Don't Let 'Em Lock Down Facts....

Mary Hodder has a good post over at biplog about the new push in Congress to overturn Feist. Feist is the case which established you can't copyright facts, like, say phone numbers, or the temperature outside. Congress is looking to change all that, and that is not a good thing. The EFF has a page on how to make your voice heard here.

Why does Searchblog care about this? Lock down facts, and search is much less useful.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:40 PM
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So Is It Hot?

Search Tuna - yes, Search Tuna, is a registration site that purports to take search deeper - like a tuna diving deep in the sea. Yikes, the metaphors, migod. But, in any case, I registered, and I'm going to check it out. Thanks to Tim Bray for the pointer. Tim is surfacing all sorts of cool stuff in search ever since his On Search articles were highlighted in SEW.

Anyway, as to Search Tuna. Some tidbits from their "about" page:

Search Tuna performs a live, customized web search for you. This takes some time, but our goal is to always get you the best results possible. In this sense, Search Tuna is a results engine.

We e-mail you a link to your results when we're done. That is why we ask you to register — we need your name and e-mail address. Your results are also always available at your account page. Or, you can simply wait.

I kind of like the attitude at this site. It's very no nonsense.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:39 PM
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The Buzz From the Blogorati Ain't Great...

But orkut keeps chuggin nonetheless. Xeni sounds off about how she can't seem to bail from the system (I think they never considered that anyone would *ever* want to leave...), Marc gets tossed in jail without a phone call or a lawyer, Corante is not pleased (pointing out that negative posts and comments about orkut have been deleted from the system, at least early on),danah has a more than a few pointed words as well (and 19 trackbacks and counting...). Folks, the buzz ain't so good. What to make of it?

Well, I think it's fascinating, but I'm writing a book about search, and watching Google manage this particular herd of cats is simply too interesting to look away. So here's my comment, for what it's worth: pretending that this is not a Google project is disingenuous. Orkut *is* a Google project. End of story. Even if it wasn't intended to be, it is. And the folks at Google know that as important as the influencers in tech might be, orkut, in the end, is about the folks who could give a crap about the blogosphere. I'll wager they'll ride out the initial bad reviews, and hope the masses join up. Unless, of course, a few major journalists write it up as a bust. It's rather like the Dean campaign, no? Are Xeni and danah providing the primal scream?

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:59 PM
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Why Good Things Come After Bad Things Happen...

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:27 PM
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RSS Advertising

Does anyone know anything about this outfit: RSSAds. The site is pretty thin on details, but I'm trying to grok how a business model will develop for RSS, and this company is clearly trying to set up against that issue. Anyone else out there have input or ideas? (Matt?)

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:14 PM
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The Orkut/Data Connection

Jeremy Zwadony nails a key reason Google needs Orkut - it's the data...Yahoo, MSN, AOL all have boatloads of data about their users. For future search models like local and personalized advertising, and for user lock-in, this kind of information is critical. So far, Google has very little data on its users. Orkut could solve that, for a portion of the user base...if it would work, that is. It was offline (unintentionally) most of yesterday...wonder if they are ruing the .net decision...

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:14 AM
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The Economist on MSFT

A good overview of MSFT's role in the industry, with special attention paid to the European antitrust case and the role Google plays as MSFT's next target.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:21 PM
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A Chat With Halsey

Yesterday I spent the morning with Halsey Minor, founder of CNet, then 12Entreprenuering, creator of Snap, icon of the boom and bust, and now CEO of Grand Central. Halsey was his old enthusiastic self (not to say he ever wasn't, but it's not been easy these past few years, after all, and he did move away for a spell).

Halsey is convinced he's got a winner with Grand Central. After a couple hours of whiteboarding, it's hard not to at least see his point. The company is in a really interesting space, essentially providing the glue that allows for innovative companies to create really cool tools through web services. While web services as an industry has been on a three-year slow smolder, I think it may finally catch fire this year.

