Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

May I be the first to say that MSN Search is ill-fated?

Daniel, actualy I think you can't possibly be the first to say that MSN Search is ill-fated :)

But, Daniel, when you get to be an old fart like me, you'll recall saying similar things about the first release of other Microsoft products. Around about the third release, five years later, they've gotten it right. They have the money and persistence to outlast their competitors. So, I wouldn't write offf MSN Search just yet.

I like it! I mean, I *hate* the idea in general, as it's beyond phoney (like most reality TV, sadly). But I like the part where I watch a fake video in the "blog," decide to follow the "advice" of "Tad" (out of boredom, I guess) and search for "blubber blowout" on MSN.

In the first result, which I suppose is what I'm supposed to click on, I find a website that is part of the Spread Firefox campaign.

Between this and MSN.com's recent switch to standards-based HTML, I think that MSN is trying to say something about Internet Explorer.

I have to admire their bravery. Perhaps the next MSN Explorer will be Gecko based?

This is all very amusing to me, by the way. I will never understand marketing. I guess that will doom me in the end, as I probably won't be able to sell anything, but at least I won't look like an idiot to all my dev peers.

Hey David,
The viral part is in the story, and we have worked to place it deep within the engine to entice people to search for it. I don't want to beat a dead horse with my reference to a search opera but that is what it is. As far as the appearance of the fake blogs: It wasn't intentional and I wonder now if by working on this campaign for so long that, as it was planned as a character page, that i failed to see the similarities (pointed out it OHHHHH so many blogs....Ok clearly this is my bad. But it's a campaign that takes a bit to get into. I will tell you one thing; in the end this is great conversation (even if my ulcer is acting up again). So no PR BS: I do appreciate the feedback. It's one long journey and this is another step (ok bump) along the way. I will share the end results with ya...great, or not so great at the end.
Sean

Well, I can kind of see what you're saying about the "viral" aspect. But I certainly don't want to spend time looking for easter eggs.

I know this has been discussed to death before, but after being introduced to RSS, I rarely ever visit websites on a regular basis...I hate "polling" for updates. (The ONLY site I poll is the Visual Studio 2005 feedback site, and they *seriously* need to get some RSS feeds!)

Viral ads work much better with syndication. And even with an RSS feed on the campaign itself, you'll need something to get me to initially subscribe to the feed. I don't blindly go looking for new feeds.

So unless somebody else who has a blog that I read frequently links to the "viral" ads, I probably won't see them. And many of those people won't see them unless you have an RSS feed, even if you ask them. This is what the big argument has been about, and I have to agree with the critics in this case.

On the other hand, all the bad publicity *did* make me look at the website at least twice, so I guess it's not a complete loss.

Sean, your willingness to jump into this, on your site and on others', says a lot.