So how old is John McCain? Six-packs, automatic transmissions and the American Express card were all introduced after he was born, not to mention computers which McCain admits he doesn't use.
McCain, himself, jokes that he's older than dirt. And while his age is being raised as a campaign issue, medical experts say voters shouldn't be concerned that, if elected, McCain would be the oldest man to assume the presidency, at 72.
In politics and other fields, they explain, it's not unusual for talented people to do signature work late in life, when they can apply the cumulative wisdom of experience, and leverage personal connections cultivated over time.
Nonetheless, a significant slice of the electorate has qualms about McCain's age. The presumed Republican nominee will celebrate his 72nd birthday shortly before his party's convention. Polls show the age question isn't going away, despite the Arizona senator's efforts to deflect it with self-deprecating humor, or disprove it by keeping a grueling schedule.
"Sure, people live to be 90, but you are not as sharp," said Virginia Bailey, 73, a retired administrative assistant who lives near Schenectady, N.Y., and is a Republican. "I'm not as sharp as I was ten years ago, and I'm sure (McCain) isn't either — even though he wouldn't admit it."
McCain's senior-citizen status raises more concerns among voters than Sen. Barack Obama's relative youthfulness, a new AP-Yahoo News poll indicates. Twenty percent said "too old" describes McCain "very well," compared with 14 percent who felt strongly that Obama is "too young." Overall, 38 percent said "too old" describes McCain somewhat or very well, compared with 30 percent who worried that the Illinois Democrat, who turns 47 this summer, is too young.
Capitalizing on the concern, New York City graphics designer Joe Quint has launched an Internet site called thingsyoungerthanmccain.com. Quint, a Democrat, said he doesn't believe septuagenarians should be disqualified from the presidency, but age should be part of the discussion. He's planning a book of his Web site items before the election.
The age issue is "clearly a potential problem" for McCain, said independent pollster Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. "There is a larger issue of whether people will come to see him as old apart from his age," Kohut added. "Will they think of him as having old ideas?"
Medical science, however, suggests that concerns about McCain's age are exaggerated.
"The presidential campaign is full of chatter — much of it quite misinformed — about the role of age," said Dr. William Thomas, a geriatrician and professor at the University of Maryland's Erickson School of Aging Studies. Geriatrics is a medical specialty that focuses on the elderly.
"People in old age are fully capable of imaginative and skillful work," Thomas added. "A person's age is not a block to doing fantastic work."
Although U.S. life expectancy at birth is about 78 years, a person who reaches 70 can expect to live another 15 years. For a seventy-something president, that could work out to two terms in office, plus time for writing memoirs_and cashing in on book sales.
But differences among people in their seventies can be stark, because some have already started into a steep decline.
Dr. David Reuben, chief of geriatrics at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, said he sees no outward evidence of such a problem with McCain, despite the occasional gaffe.
"As a clinician, I look at whether they appear to be robust, whether their sentences flow, whether their thoughts connect, whether they are easily distractible," said Reuben. "McCain appears to be quite robust."
The main medical concern about McCain is not his age, but his history of melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer. If McCain is elected, Americans would have to get used to the idea of their president as a cancer survivor, closely followed by doctors for any sign of a recurrence.
But Reuben said there's very little difference in clinical terms between McCain's age and Ronald Reagan's, who turned 70 soon after he was sworn in for his first term. Reagan managed to avoid the "old" label by often riding horses and clearing brush on his ranch in California. But could seem to be forgetful at times. In Iran-Contra testimony in 1990, a year after leaving office, he couldn't remember that Gen. John W. Vessey served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for three years in his administration.
Reagan's Alzheimer's diagnosis came later, nearly six years after leaving the White House.
McCain has embraced what he calls his own "oldness." He jokes that he's older than dirt and has more scars than Frankenstein, but he's learned some useful things along the way. That seems to put many voters at ease. In the AP-Yahoo News poll, 58 percent said the term "too old" doesn't describe McCain at all well, or only slightly.
"I figure he's a very experienced man," said Robert Covarrubias, 38, a trucking company manager from Los Angeles, and a Republican. "We've had presidents who were up there in age before."