Should it ignite, I am not as convinced as Halsey that Grand Central will be the winner. He points out that there's really no one in the space doing what he is doing, but then again, Jonathan Abrams probably said that when no one had heard of Friendster. If Grand Central proves the space, IBM, MSFT, and others will move quickly to own it. Halsey has a defense on this point too, but in the end, it's all about execution, so we'll see.

Nevertheless, Halsey's vision for the space is compelling. It's based on the law of unintended consequences, in a way, combined with the concept of network effect. But maybe it's best put as a Who Woulda Thought Of That kind of business. (As in, who woulda thought a major bank would sell certificates of deposit via an internet auction?!)

When the web is viewed as a platform, individual services can be snapped together to make for powerful and previously unthinkable solutions to common problems. Grand Central is something like a big Lego board, a common interface where corporate IT guys, web developers, and publishers can think up and build cool new hacks.

Want proof? So did I. Halsey has a bunch of examples in his process directory, and he walked me through a few. Sales automation, for one. Imagine you're using Salesforce.com and your CRM system tags a bunch of potential leads. With Grand Central as the intermediary, your company could write a process that goes out through Grand Central to a bunch of disparate web services - Dow Jones, Dun & Bradstreet, Google, the SEC - and compiles a dossier of competitive information for your salesforce to use when it calls on that client. Grand Central negotiates with each of the databases and/or websites, organizes all that information into a format Salesforce.com understands, and then pushes it back into the system.

Not convinced? How about this: I think it'd be really cool to use such a system to hack together an index for the internet economy (or anything else) via dozens of feeds, integrated into an online application showing the health of the sector in real time, with various knobs and buttons you could tune. We tried to do this at the Standard, but it would have taken too many engineers too long. With web services and Grand Central, the idea may be possible to execute. Still don't see it? How about an application (perhaps integrated into your calendar) that knows when you have to go to the airport for a flight. It asks you for your flight number and your location (if it doesn't already know), then runs a process which queries online traffic information sites, MapQuest, and SABRE to determine when you need to leave for the airport. It determines which route is the best, then sends you an email with a map and the optimal time to leave.

Still want more? How about this: Grand Central has already created an interface that optimizes and automates the process of selling things on eBay, integrating SAP and EDI for big companies that want to clear inventory. There's a lot more to be done in this space - and GC claims to be working on it. Ditto for Amazon. (For more on that...see this CIO piece.)

Anyway, the options are as limited as the imagination. And that's cool. Whether Grand Central will make it happen remains to be seen. But don't count them out. Their tech has been feted by Infoworld and the company is one of B 2.0's "Hot Startups" for this year. Halsey has a very tight relationship with Salesforce.com (CEO Mark Benioff is on his board, Halsey was on the SFDC board till they filed, Halsey is a major shareholder in SFDC). He also seems quite patient. He says he expects to be pushing the rock up the web services hill for at least another 18 months. A lot can happen in that amount of time.

So... How on earth does this relate to search, you might ask? Well, using web services to open up previously dark and deep databases of corporate information is a very interesting aspect of the search story. These databases require many levels of access control - many require fees and security/querying protocols, and many are not HTML compliant. Until the web weaves itself into more of a platform, and companies like Grand Central allow for business models to develop which make them available to the masses, those corporate databases will remain unsearchable to most. Halsey commented that the massive amount of useful, structured data that is in fact NOT available through Google et al is an extraordinary problem/opportunity. I agree.

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:10 PM
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Google Deflates Expectations

According to reports surfacing via the Times in London, CEO Schmidt is telling private investors that he is in no hurry to go public, especially given how much cash his company is already generating. The race to claim the Second Coming of the Bubble seems dealt a setback.

Silicon.com, Times of London commentary, and news story.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:15 AM
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Why You Should Google Your Date

He might have the FBI on his tail...(thanks to SEGuide)

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:13 AM
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Update: American Blind Files Suit

Trademark issue is heating up again, CNET reports...in essence, American Blind is not waiting for resolution on Google's earlier request to the courts, and is suing Google, AOL and Netscape for trademark infringement.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:56 AM
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Turnitin.com

(via IP) I am constantly amazed by the business models made possible through the Internet. Turnitin.com is an anti-plagiarisim site - the student's work is submitted to the site, the site then makes a "digital fingerprint" of the work and compares it to thousands of others. It feels eerie and somehow wrong, and a student at McGill University agreed. CNN reports he won a university review case regarding the use of the system.

