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If you happened to watch today’s hearings that featured Google, Yahoo, Cisco, and Microsoft you saw a double sided ambush. These are some folks worried about their congressional seat in an election year. These are same lot who voted for open and free trade with China. Yes, this is the same lot that is now waxing poetic and pointed accusatory fingers at the big four for doing what we do – making money in the market place that our government and lawmakers created by granting China, most favored trade status.

The message underneath is pretty clear : “as long as it political prisoners working for 50cents a day to build designer tennis shoes for Walmart in Shanghai – it is ok. But once it is “in your face” with flat out censorship – it is not ok! There is zero difference between that guy building Nikes for Walmart and Google selling the keyword “great wall”.

Dear Washington;

Get over it, or change your damnable trade laws THAT YOU MADE.

Leave the internet alone. It is too big and complex for you to understand. Let the boys in California do business and quit trying to make political capital out of a less than ideal situation. It is not up to the Four Horsemen to fight our national battles or more precisely – the battles you don’t have the nads to fight where you should be fighting. If you have a problem with the way China is doing business, then take it up in Beijing.

Brett Tabke

First, happy Valentines day in the US. I have spent the better part of the last few weeks – locked in combat with “the cube”. Yes, it is coming up on conference time (www.pubcon.com) and I am busy finishing the session grid. I have always likened it to solving a Rubik’s cube. XX number of Sessions with XX number of speakers with XX number of egos makes for a fun challenge. The good news is – the grid is almost done! Best conference ever.

-bt

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Keynote by Malcolm (Tipping Point) Gladwell
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post note: Did I just become the first one to ever put a banner ad in a robots.txt?

re:http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2006/01/29/exploding-the-conference-business/

Last week Jeff Jarvis (buzzmachine – one of my ‘gotta reads’) talked about conferences in a blog post. His sentiments have echoed many I have heard. Scoble addressed many of Jeffs comments, but even Robert was a bit conservative in his estimates of what a conference costs these days.

[scobleizer.wordpress.com...]

2000 of My Closest Friends for 3 Days:

Lets say you are going to plan a conference for 2000 people for 3 days. To hold a conference that size, you are going to be pretty limited in what venues you can use. Those that will work – will cost you. If you are in a hotel, your rates will go down, but in a convention center they can increase significantly. At a minimum, you will pay about $1 a square foot. Or, a conference of 2k for 3 days, will run $50,000 to $80,000 for the space.

Next, a you will need a contractor to handle the conference setup, and to work with the venue. Most cities and convention centers require union labor to handle things like booths. That will run you another $20k-$50k.

You will need some AV. You can do it for about $10k on the cheap, or $20-$30k if you wanna be real.

Then you’ll need security as mandated by the venue. About $5-7k.

Then some labor to operate the thing. Another $10-15k.

Conference books. About $10-15 per attendee ($20-$25k).

Shipping all this stuff – another $5-20k (it gets out of control in a hurry).

Figuring out how to get all this to sync – at least $10k in consultants (very conservative).

Computers to manage your registration on site and for presentations $5k.

On venue site misc expenses (trust me) $10-20k.

Hey, you want internet at your conference? That will run $500 to $1000 PER connection! (or $8k easy)

You want a big shot keynote speaker? Figure $40-$150k speaking fees (plus expenses).

Showing your panel speakers some love : $2k – xx,000

Then your online site $7-10k a year.

You gotta have some of them there perty signs to tell everyone what’s where when – $2k on the cheap – $5k to get real.

Then your guys to build and run the conference (1 person per 500 attendees min) at probably 70k-90k a year.

You need to get your people there right? Lets say $20k in planes, trains, taxis, and hotels.

Who is that over there? Billy Joe Jim Bob Name tags: $3 each. ($5k)

Taxes, insurance, offices, phones, internet – oh no!. $xx,#*$! – $#*$!,#*$! per year.

Decorators? Don’t even go there! $20k just for designs.

Meeting planners? $10k just for the coffe talk. –$50k for them to actually do some work.

Still with us? Ok, here is where we shake out the men from the boys:

Getting a hotel for the conference? Lets say you reserve a room block of 750 rooms for 3 nights : 2250 times at say $159 a night. That’s a cool $380,000 you just guaranteed bucko. You still have the stomach for this? What’s more? you are probably going to have to make that commitment 1 full year out before the conference! Hello!?

