(Updated x2) Top Yellow Pages Searches

Ya gotta love the Yellow Pages - all printy fresh. In a press release issued today (the link is an instant download and I imagine you don't need the pdf clutter), they offered up their top searches for the year - the year 2002. In any case, it's interesting to see what the top "references" are - their terminology, best as I can tell, for the equivalent of a person taking action based on a Yellow Pages listing. This data comes from the Yellow Pages Integrated Media Association, which exists mainly to promulgate the idea that the Yellow Pages are a vibrant and long-lived source of leads for local business. Caveats herewith in place, the top ten are:

1. Restaurants
2. Physicians & Surgeons
3. Automobile Parts-New & Used
4. Automobile Repairing & Service
5. Pizza
6. Automobile Dealers-New & Used
7. Beauty Salons
8. Attorneys/lawyers
9. Dentists
10. Hospitals.

The data also includes the actual number of references for each term. The top term (Restaurants) had more than 1.3 billion references. In other words, folks used that category in the Yellow Pages 1.3 billion times in 2002. How on earth did they came up with this number?The study of course has no methodology attached to it. I mean, how *do* you track this? Compared to paid search, which is entirely trackable? Anyone know?! Guess I'll have to call the YPIMA and ask. Also, I've emailed folks at Google and Overture to ask what the equivalents are in paid search, which would be a fun comparison. ...

UPDATE: Click on the (more) link below to see the full response from the Yellow Pages Integrated Marketing Assocaition on how they got this data...Thanks to the IMA for this response!

John:

This survey was conducted by New Jersey-based Knowledge Networks/SRI. The surveys are based on 17,443 telephone interviews evenly spread throughout each of the previous two years and have been conducted every year for almost a decade. They also include 2,485 "yesterday" users. The research methods include the use of a random digit dial sample with one adult selected at random in each household. We have data on our Web site for the Top 300 Headings. You may find several free reports at:

http://www.yellowpagesima.org/research/index.cfm

The estimates of usage by heading represent the number of times individuals (for consumer or business purposes) look up a particular heading annually. It is important to note that these references do not include the particular product or service the individual is seeking. For example, many references to the "Automobile Dealers - New Cars" heading are for other dealer products, such as recent-model used cars, auto parts or repair services. While there may be individual headings for these products or services, a segment of consumers refers to the "New Cars" heading for all dealer services.

This usage data is taken from the Yellow Pages Industry Study (1994 - 2002), conducted for the Yellow Pages Integrated Media AssociationSM by Knowledge Networks/Statistical Research, Inc. Cranford, N.J. For more information on the study, contact Burt Michaels at Knowledge Networks/SRI 908-497-8060.

For questions about any of our Yellow Pages research, please contact our research director, Larry Small, at 303-690-0557.

Christopher G. Bacey
Director of Communications
Yellow Pages Integrated Media AssociationSM
Two Connell Drive, First Floor
Berkeley Heights, N.J. 07922
908-286-2394
www.yellowpagesima.org

UPDATE #2: I have heard from both Yahoo and Google, and they decline the opportunity to publish the top ten keywords in paid search. That's too bad, I think they'd be fun to know. ....

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:00 PM
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Moving Beyond the Browser...

A Nielsen/NetRatings report shows how widespread the use of web-enabled applications (ie Chat, iTunes, etc) has become. MediaPost reports.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:12 PM
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Wired on How to Save the Internet

Back in 1997, Wired ran a cover story called "101 Ways to Save Apple." The cover remains my favorite for a number of reasons, the brilliance of the image, the genius of the singular imperative "Pray." I'm not sure the story, in which we polled a bunch of folks and created a list - Editors LOVE lists - was that great (actually, point #101 was pretty good: "Don't worry. You'll survive . It's Netscape we should really worry about.")

This month Wired is revising the 101 Ways meme with 101 Ways to Save the Internet. The story was written by Paul Boutin with input from a few key folks, including several readers of this blog. The voice is almost right, the politics line up, the issues are well chosen, but something about the list feels a bit off. I can't put my finger on it, but overall, it's a good rundown of all the issues the Net faces as we head into 2004.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:37 PM
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Rename it "Cardster" and Watch the VCs Come Running....

