Back around the year 2000, I was working in operations for a startup called MongoMusic. Mongo was creating a technology/service that helped people discover music that sounds like other music. Mongo was a modern day Pandora and we needed to store a lot of music. This involved ripping, metadata, storage and retrieval. It was terabytes of data, which at the time was difficult to manage.
We started with some Sun machines and attached disk arrays as our initial storage plan. Then we moved to Network Appliance Filers. From there we developed our own cluster of commodity storage devices and then we switched to an early stage storage provider called Scale8. Scale8 provided a caching server that had access to it’s data center storage. The caching device could be mounted like a local drive and essentially provided a limitless file system. It was early days for them and there were bugs, but I loved the solution. Once Mongo was bought by Microsoft, we championed the service internally and I think one other MSN team used them briefly, but Scale8 ultimately went out of business. They were probably a year or two too early, didn’t hunker down quite far enough during the dotcom bust and probably had other things holding them back that wasn’t apparent from the outside. But. They were very early in the cloud storage space. They had a good and improving product. They just didn’t have the timing.
Published on February 25, 2009
in Blogroll.
Recent SEO chatter indicates that “Brand” has recently been given more weight in the serps, so it appears that Google is doing their part to help folks like Ford with reputation management from the start.
However, Rob points out (I highly recommend reading his blog) that brands need to distribute positive content well beyond their own site in hopes of managing reputation in the serps. I’m sure Google would prefer that the serps have a balanced perspective - To show content with a range of opinions/information - not all positive.
What I find the most interesting are the paid results. I’ve suspected for a long time that the natural results for commercial terms will gradually shift to more paid results. Taking Rob’s example of the Ford Fusion search, and his comment about the need for more positive content. It seems to reason to me that Ford will produce quality content - possibly on other domains - then purchase the same search terms to squeeze Mazda and Car Price Secrets out of the top paid results. At the end of the day, there is little a big brand can do to control the natual results, but it’s pretty easy to buy out the spots in the paid results. Look for more brands to buy the same term multiple times across content destinations.
I get asked from time to time what blogs I read. Here is a selection of blogs that cover ad sales, ad news, online marketing, and social media.
http://blog.contextweb.com - good corporate blog
http://www.doshdosh.com/ - social media marketing
http://www.paidcontent.org/ - content and news focused
http://www.marketingvox.com - marketing news
http://www.marketingsherpa.com - digital marketing case studies
http://www.shoemoney.com - more grass roots affiliate marketing
http://www.adrants.com - Insight to ad creative
