Ocean has been on a hiatus for the past month, basking on the sun-drenched, dried-out lawns of Minnesota. Doesn't every blog deserve a break? We'll be back in action soon.

Feedster rolled out a new look and new site features this week. The long-time RSS search engine and content aggregator has moved from a traditional search engine style service to one that's a little more Web 2.0-ish, with a heavy focus on widgets, customization, and more buzz-style presentation of content. The biggest change from the previous version is the interface. Gone is the traditional Google-ized search console (lots of whitespace). Instead, it's been replaced by one that puts the focus on content and discovery by gently easing readers into stories that are separated into content categories. In many ways the deemphasis on the lone search box model highlights a shift in strategy. Despite being in the RSS game as long as any of the other players, Feedster's previous incarnation focused heavily on the search side of RSS and syndicated content. Now, with customizable tools and a more discovery focused approach, Feedster is hoping to capitalize on the same kind of success and traction in the content discovery space. But the mountain in front of Feedster is a big one, and they're at the bottom. The biggest challenge is at the heart of Feedster lies RSS. Though it's a standards-based protocol, is ubiquitous with blogging, and enjoys integration with all major browsers and operating systems, RSS still has yet to make its way into the lexicon of the average internet user. A 2006 Marketing Sherpa study on RSS notes that while at least 75 million US and UK users use RSS on a regular basis, only 17%-32% of RSS users actually know they're using RSS. This study is over a year old, but if the percentages of users "in the know" has remained constant, that's well over 50 million people who don't know they're using RSS. The most recent movements in the RSS space have come from the Google/Feedburner acquisition. For the time being it has nothing to do with aggregating content but rather tracking the content that's being aggregated. Yet, one has to think that if Google's making a play in the RSS space there are a bunch of smart people out there that seem to think RSS is going to be big, eventually. But what side of big will it be on? Big to the publishers or big to the general Internet audience? Will consumers even care where and how they get their content - will they just care that they get content? Herein lies the challenge faced by Feedster. Though the visual update is welcome, they have just entered the very crowded "content-discovery" space. Their service has always been perfect for people who know what RSS is and how to use it, but that slice of the market is very small. The refresh is good, but what's coming down the pipe for Feedster? Welcome to Feedster, Version 2.0 via [Feedster Blog and GigaOm]

Amidst all the iPhone launch hoopla, we overlooked a compelling article from GigaOm contributing writer Raghav Gupta. Gupta, VP of Consumer Services & Partnerships at Brightcove, contends that iPhone represents a "Sea of Change" for the music industry. Why iPhone Will Change the Mobile Music Industry via [GigaOm]

The past few weeks have reminded us once again of the massive hype that develops when a revolutionary new product hits the mainstream marketplace. Apple's iPhone is no exception. The so-called "Jesus Phone" has dominated online and offline news in the past weeks, with one person even attempting to steal a device during a live interview on FOX. Beyond the hype of the launch itself, there have been an equal number of industry pundits and experts predicting that iPhone will "change the way we think about phones and wireless". So, in the spirit of bold soothsaying (such as predicting a single product will turn a multi-billion dollar industry on its head), here is one more: iPhone will change… Now you fill in the blank. Whatever you want. Go ahead - pick any topic….anything at all. It's not that iPhone (the device) will only change the wireless industry. iPhone (the experience) will change everything. The device itself is a thing of beauty, and (once again) reinforces the claim that the teams in Cupertino are masters of design. And even though many are crying foul because it doesn't have a removable battery, 3G network support, or a memory expansion slot, those are complaints that revolve around feature sets and can be remedied through software updates and hardware tweaks in future models. What's important about iPhone is that it's a disruptive force in a culturally significant area. Though cell phones are constantly getting smaller and more powerful, the social significance has leveled out. Why? Because most people own a cell phone. They're not a "new" thing. They just are. They're a part of life as we know it, and we expect them to be there and function. The key to iPhone is that it raises expectations, not just about how a cell phone should work, but about how we interact and engage in otherwise socially inert activities. iPhone takes an experience and activity that is commonplace to millions of people everyday and masterfully demonstrates how to enrich an experience, instead of detract from it. It is a disruptive force in a social norm. From radio to the Internet, anytime a disruptive force has come along and upset the standard the impact has always - ALWAYS - been felt in every other area of modern life. iPhone will change the way we think about cell phones and wireless. But it will also change the way we think about a lot of other things too.

