press, lots of money, but not even a memory today.

Snickleways: Snickleways? Incredible that an otherwise serious e-commerce company would have had such a silly name. Another project that people are probably too embarassed to remember.

eYada.com: the Web site that was going to kill Talk Radio is completely forgotten today

Pioneering Silicon Alley Games Developer Hyperspace Cowgirls Site Lies in Ruins

Before there were Web developers, there were CD-ROM developers, and New York's Silicon Alley was host to plenty of them, perhaps the most important being Voyager, which failed way back in 1997. Hyperspace Cowgirls (whose name was hatched in a dream experienced by its founder, Susan Shaw) was a project that had more success, but it foundered in the wake of the near complete destruction of New York's technology industry in 2000-01, and ceased operations in 2002.

The Hyperspace Cowgirls site (hygirls.com) is interesting to poke around in especially in its unlinked News area, which provides valuable insight into the star-crossed history of New York's Silicon Alley.

Four Ghosties (Site is Dead, shows Advanced Decay) Very few sites lying in a state of advanced decay ever come back. "Advanced Decay" usually indicates a lot of broken links, possibly some broken applications, and a "Last Updated" sign from many months ago.

WWWAC.org is Dead (Does Anybody in NY Still Care?)

It's impossible to tell the story of Silicon Alley without mentioning WWWAC (the World Wide Web Artists' Consortium), whose most influential instantiation was its popular mailing list. Back in the 1990's, it seemed everybody who could hack an HTML page belonged to the WWWAC list. Spectacular flame wars were started there, jobs were offered and gotten, technologies and individuals were hyped beyond belief, and misery was shared when New York's nascent technology industry melted down into wax after the boom busted in 2000. WWWAC also did its part to create a "scene" through its many CyberSuds parties in the same way Courtney Pulitzer sought to.

Today, New York is in the midst of a modest technology industry comeback. Google and Yahoo both have offices in Manhattan from which are hatched plans to capture media spend from the old line advertising agencies. Employment has withstood the worst of today's cutbacks, which have fallen heavier on the financial industry than tech.

Unfortunately, the WWWAC site doesn't reflect New York's revived tech economy. It lingers like a sullen ghost, with its Online Jobs Board empty, and its most recent "upcoming event" listing dating from more than a year ago. You can almost see the tumbleweeds blowing through the other ruined areas of this site, all of which are in advanced states of bitrot.

Are you interested in the history of Silicon Alley? Fred Wilson was influential in Manhattan's tech industry evolution. He has spokeon the subject candidly in the past, and in September must deliver a 25 minute speech summing up key events in the evolution of New York's high-tech industry that spans the early experimental years, the bust, and the future. Fred's Wiki (The New York Internet Industry Brainstorm WIKI) is open to all who have stories to add.

Four Ghosties (Site is Dead, shows Advanced Decay) Very few sites lying in a state of advanced decay ever come back. "Advanced Decay" usually indicates a lot of broken links, possibly some broken applications, and a "Last Updated" sign from many months ago.

Interpublic Invests in Huge: But Is Huge's Web Site Any Good?

Ad holding company Interpublic announced that it has bought a majority interest in Huge, a digital design shop. Because I've recently been on the war path against the crappy websites maintained by large ad agencies, I wanted to check out the site of Huge.com, to see what shape it was in, and what such shape might tell us about Huge's digital prowess. Here's what I found:

Huge
http://www.hugeinc.com/
Compared to the sites maintained by old line ad agencies, HugeInc.com is significantly better, but still needs help in terms of usability and search engine fitness. While it does make good use of metatags (yes, Virginia, you still need to pay attention to them, because they'll be used as the descriptions on SERPs), the site should add TITLE tags to its home page index.html file. This title tag can be populated with the same text used in the META tag ("HUGE is a strategic design organization that develops commercially successful websites, software applications, branding solutions, and more)." Frankly, I don't think a lot of people are going to be searching on these terms, so I'd throw them out and start over.

It looks like somebody at HugeInc.com has been studying SEO. The site's main content areas ("Process," "Our Work," "News," "Why We're Different") are all hosted on static pages, which is a good thing, and they do have unique TITLE statements, which is also good. Not so good, however, is HugeInc.com's crappy URL formation. For example the URL for the page for its AtlanticRecords client page is: http://www.hugeinc.com/casestudies/clients.php?ID=14
This URL would work much harder with search engines if it read:
http://www.hugeinc.com/casestudies/atlanticrecords.html. Accomplishing this no harder than installing the right Blog plug-in.

When I test-drove HugeInc.com this morning, I noticed that the site was not always available (other sites were). This may have been due to the site being under a heavy load from all of the press coverage about the Interpublic announcement, so it's probably just a temporary bug.

Again, HugeInc.com is many steps above your typical ad agency site. The signs of obvious cluelessness are minimal, the site is generally usable and its minor infirmities could be easily improved with just a few tweaks. Best of all, HugeInc.com makes controlled use of Flash, which tends to sprout like unwanted Kudzo on other ad agency site.

It's refreshing to see an ad agency site that doesn't suck outright. Good job, Huge, you've got a clue!

Searchability/Usability Score: B

Even More Reasons to Laugh at Cuil.com

Google Blogoscoped's Phillip Lenssen has compiled a hilarious list of graphical errors encountered today at Cuil.com - the dizzy-headed Britney Spears of Internet Search Engines. I wonder who's going to be insulted more by this: Eric Schmidt or Steve Ballmer?

Go Phillip!

