December 25th, 2006 - A Humbling Moment as a Guest Lecturer
I had the pleasure of being the guest lecturer for a Communications class at Waterloo’s Wilfred Laurier University this week. I enjoyed sharing some thoughts on the evolution of Internet communications, the state of online advertising today (including an overview of pay-per-click advertising), and a look at potential careers in the field.
It was my first time in a university classroom since graduating from the University of Western Ontario in 1996. Yikes! My humbling moment came when I showed logos of some of the big search engine players of the past (Hotbot, Northern Light, AltaVista, OpenText, etc.). When I asked who had used these at some point (of course I had used them all a fair amount), one person admitted she’d used Hotbot in the distant past. My brief history lesson on search was a set of memories to me, and ancient history to them.
As an aside, if you want testimony to Google’s dominance, look no further than the current crop of university students. Of the 40 in the class, all used Google as their only search engine.