Yesterday we focused on many prominent people; today, we focused on big things.  Stories about technology, then and now, and how it changes over time.  YouTube will show you why everything is bigger in Texas, including the American Eel.  Remember, Yahoo!  If you do, you're old, just like me.  2023 nominations for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame were announced, and one of the nominees is also going on a brief North American tour, kicking off where?  Texas, of course.  Finally, if you click on that picture below of Peter Rowen when he was on the cover of U2s album Boy, and it takes you to Apple Music, on the Apple Music website, Rowen blinks, and it will freak you out!

Twitter announced several events that would make good advertising opportunities for brands.  Twitter challenges have been widely reported, and the loss in advertising revenue may be chief among them.  If nothing else, there is a decent calendar of significant events in 2023 for your review.  Let's take a quick look at a few of the best brand-worthy events Twitter recommends and see how that looks.

The Woman's World Cup in soccer, the Super Bowl, and Formula One are all listed as brand opportunities.  Twitter itself said activity on the platform during the recent Men's World Cup was up.  Given the multiple locations and frequent storylines, Twitter is uniquely positioned to provide value to advertisers.

Winter brings a lot of award shows, breaking news, who is wearing what, and other hot takes also make Twitter useful during the shows.

E3 is listed as the big gaming event.  This is a new area for all brands and advertising, and it will be interesting to see how Twitter is used alongside specific gaming communication tools like Twitch and Discord.

As Twitter began to change at the end of 2022, alternative platforms started to prop up or expand.  To date, none of the alternative media platforms looked poised to even compete with Twitter.  A better question is, why not?  The advertising and branding elements highlighted above help distinguish Twitter as a tool unmatched in its reach and ability to get small bits of breaking news out to a massive audience.  If you are at the World Cup or the Super Bowl and you see something, you can post it, and it could be trending everywhere.  If you are at the event and live tweet, you probably aren’t looking at the ads either, but if you are not at the event and browsing Twitter, you will. 

Remember Yahoo! Back in the days before Google, Yahoo was one of the big players in Search Engines.  At the beginning of the search, Yahoo wasn't an algorithm; it was a listing website.  With more digital yellow pages, users would fill out forms and list in categories that people could search for.  This article in Search Engine Land says Yahoo is looking to get back into the race.

Websites like; Yahoo, Excite, Webcrawler, and Altavista all used a listings feature and various methods of categorizing website information.  Everything was manual and slow; luckily, so was the web!

Then came Google, and the ultimate web index was created; it is not a stretch to consider the early algorithms as predecessors to large language model AI (ChatGPT).  Google seemed to take over based on its results; the more Google gained, the fewer businesses were willing to pay the listing sites to show up in Searches.

Now we are moving to an advanced AI engine, which might be why Yahoo is starting to poke its head back into the search ring.  Remember the article we highlighted last week that showed more than 50% of the most viewed web pages were a combination of Google and YouTube.  Search that utilizes AI could reduce the number of results and the number of websites you have to look at to find what you are looking for.

It has also been reported that Microsoft will use ChatGPT and AI to enhance its web business.  The future looks bright for AI and search. 

add pic

Mark Hoppus, bass player, vocalist, and co-founder of Blink 182, is also a recent cancer survivor. We opened this week with a remix of our Fight Cancer Club newsletter. Let's end the week with a message from Mark:

Then go see Blink!

[Music Notes]

They make children, not like this one.

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

Thank you for spending a few minutes with us. Here’s one for the road!

With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

O/X