Oh wait – we were doing for 2k people right? And they will be there for the 3 nights of the conference plus the travel day. So that is 8000 room nights and you will probably spend $180-$225 for rooms. So a real figure closer to $1.25- to $1.8 million. Yes, that is MILLION!

Next you’ll need to feed some people. Most conference centers will run about $50 per person per day for a continental breakfast and box lunch package. Or for a three day conference, $150 per attendee. Any where from $300k to $500k for food total. If you get shmancy fancy, you could easily top $150 per person per day.

Hey, so you are out of pocket for half a million to one million on this “little conference” and committed to several hundred more – you best be doing some marketing. add $50-$150k.

Happy Fun Thoughts:

As scary as that may be – lets think some happy thoughts and talk revenue baby:

In order to build a conference of 2k, you will end up comp’ing about 25%. Those will include staff, speakers, friends, friends of speakers, and VIP’s. Every conference I have been around has a comp rate of 25% or higher.

Then you will have deeply discounted rates for exhibitors and sponsors. If you have 50 exhibitors, you can figure on giving each 4-6 passes to go along with their package.

Next, you will more-than-likely have a discount rate for exhibit hall only attendees. That will run another 10-20% depending on your conference style and attraction. Of that, you will probably have a discounted coupon rate for your exhibitors. I know of one large conference that regularly gives exhibitors a 50% discount rate that they can pass on to their clients.

Then you will probably have a deeply discounted early sign up rate.

Lastly, many conferences will have single “day rates” that cut prices in half for each day.

So here is the big secret in conferences today – at a minimum, a modern conference of 2k will have less than 50% that actually pay to get in the door, and of those – only 30-35% will pay full price. For example, I know of one big new york conference that had 8k people attend last year. Of those, only 555 were paid in full, 1500 were single day passes and the rest were exhibit hall only and comps.

Exhibits? Ya, those will require special handling. Rarely do conferences sell packages at full price. Even the largest conferences out there today often discount their sponsorships 50% for multi conference signups.

So, as Scoble hints, it is exponentially harder to do a conference of 2k than it is to do a conference of 4-5 hundred. It is like that Richter scale thing where things start multiplying out of control.

Our Orlando conference of 500 in Feb of 2004 was 7000% more profitable than our Las Vegas conference of 1500 last fall.

I think 2006 will be a big year of shake out in the conference business. We will see many smaller conferences fade and the bigger ones solidify their standing. The Fad-Techs and the CES’s will grow in dominance. What will separate the big from the small will be marketing.

Does Alan Meckler selling Ses makes a whole lot more sense now? Alan will not be missed (atleast by those of us that run conferences…lol)

Jeff did have some very interesting comments about a conference being a conversation, we will tackle those another day.

BT

[webmasterworld.com...]

[eff.org...] 004345

I’ve said for years that in any court case, “the one with the most money will 99% of the time win. Yesterdays ruling that Googles republished copy of pages (they call it a “cache”) proves that point.

What Does It Mean:

It means we can now all start “caching” search engines and republishing works. Simply download and install a search engine just as ASPSeek and fed it some URLs. And as added bonus points The search engines will glady cache your cached pages.

[aspseek.org...]

- bt

The third attempt at a search marketing magazine:

[searchmarketingstandard.com...]

Many will probably remember the first big magazine BallyHoo by Troy Perkins.

-bt

[webmasterworld.com...]

Yahoo CFO Susan Dreker said earlier this week:

[seattlepi.nwsource.com...]

We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google,” Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.

So when my email and stickymail started going off that Yahoo had responded, I was excited. At least until I found out they had responded on their blog.

They have the phone number of every major tech reporter in the country in their Rolodex. So why not call up Bloomberg for a second interview and respond – or how about the AP – or the New York Times, – one of a dozen other top news outlets in the country? To publish a “nondenial denial” on the corporate blog is to be dismissed from top to bottom. It pollutes everything they have to say via that avenue from now until eternity.

This is a perfect example of why the corporate search blogs should be ignored. It is why companies should not act this way. It is also why we do not link to corporate search blogs.

If they have something to say – then issue a press release, or grab the nearest real reporter on any street corner and talk.

- bt

The Google toolbar tracks everything a person does with his/her browser.

Google knows the following about toolbar users:

• searches they performed on Google
• what url they click on
• time they spend on each site

A massive set of derived data:

• forms they filled out (not actual values)
• purchasing actions
• blog entries
• chat rooms and groups entered
• what advertisements they viewed
• competitors urls
• private and https urls unseen to GoogleBot

This is what the web referrs to as spyware. If a user enables the tracking mode advanced features of the toolbar (every toolbar I have seen has it on), the above info is tracked forever by Google.