OK, here's a new idea: Search for people based on their business cards. I kid you not. CardBrowser is a web-based, paid registration database of...business cards gathered at various high tech conferences (more than 100 a year, they claim).

Now, nowhere on the site can I find exactly *how* they gather those cards, or if the folks represented on those cards are aware they are in a database, but...I've called to find out and will report back when I do.

The company behind CardBrowser is marketing the database as a way for companies to find "passive" job seekers - folks who already have good jobs in high tech who might not be actively raising their hands for new jobs. Recruiters can buy a subscription to the site and then contact potential recruits - and, the site boasts,have a pretty good chance of getting a response, as the information on a business card tends to be accurate.

This brings up a rather odd catch 22. Now, if the folks who are in this card database - and the company claims to have more than 17000 names, with some 2000-4000 added each month - *do* know they are being added to this database, then well, they ain't exactly passive anymore, are they? As an employer, I'd be less than happy to discover some of my key people in this database, and were I the distrustful type, I'd probably get a subscription just to check. If, on the other hand, the folks do *not* know they are in the database, seems to me we've got something of a privacy problem on our hands. The company has no privacy policy I could find, and does not address this issue anywhere. Could this be a simple oversight?

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:36 PM
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Another Oddly Named New One...

Tara over at ResearchBuzz has found this new entry: Ay-Up. Yup, Ay-Up. As she points out in her post summarizing its features, Ay-Up is unique in that it offers free site search. Worth a looksee. (And yet another new engine that needs the help of a logo specialist...)

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:22 AM
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At Least It Doesn't Claim To Be The Next Google....

The latest entry in Odd Little Search Engines That Might...Sootle. Please, let me know if you want me to stop pointing you to this stuff. This engine is in deep Alpha, which might explain its name, logo, and terrible results (30 results for George Bush...) but not the lack of grammatical coherence in its "about" section...Given that the name of the Financial Director is "Peter Fiasco", I'm beginning to wonder if these new sites aren't elaborate jokes tossed up late at night by overworked engineers at Yahoo or Google....I mean....Sootle?

UPDATE: Within 12 hours of my posting this, both Peter Fiasco (my apologies, he's apparently a real guy) and the founder of Sootle, Sid Yadav, emailed me. They were quite kind, pointing out that my criticism of the site would inspire them to greater things with their new creation. Sid points out that my Bush search in fact found 30 *clusters*, and a total of 313 results. His index is only 11 days old, and is only starting to crawl ...literally. He calls Sootle "a hobby sort of project" and is working on a new logo and interface. Stay tuned....

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:12 PM
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Vertical Search: Sidestep The Obvious

Folks from time to time ask me if the game is up, if Google, Yahoo and a few others have locked up search forever. Bah!, I say. Search lives in every corner of the internet, insinuating itself into every fold of discoverable information. There are simply too many folds - large search companies can't profitably exploit every one of them. Hence the continued rise, in 2004, of the vertical search category. Examples? Sidestep, a travel search site that seems to be gaining traction of late. Why? The company's core promise to consumers can be found on its site: "SideStep is a search engine - not an online travel agency. " In other words, you can trust it, as it's not trying to sell you anything. It's focused entirely on its mission of finding the best travel deal, as opposed to selling you whatever inventory its partners might want to clear that day.

So what's the point? Have I fallen in love with Sidestep? No - it's still fish with feet - requiring you to download a software application that "watches" you do travel searches, then makes better suggestions. But I just love the idea it represents: search is a real time publishing opportunity. You can make a business of solving a person's ephemeral but specific information problem, addressing a person's simple but non-trivial query - "What's the cheapest hotel room in New York right now?" - and make a decent living at it to boot. Obritz, Expedia, Hotels.com - they all claim to do that - but they're not publishers, they're agents. Same with so many other first-generation vertical sites - Autobytel comes to mind. My experience is that they are all in the thrall of their partners and their inventory - they are in no way independent. (Just try asking Autobytel this question: "What's the cheapest Volvo c70 on the Web right now?" They send you to a dealer. Not exactly what you had in mind, eh?) I just love the idea that finding an honest answer to a reasonable question works as a business on the internet. Somehow, it feels like the essence of what publishing on the web can be - impartial (and complete) answers to honest questions. So I root for the Sidesteps of the world. The idea it represents scales to all sorts of opportunities, yet to be discovered.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:52 PM
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And From The I Couldn't Resist Department...

