Fishing For Dipsie

I won't get into the whole song and dance behind Dipsie. I posted on the company back in early November, and for a while it was one of the most searched terms on the site, as it seemed to promise That Which We All Long For, which is to say, The Next Google.

I spent some time over the past few months talking to folks about Dipsie, and have in fact been quite close to posting Real News about the company at one point or another. But as with many startups working through the inevitable kinks, the Real News never quite materialized. Now, Gary posts that Dipsie has told the Chicago Sun Times that it will launch its public beta on May 10. There's no other news in this piece, but it does reflect the bravado of founder Jason Weiner. As Gary says, let's see what happens in May. We can all hope, of course. But me, I'm a skeptic. Prove me wrong, Jason; I'd love to be wrong....

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:49 PM
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A Month of Search Patents

Gary has his patent roundup posted, and it has more interesting stuff.

There's a patent application for serving ads in email - from employees of Google. Overture gets a patent for search sets. Other search related patents go to Seibel, AT&T, Yahoo, IBM, et al.

My favorite: "Method of doing business by identifying customers of competitors through world wide web searches of job listing databases" - from IBM.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:33 AM
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Marchex IPO Gets Out, Deal Oversold

A portent: The Marchex IPO, first reported here, priced yesterday and the book was oversold, according to the Seattle PI.

MCHX went out at $6.50 today and is now trading at $8.90. That's damn good for any IPO. The company plays in the paid inclusion ad space and was founded by the execs behind Go2Net.

Marchex - Hoovers

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:07 AM
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The Top Keywords of the Week

Another tool for you zeitgeist freaks, Wordtracker will tell you the top 500 search keywords updated daily (it comes as a ticker up top). It's an interesting reminder of the real world - "prom hairstyles" makes the top 15....

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:58 AM
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Unconfirmed: Koogle to Helm F'ster?

Now that would be something. Galbraith seems to think so. Recall he's taken a wildly successful but directionless startup to greater glory before ... Koogle is Chair of F'ster now...

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:52 AM
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NewsMap

Via boing boing, a very cool map visually relating what stories the newsmedia is covering, a hack on GoogleNews. You can toggle by country, pretty impressive. More on the NewsMap here. This reminds me of Map of the Market, which is now several years old but still cool too.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:27 PM
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GlobalSpec: Domain Specific Search and the Semantic Web

I better watch out, or I'll draw fire from Clay Shirky soon. But much of the debate over the semantic web clears my head by quite a distance - I'm more interested in what works and why. I just got off the phone with the GlobalSpec team -Jeffrey Killeen, Chairman & CEO, and John Schneiter, President. It seems to me that GlobalSpec is one of those innovations in search that works - at least for its intended audience - by adding context, organization, and tagging to a limited dataset. Sounds semantic to me.

GlobalSpec is a domain specific (or vertical) search engine. It got its start eight years ago as a classic IT play - take all the catalog-based information about engineering parts - sensors, transducers, etc. - and roll it into a huge, cross-referenced database, which you then distribute over the web. Make money by connecting customers to parts suppliers. Simple.

Over the years GlobalSpec has evolved into a robust community of a million or so engineering types who use it to find and spec parts. That alone is pretty cool (I mean, a million engineers!). But the coolest stuff was just launched: They call it "The Engineering Web" and it's a domain-specific crawl of the web for engineering information. And not only have they crawled the web (about 100K engineering related sites, so far), they've also surfaced invisible web databases not found in mainstream search engines - patent and standards sites, for example, which are walled off by registration and business considerations. Anyone can use the service - it's not limited to registered users. In essence, GlobalSpec has built a portal that drives traffic and intent through their original database business, in the process building an intelligent island of engineering information that lives in the public sphere. Of course this means they can add AdWord-like functionality, which of course they are working on.

My thought: If only cars.com was this cool.