That by itself is benign. It is when you put it in the context of the US governments request for information from Google that things get very suspect.

[theregister.co.uk...]

More than three quarters of web surfers don’t realize Google records and stores information that may identify them, results of a new opinion poll show.

[webmasterworld.com...]

So from out of no where comes word that Google will cofund a group that is AntiSpyware.

[eweek.com...]

Sources say the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School will run the operations of the coalition with help from Consumer Reports WebWatch, a consumer advocacy group.

Ya buddy – Harvard involved in it! Lets to those college boys on the case. After all – they have a ton of leisure time and think they have the world by the tail. Now maybe we can get some decent legal action on Malware!

However, from there – we go down hill pretty fast:

Vint Cerf, the renowned technologist who was recently hired as chief Internet evangelist at Google, is on board as an adviser to the coalition.

Can you say “conflict of interest”? This is an attempt at co-opting an issue that is right in their front yard.

And from there – it flat out gets shady:

The groups domain? Umm, dude – it is owned by Google…
————————————————————————-
Domain ID:D109507546-LROR
Domain Name:STOPBADWARE.ORG
Created On:14-Dec-2005 01:04:00 UTC
Last Updated On:19-Jan-2006 21:11:56 UTC
Expiration Date:14-Dec-2006 01:04:00 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Network Solutions LLC (R63-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:40225598-NSIV
Registrant Name:Google
Registrant Organization:Google
————————————————————————-

And just when I was feeling all Googly about Google again…

[webmasterworld.com...]

-bt

Revolutions do not happen when things get worse, or human rights are walked on. People have better times fresh in their memory. They are willing to endure some hard times because they feel blessed about the average or good times they just had.

Historically, revolutions happen when things start to get “a little bit better”. People start to want, hope, and dream of a better future. That desire – often along with an empty stomach – moves them to action.

Not the US Government – nor US companies – are going to single handedly start a revolution in China. Only the Chinese can do that if they desire. Hopefully, the taste of a little Google brand of information freedom can help things get a “little bit better” in China.

From blood stained concret of Tiananmen Square, to the factories of Shanghi, there is a fire in the belly of China. Google in China is not a seed of freedom. Google is potent fuel to the fire.

As distasteful as many of us find government imposed censorship, Google did the right thing. It is better to be part of an imperfect solution, than to be part of the problem. Lets us hope, the quest for freedom continues to grow.

What exactly will be censored? www.google.cn

-bt

The Sacrificial Machine:

We had a machine at work for awhile that we would install suspect software on it and let it have its way with the machine. We used to run an mp3 site for mp3 software and that stuff would often come with AdWare and spyware as tag alone installs. It was always scary to fire up the sacrificial machine and look at WebmasterWorld. Via popware and AdWare, we watched benign text get churned into some ones (often a competitors) advertisement. It was unnerving and infuriating. It is an over used word, but I did feel “violated” for my site and my community. It was as if someone was stealing from us in broad daylight and the cops wouldn’t do anything to protect our property.

Internet Explorer – And Microsoft ActiveX:

On the way to “web is platform” nerdvana, Microsoft ran into a few problems. The first of those problems was Active X. Aside from making for some great viruses, ActiveX has done little to live up to the hype. It is so overly complex, that only major corporations with deep programming departments and hackers can write programs to take advantage of it. As far as I can determine, the only real purpose ActiveX has thus far live out, has been to leave systems vulnerable to easy attack. Although the Microsoft security patches have fallen from a weekly occurrence to a monthly one (thank God!), there are still many holes being found in Windows. Any operating system that could allow a Gator to be installed and not easily uninstalled without heroic measures is fundamentally flawed.

It was via many of the ActiveX access points, that AdWare programs have found a living. It was through those points, that they were able to quietly be installed. I am sure we have all seen the reports that some of the AdWare programs used questionable install methods and ethics. Whether that includes Gator (now known as Claria), I do not know.

[wired.com...]

“Our idea was a program that would store your passwords and automatically log you into password-protected sites,” says Wally Buch. …They called it eWallet.

