Ahh, now you all understand what I meant when I said YouTube is a moat, not a revenue generator. By putting YouTube results into Google’s main engine Google ensures it will have better searches than Yahoo and Microsoft (who were, truth be told, getting damn close to matching Google’s quality). And it does it in a way that Yahoo and Microsoft will not be willing to match. Seriously, can you see an executive at Microsoft advocating putting YouTube videos into Microsoft’s search results? I can’t. That’d be the equivilent of sending traffic to a competitor. It’d be what I advocate at this point, but that explains why I am a stupid blogger and not some multi-millionaire executive.
Anyway, Google just distanced themselves from Yahoo and Microsoft. And they just provided a way to monetize YouTube videos.
I love Google’s strategy. It continues to mess with Microsoft’s strategy. Microsoft still treats each team as something that must make money. Google doesn’t do that. They didn’t care one bit that YouTube didn’t have any revenues. They knew that there’s other ways to make money off of YouTube than to force YouTube to monetize on its own.
Truth be told even I didn’t quite understand just what an impact that the YouTube purchase would have. It’s all very clear now. It also is even more worth putting up with billions of dollars of lawsuits.
If I were at Microsoft now I don’t know what I’d be advocating. Ray Ozzie really has his work cut out for him.
Google just put Microsoft’s Internet strategy in a box. It also explains why Microsoft has put so much effort into Silverlight lately (they need that to build a platform to get out of the box) and, might even explain why the lawyers are sabre rattling about open source. The execs at Microsoft don’t like being put into boxes. That isn’t a place they’ve ever been before.
If Google were playing chess I think they just said “check.”
And you wonder why the rest of the industry is talking about FOG (Fear of Google)? Exactly.
On one of my ultra-high traffic web servers, I switched from eAccelerator to APC today (an opcode/caching system for PHP). So far it seems pretty nice… Especially the ability to disable stat for each PHP request.
I ended up making a datastore class for vBulletin also so I could use it for the forum, so if anyone else is using vBulletin on a server with APC, here you go (if you know what this is for, you will know where it goes ).
// #############################################################################// APC/*** Class for fetching and initializing the vBulletin datastore from APC** @package vBulletin* @version $Revision: 0.0.0.1 $* @date $Date: 2006/05/08 16:51:06 $*/class vB_Datastore_APC extends vB_Datastore{/** * Fetches the contents of the datastore from APC * * @param array Array of items to fetch from the datastore * * @return void */function fetch($itemarray){if(!function_exists(‘apc_fetch’)){trigger_error(‘APC not installed’, E_USER_ERROR);}foreach($this->defaultitemsAS$item){$this->do_fetch($item);}if(is_array($itemarray)){foreach($itemarrayAS$item){$this->do_fetch($item);}}$this->check_options();// set the version number variable$this->registry->versionnumber =& $this->registry->options[‘templateversion’];}/** * Fetches the data from shared memory and detects errors * * @param string title of the datastore item * * @return void */function do_fetch($title){$ptitle = $this->prefix . $title;if(($data = apc_fetch($ptitle)) === false){// appears its not there, lets grab the data and put it in memory$data = ”;if($dataitem = $this->dbobject->query_first(” SELECT title, data FROM “ . TABLE_PREFIX . “datastore WHERE title = ‘” . $this->dbobject->escape_string($title) .“‘”)){$data =& $dataitem[‘data’];}$this->build($title, $data);}$this->register($title, $data);}/** * Updates the appropriate cache file * * @param string title of the datastore item * * @return void */function build($title, $data){$title = $this->prefix . $title;if(!function_exists(‘apc_store’)){trigger_error(‘APC not installed’, E_USER_ERROR);}$check = apc_store($title, $data);}}
I saw my first Apostolos Gerasoulis commercial tonight, and it reminded me that I meant to check on Alexa’s traffic data for Ask. Then I threw my site in too. Here is what I saw:
I take two lessons from this graph: First, the TV advertising isn’t jolting Ask’s traffic. The biggest spike was when they dropped Jeeves at the end of February. TV advertising didn’t seem to benefit MSN much last year either.
Second, there is some serious webmaster skew in the Alexa data. There is no way that I have 1/4th the daily reach of Ask. I think my site gets a little boost because tons of SEOs install the Alexa toolbar.
).