Is this a search-related story? I think so. Turnitin.com has to search the web for papers, apply their algorithm, then compare submitted papers against their database. Newly submitted papers add even more to the database. Given the site has contracts with 3000 universities, this database must be massive. Trusting Turnitin.com's algorithms to determine what is "unique" without some level of review and transparency strikes me as insane. In my own classes, i'd never force my students to use such a system. But then, perhaps it would have helped the NYT in the Blair case....

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:19 AM
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Corporate Reputation Management Engine

So perfect is this, that I must simply quote from the release, and let it speak for itself. SEO has come to PR!

Converseon Launches First-of-Its-Kind Search Engine Reputation Management Service

"Search engines have become the primary resource for journalists and other constituents to gather information on a specific company," says Robert Key, President & CEO of Converseon. "Yet, while many companies may pay close attention to how the traditional media portrays them, most companies are completely unaware of what information is appearing when search engine users type in a company's name." He points to examples like McDonald's and Nike, where users typing in the companies' names on Google are exposed to highly negative information, including McSpotlight.org, a "protest site," and the "Boycott Nike Homepage."

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:00 PM
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Current Column (Finally!): Why Blogs Mean Business

I wrote this in November, about two months into my NetNewsWireLite conversion, so if it feels dated, well....there you have it. But I think the meme still has traction.

THE MESSAGE
Why Blogs Mean Business
Today they’re lousy media experiences for mere mortals. But that’s about to change—and so is the way you gather information for your work..

By John Battelle, January/February 2004 Issue

The buzz on weblogs is becoming unbearable. Not because I think they don’t merit the attention—they do. But the mainstream discussion on the subject misses the point. Nearly everything you read says either that blogs are ill-defined harbingers of a long-foretold Internet media revolution or that they’re irrelevant, the ephemeral scribble of teenage girls.

Folks have forgotten that blogs work because people have something to say and others find what they say valuable. Our business culture works the same way—it runs on the currency of influence, authority, and relationships. People who have strong and well-informed opinions command respect and become influencers; they win deals, drive decisions, and ultimately determine the fate of companies. The thirst for high-end business information—the kind that makes people feel like influencers—has created a $15 billion professional publishing market in the United States alone.

So here’s my prediction: Blogs will soon become a staple in the information diet of every serious businessperson, not because it’s cool to read them, but because those who don’t read them will fail. In short, blogs offer an accelerated and efficient approach to acquiring and understanding the kind of information all of us need to make business decisions.
For example, Robert Scoble, a Microsoft marketer, maintains a blog where he comments on just about everything, including his views on Microsoft’s role in the industry. You can bet his views are studied by the folks who make decisions over at AOL, Google, and Yahoo—and in Redmond.
(more via link below)

Until recently, blogs have proven to be an incredibly lousy source of information for most businesspeople. Finding and keeping up with the relevant ones is far too time-consuming. But I’ve recently started using a newsreader, and after spending hours setting the damn thing up, my business life has changed forever.

A newsreader is a relatively geeky application that allows me to scan a list of blogs I specify, pull down new posts, and organize them neatly in a single window. Thanks to the combination of using a newsreader and plugging into a few good blogs (which then plug into more, and so on ...), I’ve created a hot list of business-oriented information that doesn’t just rival my old information-gathering habits, it blows them away. Not only do I spend less time searching and more time learning, but I’ve also joined a challenging and diverse community of minds and business interests. Once you’re in this kind of web, you don’t leave it—you’d be out of the loop. And in business, being out of the loop means death.