OK, you don't usually spend a lot of time comparing accelerometer specifications, so why should you care? Well, GlobalSpec points the way toward the creation of hundreds of powerful vertical search engines, engines which, because they are limited in domain and exclusive by nature, can in fact offer extremely cool tools to find exactly what you want. (This idea is of course not new, nor mine, but still...) They also will create important data mines of user behavior - GlobalSpec has the parametric details of every search ever made against every product in its database - which is a goldmine for companies who are trying to fathom what the market wants. Think about that for a minute...let it sink it. Yup, Battelle's on his Database of Intentions horse again.

I wish for the day when there's a GlobalSpec for every imaginable domain, and a meta search engine which intelligently crawls those verticals...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's why GlobalSpec points to some exciting developments in search. Because of its limited domain, GlobalSpec can use relatively simple keyword-based algorithms to surface lists of ideas or terms related to your search. This allows you to refine your search in ways that simply don't scale in the Googleverse. These related ideas are inferred from the results of your initial query. For example, if you search on "aerodynamics", you will get "aircraft , Flight Mechanics, Helicopter Aerodynamics, computational fluid dynamics and Theoretical Aerodynamics" as related searches.

It's clustering without the crappy results. This stuff really only works when you are living in a gated community of sorts - out on the big bad web, there are simply too many false positives. (I'd also point out that domain specific vertical search engines in more consumer/commercial domains - such as cars.com or Expedia - are further polluted by the commercial interests of the industry they serve. They could learn a lot from the GlobalSpec approach.)

The GlobalSpec guys outlined a useful trio of attributes shared by domain-specific search engines like GlobalSpec. First is organization. This is the basic premise of domain specific engines - through organization comes efficient search. Schneiter calls his engine "parametric" - everything in the index is organized against the standards and parameters of the engineering field, making "parametric search" a reality. Second is context. Domains engines are by definition contextual, but GlobalSpec has a drop down menu next to its search box that allows you to contextualize the search even more, across a bunch of subdomains like Products & Manufacturing, Company Name, Application Notes (engineers care about this), Suppliers, and Standards. And third is access. Vertical search products, by their exclusive nature, can provide domain-specific access to the invisible web, in fact, they can enable commercial transactions that otherwise would be impossible (as GlobalSpec does, see here - at the bottom is the option to purchase an engineering standard from a company with a deep database of standards, a database which cannot be accessed via mainstream search engines). To that end, I'd argue that a fourth attribute of vertical search engines is commerce - these engines enable serious, highly efficient closed loop markets.

Come to think of it, Topix feels a lot like GlobalSpec, but for local news/advertising instead of engineering. And so on...

FWIW, GlobalSpec is backed by Warburg Pincus, and will be profitable this year. The company will not reveal revenues but say they are in a "scale position." Worth watching....

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:54 PM
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Eric S. Interview in WSJ

Couldn't get onto the WSJ page yesterday, so missed this interview with Eric - and it's behind a paid wall in any case. Then I noticed this free link in Beal's blog today. Eric gives some insight into his management style, the possible IPO, and how decisions are made.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:36 AM
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Google Lawyers Busy: New Lawsuit Over Location Search

When I met with Eric a year or so ago, he said that Google had gotten to the size that draws lawsuits, and he expected his legal department, already robust, would have to get even bigger. He was right. Add another suit to the pile: Digital Envoy is suing Google for violation of a licensing agreement.

Details from CNET:

Several years ago, the two companies struck a licensing agreement allowing Google to use "geo-location" technology invented and developed by Digital Envoy, said Timothy Kratz, a lawyer with the firm of McGuireWoods. The technology uses the Internet Protocol (IP) address of a computer visiting a particular Web site to determine the nearest city in order to direct specific advertisements to the computer's user.

The license allows Google to use that technology on its own site, but not on third-party sites, Kratz said. "If an advertiser is signed up under the massive AdWords program, and if its ad runs on (the Web site of) USA Today, then it's a misappropriation of our technology.

Round up of search stories at CNET here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:18 AM
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Case Wants AOL Back

That's what this NY Daily News story claims. Now that would be something. I think the Time Warner guys would sooner run AOL into the ground than give it back to Case and risk his turning it around, and making them look hapless twice.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:37 AM
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Why Topix Is Different: Toward A Sustainable Model For Net Media Companies

Last Friday I had a chance to stop by the Palo Alto offices of Topix, in many ways a classic internet start up – Valley-based, run by a serial entrepreneur, good buzz – but it didn’t take long for me to sense that something was different this time. Before I get into that, let me first give you a few thoughts on the service itself, and the broader role it plays in the search business.