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:37 PM
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Australia's Answer to Google? Nah.

Yet another pretender to the throne, Mooter.com is a new search engine out of Australia. It uses clustering technology - not a new idea - but claims to have made it better. I tried it (quite cursorily) and it was, well, not awful. Scattered reports say the site sometimes fails to return results, but that hasn't stopped the Mooter CEO from saying they plan to go public on Google's coattails. At least she's being honest. According to a local news story on the IPO, Mooter has no profits. And if you hit their site and poke around, they sound darn flaky. From their Mission Statement:

As we move, as we track through the information now presented, as our brains cavort along their apparently random paths, increasingly powerful technologies will anticipate our needs. ....We must keep thinking. About who we really are. About what we really want. We must have a powerful tool for finding our way around the information world: a tool that does not impose value on us, but helps us find our own meaning.
If we do not, the mutated survivors will be the corporations who have managed the most manipulation, not the beauty of the human spirit in all its fierce joy of living and intensity of love for self and other sentients.
We must be mindful of what we plant, our children will bear the fruits.

Dude, pass the bong. It's sophomore year again.

And if they do go big time, they gotta do something about the logo. It looks like the mascot for a cold medication.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:58 AM
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Watch This Space: Comcast

There's been a lot of noise over Comcast lately, most of it about the company's rather restrictive terms of service for their broadband product. (It boils down to this: They make it hard to do anything but take a high bandwidth feed from them. Thus they are approaching the internet, predictably, the way they approach cable - a dumb system with intelligence, such that it is, embedded in the servers, rather than at the nodes). So watch this space: Comcast is continuing to flex its programming muscle. This means that Comcast the ISP will act more and more in the interests of Comcast the owner of entertainment programming. Which net net, isn't going to be good for the net, at least in the short term.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:57 AM
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Parts of Patriot II Slipped Into Law While No One Was Looking...

This is a very big deal. Not just because of the law itself - it's heinous - but because of the way it was passed by the Bush administration - on a Saturday, during Saddam's capture celebration, after an unaccountable voice vote on Thanksgiving with no debate. And of course the media did not pay attention, and of course, I hope, we will. I'll summarize the effect of this later - it gives the government extraordinary new powers of search (which is one reason it relates to this site) - but for now, please give your lawmakers hell.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:27 PM
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Find O' The Day: WordNet

If you're a linguistic geek, or just like stoning out on how words work, check out WordNet. I was told of this site in an email discussion with a reader, it's an ongoing academic research project based out of Princeton.

This site (it's also available as downloadable software) is basically a database of interconnected word meanings. The site says: "WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory ." Er, in other words, it's a neat way to see the various "senses" a particular word might have. The online site has a Word Search function. Type in any word, say...."search"...and you'll see it has five senses as a noun, and four as a verb. You can then explore various aspects of the word's senses, including synonyms, derivations, and - really cool - hypernyms: "Search is a kind of..." and hyponyms "..is a kind of search."

I'll admit, this was my first time stumbling across the terms hypernym and hyponym and actually understanding why they matter. So why does this matter to Search writ large? Because one way to think about improving Search is for an engine to drill down on a particular query based on what sense of the word the searcher intended. In other words, when you type "jaguar" into the query box, which sense did you mean - the cat, the car, the team, the software? If a search engine can create "senses" of words on the fly, it might be able to create smart responses to difficult and high-results queries (AltaVista and others do something similar with clustering, but this technology has not been blessed by everyone as relevant enough..including Google). Think of Google's spell checker, but with "senses" of words, instead of spellings of words. "Did you mean the cat?...." etc. Now, I have no idea if this particular implementation would be useful to a search engine, it probably has all sorts of problems. But it's interesting to think about nevertheless.

Thanks to Steve K for this pointer and the conversation that provoked it.