That’s why I’m convinced that this newfound habit of mine won’t stay in the realm of geeks much longer. Entrepreneurial outfits such as Bloglines, Daypop, Feedster, and Technorati are already finding ways to make blogs easier to use and bring them to the masses. While most of the early products required that you speak geek, second-generation entrepreneurs like Meg Hourihan (co-founder of Blogger) and Nick Denton (the blog pioneer who publishes Gawker and Gizmodo, among others) are also on the case. They’ve teamed up to create Kinja, a directory that promises to provide not only blog listings (so you can find ones you might like) but also a newsreader-like interface that will allow you to read them easily.

Sound good? I’ve saved the best part for last. In its second rev (it will launch early this year), Kinja will incorporate a recommendation engine that will work somewhat like Amazon’s. When you find a blog you like, Kinja will recommend other, similar blogs. Over time, a Kinja-like approach to the blogosphere’s wonderful mass of opinion, interpretation, fact, and fantasy will become standard for nearly everyone. And Kinja isn’t alone: AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo, and even Amazon are paying attention, as are many startups. The race is on to make your blog-reading experience relevant, efficient, and profitable. Who will win? I don’t care, as long as it happens quickly and it works. With nearly 10,000 new blogs coming online each day, there’s little time to waste.

John Battelle’s Searchblog can be found at www.battellemedia.com.

Find this article at http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,575603,00.html

©2003 Business 2.0 Media Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:54 PM
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Booble Hears From The Lawyers

Predictable, as I said earlier, Google has sent a bigfoot letter to Booble. Full text here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:38 PM
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Orkut is back up

But for how long?

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:15 AM
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Interesting Twist: Google and WhoIs LookUps

Andy Beal points out in his blog that Google has been blocked from performing Whois lookups by Network Solutions. The "Whois" feature (which lets you find out who owns a web domain) was one of many added recently by Google in its continued quest to "make the world's information accessible." Alex S. at BizWeek pointed out in a piece blogged here that there's a business model behind this intent (I'll take disintermediation for $500, thank you very much). We had a back and forth about it in the comments as well.

In any case, it's significant that Network Solutions is pushing back. Andy, who writes in large part to the SEO community, comments:

There's some hypocrisy here. Google publicly chastises anyone who run ranking reports on the Google Index, claiming that it is a drain of their server resources. Yet they seem quite happy to launch a service that has the same impact on Network Solutions...

As I think Andy implies, I'm not sure this has anything to do with drains on servers and bandwidth. I think it has a lot more to do with who owns the customer. Network Solutions knows Whois is a major draw for customers, they use that draw to convert Whois lookups into paying domain registrants. In this particular case, the argument that Google was, in effect, stealing their customers at the point of conversion holds some water. If I do a Whois lookup on Google and see a bunch of ads for registrars that are not Network Solutions, well.....that ain't good for Network Solutions. And if I'm Google, and thinking about doing registration at some point (like Yahoo does now)....well, having this feature didn't hurt. Network Solutions had to do something.

I wonder if others - airlines, UPS, etc. - will follow suit.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:12 AM
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Amazon: Walmart of the Web Once More

Remember when everyone was calling Amazon the Walmart of the Web? That was so 1990s. But...after reading Marketing Wonk's interesting take on this article in Internet News, Walmart certainly came to mind, and not because they both sell a lot of shit. The commentary:

It might have taken warehouse store price pressure 300 years to develop and begin to put out of business Main Street bricks and mortar stores, but on the Internet, Jeff Bezos hopes the process will take merely a few years. In comments to financial analysts, Amazon.com CEO Bezos said the corporate strategy will remain to lower prices - even at the expense of gross margins - in order to gain share, prevent competition and create more power to put pressure on suppliers.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:40 AM
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On Marketing Marketing

It's not easy to market marketing to marketers. David Galbraith points out a funny contradiction...

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:41 AM
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NYTD Earnings: Lessons Learned

Back in the day, everyone was going to spin out and go public, even the digital unit of the New York Times. Then the crash came. The press (that which even bothered to cover the sector, or was left standing) beat everyone about the head in a fit of schadenfreudian pique, and the game was called over.