Background: Topix was founded by six guys, four of whom went to high school together in Pittsburgh. No, I'm not making that up. Most of them are IT/Valley vets, CEO Rich Skrenta founded NewHoo and sold it to Netscape a mere six months afterwards, then morphed it into the now famous Open Directory Project. But Netscape was sold to AOL, and after a while Rich got bored (I assume) and left with the intent of starting a company he could "work into my 40s on." I like the sound of that.

Topix is an internet media play. More specifically, it’s a local advertising media play. The service takes a crawl-and-index approach to a vast array of internet news sources, then runs the resultant stew through a metadata engine which tags every news story with location and subject data. Topix then builds more than 150,000 topic- and location-specific pages, pages that live comfortably between the great gunky mass of search results, on the one hand, and the impersonal morass of most news sites on the other.

Skrenta likes to call Topix a “150,000-facet diamond,” at least one facet of which should appeal to most news consumers. But step back a few thousand feet and look at Topix’s approach, and you start to see something else at work, something instructive to anyone interested in next-generation approaches to search.

At the risk of getting mired in academic debate, one could argue that Topix is a proof point in the semantic web. Topix is not interested in every web result that might be rendered for a search “news kentfield,” for example. Instead, it searches a limited set of web pages – in this case thousands of news sites – and then annotates the content of those pages with semantic tags - latitude and longitude, for example. It then machine-generates something of an “encyclopedia page” for Kentfield, cobbling together news, weather, advertising, police blotters – a local newspaper in real time (Skrenta pointed out that Topix utilizes a newspaper-like layout on the site, because... it seems to work for the reader. Imagine that, we don't have to throw out everything we learned over the past 200 years). Topix also creates pages by subject; Skrenta argues that in fact many of their industry-related pages - Wireless, for example, or Search Engines, are among the best sources of business information in the free web.

If you take this approach to the web - mediating SERPs with subject-related "landing pages" - you could imagine a broad scale search engine which manages a machine-created ontology of subject pages. WebFountain comes to mind, orthogonally. In fact, such an approach has been attempted by any number of companies, I have heard that Excite was working on such a project before it fell apart in 2001. (There are others, readers, can you chime in?).

Skrenta does not shy from the semantic tag, in fact, he is one of many I’ve spoken with over the course of reporting the book who agree that the web is failing to scale, and well-documented “neighborhoods” of semantic order will help bring the web back into focus. “Whole cataegories are dead on Google now,” Skrenta told me, referring to the ongoing arms race between relevance and search spam. He's right, of course. But here's where the story turns to Topix's distinction.

The inevitable next question for Rich, is, "Sure, OK, broad web search engines like Google are starting to fail under the sheer weight and scale of the web. But Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL - they're all hard at work on this problem. Even more, all three have news products already, and are very focused on integrating local search. What makes you think a small startup like you can make it in the face of such pressure?"

A Valley entrepreneur will usually respond with one of two answers: 1. Don't Worry, I'll Sell While Small, Make A Good Sum, And Get A Good Job at An Established Company (as Rich did with NewHoo; Blogger and Kaltix also come to mind), or 2. I'll Take VC Money, Take the Execution Risk, Sell Later And Get Silly Rich (the current path of, say Friendster). In other words, when the market is dominated by large, entrenched competitors, your best shot at succeeding as a startup is to sell, either at the beginning of your life (when the LargeCo is basically buying the talent and nascent market opportunity), or after you've scaled to the point of inflection on the build/buy curve. It costs money to get to that scale, which is where the VCs come in.