Respecting Innovation:

I love software innovation in any sector. Take Claria/Gator for example. It started out as a simple little program that would act as a “wallet” for people to securely and easily spend money online. It was morphed into an amazing (but annoying) Ad program. I say amazing, because some of the things going on at the code level in Claria are break through tactics. Some of which, you can clearly see showing up in other major ad programs. Gator was the original contextual ad program that silently fed ads that worked along side webpages.

The Scumware Nonsense:

I was fundamentally against the webmaster stance that there was something inherently wrong with Gator. I believe strongly that Claria/Gator is one of the most innovative products of the last five years. AdSense and its clones would not exist if not for Gator. More than anything else, Gator points out the gapping holes in Microsoft Windows. It also pointed out the holes in our installation routines. Will we ever again blindly click on that agree button to install software? For that wakeup call, we owe them a debt of gratitude for teaching us all to question that program we are about to install.

[wired.com...]

Google – with its interconnected search, email, chat, blogs, and social networks – is also in the business of targeting ads based on user behavior. So are MSN and Yahoo! All three maintain profiles of everyone who signs up for their services. They use cookies to track what visitors do on their sites while they’re logged in; the downloadable Google and MSN toolbars track which sites users visit when they’re logged out. Like Claria, Google has amassed a vast database of user profiles that it plans to use for even better targeting in the future.

On side note, I also respect Claria for it’s tough stance and business tenacity. They have taken a tired, beaten, and bruised company and turned it into a company that works with some of the largest companies on the web today. I think they will be used in public relations courses as text book examples of proactive damage control and campaign management.

It is doubtful I will ever learn to “love” Claria. However, the one public service it has done is to show us where to truly point a finger of blame – straight at Redmond for giving us an OS that would allow AdWare to make a living in the first place.

- bt

On the day last November that we booked Gladwell to speak at this springs PubCon Boston, he sold the movie rights to Blink.

[film.guardian.co.uk...]

Leonardo DiCaprio is to play a man with a particular gift for reading body language in the forthcoming adaptation of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller about how people make snap decisions.
The writer-director will be Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of 2000′s drug trade film Traffic. “[Gaghan] came to me out of the blue,” Gladwell told trade magazine Variety. ‘He thought there was something in the book that was a movie. We took one chapter from the book and fashioned a story out of it. But most of it is something we dreamt up together.”

bt

We all quietly missed a major story last week: Berkshire Hathaway to Buy Business Wire

[wtopnews.com...]

That is Warrens first buy in internet space.

-bt

The Beast:

And so it begins; the politics of personal destruction turns its’ malcontented eyes upon warm and fuzzy Google. “The Beast” always needs to be fed.

Bush and the right wing have all by dominated the DC news cycle for the last 6 years. Wrong doing at the highest levels of govt – from suspect actions of the vice president, to questionable activities of the NSA, The Beast has not has a satisfying orgy since Lewinsky and Clinton left town. Even Jacko couldn’t keep The Beast contented for long.

Google The Blue State:

CNN reported last year on a USA Today campaign finance analysis of the 2004 election. The story at the time was a page three nerf story that didn’t cause any concern or discussion at the time. The story maintained that 98% of all Google employee contributions went to Democrats in 2004.

[money.cnn.com...]

A USA Today campaign finance analysis found that, of the company’s overall political contributions, 98 percent went to Democrats, the biggest share among top tech donors.

That story is about the 2004 election. Since that time, Google has went public and grown significantly. Google employee net worth has grown by several BILLION dollars.

So, lets cut to the chase : if Google employees are very generous with their campaign contributions, they could almost fund the entire democratic presidential campaign alone. At a minimum, they could be the difference in a close election.

Think that is a stretch? Imagine what a 1-2 million dollars worth of public service announcements educating people about “chads” could have done in Florida in 2000. What about a 5-10 million dollar ad buy in Cleveland or Pittsburgh in Oct of 2004? Google contributions could have easily swayed the last two presidential elections the other way!

[usatoday.com...]

Top Google givers last year included CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company stock is worth about $2.8 billion. His biggest donation: $25,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. His was among several big employee contributions made shortly after Google’s IPO.

Pre-emptive Pacification Program:

When Bill Gates had a similar political problem in 1999, he went on a right wing pacification program. It included lobbyists, massive political contributions, and speeches aimed at propping up the right wing platform. In return, the Bush administration took the harsh sentence imposed by Clinton dominated courts and morphed it into a hand slap.

[lightreading.com...]

Our mission in Washington boils down to this: Defend the Internet as a free and open platform for information, communication and innovation, writes Google attorney Andrew McLaughlin.