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel steps down from the helm of the search/media giant. Yahoo founder Jerry Yang (otherwise known as "Chief Yahoo") returns to head the company for the first time in more than a decade. First Panama in the US, then Quality Pricing, then Panama globally - aren't these clear indications that Yahoo was on the right track to shore up the area that was bleeding the most? Semel assured stockholders earlier this year that the plan was in place to bring the portal back to prominence, or at least to line the company coffers with some of the search advertising dollars that have been heading Google's way, and the technology rollouts in the past 12 months have certainly helped to make that case. But this news isn't just about raising profits. With the nagging issue of employee churn, Yang's arrival is more than just your typical corporate America ousting of a CEO that's not performing. Even though Semel stepped down on his own accord, the pressure to increase morale has to be tremendous, and that's why Yang is back in the game. There was a time when Yahoo was King of the Hill, and though we tend to forget, that era wasn't too long ago. The Yahoo we all know and love offered great technology, great content, and great fellowship both in and outside of the company. Just as Yahoo's future depends on its own technology and that of its acquisitions, it's the culture of the company that's going to be the one thing that will determine whether it faces a future of blue skies or storm clouds. Semel Out, Yang In at Yahoo [via GigaOm]

On Monday AdWeek published an article pondering the question - 'Does Search Get Too Much Credit'. The article discussed the rising popularity of search engine marketing, how it relates to larger branding initiatives, and the tendency of marketers to apply too much credit to the "last click" leading to a sale or conversion. From the article:

…if you go upstream from (search) clicks, a lot of users have been to the advertiser web site before because they've been exposed to other advertising…

This article couldn't have come at a better time. Search marketing budgets everywhere are expanding and more organizations are devoting resources to the interactive space. It's nice to see that a leading publication such as Adweek is taking notice, and their commentary on the last click debate sheds light onto an increasingly complex scenario - who gets the credit for success? The idea of a last click is something that makes offline advertisers pull their hair out and online advertisers crack open a bottle of bubbly. If a conversion is generated through a specific piece of online media, the digital group has typically been quick to capitalize on that success. Yet if an advertising campaign is engaging in multi-channel distribution it's easy to see how the last click may have been the penultimate in the buying cycle, but it may not have been the one to initially engage the customer. For too long the debate has focused on after-the-fact accountability - who's to blame for something not working and who gets credit when it does. Though Adweek points out agencies such as Avenue A/Razorfish who typically only apply 60% of the credit to the last click and the rest to prior initiatives, it still doesn't answer the question of who is ultimately responsible. Some would argue that the solution is to only count certain search campaigns as being 100% responsible for the conversion. Others, like Avenue A, will say that only a percentage of those campaigns are responsible. And still others will say that all online transactions are being driven by offline media, or vice versa. But if any of these solutions worked, why is the argument still raging? The idea of "credit" as it is presented here is at odds with today's online audience. Web users no longer behave in a linear fashion. They move in and out of digital spaces with fluidity and ease. The once clear distinctions between offline and online activies have now been replaced by seamless transitions as audiences flow from terrestrial to digital and back. The current approach to "who gets the credit" is rooted in linear measurement. It presumes that individual stakeholders will be responsible for success or failure. It supports the methodologies of design, strategy, and distribution taking place within distinct silos apart from each other. This model is wrong. In today's web experience no single group is responsible for the outcome of an advertising campaign. They all are. Instead of asking "who gets the credit", shouldn't marketers be figuring out why they're still trying to slice up the pie?

