Monetizing Manny Pacquiao

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Over the weekend, the streets of Manila were pretty much empty. Which is a rare case to consider. The malls had no people. Sunday lunch out was pretty much dead — a whole nation was glued to the television watching the Pacquiao vs. Hatton fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. With 8 seconds to spare in the second round, Pacquiao landed a stunning left blow into Hatton’s lower jaw sending him to sleep, and a TKO.

But Pacquiao wasn’t the only winner that evening — dozens of Filipino bloggers cashed in from page views netting thousands of dollars from the search engines:
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Celebs on Twitter still see a one way street?

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When Twitter broke the mainstream, Eric Weaver from the Brand Dialogue made a valid observation. When there is finally a chance to interact with their fans in ways unimagined before, celebs in general still don’t want to listen. If you look at the chart of followers vs. following ratio, most hard hitting celebs are following much less than 10% of their audience.

Yet that’s how many Twittering celebrities are using the site: as one more one-way communication channel. Some seem to be taking the time to respond to fans, but most appear very uni-directional.

Is it the inconvenient truth therefore, that when mainstream takes over, the conversation always becomes a one way street?

Telcos may soon be in the business of selling keywords

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I had a revelation today as I met with Ray Tsuchiyama, the marketing director for Tegit Communications (these are the guys behind the famous T9 predictive text recognition in almost all the phones in the world). I was expecting a regular press interview for their new T9 Nav technology but I was surprised to hear something much more interesting than their on-device search. Apparently, the other half of T9 Nav is developing a service that will be out in the latter part of the year, roughly called Off Site Search.
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Yahoo! shuts down GeoCities, pushes paid Web Hosting Service

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I remember my first blog website. It was on Geocities. Sad to hear that Yahoo! is pulling the plug. But it is more of the nostalgia that adds to my sentiment. It is finally time to lay GeoCities to rest. Yahoo! does not mention an exact date, but there are always references to the latter part of the year:

Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.[Yahoo!]

What I find rather funny is how Yahoo! pushes the “award winning Yahoo! Web Hosting Service” which is an all in one paid service as the prime option for GeoCities migration. I have nothing against this — but obviously they’re not telling the public of other perfectly good (and FREE) services such as WordPress and Blogger.

Closing geocities forms part of their strategy to streamline all their services and eliminate those that don’t seem to fit in the scheme of things (i.e the closing of JumpCut in June ’09).

Farewell, Geocities. We knew thee well.