At a minimum, I think we will see Republicans marching to Mountain View with their hands out repeatedly. Will Larry and Sergey “share the love”?

The only question is if Google will be able to survive their ride on The Beast? Yesterday, Google lost $50 off it’s stock value. The biggest one day decline for Google ever – and that was but a simple subpoena issue. Imagine what a real “issue day” for the beast will be.

What happened this week was not a country seeking data from Google – it was the first salvo of the 2008 presidential election. This was target practice from The Beast.

This week was your only wake up call Google. The politics of personal destruction are knocking at the door. Heads up Larry and Sergey, The Beast is coming.

-bt

Thanks to everyone who made it to the open house at our new offices yesterday.

We had a great time. Thanks to RogerD and LifeTips for the flowers.

[pubcon.com...]

-bt

Happy Friday the 13th.

Lets boil the entire Web 2.0 noise down into a simple sentence:

The total spamification of Usenet, meant people had to go somewhere else to communicate.

That is all that is at work in all the 2.0 talks, papers, research, and general huff-n-puff that is going on. People love to talk. Mankind has taken every opportunity in history to communicate:

• stone tablet
• runners, horses, carrier pigeons
• flag tower to flag tower
• smoke signals
• quill pen and parchment paper, corn husks
• books, flyers, newspapers
• telegraph
• radio
• phone
• television
• computer to computer
• internet

Any time something has interfered with any of those lines of communication, there was a break through, or a movement to a new type of communication. In the case of the internet, that is people moving from the public spam fest known as Usenet, to privately controlled entities such as bbs’s and social networking sites. Spam is at the root of the Usenet decline. From body part enlargement ads, to carefully constructed whisper campaigns, people got tired of fighting it the same way we got tired of fighting it in our inboxes.

From there, came this onslaught of irrelevant stuff from web-is-platform to, “a new way to communicate” piled on. None of which had anything whatsoever to do with “Web 2.0″ as was originally envisioned.

So lets stop pontificating about Web 2.0 and tell the truth – Usenet is dying, and Tim Oreilly needs to make a buck!

Everything else you have heard about Web 2.0 is just bs to fill dead air time.

-bt

… The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

This one should be filed under that old “hate it as a user – love it as a webmaster” file folder.

As webmasters, most of our sites life blood is advertising. As webmasters we enjoy getting those checks every month, but as users, we all kinda wince at some of the over kill out there on the web today.

From about 1998 until 2003, there was a pretty strong anti advertising component on the web. A flashing banner ad would send alot of users into a web rage. That trend was watered down as banner advertising went bust. I also think it went bust because some search engines started to devalue pages with banner ads on them. Whether that was done because it was competition, or because users clearly didn’t want those types of pages is an argument for another day.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Since the rebirth of advertising lead by Googles AdSense program, the trend has been back towards advertising and webmasters. The non offensive benign text based ads are rather harmless. However, with the rise of AdSense, there has been the slow rebirth of graphical based ads and buttons. What webmaster hasn’t wanted to maximize his or her revenue and ad inventory?

Based on the continuing rise in the number of threads dealing with web spam, it is clear users are once again getting annoyed by the growing onslaught of visual noise. The blog entry we did here a few weeks ago about web spam generated a large vocal response from members. It was equally split between “love” and “hate”. By far, the largest set of feedback was about ad blockers and how easy it is for people to cut 75% of the web junk off their machine. Having not looked at Ad blockers for a few years, I was amazed at the depth and quality of software available for this specific task.

[pcworld.com...]

From simple ad blockers to users self editing their hosts file, Ad blocking is back – as big as ever. The raw category niches that the Ad Blockers have addressed is comprehensive:

• Popup blockers
• Spyware blockers
• Adware blockers
• Text Advertising blockers (Google, Yahoo…etc)
• Instant Message ad blockers
• Flash blockers
• Banner blockers
• Browser based blockers
• Affiliate program blockers
• Keyword site blockers
• Proxy based ad filter services
• Interstitial stoppers

It is scary to think of as a webmaster, that those kinds of utils are available to the public to stop our income. We used to only have to look at a couple of issues, but now – it seems this stuff is growing like wildfire and the anti advertising voices are rising again.

I don’t know if there is an action item here, other than to be aware there is a limit to advertising on ones pages. We can’t let another antiadvertising trend get started.

-bt

… For my birthday I got a humidifier and a dehumidifier. I put them in the same room and let them fight it out. – Steven Wright