Mindful that it could backfire on them, Democrats have mostly broached the age issue indirectly, by trying to link McCain to festering problems that Washington hasn't resolved. That may resonate with some voters.
"Not only age wise is (McCain) old, but he has also been a politician for a long time," said Aaron Andrus, 28, a software developer from Salt Lake City, who is not affiliated with either party. "I don't see how what he would do would be any different from what has been done time and time again, and has brought our country to the point where we are today."
Monday, July 14, 2008
Microsoft and Icahn play hardball with Yahoo
Yahoo's board declined a new search deal over the weekend, but Carl Icahn's strategy seems to involve replacing Yahoo's current board
July 14, 2008 10:59 AM
It seemed like a welcome relief when Microsoft walked away from the Yahoo deal, but the company has now got heavily involved with "billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn," which seems like a way to pick up Yahoo's search business on the cheap.
During skirmishes over the weekend, Yahoo rejected a new search-related deal, while Microsoft declined to buy Yahoo at the old $33 price, have already made several higher offers. According to The New York Times:
But the offer proved tough for Yahoo to swallow, these people said. It would have effectively led to the sale of Yahoo's search advertising business to Microsoft, leaving the remaining operations in Mr Icahn's hands. Yahoo also believed that the promised revenue of the latest offer [$2.3 billion a year] was less than it would earn through the Google partnership.
The latest deal would also have replaced Yahoo's board, which seems to be a big part of Icahn's game plan. So the question now is whether Yahoo's shareholders will do that. Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting is scheduled for August 1, so we may soon find out.
Any deal with Microsoft could, of course, be delayed by regulatory investigation, and the Yahoo/Google deal is already being investigated by US anti-trust regulators. So it looks as though we may be stuck with this farrago for at least a few more months
July 14, 2008 10:59 AM
It seemed like a welcome relief when Microsoft walked away from the Yahoo deal, but the company has now got heavily involved with "billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn," which seems like a way to pick up Yahoo's search business on the cheap.
During skirmishes over the weekend, Yahoo rejected a new search-related deal, while Microsoft declined to buy Yahoo at the old $33 price, have already made several higher offers. According to The New York Times:
But the offer proved tough for Yahoo to swallow, these people said. It would have effectively led to the sale of Yahoo's search advertising business to Microsoft, leaving the remaining operations in Mr Icahn's hands. Yahoo also believed that the promised revenue of the latest offer [$2.3 billion a year] was less than it would earn through the Google partnership.
The latest deal would also have replaced Yahoo's board, which seems to be a big part of Icahn's game plan. So the question now is whether Yahoo's shareholders will do that. Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting is scheduled for August 1, so we may soon find out.
Any deal with Microsoft could, of course, be delayed by regulatory investigation, and the Yahoo/Google deal is already being investigated by US anti-trust regulators. So it looks as though we may be stuck with this farrago for at least a few more months
Female bodyguards for Dhoni
Mahendra Singh Dhoni has taken time out from cricket but he still needs protection. In fact, he is being given special protection to keep him safe from his ever growing female fans. The Jharkhand Police has arranged for female bodyguards for this much sought after cricketer.
When Dhoni reached his house in Ranchi last week the Jharkhand Police promptly deployed five female bodyguards outside Dhoni's house. These armed female guards will escort Dhoni when he moves around his hometown. Clear about their duty, one of the constable said, "Dhoni has a huge number of female fans and we have been appointed to protect him from them".
The Jharkhand Police have deployed these special guards in view of the hysterical reactions with which female fans have greeted Dhoni in recent months. In Kolkata one female fan broke through the security and hugged the Indian ODI captain. To avoid any more embarrassment for Dhoni these female constables will accompany Dhoni where ever he goes including his college in Ranchi.
When Dhoni reached his house in Ranchi last week the Jharkhand Police promptly deployed five female bodyguards outside Dhoni's house. These armed female guards will escort Dhoni when he moves around his hometown. Clear about their duty, one of the constable said, "Dhoni has a huge number of female fans and we have been appointed to protect him from them".
The Jharkhand Police have deployed these special guards in view of the hysterical reactions with which female fans have greeted Dhoni in recent months. In Kolkata one female fan broke through the security and hugged the Indian ODI captain. To avoid any more embarrassment for Dhoni these female constables will accompany Dhoni where ever he goes including his college in Ranchi.