I found it wonderful to hear that Rich didn't want to take either of these options. Instead, his goal was to simply start a neat service, get to the point of self-sustaining revenue (with six employees and an office over a trophy shop, that won't take long), and grow it slowly. In other words, no VC money, no dreams of world domination. Rich just wants to build a nice media business, without having to either sell it or sell out. Rich met with the VCs about Topix, he told me. "After five minutes, every one of them would tell me their vision of what I had to do to win in the market," he said. "If you take their money, you have to buy that vision." Better to fund it small, with angels and friends, and let it grow to its own place in the sun. Could it be that the post-bubble web, version 2.0, will allow for such companies to succeed?

I certainly hope so. May a thousand such flowers bloom - and I see them springing up, over at Nick's Gawker Media, for example, or the grandaddy of them all, craigslist. I've heard pretty much the exact same philosophy from both Nick and Craig: I want to run my little media company, VCs and exit strategies be dammed. Welcome to the club, Rich. May you work into your forties at Topix.

UPDATE: Rich emailed me as I posted this with this news:

"I wanted to let you know that, as of this morning, Topix.net is
now crawling over 6,000 news sources, up from 3,600. Here is an
approximate breakdown of the kinds of sources we are crawling:

24% Daily newspapers
19% AM & FM news radio stations
15% Weekly newspapers
15% B2B and consumer magazines
12% TV stations
9% College newspapers
5% Government websites
1% Weblogs

We have also enhanced our news crawler to navigate through javascript
and frames, which has increased the yield and coverage of our news
crawling.

We're also including the news source name on the attribution line,
instead of just the domain name as we were previously."

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:57 PM
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elgooG

Love this hack. You have to enter your search backwards...

thanks, Seth...BTW, Seth hates the new Google interface...

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:33 AM
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Semel Gets His Fortune Profile

Long profile of Yahoo CEO Terry Semel with integrated Yahoo back story and prediction that Yahoo will make it to the Fortune 500 list in five years or less. One intersting note: Yahoo used to be driven by the engineers, but has outgrown that approach. Sound familiar?

I believe the article may be behind a sub wall, if so, here are a few excerpts:

"Everyone talks about what he did with movies and entertainment," Yang says, "but what he really did was pioneer how to take a piece of content and get it out there. He has a distribution mentality, which at the end of the day is what Yahoo does on the Internet. And so when we started talking about Yahoo generically as a distribution company, we both just went, 'Gosh, this is going to be really cool.' "...

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:54 AM
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Baidu Chief On Google, China

Worth a read it you care about the Chinese market....

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:34 AM
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Google Says: Check Under Our Hood (Personalized Search, et al)

Google's got a refined look, and it's rolling out a Labs approach to personalized search. The approach is distinct, it requires a lot of input from the user. It's the result, I believe, of an integration with the Kaltix technology Google bought last year. The company, in a press release, calls their personalized search "revolutionary." We'll see. The Labs implementation walks you through a step by step process which uses categories to refine and personalize your search, and uses a search for "Stanford" in the health category as the example. I changed it to "Berkeley" and got a message that "Personalized results not available for this query." But I'm not *from* Stanford...

Google also released the ability to receive search results via email (called Google Web Alerts, a lot like Google News Alerts), and made a host of tweaks to its interface, most notably on the home page (the "tabs" are now links, check out the "more" link, and also the search box seems bigger, and there's a line imploring you to "get more from Google" ); in Froogle, which now has it's own spot on the home page and gets a redesign (new tagline, but it's still in beta); and in news (incorporates thumbnails).

My first take: This is Google saying "Hey, folks, there's a lot more to us than meets the eye. Come take a look, and get into a relationship with us." More when I get back from morning rounds.

BTW, the Google Directory lost its place on the home page....

(full release in extended entry)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

GOOGLE INTRODUCES PERSONALIZED SEARCH SERVICES; SITE
ENHANCEMENTS EMPHASIZE EFFICIENCY

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - March 29, 2004 - Google Inc. today released three
new innovative features that demonstrate the company's ongoing
commitment to improving the search experience for users. The new offerings
include a revolutionary search engine that uses user preferences to match
search results to their interests, a service that delivers search results
via
email, and an enhanced interface for Google web sites worldwide.

