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Columnist Sarah Lacy is irked by TED’s smug exclusivity and the nearly unqualified show of support from Silicon Valley

Bidding adieu to a financial adviser can be as difficult as ending more personal relationships

Bidding adieu to a financial adviser can be as difficult as ending more personal relationships

Google has financially backed a project from a Harvard University scientist to unlock the secrets of common diseases by decoding the DNA of 100,000 people.

The project will be the largest human genome sequencing project in the world, and may lead to new cures for disease.

According to Bloomberg, the project will begin in the U.S., U.K., China and Sweden this year, initially deciphering the genetic makeup of 1,000 people at a cost of $50 million.

The new investment takes Google further towards its quest to index any and everything on the planet, having invested in genetics testing company 23andme last year, and more recently preparing Google Health for launch.

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Look to the evolution of television advertising to understand the necessity of widgets in today’s online world

Through a variety of sources we’ve confirmed that Technorati is making plans for a major shift in it’s going forward strategy, and is also considering a number of corporate development transactions.

First, they’ve been pitching venture capitalists on another round of financing. That’s not surprising - their last round, $10.5 million, was in June 2006. The company has raised a total of just over $20 million, and given that they have 25 employees, it’s time for another round. But we’ve also heard that they’ve hired Montgomery & Co. to shop the company to buyers, simultaneous to their funding pitches.

What’s more interesting, though is what we’re hearing on the product front. Technorati, under new CEO Richard Jalichandra, recently changed it site to focus more on its core blogging audience.

That change foreshadows the upcoming shift - which places the Technorati site itself as an anchor in a new blog advertising network.

Advertising networks are popular right now - Glam recently raised $85 million after transitioning, seemingly overnight, from a small web property focused on women to selling advertising for a variety of similarly-focused publishers. And John Battelle’s FM Publishing, an advertising network focused on technology blogs, recently hired investment bank Savvian to help them raise money or sell after turning down a $100 million buyout offer.

Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. This self-service model looks a lot more like Adbrite than Glam or FM.

Technorati tags, which are very often used to describe blog posts with keywords selected by the author, would also be a natural way for Technorati to target advertising more effectively.

Technorati has also considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. But our understanding is that they’ve gone with the ad network idea, and are currently focusing engineers on finalizing the product.

Will the strategy work? As we’ve argued many times, ad networks suffer from fickle customers. Glam offers partners revenue guarantees based on page views (and lost $3.7 million last year on $21 million in revenue). FM has resisted guarantees to date, but lost high profile partner Digg last year to Microsoft. Others, including us, have simply sold advertising directly while continuing to work with FM. With Technorati entering the market, publishers will have yet more choices. That’s good for everyone except the ad networks competing for their business.

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After Google’s stock took a hit based on reports that Google ads are not being clicked on as much as they use to be, comScore is reporting today that the market may have got it wrong

the evidence suggests that the softness in Google’s paid click metrics is primarily a result of Google’s own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings and, therefore, the opportunity for paid clicks to occur.

In part this might be right, but what’s being ignored by most is a little decision in November that changed the way Google ads worked:

Google has made a small change to AdSense that may make a big difference in cutting out errant clicks and even your AdSense revenue. They’ve redefined the clickable region for Google AdSense from the entire boxed region, to just the text link.

I’ve been hearing first hand reports since then from publishers who have experienced a big downturn in CTR and Adsense revenue since that change was implemented. Well regarded online marketer Jeremy Schoemaker even recently told me in a podcast that Adsense was dead as a monetization strategy. It’s happening to big sites and small sites. Markus Friend from Plenty of Fish, one of the more famed and bigger free-making money from Adsense sites (January):

The CTR on text ads declined about 60% in the last 2 months with googles changes, Image ads on the other hand stayed the same. If you take a screen shot of a text ad and then run it as an image ad it will get 2 times the click thru rate.

You read that right, image ads with double the CTR of Google ads when showing the exact same thing.

SEO BlackHat gets it right February 27:

4 months later, that little back and forth in the Google Rec Room shaved about $85 Billion (with a B) in market capitalization.

But it wasn’t as stupid an idea as it might seem. You see, Adsense works in a Quasi-market place environment. The market will bid up the cost per click once the adjustment for accidental clicks is readjusted. Right now, marketers should be getting a better value per click as a higher percentage of the clicks are “real” or intentional. That will lead to higher bids per click and ultimately should be close to a break even for GOOGs bottom line.

The short story: the changes to the clickable area in Google ads has resulted in a decline in accidental clicks, resulting in the overall click rate to decline. If Google is seeing a decline in CTR it’s at least in part due to its November decision.

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For most Cubans, life remains a slog. But there’s plenty of potential for growth in everything from oil exploration to upscale tourism

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