Xoogler, Management Vision, and AOL
February 3, 2011
I don’t know much about America Online or AOL. The service never hooked me. When the company bought Relegence, a mash up outfit, I was interested again. Then Relegence became Love.com and now I have lost track of what was a quite promising technology.
I read “LEAKED: AOL’s Master Plan” because it promised insight into the alleged turnaround. AOL generated a profit but its revenues were down. At some point the revenues have to go up. Keeping the profit would be a plus for stakeholders.
The write up ran down some basic facts about AOL and its goals. What I liked was the phrase “the AOL way.” I recall the CD-ROMs and the birth of “carpet bombing marketing.” I recall the sale of AOL to Time Warner and the consequent business circus that ensued. Now, I get to learn about the AOL way. I am game.
If the write up is accurate, the AOL way seeems to be focused on content. The idea is that AOL will become 2011’s William Randolph Hearst empire. I recall that Mr. Hearst was dubbed “the wizard of ooze.” Instead of print, AOL will emerge as a media giant built of bits and bytes. Three points from the article caught my attention:
- The game plan for Jan Feb Mar 2011 at this link.
- Staff writers have to do 10 stories per day
- Pick stories that generate traffic, revenue, “edit quality” (I don’t know what this means), and turn around time (maybe stories a person can write quickly and without fact checking or research).
Several observations:
- What happened to search? AOL once embraced PLS, Fast Search & Transfer, and probably other systems unknown to me. I did not see much about search in the AOL way. If you know about search and the AOL way, please, post a comment in the form at foot of this story.
- What will set AOL apart? More shallow content is likely to get filtered by Blekko and then, hopefully, Google?
- Where is that old Google zing? The AOL way sounds like an old line publishing operation to me.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2011
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One Response to “Xoogler, Management Vision, and AOL”
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Steve, AOL is a big Solr user. 2 AOL guys are Solr committers.