1) Buy and hold as an investment strategy - dead. The bigger question is whether people will still use Warren Buffett as an analogy for success of the concept (for better or worse), or whether people will trade their asses off from here on out and say “works for John Paulson.”

2) Google - dead. Not sure whether it’s just because Goldman Sachs said it and they’re still standing (unlike most of their peers), or whether the old adage “the bigger they are the harder they fall” is just sticking better than usual nowadays.

3) Wall Street bonuses - dead. I don’t think they should die (and I’ll have more on that later), but perception is reality and the perception of the taxpaying public is enough is enough.

Mike Arrington:

It’s unlikely Google will ever find another money machine as efficient as search advertising, which accounts for about 40% of the $40 billion advertising dollars spent online each year. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to try.

They have been trying for a while too. Each time winds up looking like a distraction - meanwhile, capex will remain bloated, brain drain continues, and shareholders’ 3-year return just hit zero percent.

Maybe it’s time to clean out the entire M&A department, and wipe the R&D slate as well - start over, with a free-range cash cow in pocket. Sprinkling in a dividend yield might not hurt either.

UPDATE: More reasoning on dividends (although I’m personally steering clear of the fat long position idea contained within).

Things I missed because I was doing fun stuff like running from tornados

• How to stop the next bubble? While the read is interesting, there are certainly plenty of conflicting arguments amongst the discussion participants (summary: they don’t really know the answer). It’s primarily a macroeconomic and regulatory chat - nobody seemed willing to touch on the subjects of herd mentality and the “keeping up with the Joneses” phenomena so prevalent in society - you are not going to stop those bubble creating factors without some embarrassing pain. (h/t The Big Picture)
• There’s no such thing as a free lunch, at least not if lunch is really dinner and you work at Google. Google has axed its famed free dinners, but they really weren’t free to begin with - everyone is on salary and was working extra hours as a result of the perk. Now employees have an excuse to leave early, and go work on their startup. (h/t Mashable)
• Drug and alcohol spa Cirque Lodge in Sundance Utah is using fly fishing as a rehab strategy. Catching trout in the Provo River would certainly keep patients’ minds off harmful substances, but as the Trout Underground noted isn’t it just swapping one addiction for another? I guess you’d have to be a participant to understand; in urban America, when one wants to describe something that is instantly addictive they say “It’s like crack” - in the Mountain West we say “It’s like casting dry flies on the Roaring Fork during the green drake hatch.”

Adieu.

Less than a week after Google rolled out Knol, its “Wikipedia killer”, the blogosphere has decided to whip itself into a frenzy. The major cause of the consternation - Google seems to be ranking Knol pages, which are supposed to be filled with content from a never-ending and every-increasing number of “experts”, a bit higher than the average SEO junkie might suspect.

Sounds like competition to me.

Is Google bad or is Google good? I don’t think the “experts” really know for sure, but I do see a pattern emerging. When blogs became popular, those working behind the scenes figured out that comments and trackbacks were a good way to generate search engine attention - and they latched onto the best ranked blogs. When the search engines figured this out, they appealed to the best of the best to add the “nofollow” tag to their discussion threads to weed out the scum. The big blogs agreed, I believe out of fear that Google would see discussions without the tag and bump down the renegades accordingly. All was well, as the favored few remained high on the first page list.

Unfortunately, content creators are now coming under increasing stress. The sole business motive, advertising, is showing signs of weakness. Purveyors of online expertise are crying for folks to click on their ads - they ask “why give the money to Google?”. Meanwhile, they beg at Google’s feet for traffic - it’s the proverbial biting of the hand that feeds you.

What’s even more odd about all this, and what would clue the average internet surfer into how badly the tech blogosphere needs a twenty-ton dose of Ritalin, is that the crowd waited until the day after they pounced on Cuil, a potential Google search competitor, before releasing their joint statement on the evil Knol. Yes, after giving a well-publicized Google search competitor a general thumbs neutral/negative (not entirely unearned, since Cuil had major technical problems on the day of its launch) the virtual chatterbox moves on to complain about the fact that Google might be infringing on their territory by juicing its own search results with competitive content.

Instead of recognizing the the signs of an impending threat and rallying behind the future generation, content creators are playing cards for the small pot instead of the final table. To be fair, some have a clue - seek alternatives and take action instead of pissing in the wind. Still, discussion revolves around quick fixes.

Budding surgeons don’t pass their boards by suggesting band-aids for severed femoral arteries, and it seems much of the tech blogosphere forgot their hemostats on this trip to the operating room.

Cuil, the latest “Google killer”…

• Google wins, but Cuil is just a few hours old (Techcrunch)
• Cuil is dark, mysterious, and somewhat innovative, but Google is still better (Mashable)
• Google is paying attention, with a preemptive strike on Cuil’s size claim (Search Engine Land
• Despite an early stumble, the search market is too big to quit on (Silicon Alley Insider)

Cuil is getting a lot of coverage - it’s on the front page of Drudge too…

It makes me think that the long standing love affair with the Google brand is fading (or has already faded). That, or folks need something to write about on a Monday morning and Cuil has a good PR team.