Agri, defence agendas to follow suit, says Rodriguez
Dr Placid Rodriguez, former president of Indian Nuclear Society and ex Director of Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, said the deal comes under the whole gamut of strategic alliance covering defence, space, nuclear and agriculture.
An eminent scientist has expressed fear that after the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal, Washington may try to push its agricultural agenda and defence sales to New Delhi.
"My greatest reservation (about the deal) is that the strategic alliance between India and the US is going into agriculture because in the other three sectors (defence, space and nuclear) we are strong and we can go independently and we will go," Rodriguez said.
"Our agricultural universities, state universities, ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) laboratories -- they will be completely overwhelmed by giants like Monsanto whose resources are plenty and whose motivation is only monopoly," he said.
After Bt. cotton, now genetically modified brinjal is going to be brought in, Rodriguez said, adding, "we don't know what's next". "Even European Commission has not accepted genetically modified food and we are not examining all the consequences".
The former President and Honorary Secretary of Indian National Academy of Engineering said another "lubricant" (for the US to sign the deal with India) behind the 123 agreement is the "large possibility of defence sales (in India}".
"We are in the market for 125 fighters (a multi-billion dollar business opportunity). In fact, we will not buy any reactor from the US for 20 years. We will be buying reactors from Russia and France. What the US wants is a monopoly in agriculture sector", Rodriguez said.
While Russia, France and to some extent Israel are India's collaborators in defence equipment, the US wants greater pie of the Indian defence market, he said.
Rodriguez expressed the view that the deal is actually an international civil nuclear cooperation agreement -- a deal between India and international community -- and has been given "wrong connotation" that it's an Indo-US deal, attracting opposition from the left parties. Ardent supporters of the deal, including Prime Minister, "played too much" about the deal, he said.
"After all, IAEA is a 145-member body in which US is also a member. NSG is a group of 45 nations. So, it's actually an agreement between two groups and the US is the strongest and most powerful member of the groups," he said.
While stating that the deal is "acceptable", he said there are certainly question marks.
"What if the US President (after the safeguards agreement with IAEA and NSG) says that the decisions are governed by the Hyde Act which is ultimate," he asked.
He said India has agreed to a clause in the 123 agreement that the agreement would be subject to the national laws of the two nations. But it would have been better to say it would be subject to existing international laws, Rodriguez said.
"It has been suggested that we must also pass a national act which says we are not bound by Hyde Act because it's our national law. That's only way of getting over it," Rodriguez said.
He also disagreed with the view that the agreement with the US is the full civil nuclear cooperation deal, saying reprocessing, heavy water technology and enrichment have been kept out of its purview.
On the issue of reprocessing, there are conditions, he said.
"We have to build new plant exclusively from the imported fuel materials and thereafter we have to give result of reprocessing and they will come back to us with decision after one year; it does not say that a favourable decision will be taken," he said.
An eminent scientist has expressed fear that after the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal, Washington may try to push its agricultural agenda and defence sales to New Delhi.
"My greatest reservation (about the deal) is that the strategic alliance between India and the US is going into agriculture because in the other three sectors (defence, space and nuclear) we are strong and we can go independently and we will go," Rodriguez said.
"Our agricultural universities, state universities, ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) laboratories -- they will be completely overwhelmed by giants like Monsanto whose resources are plenty and whose motivation is only monopoly," he said.
After Bt. cotton, now genetically modified brinjal is going to be brought in, Rodriguez said, adding, "we don't know what's next". "Even European Commission has not accepted genetically modified food and we are not examining all the consequences".
The former President and Honorary Secretary of Indian National Academy of Engineering said another "lubricant" (for the US to sign the deal with India) behind the 123 agreement is the "large possibility of defence sales (in India}".
"We are in the market for 125 fighters (a multi-billion dollar business opportunity). In fact, we will not buy any reactor from the US for 20 years. We will be buying reactors from Russia and France. What the US wants is a monopoly in agriculture sector", Rodriguez said.
While Russia, France and to some extent Israel are India's collaborators in defence equipment, the US wants greater pie of the Indian defence market, he said.