Fate of ConservativeMatch.com Is Cautionary Tale For Online Dating Sites

Many of us have horror tales of online dating that for obvious reasons we'd prefer to not share. A few have shared such horror stories anonymously, including M. Nevada's truly horrifying tale posted some years ago at the defunct Netslaves.com.

Mainstream dating sites such as Match.com are under fire from more specialized sites, which is clearly one reason why Match.com posted an anemic 1 percent subscriber growth rate in IAC's most recent 10Q Quarterly Earnings report filed today. But the advent of niche sites begs a larger question: why should people spend money to find people exactly like themselves? What could be more boring? For instance, consider the case of ConservativeMatch.com, whose tag line was "Sweethearts Not Bleeding Hearts." This site, which launched in 2003, ran out of steam in 2007. This isn't a Left vs. Right issue; a site for liberals launched by the same company, ActForLove.com, appears from its SiteMeter report to be drifting along with fewer daily visitors than Ghost Sites.

I can't imagine a more wrong-headed idea than an ideologically-based dating site. Some of the nastiest people I know share my political and religious convictions. Some of the most interesting have positions diametrically opposed to my own. Politics may make for strange bedfellows, but it rarely makes for happy ones.

You can examine more achival screens for conservativematch.com at the Internet Archive.

Why Are Advertising Agency Sites So Awful?

Ad agencies are an endangered species in a cost-conscious, metrics-driven world ruled by Google. Today's ad men are in a profound state of denial about how much their comfortable world has changed, and there's no better evidence of this than by examining their web pages. Here you'll find cluelessness across the board. Here's a quick and sickening report on the search engine readiness of some major agency sites. Read it and weep.

DDB.com
http://www.ddb.com/
Frames deprive content pages of unique URLs, the home page has practically no content at all, and the only indexed content seems to be in uploaded PDFs. These sins are typical of Flash-heavy, search-engine ignorant sites. Perhaps no serious agency types care whether folks come in through search engines. If so, they're making a big mistake.
Usability/Searchability Grade: D

Draft FCB
http://www.draftfcb.com
Better than the other sites in terms of having SOME text content on the home page; worse but commits sin of making text content images. (Are they worried that somebody will steal the big idea? Or just paranoid about the fonts? Hint: Stylesheets can work wonders.) What's ironic is that DraftFCB is actually buying the keyword "advertising agency" from Google. But the back button doesn't work, which means you're trapped.
Usability/Searchability Grade: D-

JWT.com
http://www.jwt.com
Home page text content? Nope. Consistent navigation? Nope. Search-engine unfriendly fames, over-reliance on Flash and PDFs? Triple yes. SIte must be doing something right, because it ranks very well organically on Google for the search term "advertising agency," so it's not a total wash. If only these guys had made proper use of their Meta tags, the listing would be much less cryptic. Usability/Searchability Grade: C

Ogilvy.com
http://www.ogilvy.com
The late David Ogilvy would have kniptions if he could see his company's current site. The home page has a text count of zero, clicking on links results in annoying pop-up pages, the URL structure is a mess (although it could be worse), and content is duplicated on several Ogilvy-owned sites (which will cause Google's Duplicate Content Filter to have kniptions!). May not inspire confidence that Ogilvy is digital-ready.
Usability/Searchability Grade: D

Young and Rubicam
http://www.yr.com
No surprise here. Texts live only as images, without ALT tags. No worse than the other sites, but no better. I suppose this bad situation is due to the consensual wisdeom of the ad men, and other B2B types, who reason that it's unlikely that any real client is searching for their services. WRONG!
Usability/Searchability Grade: F

Fun With Search Engines: "Tarnished Internet Portal" Proves Google is Best

After seeing Yahoo referenced as a "tarnished Internet portal" today in a news article, I examined the search engines to see which of them properly associated this characterization. Neither Ask.com nor Yahoo.com nor Live.com nor newcomer Cuil.com had any data, but Google, in its infinite wisdom, correctly revealed a smiling picture of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, along with a bunch of stock charts in decline. Does anyone need additional proof about Google's superior search prowess?

Even With Bugs Fixed, Cuil Doesn't Cut It

I revisited Cuil.com today after Blogging very negatively about it yesterday, and the results were a little better than those reported ealier. But after doing several searches, it appears that the results are still easily bested by Google. I don't think this is a technical glitch: just a direct result of an algorithm which doesn't properly take into account site popularity. Yes, popularity isn't a perfect proxy for site worth, and it can be gamed by SEOers. But factoring popularity (PageRank) out of the picture has serious consequences that unfairly discriminate against site publishers. For example, another site I run, BrooklynParrots.com, hardly even makes an appearance for the keyword search "wild parrots in Brooklyn." My site FYI is the only site that deals with this topic systematically, has been up for more than three years, and has excellent rankings in Google and the other engines. But for some reason Cuil.com thinks it's completely irrelevant. I'm sure there are thousands of other site owners who've been pushed off the page one SERPs on Cuil.com. This hardly serves the needs of users or publishers.

Search results do matter, and the mere fact that Cuil.com claims to index more pages than Google doesn't necessarily translate into increasing accuracy. Cuil's failure to provide accurate results isn't a bug: it's a feature that was designed in from get-go. For this reason alone users should shun it, and I expect that once all the PR dust has settled, we'll all quickly forget that Cuil.com even exists.

New Mediapost Article: An Open Letter to Steve Ballmer

I wrote a new opinion piece entitled An Open Letter to Steve Ballmer in which I argue that Microsoft must restructure its entire approach to search and online advertising. While it's a serious topic, I tried to inject as much humor as possible into this piece, which was published Monday, July 28th, in Mediapost.