Well, game's on again. I've said this many times, and I will keep saying it. What happened in the late 90s was a warm up, and the main event is upon us. I hope we're not headed back to the mania of that period, but certainly many - if not most - of the bets of that era are proving prescient, if not financially rewarding in the short term.

Case in point: The New York Times' earnings, announced yesterday. In essence, the NYT's digital business (NYTD), run for years (including the late 90s) by the remarkably adaptable Martin Nisenholtz, is the story of the day. The NYTD is now on an earnings run rate of $30 million a year, and it's only going up. Were it not for the NYTD's earnings doubling this past quarter, the entire NY Times Corp's earnings would have stalled compared to last year. I am sure shareholders are quite pleased with Martin, and he deserves the credit. I've no idea if NYT execs wish they could have spun NYTD out, but I am quite sure they are pleased they stuck with it after the crash. They are only beginning to reap the rewards of that foresight. (Not many publishers had it.)

PS - The Times has Google to thank in part for these stellar results.... NYTD is one of Google's premier AdWords clients.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:15 AM
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Another SE Chart

This one from SE consultant Bruce Clay. It includes overviews of all the majors. If you stare at this for more than five minutes, ping me. We have at least that much in common. (Thanks, Kottke).

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:32 AM
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Gigablast Connects Wayback...

Gigablast, still the work of one mad scientist (Matt Wells), now directly links search results to the Wayback Machine (link via Resourceshelf). This is pretty cool - I've always wondered why other engines don't crawl history, so to speak, or at least offer it as an option....

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:08 AM
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TiVo makes Interesting Move

TiVo disclosed late last week that it has purchased Strangeberry, MediaPost reports. Strangeberry was the company founded by key ex-Marimba employees to do home networking/broadband stuff. So far no clarity on how the peanut butter and chocolate will mix, but I sense it will be pretty cool. Strangeberry was doing a lot of work using Apple's Rendezvous wireless networking technology. Blog rumours say look for a kick-ass home-server kitchen-sink type box.

TiVo's SEC filing w/r/t the purchase. More via PVRBlog...

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:22 AM
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Google Clears Sarbanes-Oxley Audit, Next Stop....Wall St.?

Markoff writes in the NYT today that Google has completed an internal audit of its compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. This is no small feat, the law requires an audit trail of every third party transaction, and Google has millions of them a week in its PPC engine. According to the Times:

Google's board has been awaiting the report before giving the final go-ahead for the company to file a formal stock registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to several executives involved with the process....

The company has not yet picked a lead underwriter for its stock market offering, Google executives say, but several people involved in the process say that J. P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the only real candidates to manage the deal. Google is still weighing whether it should offer some shares through a public auction, in part to deflect potential criticism over whether the many investors eager to own a piece of the business will be treated in an equitable fashion.

The "dutch auction" approach popularized by WR Hambrecht is worth a longer think as it relates to Google specifically and others more generally. I'll post more later.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:54 AM
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The Corporation

Kottke posts on the Sundance audience-award-winning film The Corporation, which asks why a corporation has the same rights as a human being in our culture. I believe this question is important, and will continue to gain relevance. I've long wondered how it is that many corporations act like such selfish, amoral assholes, while the people in them are often so wonderful. This film explores that question. From Kottke's site, quoting material explaining the film:

Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a "person" in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employees a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.
Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

This may seem too pat for some readers, but I think these are core issues folks at Google are struggling with as they determine whether or not to go public. "Don't be evil" and "amoral pyschopath" are not exactly compatible MOs.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:12 AM
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Cost of a Ticket Into Orkut?

$11, if you believe that eBay provides a perfect market....(Thanks to Bo)

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:57 AM
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Way Cool Music Search

I found Grandaddy by using Amazon's collaborative filtering technology - when I bought a Flaming Lips album on the advice of a friend, the Amazon filter said "folks who bought 'Yoshimi...' also bought..." I bit, and am glad I did. Now, take this idea to search, at least in a way. Thanks to Scoble for this gem: MusicPlasma. More proof of what can be done on top of a search platform. This takes a Grokker-like interface to show how your musical tastes relate. Type in one band you love and it will show you others you'd like. You can drill down in sort of a Venn diagram-driven search - say "Radiohead" then "The Shins". As far as I can tell, this is built on the Amazon API (perhaps someone more astute than I can figure this out?). This is why, as I will say again, Yahoo and Google should really rev up their API programs.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:53 AM
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Toolbar Wars: MSN Counters

Dow Jones reports that MSN has added a search toolbar. What took so long?