Rodriguez expressed the view that the deal is actually an international civil nuclear cooperation agreement -- a deal between India and international community -- and has been given "wrong connotation" that it's an Indo-US deal, attracting opposition from the left parties. Ardent supporters of the deal, including Prime Minister, "played too much" about the deal, he said.
"After all, IAEA is a 145-member body in which US is also a member. NSG is a group of 45 nations. So, it's actually an agreement between two groups and the US is the strongest and most powerful member of the groups," he said.
While stating that the deal is "acceptable", he said there are certainly question marks.
"What if the US President (after the safeguards agreement with IAEA and NSG) says that the decisions are governed by the Hyde Act which is ultimate," he asked.
He said India has agreed to a clause in the 123 agreement that the agreement would be subject to the national laws of the two nations. But it would have been better to say it would be subject to existing international laws, Rodriguez said.
"It has been suggested that we must also pass a national act which says we are not bound by Hyde Act because it's our national law. That's only way of getting over it," Rodriguez said.
He also disagreed with the view that the agreement with the US is the full civil nuclear cooperation deal, saying reprocessing, heavy water technology and enrichment have been kept out of its purview.
On the issue of reprocessing, there are conditions, he said.
"We have to build new plant exclusively from the imported fuel materials and thereafter we have to give result of reprocessing and they will come back to us with decision after one year; it does not say that a favourable decision will be taken," he said.
Why Google Rules the Online Ad Market, and How That Could Change
Over the last few weeks, I've been pre-occupied by an online debate over a crucial question, and its implications for online content and advertising: Is the Internet making us more stupid, or more intelligent?
On one side: Nicholas Carr. In an article for the Atlantic, Carr argued that "the Net... is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation". Because it encourages us to read shorter articles and flit between them via links, he says, our capacity for thought is becoming impaired. In support of Carr's view, writers are being taught to assume that readers have almost no attention span when reading on the Web.
On the other side: Scott Karp. Karp claims that our shift in reading behavior to shorter, hyperlinked articles on the Web is a more efficient way of gathering information, and that our mode of thinking may be changing for the better.
This debate has pre-occupied me because, after months of research and planning, we recently launched what we think is the best free financial news product on the Internet (Market Currents). And guess what? No coincidence: It consists of tiny bite-sized nuggets of information, with outbound links in almost every sentence. Perhaps we just contributed to the dumbing-down of humanity.
In pondering the question of whether the Internet is reducing our capacity for thought, I've come to the conclusion that the problem isn't what we read on the Web, but how we read on the Web. And this distinction provides the key to a question of huge economic importance to anyone involved in the Internet: Why aren't online ad rates higher? Let me explain.
Carr and Karp focus on the brevity of most articles on the 'Net and the existence of hyperlinks between them. For Carr, constant reading of short articles shrinks our attention spans, entailing the loss of our ability to read books and longer articles. For Karp, shorter, hyperlinked articles are a more efficient way of finding information, so he views them as an advantage, not a threat.
The real concentration problem
But as I examine my own online reading behavior, I find that my inability to focus isn't due to the length of Web articles, but how I'm reading them. Four factors reduce my concentration when reading articles on the Web:
1. When I'm reading an article on the Web, I often shouldn't be. A frequent scenario: I'm reading and responding to emails, and one of them contains a link to an article. So I click on it, and quickly skim the article. But really I intended to spend this time responding to emails, not reading articles. Another scenario: I'm working on something, but take frequent and short breaks to check the news. In both cases, I haven't intentionally allotted time to reading an article on the Web; I've been distracted into reading an article on the web. Contrast that with reading a newspaper: when I read a newspaper, I've consciously decided to allot time to that, so my concentration level is far higher.
2. When I'm reading an article on the Web, I'm often distracted by other activities. Once I do decide to read an article on the Web, I'm constantly distracted. Reading anything on a PC is hard, because PCs make it so easy to flit between tasks with a single click. Email, again, is the worst culprit: somehow its real time nature lures me into checking email frequently even when I'm doing something else. I let myself be pulled into answering emails as they enter my inbox, whatever else I'm doing.
