1/18/2006
Allthough Yahoo managed to increase their profits by 80 percent, they were unable to meet analysts expectations and promptly suffered a 13 percent drop in their stock value. Couple this with the demise of Searchfox and the blogosphere is abuzz with speculations on the crash of the Web2.0 [via Micro Persuation].
While there is no doubt that the whole 2.0 thing is overhyped, there has been a tremendous amount of innovation last year, which produced a lot of lasting values. I hope nervous investors will understand some day too.
Technorati Tags: searchfox stock web2.0 yahoo
1/8/2006
For the last week the German blogger scene was busy with two rather similar incidents: Renate Holst, an employee of the federal court »Sozialgericht Bremen« threatened to sue Shopblogger, a very popular blogger here, because he used the term »Sozialgericht Bremen« in the title on one of his posts that then appeared on the first result page in Google for this term. Almost the same time, Günther Klum, the father of supermodel Heidi Klum, threatened to sue another popular blogger, because he used Heidi’s name in one of his posts titles.
Both Klum and Holst seem to have made a serious impact - but not in the way they expected. The threatened bloggers posted about the incidents and immediately got a lot of coverage from other blogs. Through worldwide inter blog connections the stories made it to well read US blogs and even made the digg front page. Then mainstream media kicked in: The popular German magazine Focus did an interview with Renate Holst, where she managed to even make matters worse by explaining, she just wanted the blog article in question to disappear. Some call this censorship. Meanwhile Klum managed to piss of the well respected Handelsblatt newspaper.
So what’s the punchline? By 2006, Weblogs have established extremely powerful networks. Anyone with an interest in public relations should be very careful about attacking well networked bloggers. Some people say, there is no such thing as »Bad Publicity«, as it is always good to be in the spotlight. I believe Holst and Klum have done a lot of damage to their brands’ reputation though, and neither of them expected this to happen. They simply underestimated the power of the word of mouth.