It’s Friday, Google must be launching something: Okay, so I was unimpressed with my first look at Google’s music search. On the other hand, I’m instantly a fan of m.gmail.com, a way to access your gmail account via a web-enabled mobile phone. Details at Search Engine Watch. (via: Steve Rubel)

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Chutzpah: WSJ.com is reporting (sorry, behind pay-wall) that Richard M. Scrushy, the former chief executive of HealthSouth Corp. who was acquitted in June of leading an accounting fraud scheme at the company, is suing the health-care company for firing him.

Quote:

Scrushy…is seeking more than $70 million for “HealthSouth’s breach of contract.” HealthSouth ended his employment in early 2003, shortly after the accounting scandal erupted.

So, let’s say (I know this is a stretch, but let’s do it for argument’s sake) Scrushy is “innocent.” Still, he is responsible for hiring and managing a team of executives who claim they cooked the books at his direction. That all of this happened on his watch is enough to cause his firing. Can there be any more blatant display of negligent management on the part of a CEO than letting this happen (even, em, if he didn’t actually lead it, himself)?

Thin-slice review — Yahoo audio search vs. Google music search: So, you’ve heard: Google adds “music” results to its search. Music is something I search for, so I thought I’d give the new feature a two minute comparison test with Yahoo’s audio search tool, my current default music search method (if iTunes fails me — and it regularly does).

Here’s my instant reaction: With Yahoo!, you go to a special URL: audio.search.yahool.com. With Google, type in the word music followed by a colon (Music:) followed by the title or artist or term you’re looking for.

I used the name “Chris Thile” (no surprise for longtime rexblog readers) for my test:

Google: music:chris thile
Yahoo: (audio.search.yahoo.com) Chris Thile

This is going to be a short review: Yahoo’s mojo is showing. Really. Yahoo offers options like podcast search and the ability to set your preferred audio service. Other than being Google (therefore, being newsworthy), the “music:” shortcut is not ready for primetime. Like other Google features, it will improve. However, with its music search, Yahoo has been adding innovations since it launched last spring.

Strangely, however, it took me a couple of clicks on both Google and Yahoo! to connect the dots between Chris Thile and Nickel Creek.

It’s strange to watch Google playing catch up with Yahoo on this and several other fronts. Competition is good — especially when it’s helping me find something I’m looking for.

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I love this headline, really: “I’d Love This Product Even If I Weren’t A Stealth Marketer“

(via: blog write for ceos)

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I also had an incredible music night: My friend, Nashville blogger and songwriter BB Logan, was in the audience last night of a CMT Crossroads taping featuring Bonnie Raitt and Lyle Lovett. I also had an incredible Nashville-music-that’s-great night, as well. I attended this fundraiser and it was truly amazing. A partial list of those performing: Matraca Berg, Kim Carnes, Jamie Hanna, Jeff Hanna, John Hiatt. I only wish BB had been there to review it on her blog.

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How’d I miss this? One would think, with the ego-alerts (egolerts?) I’ve set up to discover if my name is ever mentioned online somewhere (I listen to the web), that I would run across a story about how great my brother is. However, my oldest brother is way too humble to let me know that his hometown paper, the Mobile Register, did a feature on him last month. I guess it’s appropriate that I didn’t run across the story until today. See, it’s his birthday (like I said, he’s way older than me) and I’ve been thinking about him all day.

Why the WashingtonPost.com is “giving away content”: Matt McAlister blogged the “open content models” session at the Syndicate Conference and has some great points from Jim Brady of the Washingtonpost.com related to their encouragement of developers to “remix” the content found on WashingtonPost.com and its RSS feeds. (Previously on rexblog.)

Key points as blogged by Matt:

But what’s the business model? There are many opportunities in this model including:

Customer acquisition. Distributing links to your stuff is going to yield new customers who might not otherwise know you exist.

Retention. If you are the dominant source for a particular type of content, then people will come to you when they need that content or similar content.

Branding. Your brand gets distributed with your links. And the mashups may leverage your brand to validate the tools they create using your content. Again, your brand becomes associated with the utility of the content.

Partner Loyalty. Or perhaps it’s more like partner lock-in. Once a partner figures out how to do something successful with your content, the switching cost to another similar content provider will likely be too high.

Cost Savings. Washingtonpost.com doesn’t hide the fact that they intend to use some of the ideas the evolve from the mashup partners. They get free product development this way.

Distributed Ad Revenue. Washingtonpost.com does not allow anyone to make money from using their content, but they could. If there was a partner doing something smart that they liked, they could run advertising on that site together and share the revenue. This is how you break out of the online revenue cap problem that many online publishers are facing.

I can think of other “monetizable” results of giving away content that includes links back to WashingtonPost.com, but the most obvious one left out is: Google Juice.

Technorati Tags: blogging, mashup, publishing, rss

It’s Thursday, Google must be launching something: Can’t wait to try out Google Music (story via news.com):

Google Music will allow a user to type in the name of a band, artist, album or song in the main Google search bar special, and results will appear at the top, accompanied by icons of music notes, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google.

Items that can be purchased will have links to merchants for online ordering or downloading, she said. Initial merchant partners include Apple Computer’s iTunes service, RealNetworks Rhapsody, eMusic, Amazon.com.

I’ve been a big fan of Yahoo! audio search, so it will be interesting to compare the two.

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