3. Hyperlinks within articles themselves can be a distraction. Often I'll click a hyperlink to check it out, and that pulls me away from the article I'm reading. Prof. Michael Jackson says that hyperlinks are turning us into a race of mental grasshoppers. "Links help you to pick your own path through a complex mass of information," he says , "but they also distract you, tempt you into pointless digression, and break the coherence of your thought."
4. Reading is harder on a screen. I remember reading an article by Jacob Nielsen in which he estimated that it's 25% harder to read an article on a PC monitor than on a sheet of paper. (If you know the source, please leave a link below.)
The core problem, then, isn't that short articles are cutting my attention span, but that when I read articles on the Web my concentration is weak to start with. Put differently, when I read an article on the Web, I don't have strong enough intention and focus to do what I'm doing.
Do Bloggers have A.D.D.?
If correct, this analysis explains an unusual phenomenon we've seen at Seeking Alpha: Blogger A.D.D. Some background: each quarter, U.S. public companies issue their financial results and do a conference call with analysts to discuss their results. These calls are packed with valuable information about companies and industries. But the calls are hard to listen to -- they last an hour and often overlapy with each other. So professional investors read transcripts instead of listening to the calls themselves. We decided to make these transcripts available to everyone by publishing them for free every quarter, with powerful search tools.
But remarkably, bloggers, who are arguably the most Web savvy Internet users, hardly ever read the transcripts or link to them. Bloggers are writing regular commentary on Google, Apple, the newspaper industry and alternative energy, but are ignoring unquestionably the best source of information on these topics, which is now available for free. Moreover, the transcripts contain not only the best information about companies and industries, but also a ton of great quotes. The problem is that they're over 10 pages long (though you can view them on Seeking Alpha in a single page.) In contrast, Seeking Alpha's regular readers -- investors, who perhaps have longer attention spans as they research stocks -- are consuming over a million page views of transcripts in a typical month.
My guess is that bloggers, at the forefront of Internet usage, have lost the level of concentration required to skim a long document. How else to explain the fact that this earnings season, tens of bloggers will write about Google and Apple's results, but not one of them will read the transcripts of those companies' conference calls to find out what's really going on in their businesses?
Why banner ad prices are so cheap
Weak concentration when reading Web content also explains why the value of online banner ads is far lower than it could be. In theory, online ads should command higher rates due to three advantages they have over print or TV ads. First, online ads are usually contextually or behaviorally relevant. Second, they're clickable, so you can quickly execute a transaction or find more information about the advertiser. And third, their impact is measurable.
But the reality is that most online ads command far lower rates than print ads. Why? Because readers of online content are only "half there"; they often haven't intentionally allotted time and mental space to think and ponder when reading online. So they don't adequately consider ads, even when the ads are contextually relevant to what they're reading. In contrast, when I personally read a newspaper, I'm "fully there", and when I pause to think about an article, my eyes meander to the ads next to the article which I consider with more concentration than online ads.
Google's dominance of the online ad market
This also explains why Google (GOOG) dominates the online ad market. When I'm searching online, I'm doing something that requires intention -- I have to type in a search phrase, rather than just click a link. I'm interested in results related to my search, even if they are ads. In other words, I usually have far stronger intentionality when searching than when reading an article. As a result, Google's search ads have better performance than most banner ads. Combine that with the frequency with which Web users perform searches, and it's clear why Goolge dominates the online ad market.
Google's dominance of the online ad market will change if ads displayed next to content perform better. For that to happen, we need to stop ourselves becoming "mental grasshoppers".
How will we achieve that? The Internet and mobile devices have both given us great tools for instantaneous connectivity. Now we need to develop better tools to combat unimportant interruptions, and provide better prioritization and time management. Top of my list: stop using email as a de facto time manager, because what arrived most recently isn't necessarily the most important claim on your attention. Constantly checking email disrupts concentration on other, more important tasks.
If we can spend more time doing what we really intend to do when we intend to do it, the Internet will enhance our knowledge processing and analysis rather than curb it. Online disply ad rates will then rocket, to the benefit of publishers like the New York Times (NYT), Time Warner (TWX), News Corp (NWS), Pearson's FT.com (PSO), Yahoo! (YHOO) and TheStreet.com (TSCM). And Google's share of the overall ad market will decline.
