Real Time Search Engine "Twecan.com"

We launched a new Real Time Search Engine called "Twecan.com". It harnesses the knowledge of twitter users and classifies the Tweets in areas that can make more sense for users, even for non twitter users. You can find classifieds in your city or on a product, you can find stock information and news around that stock by using $ sign before the ticker for example $Aapl will give you all the tweets classified into news, tweets, top users, how many tweets are being done every hour (on our Tweetometer), and any charts or pictures about the stock. Really you can find anything what people are tweeting about. Don't forget to check the top keywords to find what is hot online right now. Please post your comments and feedback for us to make "twecan.com" better.

Isn't everything local

If you really think carefully "isn't everything local "? Many people say local is in my city which is correct but if I am traveling to another city anything in that city is also local. So what really is local and what is not?

According to wikipedia local is " Local generally means that which relates to a specific area or place, and is not vast or widespread." that's correct so when I am visiting a new city, businesses are local, people are local and the businesses who want to attract me into their stores are local.

So lets get to Business now, I do lot of research before I go to any city so don't they have to do some advertising beyond local to reach me? So will it be called local advertising or not. I think I am in a philosophical mode today ;0).

I think I answered my own question, but would love to hear from everyone.

Can Newspapers reinvent themselves and come back to their past glory?

Can Newspapers reinvent themselves and come back to their past glory? Some will some will not depends on if they can change their old self.

I recently attended NAA Mediaxchange2009 and you could see the newspaper industry is in trouble including NAA. They are still teaching people they need to do SEO, change websites make them interactive by adding Videos etc, I think they need to take a long leap to present world of facebooks, myspaces, etc. Like it happended in Asia they are way ahead of West in Cellphone content, technology, communication because Asia missed the boat of high speed internet. They need to accept Newspapers have missed the boat and they need a "Giant Leap" to survive and do something interesting and have every opportunity to be the next big thing.

Local is still not captured by anyone, they ahve the opportunity to get their market back from yellopages, other content sites, local advertising, local news, local communities. They need to redefine themselves, rediscover themselves, they need to get some young blood who live and breathe in the twitter, apple, myspace, second life world. They have local content, they ahve local businesses talking to them, they have access to schools, universities. They have it all for all age groups they need to take next steps not just next steps next, next , next ......... steps and run instead of crawling. If they are afraid do like some newspapers are doing now, Greenspun Media excellent excellent stuff, they are on the right track, Gazette with Chuck Peters. Lets motivate each other and go without looking back.

I think NAA needs to take these steps as well as they represent the industry and if they are slow the industry will die a bad and painfull death.

Next Big Thing

Most of companies today are trying to figure out what is the next big thing and what the users want. They get too sucked up in the debate of what features people want with user studies, research data from Nielsons, comscore etc, focussed groups and what not. They forget users are very sophisticated these days and to predict what features they are going to like or not is very hard if not impossible to predict. So why go that way, if you have an idea and with all the strategies, market trends, and belief you have about your idea to be the next big thing than build it in a way that you create a platform which motivates people to contribute and take it to the next level.

Future is all about users, if you cannot motivate them to try it out and get connected, than it will be very hard to create the next big thing. Google did that with with their search which motivated website owners to spend so much time with their website that they created a multi billion dollar industry of SEO. Facebook did with providing the freedom to users to create their community, this is not the first time its been done, forums have been in existence from they day internet was invented but what they did was motivated people, businesses to create new tools and communication channels. Myspace did it in the same way, their have been many sites which did similar things before fortunecity, geocities but there platforms were limited and control freak, lost focus on the development in technology to motivate people to contribute.

Well I can say these platforms have changed the defination of open source, even though these new platforms are not open source but their inspiration is definetly from the open source platform by opening up their platforms with API's.

1-2-3 of e-marketing

Their is a big misconception among people that once they start a website they will start getting traffic on their and they will start generating revenues. For anything you launch online or offline you have to market your product. There are different strategies based on the type of product. Online market is more competitive as anyone can be running a competitive business out of basement so you have to be very innovative and "Always follow the basic rule of marketing: tracking your ROI, for every dollar you spend you need to track what you got for it. Else it is same as throwing your money away".

Many people get very excited and will say I am going to do viral marketing online and my site will be a big hit in few months as I don't have money. But viral marketing is not always cheap, and if your product does not serve the purpose or users don't like than your popularity can go do very quickly.

So long story short and back to some tips:

1. Always track the effect of every dollar spent online and how it affects your ROI. (Tracking is very important)
2. Try some new media's they are normally cheaper and create more buzz, but be careful of fraudsters and understand the product if don't believe in it don't try it.
3. Design your product from customers point of view and don't try to fool the user to visit your page as the consumer is getting very savvy and you will just loose a customer for ever and waste your money online.
4. The structure and flow of your website should be very easy and search engine friendly.
5. Submit your website to directories and search engines, (read the instructions from search engines on how to optimize your website to get better exposure).
6. "Never use black hat SEO techniques"
7. Make sure you know what your target market is and which sites they visit and try to come up some unique ways to be in front of your consumers.

This is in no way the only list their are so many other things you can do, this is just some help and best of luck.

Tribune declares bankruptcy! Who is next?

Looks like things are moving down a slope. Yesterday Tribune declared Chapter 11, news is next in the line is New York times, they might even have to sell one of their best online asset to survive about.com.

I have been trying to convince Newspapers to make dramatic shift in their online strategy but they are moving at snails pace and looks like they have no interest in change. With Recession in the country advertisers will be looking to spend money where they can track their ROI, even though advertising will increase but advertisers are going to work more hard for ROI. This will move more budgets to online promotions rather than physical newspaper.

The only Newspaper I see is taking some interesting investments in online is Gannett group.

I can only hope newspapers are going to change fast enough to avoid which is unavoidable if the change does not comes ASAP.

Newspapers: What will happen with Newspapers?

This is a question I have been thinking about for a while and recently attended two newspaper conferences in US NAA and NNA both have a different audience. NAA is attended more by national newspapers and big publishing houses where as NNA is very mom and pop based small newspapers, daily, weeklies.

The average age of people running these small papers is 65+ and everyone is trying to see what can they do to increase the circulations and get more advertisers, lot of them have websites now but they have not bought into that yet. They are being either handled by the publishing houses they work under or other third party hosting providers but I don't think they believe in it. Some who believe don't have the resources so what will happen to all these thousands of community newspapers when these people are not there. I don't see that their kids are involved in their business, these businesses are only running because of the passion of these people who started in early 1900's.

The change can come only through the main publishing houses but they are too slow to move and most of them will be out of business in next 10 -15 years only companies who are investing online will survive. Papers who can link their offline and online in a proper way will be much more profitable than in past and will be barrier for pure online papers.

Technology is the key and they have to treat technology as a driver and not a hurdle.

Lets see what will happen with Newspapers.