Charles on… anything that comes along

My latest article at Netimperative looks at these two deals: Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActive buying Ask.com (aka Ask Jeeves, the search engine) for $1.85 billion (which isn’t even a billion pounds - watch that exchange rate go south!) while Yahoo! is buying Flickr, the photo sharing site, for something that (I now find) is rumoured at about $15 million, or a thousand times less.

In brief, I don’t think Diller’s made a wise purchase in buying the fifth-ranked search engine which has Google, Microsoft and Yahoo *and* AOL ahead of it.

Whereas Yahoo’s move looks very canny. And if the price is correct, it’s a steal.

(Photo sharing sites are getting big - HP just gobbled up Snapfish.)

Bonus Netimperative link: Mike Butcher’s interesting analysis of where AOL is going:

AOL will effectively give up its past emphasis on media and content in favour of producing software tools, combined with Internet access, to become a kind of “BT with bells on”.

simple. Despite being the world’s largest Internet service provider, AOL has been losing subscribers in recent years. In the US alone it lost about 2 million subscribers last year.

It needs a way out.

And the route is not through yet more content and shopping “channels” - way of the old AOL.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• How Yahoo takes good stuff, and makes it bad, from Flickr to music videos (16 September 2005; score: 77.18%)
• First thought on eBay buys Skype (12 September 2005; score: 65.11%)
• At last, a Flickr account (11 May 2005; score: 57.89%)

I recall a Tory election press conference - it must have been the 1992 election, because the fabulous political hack Tony Bevins was alive and raising hell - in which the Tories tried to demonstrate something or other using two pie charts, one ‘before’ and the other ‘after’ to show how wonderfully things would grow under their beneficient rule.

However, the charts were misleading, because they’d used the radius of the chart to show how things would increase. This, of course, meant that the ‘after’ chart was larger by a factor of r-squared, nicely misleading everyone. Bevins, and others, pointed this out, which rather derailed the Tories. (If anyone can remember what this occasion was, please put us all out of my meanderings.)

Anyhow, CNN has now done something nicely similar in a poll it ran to show how opinions about Ms Schiavo and whether she should be left to die ran across political parties.

Here’s the broad stats: Democrats in favour: 62 per cent. Republicans: 54 per cent. Independents: 54 per cent. (The question was “Based on what you have heard or read about the case, do you agree with the court’s decision to have the feeding tube removed?”)

But as Mediamatters points out, by using a false origin (starting at 53 per cent), CNN made it look as though those durn Democrats were wildly in favour, while Republicans and independents were, like, whatever.

And to add insult to injury, it’s a poll with a sampling error of +/- 7 per cent. So the 62 per cent of Democrats might be 55; the 54 per cent of Republicans might be 61.

Remind me, what was the point of carrying out the survey, then?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• How ATM fraud almost brought down the British banking system (26 October 2005; score: 27.35%)
• "Tails are cool" (26 October 2005; score: 24.53%)
• In The Guardian: why Google bought into AOL; and review of the year (22 December 2005; score: 22.73%)