Flickr video uploads! (Maximum 90 second-clips, for now.)

Good move for Flickr—and parent Yahoo—towards taking a niche that YouTube hasn’t captured.

YouTube has a lot of video. But it isn’t as a place for serious amateur moviemakers to share their work. But Flickr, a community with many serious amateur photographers, is in a good position to grab a parallel position in the amateur director community.

I’m optimistic.

The Context of Contextual

New research from Marketing Sherpa/Eyetools:

25% of visitors pay heed to below-the-fold display ads on publisher sites.

75% of users don’t notice them.

Contextual search ads typically have poor response rates (compared to search engine ads). Standard explanation: push marketing isn’t as good as pull. But contextual search often shows up below-the-fold. So is poor placement to blame (at least in part) for the poor response rates?

How’re We Doing?

Today’s event: DMCNY luncheon at the Yale club (very enjoyable). One underlying question of the event: How does direct marketing improve its relationship with consumers? My take: Much of the issue revolves around how marketers deal with consumers’ private sphere (e.g. in sending direct mail to homes). My question: So is the consumer relationship problem the same for traditional DM as for online marketers?

Answer 1: Yes. They’re both about how companies deal with consumers’ personal sphere—there’s little real difference between sending junk mail to your home and, say, online behavioral targeting.

Answer 2: No. When it comes to the home (traditional DM’s turf), the idea of the private sphere is highly defined (say, by the walls of your house). When it comes to the Web, ideas of a private sphere are still very fuzzy.

Year-End Interview with Webmaster Radio

Webmaster Radio’s Jim Hedger interviewed me about goings on at Didit and the industry at year-end.

(Interview starts about 6 minutes in. And you’ll want to fast-forward 5 minutes through the drunken santa segment, from about 16 minutes into the show. To download the MP3 rather than listening from the Webmaster Radio site, click here.)

Wikia Spam = Good

This week’s launch: Wikia Search, the user-edited search engine from the folks who brought you Wikipedia. An algorithm does the “heavy-lifting” to find information; users do the refinement to perfect the rankings. As Michael Arrington observes and Silicon Alley Insider opines, Wikia Search sucks.

But the human editors haven’t started work yet (editing features aren’t even turned on)—so it’s unfair to pass a hasty judgment. Indeed, my prediction is for good things from Wikia Search. And spam will be the reason.

As 360i’s David Berkowitz noted in Search Insider last year, the ease of human editing will make Wikia Search a spammer’s delight. But enough spammers may just cancel each other out—and crowd wisdom will lead to the best results.

Sure, the engine sucks now. But that’s because it hasn’t been sufficiently spammed yet.

Keep Users, Lose Searchers

If you don’t like that big, pesky Yahoo search box on your My Yahoo page, you can now make it smaller. The Yahoo Blog reports: “My Yahoo! now offers a ‘small search box’ setting to help minimize the search box up top.”

Of course, a smaller search box will mean that fewer Yahoo users will end up paying attention to their own Yahoo search bars—which means that Yahoo has chosen to sacrifice its search share so as to keep more of its My Yahoo users happy.

Good idea? Bad idea? We’ll have to see. Either way, it’s one more sign that Yahoo has thrown in the towel on being the search giant, and is looking to focus on staying on top as a web portal.

Google v. China v. Google

The scenario: Censorship as punishment
Congress awarded the Dalai Lama, and China retaliated by redirecting Google searches in China to Chinese search engine Baidu.

The irony
In January 2006, Google capitulated to Chinese requests that the company censor its own search results on Google.cn. Rights groups berated Google for the move.

Why Google may have been right
At the time, Google argued that it was doing the right thing. China wouldn’t let Google into the country without self-censorship; and, Google claimed, the freedom that Google-provided information would ultimately foster could more than justify a modicum of self-censorship

Sirgey and Larry may have been on to something. Flash-forward to 2007: Chinese Googlers, re-routed to Baidu, will see their country’s censorship machine in action.

Had Google not played by the rules on self-censorship in ’05, Chinese searchers never would have seen their freedom of search yanked from their desktops (or at least not in this way). That’s hardly Tiananmen Square fodder. But it is bound to make an impression—if only subliminally, and if only in aggregate with other freedoms Chinese people lose every day—on the part of the Chinese population who’s educated enough to search to begin with.