In the long run, I suspect the mainsteam is going to catch the buzz and type “COOL” dot com into their browsers, much to a domain squatter’s pleasure. But I don’t think that is going to matter - Cuil launched today, but that doesn’t mean it was created yesterday, nor were it’s founders or funders born yesterday either. The company was founded in ‘05, and has garnered roughly $33 million over two rounds of funding (data here). Add the recent acquisition of Powerset (who itself had just launched) by Microsoft, and one could surmise Cuil won’t be independent very long.

With Google pushing into the content space with Knol, I’d be placing my bet on the flip-side - a traditional content producer (think major media) pushing back.

UPDATE: Fair is fair…ReadWriteWeb chimes in - Cuil is good, but not great.

UPDATE 2: Still more, from Forbes (including how Cuil got started).

UPDATE 3: ReadWriteWeb returns, astonished by all the PR Cuil received. Techdirt says the privacy play is a non-starter. And CNet’s Webware explains some of the problems - the comments there are telling of mob mentality, including a cadre of folks pissed off that they couldn’t find their own websites via Cuil.

On a personal note: My early morning test of the search engine (before the crowd came and knocked it down) were fine for checks of my own name. This URL showed up, along with quite a few sites that had linked in which I was unaware of.

End note: It’s easy to get someone to say nice things about your company - all you have to do is pay them. It’s also easy to get someone to say bad things about your company - all you have to do is ignore them.

Opinions of those in the know

Google released its “Wikipedia killer” Knol into the wild. I don’t create content on Wikipedia (although I do consume some of it). So leave it to the experts…

• The owner makes an announcement
• TechCrunch says its Wikipedia for money;
• ReadWriteWeb emphasizes authorship;
• Search Engine Land talks moderation;
• Mashable declares it’s Squidoo II;

and

• Silicon Alley Insider justifiably mocks its coverage of toilets.

The rest is up to you.

UPDATE: One apparent advantage of Knol…owning it.

Mike Masnick makes great points in this regard, the best of which is (emphasis mine):

So, for startups whose strategy is to get acquired by Google (and, I should note, if you start with that strategy, you’re probably going to fail)…

I have no opinion on the specific matter. But, just the other day a colleague and I discussed the fact that since Google has such an enormous (and ongoing) investment in proprietary computing infrastructure, they might be vulnerable to “evolutionary jumps” in computing technology some time in the future.

Whose estimates are we talking about?

Google’s second quarter earnings fell short of Wall Street estimates, and by Friday’s end the stock had fallen almost 10%. The reaction…

• The New York Times says Google’s miss was deliberate, and they’ve now “gone too far” (i.e. someone’s pointing fingers - no surprise there)
• Om Malik says Silicon Valley has reason to worry (he probably has a good point nonetheless)

and

• Henry Blodget outs another nutbag fund manager who’s touting a $1,000 price target (while buying all the way down at the expense of his investors)

Meanwhile, some are calling it a “rare miss” and others say it wasn’t a miss at all. I wonder.

All the fiddling with “charges” aside, according to the consensus estimates retrieved from Bloomberg some months ago, Google hasn’t hit “the numbers” in a while:

What’s the big deal?

Via Information Week:

“Google includes millions of parked domains and error pages that have little or no content, and that result in practically zero conversions, in both its Content Network and its Search Network,” the complaint alleges. “Given the low quality of these parked domain and error pages, advertisers would not want to spend their advertising budgets on these distribution networks. However, Google designed its network in such a way that it was virtually impossible to opt out of the AdSense for Domains and/or AdSense for Errors programs.”

I believe this complaint has some merit, and don’t think I’m alone in saying that parked pages full of ads suck too. I’ve also been thinking the parking business would be needing a new business model, sooner or later. Maybe it’s sooner.

(h/t Search Engine Land)

Hell = golf course

From betting on the game when the other team doesn’t show…
• Bridgewater Associates say financial losses from the credit meltdown will hit $1.6 trillion. That means we’re just a few pitches into the second inning in this mess. (h/t Paul Kedrosky)
• In 2008, autumn seems to be coming early (and looking a lot like 1987). I’ve mentioned this already.
• Retailers won’t be able to hide rising prices in the revenue line forever - consumer spending is invariably linked to the housing market. (h/t Calculated Risk)

From pointing fingers is old hat, and old hats fit nicer than new ones…

• European politicians are conflicted over how to deal with bloggers. Might I suggest they send a patsy to quiet them down?
• Some social networks are having trouble monetizing their traffic. Forget the problem of short attention spans amongst teenagers - blame Google.
• Global warming hysteria has a new friend, the plasma TVs everyone bought with their second mortgage loan.

And from technology is my oyster, now give it a sniff before you eat it…

• How does a thriving technology company morph itself into General Motors? Become extremely bureaucratic about minutia. ADDED: Make sure that minutia is completely irrelevant too.
• Voicemail is dead. I agree, not because of fabulous web services, but something much simpler - caller id and internal phone contact lists.
• Email is in trouble too? I’ll agree with that as well, but not because of the newfangled services that exist today. Too few people are ever going to want their communication publicized, and too many are shifting platforms for Outlook to be a long term handicap. Someone is going to rise to the occasion for the mainstream user.