On one side: Nicholas Carr. In an article for the Atlantic, Carr argued that "the Net... is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation". Because it encourages us to read shorter articles and flit between them via links, he says, our capacity for thought is becoming impaired. In support of Carr's view, writers are being taught to assume that readers have almost no attention span when reading on the Web.
On the other side: Scott Karp. Karp claims that our shift in reading behavior to shorter, hyperlinked articles on the Web is a more efficient way of gathering information, and that our mode of thinking may be changing for the better.
This debate has pre-occupied me because, after months of research and planning, we recently launched what we think is the best free financial news product on the Internet (Market Currents). And guess what? No coincidence: It consists of tiny bite-sized nuggets of information, with outbound links in almost every sentence. Perhaps we just contributed to the dumbing-down of humanity.
In pondering the question of whether the Internet is reducing our capacity for thought, I've come to the conclusion that the problem isn't what we read on the Web, but how we read on the Web. And this distinction provides the key to a question of huge economic importance to anyone involved in the Internet: Why aren't online ad rates higher? Let me explain.
Carr and Karp focus on the brevity of most articles on the 'Net and the existence of hyperlinks between them. For Carr, constant reading of short articles shrinks our attention spans, entailing the loss of our ability to read books and longer articles. For Karp, shorter, hyperlinked articles are a more efficient way of finding information, so he views them as an advantage, not a threat.
The real concentration problem
But as I examine my own online reading behavior, I find that my inability to focus isn't due to the length of Web articles, but how I'm reading them. Four factors reduce my concentration when reading articles on the Web:
1. When I'm reading an article on the Web, I often shouldn't be. A frequent scenario: I'm reading and responding to emails, and one of them contains a link to an article. So I click on it, and quickly skim the article. But really I intended to spend this time responding to emails, not reading articles. Another scenario: I'm working on something, but take frequent and short breaks to check the news. In both cases, I haven't intentionally allotted time to reading an article on the Web; I've been distracted into reading an article on the web. Contrast that with reading a newspaper: when I read a newspaper, I've consciously decided to allot time to that, so my concentration level is far higher.
2. When I'm reading an article on the Web, I'm often distracted by other activities. Once I do decide to read an article on the Web, I'm constantly distracted. Reading anything on a PC is hard, because PCs make it so easy to flit between tasks with a single click. Email, again, is the worst culprit: somehow its real time nature lures me into checking email frequently even when I'm doing something else. I let myself be pulled into answering emails as they enter my inbox, whatever else I'm doing.
3. Hyperlinks within articles themselves can be a distraction. Often I'll click a hyperlink to check it out, and that pulls me away from the article I'm reading. Prof. Michael Jackson says that hyperlinks are turning us into a race of mental grasshoppers. "Links help you to pick your own path through a complex mass of information," he says , "but they also distract you, tempt you into pointless digression, and break the coherence of your thought."
4. Reading is harder on a screen. I remember reading an article by Jacob Nielsen in which he estimated that it's 25% harder to read an article on a PC monitor than on a sheet of paper. (If you know the source, please leave a link below.)
The core problem, then, isn't that short articles are cutting my attention span, but that when I read articles on the Web my concentration is weak to start with. Put differently, when I read an article on the Web, I don't have strong enough intention and focus to do what I'm doing.
Do Bloggers have A.D.D.?
If correct, this analysis explains an unusual phenomenon we've seen at Seeking Alpha: Blogger A.D.D. Some background: each quarter, U.S. public companies issue their financial results and do a conference call with analysts to discuss their results. These calls are packed with valuable information about companies and industries. But the calls are hard to listen to -- they last an hour and often overlapy with each other. So professional investors read transcripts instead of listening to the calls themselves. We decided to make these transcripts available to everyone by publishing them for free every quarter, with powerful search tools.