Back in March, Microsoft announced the release of a limited public beta of their new mobile browsing platform through the Live .com Labs division of the Redmond giant. The application aims to bring the desktop browsing experience to the mobile platform by offering fully-rendered versions of a webpage within the Deep Fish browser. We were included in the beta release and had a chance to preview the Deep Fish experience on our mobile platforms here at Azul 7. First impressions were, unfortunately, not good. Installing the Application As heavy smartphone users, we expect mobile applications to have installation routines that can be accessed through a mobile device. Not so with Deep Fish. Though they offer access outside of ActiveSync to the installation files, there was just enough Javascript on the page to confuse Internet Explorer and not trigger the download of the file to the phone. So, installation was handled by downloading the file to the desktop, sending it as an attachment via email, then downloading the attachment through Mobile Outlook. After saving the file on the phone, installation is fairly straightforward. As most Windows Mobile users will know, simply click the CAB file, and installation begins. Because we like to keep our system memory free to run core system processes, the app was installed on the micro SD expansion card. Activating the Application As part of the public beta, Microsoft issued activation keys that must be entered the first time to activate the product. Even with a full QWERTY keyboard on our Cingular 8525's, entering a 16 digit activation number was a bit much. Microsoft could've saved a lot of user frustration by putting the activation routine on the front end of the Deep Fish process, requiring that activation codes are entered via the website and not through the application itself. Finally - Starting Up Deep Fish After entering the activation code, the next thing we saw was a plain, white screen. No "Success!" message - just a plain, white screen. Poking around the menus we finally found an option that enabled us to enter a URL, but there was no clear direction within the application itself of what to do next after starting it up. Visiting a Site Typically, Microsoft products tend to favor one another, so we went over to MSNBC.com. After entering the URL in the address bar and pressing the enter key on the 8525's keyboard, there was another white screen. Thinking that we'd done something wrong, we entered the URL again, but had the same result - plain white screen. No status indicator or progress bar - just a white screen (common theme, this white screen). Here's where the EDGE network speeds of Cingular/ATT's network really begin to bog down. EDGE is perfectly fine with email, but for graphic intensive applications (even with the smallest of graphics), speeds are reduced to a crawl. Though there were events happening behind the scenes in Deep Fish, the slow network coupled with the lack of progress indicators left a giant question mark on our faces as we kept watching the screen to see if anything would show up. Part of the difficulties in seeing a fully rendered web page are also inherent to the Deep Fish application itself. When a web page is requested through Deep Fish, what's actually happening is more of a proxy-type scenario. The request is first sent to Microsoft's servers, who then make a proxy call to the destination website. Microsoft's servers then receive the information from the destination site, turn it into a Deep Fish compatible image, then serve the image up to the Deep Fish app on the phone. In theory this is supposed to reduce the actual bandwidth that's sent over the wireless data connection, but it also adds latency because there are multiple requests being made, and not just one. Finally, a fully rendered version of MSNBC's homepage appeared. Now 15 minutes into the exercise, it was a welcome sign that there was actually a functioning product, despite it's Beta label. Navigating a page Page navigation is activated by depressing the joystick on the phone which activates a viewing box. This viewing box can then be moved to a portion of the web page that the end user wants to magnify. While it's clear which part of the page is capable of being magnified, moving the viewing box around the screen is cumbersome, as the box only advances vertically and horizontally 1 pixel at a time. Zooming in on a page section is accomplished by depressing the joystick button again. The zooming transition itself is fairly smooth, and is for the most part accurate. Page Links Once zoomed in on a page section, the navigation pad on the phone is used to toggle clickable links within that expanded page view. This process is not very intuitive, as Deep Fish did not provide a smooth transition between the links on the page. In many instances Deep Fish didn't recognize some links and skipped over them as we were cycling through, creating a lot of frustration of not being able to click on a link that should've been easily recognized by the software. First Impressions - Wait On This One The premise behind Deep Fish is solid - bring a desktop like experience to mobile web browsing. If developers and site managers didn't have to develop multiple sites for mobile and desktop browsing, that would save time and resources for a lot of companies. And, if the mobile experience were more robust, the theory would be that more powerful mobile phones would be appealing to a wider range of consumers because the experience would be *nearly* identical to that of the desktop. Yet, Microsoft falls short of expectations, even for a beta release. Aside from the smooth transitional zooming into a smaller part of a webpage, there wasn't a single experience with Deep Fish that went without some sort of trouble. It's surprising because, with all of the movement within the Live.com portal to bring software as a service to the masses, with their evolutionary "Ribbon" interface in the Office product line, and with Windows Mobile 6 on the horizon for many smartphone users, the strategic focus of the company appears to be more in tune with making the overall Microsoft engagement a more pleasing and productive one (for the sake of this discussion, we'll leave Vista out). But once again, the hype doesn't quite measure up to the experience. Desktop browsing on a mobile phone will be the norm one day soon, but it looks like Microsoft won't be the ones to successfully bring it to the masses. At least not with Deep Fish. Deep Fish Website