(An aside - my email is jbat@battellemedia.com. I welcome email if a particular thought of yours is more comfortable in that medium as opposed to the site's comments area. I've learned a lot from such exchanges).

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:45 PM
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China's Answer to Google

In the English language version of People' Daily (take it for what it's worth...) is a rather exuberant announcement for the launch of the "world's largest Chinese search engine", known officially in English as "China Search Online" (www.zhongsou.com). The page is reasonably clutter-free, as compared to most Chinese portals I've seen (I co-taught a course on weblogs and China last semester, the product of that course is a cool weblog called China Digital News.)
In any case, the folks behind the engine, HII (who went public earlier this month, see here) are compared to Google, they even have a no-human-editors-have-touched-this news product to boot.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:32 AM
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On Invisible Tabs (and Hands)

In an email conversation, Danny Sullivan (he of Search Engine Watch fame) and I recently were discussing last week's post on Froogle. Danny disagreed with my premise that Google's actions were inconsistent, in fact, he believes they may well be consistent with a new and evolving interface approach that he calls "invisible tabs." He explains the idea here. The gist: search engines will intuit what you are looking for behind the scenes, and deliver to you the results most consistent with that intuition, making the tab format redundant in the first place.

As Danny put it in an email to me:

The real departure is going to be if Google finally makes the jump and gives you back 10 product/Froogle results at some point, and suggest that you might also search the web, for some queries, rather than the web dominance we get now. That will be them fully putting into play this whole invisible tabs concept that I've been talking about recently.

Danny points out that Google already does this with News. Try searching for "George Bush," for example. You'll see News results at the top. Google is intuiting that you wanted news on George Bush, or at the very least, that news about George Bush is relevant to your search.

Same thing for Froogle results, Danny explains: "They're hitting the Froogle database in automated fashion, and if the automated system feels confident enough, you get Froogle results displayed. No different really in look, feel and operation than searching for "iraq" and getting news results."

Well, yes...and no. What I find interesting is this part of the idea: " If the automated system feels confident enough, you get Froogle results displayed." No matter what, code = architecture, and architecture = politics. Somebody had to code that Froogle algorithm to determine its confidence/intuition with regard to your search. Google, and any other search engine worth its shareholder's money, will never tell you how it makes those decisions. They are the Invisible Hands of the automated search process. The men behind the curtains.

And therein lies the interesting bits.

Regardless, we should all give Google a lot of credit for having neither paid inclusion nor referral fees in their shopping engine. That is leaving a lot of money on the table toward a greater end, and an indication of the philosophy which guides them.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:36 AM
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The Health of Magazines: Blame Cable As Much As Internet

More and more I'm noticing my cable lineup looks like a magazine rack. Used to be, television was a scarce resource. As late as five years ago, it was still being programmed for large audiences - at least a million, if not more. If folks wanted well-produced niche content, they had to go to magazines. Now they can go to the internet as well, but until recently, I thought magazines could still compete for a smaller audience's attention if they stood out as a voice for a particular community.

But I now believe magazines as we understand them are eroding, succumbing to the twin tides of niche cable and what might be called the second wave of Internet publishing.

First, TV. Cable seems to have finally realized that in a 500-channel universe, not every channel can garner a 20 rating. Hence a willingness to do focused, niche content that aspires to just several hundred thousand viewers at a time. This strategy can produce breakout mini-hits like Trading Spaces and Queer Eye, but in general, it seems cable has figured out how to make money selling audience sizes based on metrics quite similar to those of magazines. Thumbing up and down my cable menu, I feel like I'm at the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble - there's 25 different sports titles, scores of shelter books (that's the home/hearth category for you non-magazine folk out there), plenty of music/pop culture plays, even programmatic equivalents of "Guns&Ammo." None of these shows, save perhaps the pop culture stuff, do more than 500K in audience on any given day. In other words, TV has managed to segment audiences into the same demographic/psychographic buckets that once were the sole purchase of magazine land. PVRs only accelerate this trend, adding the convenience of search and storage to the magazine rack concept. Add in the fact that the average cable bill in the US is more than $40, and you have a subscription+ad model, just like magazines. I should also note that the advertising business has shifted in kind: production costs have been driven down by technology, and buyers now understand how to buy spot and niche cable. End game: TV wins head to head against print. Just ask the publishers of Life.

