The Caffeinated Blog

Twitter Debate: Innovative or Gimmicky?

I just jumped on the Twitter bandwagon yesterday.  I've been resisting it for a while, despite reading all the Twittervangelism out there.  I finally decided to give it a try, and so far it's been quite interesting.  It has potential for the obsessive-compulsive in me.

I've now become intrigued with the Obama-McCain Twitter debate.  I found out about it watching Attack of the Show on G4 yesterday, where they had a highly intellectual discussion about it with a panel of spotty teenage guys wearing cowboy hats and huge sunglasses in front of Stickcams.  Only on AOTS...but I digress.

The discussion, as short as it was for the attention span of a 16 year old guy, was actually quite interesting because they talked about whether the Twitter debate was actually an excellent way to use current Web 2.0 technology to reach out to young voters, or if it was just plain pandering.  The two guys that responded thought it was the latter.

I also read this blog post from Sean Maguire at Marketing Pilgrim, where he predicts that Obama will win the presidency because he's "most savvy in online politics" (i.e. social media, texting, email, etc.).  The comments that follow are quite lively and slightly more interesting than the post itself - not because the post wasn't at all interesting, but because the comments (naturally) degraded into a debate that completely missed the point of the original post.  Having subscribed to follow-up comments, I witnessed the whole thing, blow by blow.

I'd like to hear your opinions: is the Twitter debate going to win over the online community, or will they see it as pandering and gimmicky? Will Obama win because of his online political savviness?

Microsoft Offers to Buy Yahoo...Who Saw This Coming?

This is extremely interesting...

 Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo

As soon as I saw this, my first thought went to search (obviously): how search results on Yahoo would be affected, and if/how the two paid search platforms would be combined.

I'm sure that many search marketers like me are equally concerned, especially given that the Microsoft adCenter platform is widely regarded as a mess (I personally would have to agree).  And thought many don't really dig Yahoo's panama platform, it sure beats adCenter's slowness and inefficiency.

And how would the two search engines be combined (Yahoo Live? Microhoo?)  Again, Yahoo's results are so much better than MSN's/Live's/whatever the hell it is today.

Point here is that the implications would be huge.  Could this merger actually   pose a formidable threat to Google?

I want to hear from the SEMs reading this - do you think a Yahoo/Microsoft merger would be a good or bad thing?

When Wikis Go Awry

I know this has been circulating for a few weeks (I missed it somehow); but I've just read an interesting article about the software a student developed to identify who was editing Wikipedia entries.  Of course, many large corporations, organizations, and major religions were up in arms over this.  Among the "revelations" listed:

      "- Microsoft tried to cover up the XBOX 360 failure rate

- Apple edit Microsoft entries, adding more negative comments about its rival

- Bill Gates revenge? Microsoft edits Apple entries, adding more negative comments about its rival

- The Vatican edits Irish Catholic politician Gerry Adams page

       - In the 9/11 Wikipedia article, the NRA added that 'Iraq was involved in 9/11'

 
      - Scientology removes criticism and negatives article from Scientology page"

So, how much of this is really a surprise?  If you had a Wikipedia page, wouldn't you remove anything negative?  It's all just spin - PR 101 (of course, we all know the saying "there's no such thing as bad PR").

However, now I'm interested to know how involved Wikipedia is going to get in this whole debacle.  Now that they can see who is editing pages, will they start to ban certain IPs from editing certain pages?  How "human-edited" is Wikipedia going to be in the end?  They already don't allow so-called "advertising" links to be posted in any entries (define "advertising").  How much more will they have to intervene (and should they intervene)?