the meaning of life, the universe and everything

Although Microsoft does not care at all, google is one of the largest companies in the internet industry whose products and services are invaluable in my humble opinion.

Let us dive into the reasons for google's sucess.

1. google was the best among the first, which helped it win its fight with the giants and dinosaurs of the internet market.
   
   
2. Text-only ads and it's simple yet innovative interface. It gives what you need. Nothing more, nothing less.
   
   Simplicity, they offer. That's it.
   
   (to have an idea compare google search and yahoo search, or MSN search. Even finding where to type the keywords is a real pain in the rear on other sites.
   OTOH, google home page consists of a simple text box which the cursor auto-focuses, to make life even easier on the end-user's side)
   
   
3. And of course the speed and relevancy of its search results, which stems from the effective and efficient search algorithm.
   
   Speed is both due to an army of small PC that split up the search cache into pieces, and to the HTTP GZIP compression when it sends the results to the end user.
   
   
4. Just one word: innovation.
   
   They have more creative and happy employees working to get google to a better place. They are very selective on choosing employees.
   
   
5. B(to the power 3) : Big Brains Behind.
   
   
6. Google diversifies its risks by creating more than necessary services. Some succeed, some fail. They give google a "dynamic" appearance on the whole and make it win on the long run.
   
   
7. Google quickly learns from its mistakes.
   
   
8. Even as they add more functionality to their service, they remain amazing at their core business; that is search technologies. That's their core competency and as long as they hold on it, they will remain successful.
   
   
9. They have ads on their pages which you can hardly notice.
   
   
10. The last but not the least is right time, if google were founded before dot com bust, it would have been in a much worse place.

The list above is a blend of brainreaction results and my personal judgements.
Google "why is google successful" for details.

Before the dot com bust (in 2000) internet was not well-known. Internet companies were following rather pushy and agressive marketing strategies. They were thinking that creating content was simply enough. Good content would sell itself none the less.

However, pushing the services to the current and potential customers without judging their needs and wants was a key miscue, leading most of those companies away from the scene.

The ones that were not busted in the 2000 dot com crisis all shared common behaviors:

- They knew that the means of getting, keeping and growing customers was delivering and communicating a superior customer value.
- They all analyzed their customer-base, their browsing habits, clickthrough rates. They determined their segmentation strategies accordingly.

The way things work are exactly the same today as well. Except, there is way a lot more competition, rivalry and innovation around.

Thus, any enterprise or initiative wanting to survive, let alone make profit, should leave selling concept, product concept and production concept aside.

To be successful, one should follow a customer-oriented, data-driven, proactive, "sense and respond" philosophy.

During the last few day I am in a rush of organizing my "lazy sheep-generated" del.icio.us tags.

I'll ammend my thoughts and sharings on organizing tags and folksonomy issues under this post.
This post may be updated at any time when some new idea pops up in my mind, so bear with me.

Here are my simple, yet effective rules, of tag organization.

1. Use as little number of tags as possible:
Describe an entry with one tag, or at most two or three tags. More tags will lead to nothing but confusion.

2. Tag for yourself, not for others:
Your del.icio.us space is for you on the first hand. So tag your items that have meaning to you.
Something that is certainly your BUSINESS and which can be tagged as business may not be a BUSINESS to other. That does not matter. Just tag it.

3. Use common sense and utilize suggestion:
Most of the time a tag that del.icio.us offers will suit your entry just fine. Don't re-invent the wheel use common tags as much as possible.

4. Use UPPERCASE for your tags:
That's because most automated tag generators (such as lazy sheep) use lowercase for importing tags and/or autogenerating tags (such as .toread, .todo, .todescribe etc.)
When you use uppercase, you will know which items you have tagged already, and which items are waiting to be tagged, by simply looking at the tags you have.

5. Use singular tags:
I mean use TOOL, instead of TOOLS; INNOVATION instead of INNOVATIONS.
Using singular case is more object oriented first of all. Plus, by this way you will not fall into the dilemma of whether to tag something as INNOVATION or INNOVATIONS. Just skip the little "s" at the end.

6. Organize your tags daily:
So that you will not have to struggle with a tag cloud consisting of thousands of entries and hundreds of tags.

That's it.

By following these simple steps, you will soon find that your del.icio.us entries are really easy to find / share and follow.

I have literally thousands of bookmarks on delicious (and the number is increasing each day)

http://del.icio.us/vozcelik/

imho, most of the links are quite fruitful, however they are way to widespread to be accessed easily.

And I think it's time to categorize this mess a bit.

I really need to reduce the amount of tags I use.

Now I have split all of them.

The official blog of sarmal dot com:
http://www.sarmal.com/blog/

The official blog of sardalya:
http://www.sarmal.com/sardalya/blog/

The official blog of orkinos:
http://www.sarmal.com/orkinos/blog/


A pseudo office with unreal events and persons:
http://www.volkanozcelik.com/openoffice/blog/

I plan to activate this blog later in the future.

The official blog of me (this one) :
http://www.volkanozcelik.com/volkanozcelik/blog/

my blog about istanbul and art :
http://www.volkanozcelik.com/istanbul/blog/

my blog about coding and developement in general:
http://www.volkanozcelik.com/crea8/blog/


//todo: add marketing blog here
I will share my marketing-related thoughts along with my personal weblog (this blog)
Since this blog is a gobignetwork member, it is a good idea to position it as a
business/marketing oriented blog.

Although most of them are empty for the time being, at least I have split my thoughts into pieces.

That's a good thing anyway.

Cheers,

Having said that here follows a brand new blog on art an Istanbul:

meet istanblog

Cheers,

I began to realize that this blog is way too much widespread.
From this time on I will be splitting it to topic related sub-blogs.

I plan to have blogs on.

- marketing, cultural communication and other social issues.
- javascript, web development, usability, accessibility, standards.
- art, culture and Istanbul,
- my personal weblog (this one)
and
- a blog for sardalya (the dhtml api)

so it's time to get my hands dirty :)