In a widely anticipated move to counter Microsoft's entrance into the on-demand application space, Google and Salesforce have teamed up on a global partnership and announced "Salesforce Group Addition featuring Google AdWords" today. This jointly developed product will allow a connection between Google AdWords accounts and Salesforce accounts, offering smoother integration and linkage between AdWords and Google accounts. This first release of a co-developed product is targeted at SMB's who may already be customers of SalesForce but haven't hooked AdWords and Salesforce together. The buzz on the Internet has been speculating that Google and Salesforce would join forces, but many thought it might be more than just a simple integration between SF and AdWords. Microsoft has been making a strong push into the hosted-apps space with their Live platform, and is expected to move forward with a strategy to offer it's Dynamics software suite as a hosted application. This would be a direct competitor to Salesforce. With Google pushing it's "Apps" platform, a merger between Google and Salesforce seemed like a natural fit, in part to stave off the looming threat from Microsoft as well as to diversify it's revenue streams. First steps in partnerships are often much less glamorous than most would like. Many were expecting a larger initial engagement between Google and Salesforce right out of the chute and today's announcement is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but it's likely to get more intense moving forward. Salesforce.com, Google Launch SMB Tool via [PCWorld.com]

Which came first - the chicken or the egg…the advertisers or the buyers? Following in the footsteps of Google, Yahoo has rolled out Quality Pricing for their "Panama" search advertising platform, and is betting that if advertisers jump on their bandwagon, the buyers will soon follow. The basic premise is the more time advertisers spend in making sure their ads are highly relevant to users' queries, the more they will be rewarded by receiving higher levels of traffic at cheaper rates. Says Yahoo, "Spend more time creating great ads that generate traffic, and we'll cut your prices". The move by Yahoo comes at a time when their search engine share is a distant second to Google (at least in the US), and Microsoft, Ask, and other 2nd and 3rd tier engines are slowly but surely siphoning away customers and traffic. Part of their strategy to stop/reverse this trend is based on the premise that if advertisers start crafting better campaigns, the searches will be more productive, users will be presented with better search results, and traffic to Yahoo and its other web properties would grow. In doing so, they're playing the chicken or the egg game in a space that's boiling with competition and innovation. All of their eggs (pardon the pun) are in one basket. They've turned over the future of their online advertising business to the one group of people that are directly responsible for revenue - the advertisers. But what incentives to the advertisers have to write better ads if the traffic isn't there to begin with? In the not-so-distant past, Yahoo/Overture advertisers could spend as much time optimizing their campaigns as they would engaging in a cat and mouse game of click price inflation. The old Overture platform gave so much information that advertisers could see exactly what their competitors were paying per click for a specific position in the search results. With a watchful eye, savvy advertisers could position their ad campaigns to receive tremendous exposure at a fraction of the cost of a competitor. But for others it was a constant battle to manage exposure and cost. Then came Panama, and those days were over. Competitive click pricing was out, and cost trends and projections (similar to Google AdWords) were in. Instead of seeing fixed cost for a specific position on a search results page, advertisers had to pay more attention to the quality of their ads and get back to search marketing basics - optimization and testing. The latest move could be forcing the hand that feeds Yahoo one too many times. With Panama, the change was needed. Smaller players with little web advertising experience or resources couldn't compete with the larger behemoths that had the people and finances to throw at online campaigns. Panama changed that and provided more equal footing to all advertisers. But though its intentions are good, Yahoo has gone one step too far in the wrong direction by placing responsibility in the hands of advertisers. Searchers want to see good content, search results, AND good ads - not just good ads. Yahoo isn't losing traffic because their ads aren't attracting visitors, Yahoo is losing traffic because Yahoo isn't attracting visitors. The fundamental behavior of web users is changing from passively receiving information to actively exploring and seeking out information. With the rise of "Web 2.0" sites like Digg and YouTube where users are responsible for elevating and demoting content, the marketplace is shifting from the behemoth portal model to one that's more fluid and dynamic. Users no longer cry to be spoon fed "Picks of the Week" or "Hot Sites". Search engines and other discovery tools have enabled web users to control their own online journey, regardless of the information they're seeking. And it's not uncommon for people to use one service for search, a different for email, and yet another for news or entertainment. To presume increasing the quality of advertisements will miraculously draw back all the users Yahoo has lost is misguided. Despite the financial incentives to advertisers, Quality Pricing places too much responsibility for solving Yahoo's problems on advertisers, and not enough on Yahoo itself. Overview: Quality-Based Pricing via [Yahoo.com]

Upsetting those who were may have been looking for something more uncivilized, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made nice during their much touted dual interview at the Wall Street Journal's "All Things D" Conference. Watch the video after the jump. Apple's Jobs, Microsoft's Gates Make Peace at "D" Conference via [Appleinsider.com]