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:13 AM
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SEO/SEM Market Turns Sights Toward Inktomi

Until now, organic search was a one-horse race - Google. But with Yahoo coming online soon with its own search technology, based largely on Inktomi, the optimizers and marketers are focusing on Inktomi with the kind of ardor once reserved for Google. Will be interesting to watch how the two compare in the judgment of this world, once Yahoo takes off the wraps.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:09 AM
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Highbeam

A newly named "intermediate" research service from Hoover's founder Patrick Spain, integrating eLibrary, Researchville, Alacritude, and encyclopedia.com. The idea is interesting - to target the individual info-seeker who wants more than Google can offer, but does not want to pay the enterprise pricing of Factiva or Lexis/Nexis. Rafta Ali's PaidContent has posted an interview with Spain.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:58 AM
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BannanaSlug

You know that sense of vague hope which comes from entering a query into Google that will mostly likley return tens of thousands of results? And that vague sense of hopelessness that comes when those results turn up, and there's literally nothing that matches what you are looking for?

In such a case, have you ever scrolled down to the bottom of the page, where the Goooooooooooooooogle is, and randomly hit, say result page #21, just to see if that might help? Yeah, me too. Steve Nelson knows our pain. A while back, he hacked up a Google API-based application called BannanaSlug that adds a bit of whimsical serendipity to your searches. It takes your search and adds a random word to it, just to see what happens. It's kind of fun to check out...

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:41 AM
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Brief Orkut Thoughts

When Friendster started, it was something of a first of breed. It was a club that you had to know about to get in, I'm told (by Scott Rafer, with whom I shared coffee and chat yesterday afternoon. Scott was one of the first few hundred or so into that particular club). It wasn't like a million people rushed to sign up - no one knew about it unless they were told by someone else. It was a true Friend of a Friend network, growing organically. There was no need to put a velvet rope at the door - only those who knew where the door was could get in anyway. Friendster remains a place you can sign up for without an invitation.

Now, fast forward to today. There's simply no way that Orkut could launch with the same approach. Too many folks would rush the door, and they'd swamp the system, which has to scale up from somewhere. Hence, Orkut is by invitation only, and in the past few days, an invitation into Orkut has been a something of a quiet wish for many in the Valley.

Now that I've poked around for a couple of days, it's quite interesting to see how the network is growing. Not surprisingly the folks with the largest networks are nearly all employees at Google, who must have been testing the system for some time. This makes Google the Eden, of sorts, the point from which the entire network will grow (yes, for those of you reading closely, I chose Eden on purpose). It makes for an interesting anthropological study, in particular to watch how Google employees' networks metastasize outwards to the Valley and beyond. I hope for history's sake, someone is recording this progression.

PS - As one might expect, Orkut has a messaging and email interface. Should Google make good on the rumours of getting into the email business, it seems in Orkut they already have a pretty strong play.

PPS - As many have noted, including MSFT employee Robert Scoble, Orkut is built on MSFT technology. Odd, for Google to do this. It's a different kind of site - registration-based, as Mark Fletcher points out - but still, why use MSFT stuff? Can anyone tell me?

