Rice’s Riffs

Marc Andresseen takes exception to the recent comparisons of social networking platforms to Geocities. Specifically, he cites the Wall Street Journal and Steve Ballmer.
I found this curious because I had a very similar conversation recently with the CEO of a major lead generation platform. That individual, who had direct familiarity with Geocities, had similar comments [...]

Barry Diller has a very diverse portfolio of Internet businesses. Investors and consumers have long wonder what the synergies between the businesses was or would become.
Can Ask.com and search create that synergy?

Diller has made growing Ask a priority and pledged to use the search engine as "the glue" to bring together IAC’s myriad Internet businesses, [...]

In case you missed it, Mint won the TechCrunch40 Top Tech Company Award. Mint is a new simple way for you to manage your money online.
At first glance, it seems to be a more intuitive and user-friendly personal accounting replacement for Intuit’s Quicken. However, as you begin using Mint you begin to note how [...]

As the mortgage market tightens, lead generation companies begin to mount tactical offensive and defensive strategies to position for dwindling Internet originating mortgage companies.
A a recent article by Inman News, "Lead quality a two-sided coin" and commentary from LeadCritic about price increases and my review of the LendingTree Partner Summit seems to have tipped [...]

Where is the next lead generation frontier? I think it is becoming increasingly clear that getting local should be in your strategic plan if you are in the lead generation business. Mike Sachoff, of www.webpronews.com points out the glaring opportunity:

The dollar gap between U.S. local online spending and total local media ad spending is [...]

The debate continues, but increasingly the data seems to support a shift to online advertising; yielding an increase in overall online advertising spend.

“If marketing budgets shrink, and they are often the first to be cut in a downturn, digital will still continue to grow,” said Eric Bader, managing director of digital at MediaVest.
“The focus will [...]

I have been ranting about content and community in lead generation for months now, but the message often gets me skepticism at best and a confused glazed look at worst.
However, I think I may have stumbled on an enlightening analysis for my point: Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion in his analysis of "Why Some Web [...]

Adding to my argument for sustainable growth in the online lead generation market…
If you agree with my premise that advertisers are increasingly demanding a shift from CPM to ROI as the effective marketing metric. Then it seems that the Internet Advertising Bureau may have the most compelling statistics:

"The Interactive Advertising Bureau says Internet advertising is [...]

Time to jump into the fray. The last couple of weeks a discussion has been frothing over the effects of the mortgage market chaos on online advertising.
Jerry Neumann started me thinking about what might happen to lead generation in the changing mortgage market, why some arguments seem counterintuitive, and past data in other similar markets [...]

Yahoo! has launched their new social networking platform into private beta. It is very Facebook-like with some interesting features. If you would like an invitation to try it out email me wmrice [at] gmail [dot] com.
My Yahoo!Mash Profile: http://mash.yahoo.com/wmriceusa