John Battelle's Searchblog

Re:Prognostication #5
There will be a "Tylenol Scare" in search. One of the majors - AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Google - or possibly more than one will be caught up in a major privacy and/or corporate responsibility crisis......

The "Tylenol Scare" incident was a case of domestic terrorism orchestrated by some sick meglomaniacal nut case seeking to derive whatever perverse pleasure he sought to fulfill not unlike the anthrax mailings that erupted after 9/11 and have since stopped.

The story illustrated how J&J, despite the nearly unanimous conventional wisdom that Tylenol was irredeemably damaged, brilliantly transformed the crisis by not only salvaging the Tylenol line, its invaluable brand name and huge market share but also managed to turn the debacle into a magnifciently engineered marketing campaign, its corporate leadership achieving superstar status for the monumental way it improvised and set the precedent for the future of all corporate crises from that moment onward.

My confusion about Prognistication #5 is;
It totally escapes me what exactly is it about the 'Tylenol Scare' that you chose to include it as an illustration of what you predict will be a corporate responsibility crisis within the search industry in 2004.

IMHO, your analogy is awkward, convoluted and woefully incongruent, to say the least.

Other than that I love your site as you are one of my favorite bloggers. Happy Holidays! Happy New Year! All the Best!

Re: #9
There already is an organization attempting to preserve our digital artifacts- http://www.longnow.org/10klibrary/library.htm. They're also doing plenty of other interesting things (such as building a giant clock in the middle of the desert- http://www.longnow.org/10kclock/clock.htm).

Another prediction

Pharmaceutical efforts to squelch USer's purchasing Canadian drugs, based on patient safety, run out of steam as no one is able to produce any dead Canadians.

Re: Tylenol Scare: I should clarify - I meant to invoke the corporate crisis part of the scare - i.e. something terrible happens that threatens the business and the company has to manage through it - not the actual incident itself. A less than perfect methaphor.

Well I hope yr right about those first three because I'm hoping for great things from the PAM to be released in March 04.

http://www.nex.com/

It may be a sleeper for a decade like widespread encryption was but I expect great things from this distributed predictive system. So do, (maybe ) those who sent Jim Bell to jail as the first DARPA contracts were let in early 2001.
I trust for Jims sake that revenge is a dish...with a head or two on it.

Regarding # 9 (preserving our digital artifacts), the IEEE Spectrum agrees, their 2004 Technology Forecast calls for "An Infinite, and Everlasting, Archive" - what they term computing's "Holy Grail." However, what most seem to be missing, I think, is that the metadata - the database of intentions - is a critical piece of what must be saved. Not just the blogs, the academic papers, the sites, the documents. But the traces of our culture as we move through them, the patterns of our thought, the declarations of our intentions...this is critical too. We must save both if our descendants are to learn from what we are doing now...

Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty. by free online poker

thanks ! tavla

thank you

thanks