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:07 PM
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Google Alert - Pointing Toward Search As A Platform

This application, built on the (rather limited) Google API, gives an inkling of the services and innovations which might prosper on the web should Google decide to become a true platform for developers. (To learn more on Google Alert, read SEW's write up here). In the FAQ, for example, the developers of Google Alert note that "Google Alert is a free service but bandwidth and CPU time cost money. Google's API terms prohibit commercial use so you can't even pay Google Alert for more results. In the future, Google Alert hopes to launch a premium commercial service with much greater capacity. Negotiations are currently under way with Google to arrange a license for this. "

My guess is that a quick witted developer over at Yahoo might just decide to open up their API for this kind of service, and the thousands of others which might flourish if they put a couple of big brains and some developer evangelizing behind it.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:16 PM
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Paid Search Trademark Case Settled

A major case threatening to rain on the paid search party has been settled out of court by the parties - AOL/Netscape and Playboy. Terms were not disclosed. This takes some air out of the issue, but Google still has action pending.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:43 AM
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Louis Borders and KeepMedia

Today was a meet-with-interesting-folks day, starting with Louis Borders and Doug Herrington, Chair and CEO, in that order, of KeepMedia. Doug and Louis last worked together on WebVan, which I loved as a service. "We overexpanded," Doug confessed. I can relate.

KeepMedia has some grand visions of where it might be headed (think learning and communities), but it's quite busy focusing on its current model, which is providing what I'll call a "clean and well lit space for magazine search." OK, so I see most things through the search lens, but really, when you think about it, folks who use the KeepMedia service are looking for content that matches their particular interests, and the KeepMedia service has some interesting search and personal filtering technologies to meet that intent.
(more via link below)

First, the basics. KeepMedia does deals with magazine publishers (150 to date, with about 5 a month coming online) to put their archives online. It also sells one-off articles in current issues, and subscriptions. But the near term idea is broader than putting your local library's periodical reading room online - the idea here is that folks can, for $4.95/mo., create their own meta-subscription service of sorts, in the process cobbling together real value for the money. It's a poorly kept secret in the much-maligned magazine business that most subscribers read a small percentage of the total content they get in any given issue. The idea behind KeepMedia, among others, is that you can read only that which you want, and move on to other publications without paying more. After a while, you've created a bricolage of content that is driven at the article level, as opposed to the publication level. Cool? Cool.

Problem is, most folks don't want to work very hard to make all this happen. This is where you get to the personalization aspects of the service. KeepMedia suggests articles you might be interested in - much as TiVo does for TV - based on what you've read already. And it tries to keep its suggestions fresh - one tangent into Popular Woodworking won't bring up lumber articles for the rest of eternity.

In any case, Louis and Doug are keeping their staff and operations lean, and hope to get to a subscription level that will give them some throw weight in the Dead Tree Publishing space. In other words, magazine publishers are not, have never been, and it seems will never be in the web business. KeepMedia offers an opportunity for publishers to employ a model by which they might be paid for their archived content, while focusing on what they are supposed to be good at: making magazines. Louis, Doug and I had a very robust discussion about magazines - careful readers of this blog know I am a romantic sucker for magazines, but I'm also appalled at how far from most publishers have strayed from their original mission of providing community with content.

What are publishers spending most of their time on? Staunching the bleeding in circulation and advertising. Most successful models are those delivering the lowest common denominators of celebrity and scandal. Sigh. What happened to great editorial creating a great community, which advertisers then valued appropriately? Well...it's just so damn expensive to assemble that audience (circulation and advertising), and it's so damn expensive (and inefficient) to deliver them a paper product in the mail (distribution).

The internet seems a perfect solution to both the circulation and distribution dilemmas. If only we could also solve the final problem: that thing I call, for lack of a more academic term, the Thing problem. For the thing is, a magazine is a Thing. And most - nay, nearly all - online publications are not. As I've said many times, most magazine websites blow. I have thoughts on how to solve this problem, which perhaps I'll work out here, but...another time.

For now, keep your eye on KeepMedia. Think of it as a paid RSS model for magazines, and webservices for magazine publishers. For magazine publishers should not be in the Building Technology And Sales Models So As To Monetize The Content business. Why should every one of them reinvent the wheel just for the net (ahem)? Think of KeepMedia as the magazine's industry's Rhapsody or iTunes. Why not get rid of all that overhead, focus on making kickass content, and learn to love the web? Just a (rather long-winded) thought....

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