Now, the Internet. I've always thought you could create great magazines if you stayed away from competing solely on audience demographics/psychographics, and focused on the ineffable quality of publishing that might be called community. Because they serve deep and subtle content, magazines can create and/or declare community, a badge that folks wear proudly, a club in which they claim membership. Well, while it's quite difficult for a cable show to hold this rather ephemeral quality, the Internet has it in spades. Strike two.

If my beloved magazine readers are getting their high-bandwidth niche experience from cable, and their community succor from the web, what is left for magazines to do? Is Battelle saying magazines are dead?

Well, yes and no. We have to rethink what a magazine is. Again. After all, I teach magazine development, for goodness sake, so I can't very well believe magazines are a dying breed. There are exciting things to be done with the idea of magazines, if we can reinterpret them. For one, make them for smaller audiences, and compete on that point, rather than be ashamed of it. Two, figure out how to make magazines sing in the online world (nearly all attempts to date are awful). And three, figure out a way to get around traditional approaches to the twin evils of circulation marketing and distribution. I'll post more on my thoughts as to how at a later date, but I wanted to get that cable TV-as-magazine-rack meme out there, and see what you all thought.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:50 AM
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A Software Wish

As long as I'm skipping down memory lane and all, I wanted to leave one tech/site related request - late though it is - for Santa this Christmas Eve. Or maybe I should say, for Ben and Mena over at Six Apart (the folks who brought us the software that makes this site, and many others, possible). I wish for Quark Xpress for the Web. I know this has been something of a pipe dream for many (and I'm not really tight into the discussion on this topic, so perhaps it's on its way), but now that I've mastered a few of the basics of Moveable Type, I really wish I could play with the software the way I did when desktop publishing was young, back in the late 1980s, when Quark and others made history. One of my first gigs was as a paginator for MacWeek, which claimed to be the first desktop-published four-color national weekly magazine in history. It was just really really cool to be a beta tester of software (Quark version .9) that you knew was going to change publishing forever. As great as MT is, it's still too hard to tweak the sites, to make them look better and perform better from a reader's point of view. I know making this stuff is extra hard. But I'd sure love to beta test the GUI version of MT, were it ever to come down the chimney....

And Happy Holidays to you all. Thanks for reading these past couple of months, and giving me so much to chew on. I look forward to 2004.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:20 AM
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Why Yahoo, Interactive, and Google Love Local Search ...

Because it's poised to grow to nearly $3 billion in revenues by 2008, up from about $1 billion now. And because the mass of small business owners who currently don't use search would certainly switch if presented a compelling solution that actually brings in customers. Can you imagine your corner grocery store or dry cleaner buying keyword search? Me too. Move over, Yellow Pages....

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:22 PM
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Corporate Search Is Sexy

Before there was the web, there was the corporate database. Remember those days? Back in the mid to late 80s, when the Local Area Network was the Next Big Thing, when everyone was madly installing client-server databases, when applications like dBase III and NetWare ruled the roost? You don't? Sigh. I must be showing my age. I was a cub reporter back then, covering the relatively new beat of "networking" as well as the corporate database market. Yup. Somehow I found that stuff fascinating. I thought this whole idea of connecting disparate networks of information was a hoot.

Anyway, to the point. About 1987 or so a new class of applications developed. Called Executive Information Systems (EIS), these were essentially interfaces to data, designed to live on top of corporate databases and cull the stuff Really Important Executives needed to know so as to make Really Important Decisions. The coolest part of the spec was the fact that the data was queried from the desktop - EIS promised easy and intuitive access those unintelligible databases the geeks kept buying. The idea was sexy, but the category never really took off. The design was too rules based, too top down. For them to work, you had to literally redesign your entire infrastructure. Oh, and the Executives in question had to give a shit.

