[Tim Wilson]

Here’s the movie that Dustin meant to embed. 🙂

And yes kids, don’t forget – Cow videos are embeddable!

[Tim Wilson]

It’s worth pointing out again that Google explicitly ignores keyword metatags. As they say in the following video, “Not even a little.”

The rest of the story from googlewebmastercentral.com, here.

Note too: people say it can’t hurt anything to include them – yes it can. Google sees them, and downgrades your site. Seriously.

And not just Google:

1997 was the last year that the meta keywords tag enjoyed support among the majority of major crawlers out there (4 out of 7 – Excite, WebCrawler and Northern Light, also crawling the web that year, did not support it).

When new search engines emerged in 1998, such as Google and FAST, they didn’t support the tag. The reason was simple. By that time, search engines had learned that some webmasters would “stuff” the same word over and over into the meta keywords tag, as a way of trying to rank better. At the time, search engines didn’t rely so heavily on link analysis, so page stuffing like this was more effective. Alternatively, some site owners would insert words that they weren’t relevant for.

In July 2002, AltaVista dropped its support of the tag. That left Inktomi as the only major crawler still supporting it.

(I found this information on a link from the Google webmaster’s own page.)

To summarize again, why do search engines ignore the keyword meta, or, in Google’s case, actually downgrade your site for having them? Because they are considered spam. Spam is bad.

So you can use the keyword metatag to optimize for Inktomi, or you can roll the dice on being downgraded in Google. Yeah, there are other search engines besides Google — and Bing is hinting that they use keyword metas — but seriously man, how much time do you want to invest in torching your own Google results?

Okay then, what DOES Google want? They want you to do exactly what Chris does. See here, which is Google’s webmaster guidelines page. Lots of good stuff there that echoes Chris.

Yr pal,

Timmy

[Tim Wilson]

One of my favorite things about Greenspan: he recently admitted he was wrong. After decades as the face of deregulation, since “markets always operate in their own self-interests,” he testified before Congress that he had noooo idea that, left to their own devices, markets will throw themselves on the rocks of their own greed.

It was quite remarkable to see the man so visibly shaken. All he had to do was not show up, not open his mouth, and he would have been lionized, and at least in the debate on who was the most influential economist of his time….and whether his influence was good or bad. Well, now he’s told us that he thinks he was asleep at the switch. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a public figure so honest about his mistakes.

Our grandkids will still be paying for them…and he knows it…which was all the more reason to hide. You have to respect a man for throwing a 50-year legacy under the bus, hoping to start steering it in the right direction.

So yes, people who are in business, yet refuse to learn the lessons of both success and failure of those who have gone before, or learn from the insight of people smart enough to figure out that, to survive, they need to change what they’ve been doing for most of their lives — my guess is that people who won’t take a few hours to trouble themselves for that won’t be in business much longer.

Too cheap to buy a $15 book from Amazon? Pick it up the next time you take your kids to the public library. You ARE taking your kids to the public library, right? Library doesn’t have it? Buy it and DONATE it to the library, then write it off. You can be cheap and generous at the same time.

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “”Uphill, both ways, in the snow”, is how we normally finish these:-)”

Wait, I thought it was “backwards and in high heels.”

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Carnegie] “I don’t think it is a fair criticism to make of a company that they want to spend their resources on their own product rather than someone elses.”

Our point is simply that Avid’s strategy of disappearance from other forums, and from any website but their own, has helped them disappear from the public eye.

It’s not just for forums, though. Look around the web. Apart from Avid’s own press releases here and there, you’d think Avid already HAD stopped selling new products.

Avid wanted to disappear from anywhere but its own site? Mission accomplished. It’s a measure of Avid’s success with this strategy that we live in a world in which Avid is irrelevant, if not entirely absent, for anyone but their current customers.

We didn’t ask them for money. We asked Avid if they wanted our help elevating their profile through a variety of platforms beyond the forums (web articles, magazine, newsletters, podcasts, etc.), and they told us no. We tried again as recently as last month, and haven’t had the courtesy of a reply.

We don’t take it personally. We see it as consistent with the policy that they told us that they would pursue three years ago, and that they have.

That’s their prerogative. But it’s also fair of us to criticize them for what we see as a short-sighted, and ultimately self-defeating strategy. Reducing the web footprint that you can get for free is not part of anyone’s recipe for success.

