Archive: August, 2008

The chaos of the water on the big lake makes perfect sense to me. Affected by the strong tides, the out-flow of several large rivers, high winds and the thundercaps which precede the coming storm, Lake Muskoka is pushing the boat around as I speed towards our cottage on Boyd’s Bay. I am alone in the boat after dropping my nephew off at a cousin’s cottage for the day. I have a thirty minute voyage back to the relative tranquility of the north end of the lake. I’ve got the throttle fully open and the small craft is responding nicely albeit noisily. Fifty-five horsepower outboards are as indiscrete as they are powerful.

For some reason, even though wilderness is all I can see around me, I can’t stop thinking about the Internet. There is a strange connection between the networks of nature and the backbone of the World Wide Web. Both provide unending stimuli for the mind and are potent muses for one’s imagination. There are an unlimited number of possibilities in both the wilderness and the web. The forces that created this ancient lake and the Precambrian granite base it sits in are being worked into a metaphor and there’s nothing I can do to resist. My favourite fishing rod rests in its holder beside the brown tackle box but I am far too interested in this unexpected mental journey to stop to catch more fish.

One of the interesting things about being away from a steady Internet connection is the lack of up-to-the-minute information about the search and Internet marketing industry. It took a couple of days to adjust but after a couple of days, the information shortage presented a unique opportunity to simply think about the future of Internet marketing without the daily distraction of an overloaded RSS feed. While I am far short of coming to any great conclusions, I have managed to imagine how the Internet might operate in the coming years. Here’s a short run-down of my thoughts.

1/ I expect the Internet to be the dominant carrier of information in the very near future. Everything that can be digitalized will be from music delivery to movies to common television shows. As time moves forward, there will be a need to find a standardized licensing convention for commercial content. I believe this will present enormous opportunities for online marketers as everyone’s eyeballs will be directed away from the radio and television dials to the Internet.

That thought leads to the question:

Early each morning fingers of mists roll out of Boyd’s Bay into the open water. Below the mist, millions of water spiders skim and skip across the surface creating tiny ripples on the otherwise still lake. It’s the quietest time of the day, the time the sun is just rising above the ridge of trees that mark the start of the great northern forests. The conditions are perfect for catching breakfast in a place where one eats what they kill and clean themselves.

I am on vacation at my family’s cottage in Northern Ontario and this morning, I’m taking my nephew fishing. We’re in the faster of the two boats, tooling across Lake Muskoka at about fifteen knots. Beside me at the bow of the boat is my nephew Tyler. He’s wrapped in an old Hudson’s Bay blanket with a mug of steaming cocoa in his eleven year old hands. I’m talking with Tyler about being a good webmaster. He has just posted his first website and is interested in how search engines work. I’m happy to teach him the ways of web marketing but first we need to cover the fundamentals of bass fishing.

Google has sold Performics, the SEO company it acquired in its purchase of DoubleClick last year. Performics was sold to the French digital marketing firm Publicis for an undisclosed amount. Owning Performics put Google in a classic conflict of interest position, one that had been called by search marketing firms and blogs since the DoubleClick deal was announced in April 2007. DoubleClick is primarily a display advertising company which had itself acquired Performics to bolster its online advertising offerings. The sale gives Publicis an initial, albeit large, footprint in the search marketing marketplace.

In a similar vein, TimeWarner is said to be ready to dump its underperforming division AOL as quickly as possible. TimeWarner and AOL were merged in 2000 in what was at that time the biggest financial deal in business history. AOL actually bought TimeWarner however, weeks after the merger, the bottom fell out of the tech-stock market. The deal was based mostly on AOL shares. AOL’s value and thus the value of the deal was, almost overnight, worth a fraction of the original amount. That put TimeWarner back in the dominant seat and it has virtually ignored AOL ever since.