Fast forward to now. As most of the world remains fascinated with search's more public face, a significant shift seems to be occurring in the corporate data world. I'm not saying EIS is back, exactly, but the overwhelming presumption of webwide search on your desktop is certainly rewiring how corporations think about their more private databanks. A robust market has grown up around "enterprise search," (some companies, such as FAST, were spun off from consumer search companies, and Google maintains a unit focused on the market). There's a crop of interesting startups to boot, including Tim Bray's company, Antarctica. It's entirely possible some of the next big ideas in search may well be developed in this more focused, less public field. Any readers out there have suggestions of cool companies in this space I may be overlooking?

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:10 AM
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The Mayo Database

Wired News reports on a massive database project from Mayo which has interesting, scary, and rather exciting implications for diagnosis and treatment. Genetic information will eventually be included. Excerpts:

During an office visit, a medic will be able to do enough quick data mining to ensure the most accurate diagnoses and most effective treatments while the patient waits, de Groen said. "Ideally the computer would query both our own database of patients (and) the complete medical literature." ....

"It's really about applying the knowledge from many to the benefit of one," said Dr. Anne-Marie Derouault, director of alliances and distribution channel management for IBM Life Sciences, who heads the IBM teams working on the project. "Without genomics, it would be very hard to do that. Putting that kind of information with traditional information is potentially going to bring medicine to another level."

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:10 AM
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Thoughts on 2004

I am not sure why all of a sudden I am struck with the urge to prognosticate, but all weekend long I've been thinking about what might happen next year in the search/tech/media nexus. I think it has something to do with the book - my plan is to finish it by about mid year, then pray that nothing major changes for another six months while the manuscript wends its way through the vagaries of the publishing process. It's either that, or Jeremy envy.

So I've been thinking about a number of things, some small, some not so small, which might happen in the next twelve months. Given that I'm writing this on the eve of Winter's Solstice, I give you Battelle's First Annual Solstice Hopes and Predictions for 2004. I refuse to say which are hopes, and which predictions. This way, I can claim to be right next year one way or another. Take it for what it cost you on the way in.... (see list via link below)

1. The Web becomes a platform (again). Thanks to commerce and service APIs, RSS, and the ubiquitous interface of search, geeks around the world are again leveraging the web as a platform for cool new tools. 2004 will be the year these tools break out in something of a pre-cambrian explosion, reminiscent of the Mac in late 1980s, or CD-ROM in the early 90s. Only cooler. Examples: Grokker, Bloglines, Amazon API.

2. Along those lines (and no surprise to this readership, but still and all...), blog ecologies of like-minded folks will garner increasing cultural and social power. We've seen this happen first in the technology and media space, and recently politics has figured it out too. 2004 will see the rest of the world join in, especially in natural communities where power is projected: think professional verticals of finance, law, medicine, marketing. Folks who you never thought would ever blog will be coming online and claiming power. As a result, more blog ecologies will impose registration and/or subscription (the money kind, not the RSS kind...).

3. The Dutch auction/OpenIPO model will be validated. Not that it isn't already alive and working - WR Hambrecht is proving that - but 2004 is when a major player (and it need not be Google) will take the lead and fly the bird at traditional Wall Street approaches to going public.

4. Speaking of IPOs, we'll see a major IPO ($100 million+ sold to public) in search that isn't Google.

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 press and consumers will freak as they realize how important - and imperfect - this thing called search is. There will be much harrumphing, then everyone will calm down, learn from the incident, and move on.

6. Once a month, a new search player will be crowned in the press as "the next Google." One of them, in fact, could be the next Google.

7. Second generation blog/RSS aggregation sites will come close to combining directory functions with LinkedIn- and recommendation-engine-like features - think Amazon+Yahoo for the blogosphere....

8. ...at about the same time Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and Google will build or buy second-generation blog/RSS aggregation sites.

9. The world will realize the importance of our digital artifacts, and takes further steps to to preserve them.

10. Cable companies will control more than 75% of the PVR market, but a backlash/new TiVo-like device (possibly from Apple) will develop by the end of the year.

11. Microsoft will have a surprise hit product that has nothing to do with Office or Longhorn, causing a minor fire drill in Redmond.

12. I'll finish my book, try to stop writing this blog, but find it impossible to do so. Meanwhile, a deeply cool, once-in-a-decade-magazine-I wish-I-had-thought-of will launch.

So what are your predictions?

