How Murdoch Can Really Hurt Google And Shift The Balance Of Power In Search

by Michael Arrington on November 13, 2009

I’ve mostly been a spectator in this whole Rupert Murdoch de-indexing his news sites from Google circus. First because I didn’t really believe he even knew what he was talking about (or how much traffic he’d lose), and more recently because Erick Schonfeld took the story here at TechCrunch.

But suddenly this is a fascinating story to me for a bunch of reasons. This may be less about the self destruction of traditional journalism and more about the search wars.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who used to work for Murdoch’s Digital Chief Jonathan Miller when the two were at AOL, posted a video last week (embedded below) with a simple suggestion: Not only should Murdoch de-index from Google, but he should get Bing to pay him for the exclusive right to index it. TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher has been sniffing down a similar trail.

If other media companies joined Murdoch Google could actually find itself in a very difficult position, where Bing had content that Google didn’t. If you knew that Wall Street Journal and, say, New York TImes content was only in Bing search results, mainstream search users would suddenly have a big reason to go to Bing.

This would shift the balance of power away from search engines and to the content sites – if they could pull it off. Bidding wars over rights to index content would conceivably break out between Google and Microsoft, just as bidding wars have broken out in the past over the right to serve search ads into third party publishing sites.

If Murdoch is going to go through with this de-indexing Mexican standoff thing, he might as well do it the right way and drive the fear of God into Google. As a spectator, I’ll enjoy watching the fireworks.

Of course there’s another sideshow going on here as well – the renegotiation of the MySpace search deal with Google that ends next year. That deal brings in $300 million a year to News Corp., and it’s clear Google is done paying that much money.

 

 VIA http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/13/murdoch-google-bing-mexicanstandoff/

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Sony turns ads into Jeans!

Gelati Sky

Designed by Truly Deeply | Country: Australia

“This project was to re-brand Gelati Sky, a boutique, premium gelati range. The story of Gelati Sky had such strong personality. It was based around Gelati Sky founder Paul Scalisi memories of growing up in Rome, eating gelati - ‘a world where every moment seemed frozen in an amazing sensory assault and every cloud in the sky made you feel it was about to rain gelato’. We were looking for something that was strikingly unique, represented his story and would create conversation.

The communication platform of ‘it’s what dreams taste like’ was derived out of the brand strategy definition for Gelati Sky conducted by Brand DNA. The goal was to express these feelings through the package and the tastes through the flavors. The concept that we came up with was born out of these ideas. We combined the imagery of Italy with objects that looked like the flavor to create a unique, organic and scrumptious shape for each flavor. The packaging looks like it is part of memories and dreams from Italy.

Gelati Sky started as a boutique Gelati range servicing restaurants and specialist food shops. The packaging was the strongest step to building a brand consumer could connect with. As small ultra premium brand, the package needed to take on a more delicate personality than the bigger, more established companies. The package needed to not only reflect the personality and story but also to look different while still maintaining premium feel. The taste of the Gelati is simply amazing and we knew that if we developed a rich, beautiful label, one that would get buyers and customers excited it would be very successful.”

 

VIA
http://lovelypackage.com/gelati-sky/#more-9033

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Student Work - Aaron Willard

Designed by Aaron Willard | Country: United States

Kon•verse: Logo and packaging design for a California wine company. The packaging uses a minimalist design approach to capture the essence of the brand.

VIA http://lovelypackage.com/student-work-aaron-willard/#more-8960

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XBOX: Lips Jukebox Social App by AKQA


AKQA and XBOX have teamed up to launch a new game called Lips – Number One Hits. So to help generate buzz they created a social app using Facebook Connect to import photos from your profile and then overlay a range of lip-syncing videos to create animations of you and your friends singing some of the worst no.1 songs of all time!

You can then share the videos back on Facebook to make everyone look like a fool and promote the new game at the same time! The campaign has, but first I think there needs to be a few more than just 3 songs to choose from to get people interested! Click here to check out the Xbox Lips App.

VIA http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/xbox-lips-jukebox-social-app/