As Ron observes, banner ads at MacWorld.com aren’t enough to compensate for this.

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Carnegie] “criticizing Avid for “driving interest” away from the COW is not a valid argument for several reasons”

It’s valid because we specifically asked for help, and were told twice that Avid had no interest in spending energy on outside forums, and were spending the effort on bringing it all to themselves.

Ron and I were also each told this separately, me, within just a few months of leaving Avid to come work at the Cow. I had certainly seen this process well underway before I left – I just hadn’t heard it stated quite so clearly until I asked.

To another of your posts, I think that Avid has had a huge number of problems, but I agree with you that failure to consult or hire editors has not been among them.

[Tim Wilson]

[Ron Lindeboom] “Todd Terry] “Yes, some positive changes there, but I think they will prove to be too little too late.”

I couldn’t agree more.”

Me too…although the IBM analogy is the absolute worst one possible, Todd. IBM is how they SHOULD do it.

IBM realized that any changes that they made to their computer business would indeed be too little, too late. At the same time, they found that the customers who were no longer buying IBM computers still relied on its enterprise-scale infrastructure-building expertise. They transformed themselves into a services company that is bigger than ever.

A key part of their infrastructure services is servers. As announced just last Friday (Ron’s birthday – woo hoo!), IBM’s server marketshare is #1 and growing. They also had the biggest profit in Q3 of any company in the server business.

So what happened to their computers? They found them to be a distraction to what had become IBM’s core domain. They sold the computer business to Lenovo…

…who just announced that their year-on-year profits had doubled, and that marketshare is up 18%, double HP’s 9% growth, and well ahead of Apple’s growth of 11% (on much lower marketshare of course.)

IBM is doing fine. The computer division they sold off is doing fine. Do you people not read the business news? 🙂

Here’s how that applies to Avid. One part of the company that has done great is broadcast. Why? Because the transition to digital newsrooms has only barely begun – over 80% of facilities worldwide are completely in play, and Avid has dominated so far. Why? Because of Avid’s expertise in enterprise-class infrastructure – integrating not only their own products, but aggressively supporting other companies as well.

You know that Final Cut Pro has been supported as an Avid Unity client for years now, right?

But far more important than networked storage, Avid has the server business nailed. As risky as disk-based playout is, going with non-Avid servers is even riskier – nobody else is as experienced supporting them in news environments.

The moral of the story is that Avid could spin off the video business (doing great, thanks to Media Composer software) and the audio business (Pro Tools, still going great guns), spin of networked storage (Unity), and become a services and servers business that would continue to dominate the market for pretty much as long as they wanted to.

In other words, IBM is EXACTLY the model to follow. If they do, Avid will be bigger and more profitable than ever.

My prediction: they won’t.

re: layoffs, my concern (to the extent that I care) is that they haven’t laid off nearly enough people. My guess why they haven’t laid off more – it’s too expensive!! They’re reporting termination costs of $7-9 million for those 120 employees, which is right in line with industry averages.

But I think that one of the painful lessons of the current economy is that you really don’t need as many people to, say, make newspapers, as you did before. The newspapers that have figured out the RIGHT way to do this are becoming profitable again, and many are even finding subscriptions going up as they now have the resources to grow their businesses.

My prediciton: Avid won’t.

But to me, in general, I think of layoffs are often a sign that a company is paying attention. So the question is really, even more than positive management and development changes, whether Avid’s layoffs are too little too late.

They should be so wise as to follow IBM’s model into the future.

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks guys. We love feedback.

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks for asking about advertising, Frank!

Head to the “Contact Us” link in the upper right hand corner of the page, and follow the link to Tim Matteson, our Sales Director.

Thanks,
Tim Wilson
The Cow

[Tim Wilson]

It’s going to be interesting to see how the aftermarket accessory ecosystem evolves. I doubt that it will be as extensive as the add-ons for optimizing DSLRs for video, but it will surely be bigger than it is.

Note that while the demo clip is for the audio feature set only, there is indeed a video app. I’m curious enough that I dropped a line to one of my peeps, who I just found out is a VP there. Small world and all that. I met him in England, when he was based in Norway I think, and before that, Australia with a detour through Asia. He’s in Canada now. So there you go….

tw