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:00 PM
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Gurley on Cable Regulation: Counterintuitive Thinking

I subscribe to Bill Gurley's Above the Crowd newsletter, and always find his insights worth the read. (Bill is a VC at Benchmark, and a former partner of mine on the Internet Summit conferences.) His latest missive, "Cleaning Up After the Ninth Circuit in an Attempt to Save the Internet" is an exercise in counter-intuitive thinking. When I first read about this decision, I thought it was a victory against the evil cable companies, who I am always willing to believe have nothing but their own monopolies at heart. The ruling said, in short, that cable lines had to be viewed as telecommunication services rather than information services. The distinction was important, as it meant the cable lines were subject to the same sharing rules as phone lines. In other words, it could open cable up to competition, similar to what the RBOCs already face.

Given that for three of the past four years SBC felt my neighborhood was not profitable enough to offer DSL, and I had to get it from Speakeasy, which offers service on top of SBC lines, I thought this kind of a ruling was a good idea - maybe there would finally be someone like Speakeasy who could offer me cable modem speeds and who had a clue about the internet (Comcast clearly does not - don't get me started on that one).

Bill makes the case that while the intent of the court may have been good, the result could be crippling. I am not sure I agree with everything he writes - much of it is pretty rigid anti-regulation sentiment - but he makes some good points. Among them:

...Often in complex political systems, the objective of an action can be honorable, yet the impact of said action can be completely at odds with the objective. This is largely because the tools we use to encourage behavior in such systems are often crude and imprecise.

We should all know by now that rather than increasing competition, regulation typically reinforces monopolies and oligopolies. Startups will not and cannot prevail in heavily regulated industries. ...

Bill concludes that either the Congress of the Supreme Court will have to clean up the Ninth's mess.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:05 AM
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LinkedIn+Vertical Blogs = Interesting Microcommunities

(Updated)
I think it'd be cool if you could join a network of folks who read the same blog(s). I've always maintained that any good publishing effort understands and reflects its community - that it is both a mirror to the community members, and a window into that community for folks who are interested in joining or understanding that community. Conferences have always been a neat way for readers of a publication to meet each other, for example. Foo Camp was one of the first I've been to where "blog ecologies" ended up meeting FTF, and it was quite something to see how folks who'd been connected mainly by blogs ended up working together in real space.

So think if you could "see" all the other people who read this site each day (and who opt-in to be seen, of course) - and invite them into a LinkedIn like network if you wished to. I wonder if that's in the cards for LinkedIn - to do vertical OEM stuff like that? Are there others working on stuff like this?
(Thanks for the meme, Matt...)

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:40 PM
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RSS Marches On...Net-based Aggregators

I keep meaning to do this...I've noticed a bunch of net-based aggregators out there, I'd be curious if anyone uses them. One of the earliest is Bloglines, founded by the same fellow behind eGroups. There's also a new one over at Feedster call myFeedster. And there's FastBuzz. And of course the one Meg's working on, Kinja (still in stealth).

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:08 AM
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The Salesforce IPO

So Marc's company will go first - the first of the companies on everyone's list of '04 IPOs to drop an S-1 at the SEC's doorstep. Here's the Merc's story on it...

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:12 AM
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In a Name...

(caveat: site related)

A few readers of this site may recall the naming discussion we had back in 1997-8 when The Standard was born. Back then I was trying to come up with a name that properly captured the intent of the magazine, and I had several dogs in contention before Denise Caruso, Steven Johnson and I came up with The Industry Standard over (more than one round of) drinks in NYC. During that exercise, and during many subsequent and prior naming go-rounds, I always started email lists with trusted advisors, pinging them with naming ideas and getting their feedback.
This is a long way of saying that one of the reasons you see the "beta" tag on the banner of this site is that I've always been dissatisfied with its name. Somehow attaching the word "blog" felt dated, but I did it anyway, if only to signal the form the site would take. So with that in mind, I seek your counsel. You've been reading for a while now. Which of these names capture best the feel of this place? (I'm partial to the idea of keeping Search in the name, as you can tell).

-SearchThink
-SearchThought
-Searchlog
-SearchQuest

Have any others? If I rename the site to your suggestion, you get bragging rights forever, just like Steven and Denise have. Think of the whuffie....