But remarkably, bloggers, who are arguably the most Web savvy Internet users, hardly ever read the transcripts or link to them. Bloggers are writing regular commentary on Google, Apple, the newspaper industry and alternative energy, but are ignoring unquestionably the best source of information on these topics, which is now available for free. Moreover, the transcripts contain not only the best information about companies and industries, but also a ton of great quotes. The problem is that they're over 10 pages long (though you can view them on Seeking Alpha in a single page.) In contrast, Seeking Alpha's regular readers -- investors, who perhaps have longer attention spans as they research stocks -- are consuming over a million page views of transcripts in a typical month.
My guess is that bloggers, at the forefront of Internet usage, have lost the level of concentration required to skim a long document. How else to explain the fact that this earnings season, tens of bloggers will write about Google and Apple's results, but not one of them will read the transcripts of those companies' conference calls to find out what's really going on in their businesses?
Why banner ad prices are so cheap
Weak concentration when reading Web content also explains why the value of online banner ads is far lower than it could be. In theory, online ads should command higher rates due to three advantages they have over print or TV ads. First, online ads are usually contextually or behaviorally relevant. Second, they're clickable, so you can quickly execute a transaction or find more information about the advertiser. And third, their impact is measurable.
But the reality is that most online ads command far lower rates than print ads. Why? Because readers of online content are only "half there"; they often haven't intentionally allotted time and mental space to think and ponder when reading online. So they don't adequately consider ads, even when the ads are contextually relevant to what they're reading. In contrast, when I personally read a newspaper, I'm "fully there", and when I pause to think about an article, my eyes meander to the ads next to the article which I consider with more concentration than online ads.
Google's dominance of the online ad market
This also explains why Google (GOOG) dominates the online ad market. When I'm searching online, I'm doing something that requires intention -- I have to type in a search phrase, rather than just click a link. I'm interested in results related to my search, even if they are ads. In other words, I usually have far stronger intentionality when searching than when reading an article. As a result, Google's search ads have better performance than most banner ads. Combine that with the frequency with which Web users perform searches, and it's clear why Goolge dominates the online ad market.
Google's dominance of the online ad market will change if ads displayed next to content perform better. For that to happen, we need to stop ourselves becoming "mental grasshoppers".
How will we achieve that? The Internet and mobile devices have both given us great tools for instantaneous connectivity. Now we need to develop better tools to combat unimportant interruptions, and provide better prioritization and time management. Top of my list: stop using email as a de facto time manager, because what arrived most recently isn't necessarily the most important claim on your attention. Constantly checking email disrupts concentration on other, more important tasks.
If we can spend more time doing what we really intend to do when we intend to do it, the Internet will enhance our knowledge processing and analysis rather than curb it. Online disply ad rates will then rocket, to the benefit of publishers like the New York Times (NYT), Time Warner (TWX), News Corp (NWS), Pearson's FT.com (PSO), Yahoo! (YHOO) and TheStreet.com (TSCM). And Google's share of the overall ad market will decline.
U.S. stock futures stronger after government plan
U.S. stock futures pointed to opening gains after an extraordinary weekend in which the White House moved to rescue beleaguered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Anheuser-Busch recommended a $52 billion buyout offer.
S&P 500 futures rose 11.2 points to 1,251.00 and Nasdaq 100 futures rose 16.25 points to 1,836.50. Dow industrial futures rose 77 points.
U.S. stocks dropped on Friday on worries about the health of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with the Dow industrials falling 128 points, the Nasdaq Composite losing 18 points and the S&P 500 dropping 13 points.
But the U.S. government announced a dramatic package over the weekend: the Federal Reserve will open up its emergency discount window to Fannie and Freddie - the pair own or guarantee $5.2 billion in U.S. home mortgages -- while Treasury said it will seek Congressional approval to buy stock and increase the government's credit line.
S&P 500 futures rose 11.2 points to 1,251.00 and Nasdaq 100 futures rose 16.25 points to 1,836.50. Dow industrial futures rose 77 points.
U.S. stocks dropped on Friday on worries about the health of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with the Dow industrials falling 128 points, the Nasdaq Composite losing 18 points and the S&P 500 dropping 13 points.
But the U.S. government announced a dramatic package over the weekend: the Federal Reserve will open up its emergency discount window to Fannie and Freddie - the pair own or guarantee $5.2 billion in U.S. home mortgages -- while Treasury said it will seek Congressional approval to buy stock and increase the government's credit line.
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