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"Rob Burgess, Macromedia's chairman and CEO, said the company is talking to major search engines, including Google and AltaVista, to help make it easier for their Web page crawlers to index the graphically rich pages of Flash Web sites."
The second point is related to the third point in that Macromedia may have concerns that Flash developers may be waking up that they are being left behind in regard to PPC ad revenue:
As the economics underlying the search engine market have grown more attractive..., thanks to advertiser-sponsored links that appear with results
The third point is that they may feel threatened by PPC, and are renewing their promotion of Flash as an advertising vehicle:
Members of the initiative include Web portal Yahoo, advertising agency OgilvyInteractive and ad technology company DoubleClick.
Yahoo, Doubleclick, and Ogilvy stand to lose if Google's contextual advertising catches on. Some folks are feeling uneasy and I think that this is the most interesting message, read between the lines of this news item.
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:10 pm (utc) on Mar. 9, 2003]
All it does is convert flash content to html on the fly. The best part is the resulting HTML page doesn't have a title tag. :)
Here's a sample right from their kit:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Links
</p>
<a href="http://www.macromedia.com">http://www.macromedia.com</a>
<p>Contact Us
</p>
<a href="http://www.macromedia.com">http://www.macromedia.com</a>
<p>Sweepstakes
</p>
<a href="http://www.macromedia.com">http://www.macromedia.com</a>
<p>The End of Compromise
The Stiletto answers questions no one dared to ask. Can you make a performance electric car? Can you make a luxury car affordable? Can you make a small car safe? Can I drive from LA to Vegas in an electric car?
Z.E.V. has an answer: Yes.</p>
</body>
</html>
I suppose with this you'll get better results than without, but with the lack of a title flash sites will still get very poor results.
Perhaps the only people to REALLY benefit from those intersitals, rich media ads, and such are advertising agencies and the software companies (and maybe the ISP's if they charge by the magabyte!) If users and most advertisers have their way they are looking down a long black hole.
Now we want to pitch ourselves over that fence into improving the experience people have on the Internet
This made me think of those intrusive Flash ads that spread out & hide the web page so you can't read it until it's done playing.
BTW, PC users can easily defeat those ads by right-clicking them and fast forwarding to the end. Heh heh.