And as long as I'm doing site news, I've now updated my templates to support RSS 2.0, so you can see links and pics in your readers, if they support 2.0.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:55 AM
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How the Information Age = The Dark Ages

This meme has popped up a lot over the past decade: We're increasingly putting everything on digital media, which is great, but we're failing to archive it properly, and even when we do, we're not archiving the machines we need to read the data. A librarian at the British Library makes this observation again in an article entitled The Great Digital Information Disappearing Act. (Thanks Gary for the link).

But we're missing a larger point. It's not just the data - the emails, MP3s, the websites. It's also the data about the data - the traces of our digital culture that are kept in the database of intentions. That data - what people wanted, when they wanted it, how they asked for it, what they got, where they went - represents no less than the cultural artifacts of our day, equivalent to the pottery shards and stone tools left by our forbearers. Imagine yourself an archaeologist 2,000 years from now. Wouldn't you like access to MSN or Google's database of intentions, so as to plumb the traces of an ancient culture emerging into the digital era? But to date, most search companies are either not archiving that data, or if they are, they are keeping it to themselves for competitive or legal reasons. There are huge privacy issues, of course, in insuring this data becomes part of our digital history, but they are solvable. What we don't have is the cultural will or foresight to realize what we're creating.

In any case, this is one of the larger informing concepts I am working on for the book. Your comments and input greatly appreciated.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:30 AM
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A New Class of Google Results, With Interesting Implications

I just read a piece by Bambi Francisco (it's here, scroll down in the story) in which she claimed in passing that typing "ugg boots" into the main page at Google returned a subcategory of results - above the regular "pure" search results but distinct from the advertising - called "Product Search." I tried it in quotes - "ugg boots" - and it didn't work. Without quotes - ugg boots - it did. I then tried "digital camera" and there it was again.

What do you know - a new class of results (from Froogle, see my earlier post which missed this) nested rather uncomfortably between the sponsored results at the top and on the right side, and the pure results below. Also interesting was the fact that the results were in the same white background as the regular "pure" search results, though they are distinct in look and feel.

This is a very interesting development with significant implications. Many would claim this is a major step toward Yahoo or MSN-like approaches on the part of Google. Others would argue that Google in fact is simply trying to do its users a favor, inferring that most searchers who type such queries are in fact in shopping mode. But it is a clear departure from the conceit - and I use that term nuetrally - that Google has always maintained, which is that the results offered by their engine are free of human intervention - that they in fact reflect the results of a carefully tended algorithmic secret sauce applied to every site without bias. Clearly, humans have decided to put that category of Product Search on top of the main results. And certainly those results are not subject to the same secret sauce which sifts the rest of the unwashed web. (One can imagine merchants racing to game Froogle, now that Froogle results are showing up - in first position no less - on the firehose of traffic that is the main results page of Google). No matter how you slice it, this marks a departure.

Interesting indeed. I am attempting to find out if this is just a test, a trial balloon of sorts, which Google does do quite often, or if this is a permanent feature. Stay tuned.

Update: Google's David Krane, who runs corp. communications, responded to my query early this morning. He said that the incorporation of Froogle results into the main search page is "a test of sorts, yes...just an opportunity to further integrate Froogle with what folks are looking for on Google. It's been up for a couple of weeks. We'll have more data on the response after the new year."

He offered to have me speak with the product manager in charge of this, and I will be talking to her at some point in the near future, give or take a Christmas holiday. Thanks for the quick reply, David!

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:50 PM
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Search IPO in Hong Kong

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:15 PM
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Second Tier Players Strengthen

MediaPost reports that top members of the team behind Sprinks, which Google recently purchased and essentially folded into AdWords (why?see here), have landed at Kanoodle. Kanoodle also got a round of funding, and opened an office in NYC. They have a keyword search product, and will probably add contextual and local advertising products next. It's a sign of the robust market around paid search, and a good thing that companies besides Overture and Google can continue to thrive.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:18 PM
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Search Print

Amazon is not the only one experimenting with making print available online. This is a Big Deal....

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:41 AM
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