Google Personalized Web Search and Google Web Alerts, both debuting on
Google Labs, enable searchers to specify what interests them and to receive
customized results based on those interests. Changes to the Google interface

improve the speed and accessibility of Google's search offerings, further
demonstrating the company's focus on providing the best search experience
for users.

"Today, Google takes the first step in providing personal search results
based on users' preferences," said Larry Page, co-founder and president,
Products. "We can deliver search results tailored to your interests or
promptly email you new information on any topic. In addition, Google has a
cleaner new interface and easy access to the comprehensive Froogle product
search."

Google's personalized search services
Google Personalized Web Search and Google Web Alerts deliver customized
search results based on preferences that users specify.

Google Personalized Web Search uses personal preferences to deliver custom
search results based on interests selected by users. Users can control the
degree of personalization in their results using a slider, and see the
results
change dynamically as the degree of personalization changes. For example,
music enthusiasts will see different relevant sites for a search on [bass]
than
people who indicate an interest in the outdoors. More information about both

services can be found at http://labs.google.com.

Google Web Alerts are automatic updates for web users who want to stay
current with topics that interest them. After specifying keywords they want
to track, users can receive daily or weekly email with links to new web page

results, plus top stories from Google News that are related to each query.
For
example, Google Web Alerts can be used to follow the progress of a favorite
sports team or a business competitor, all without having to perform searches

repeatedly.

Google interface enhancements
The Google homepages and search results pages worldwide have been
modified to include links across the top of the search box, which directly
connect users to other Google services including Froogle. These links
provide
a faster, simpler search experience. Also, with Froogle now available via
the
Google homepage, shoppers can directly search the web for products to buy.

Google search results pages also feature a cleaner look to better connect
users to relevant information, additional Google search services and
targeted
advertising. As always, Google's sponsored links are clearly marked, so
users
can easily distinguish between advertisements and search results, which
Google strives to make as objective and unbiased as possible.

Three additional search enhancements announced today include:

. New Froogle home page and search results page - Froogle's
simpler new design closely resembles the Google homepage and search
results page. The new Froogle homepage also features links to recent
popular product searches, such as [iPod cases] or [airzooka] instead of
categories. These links enable users to see the variety of products that can

be found via Froogle, from the most obscure to the most popular. Try a
search on Froogle at http://froogle.google.com.

. A new number range (numrange) advanced search command
enables users to specify that results contain numbers in a range they set.
Users can conduct a numrange search by specifying two numbers, separated
by two periods, with no spaces. For example, a user looking for information
about DVD players between $250 and $350 or technical information on high
capacity batteries, can conduct a search for [DVD player $250..$300] or
[50..1000 wh/kg battery].

. Images now featured in Google News search results - Google News
now displays thumbnail images of photos that relate to news stories. By
including these photos, users receive more detail about any given event.
Accessible from the Google homepage and at http://news.google.com,
Google News provides users with multiple viewpoints on numerous stories
from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide.

About Google Inc.
Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around
the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D.
students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in
all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program, which is
the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all
sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience
for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout

North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, visit
www.google.com.

# # #

Google is a trademark of Google Inc. All other company and product names
may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are
associated.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:54 AM
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Yahoo and Kelkoo

Remember when eBay went on a tear, buying auction sites all over the globe? Yahoo and search/shopping feels similar. Kelkoo, a private shopping site in Europe, sold to Yahoo for $576 million yesterday.

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:47 PM
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MSFT Groks Technorati, Readies Blogbot

MSFT is claiming to be the first to focus on weblog search. I am sure the folks at Technorati , Feedster, Daypop, et al are curious to see what exactly they are talking about.

MSFT, clearing puffing out its chest, also claims it will roll out its version of news (already in beta) and, at some point this decade, a natural language query engine. Uh huh.

Thanks, Gary.

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:43 PM
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Mapquest Reverse Engineers Local Search

Used to be, you had your search, and you added the map/local angle. Well Mapquest has the maps, and now it's adding search. Gary reports that Mapquest has a local search beta up. Innaresting...Mapquest is an AOL company...

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:22 PM
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New 2.0 Column: Mike Ramsay, TiVo

I enjoyed my conversation with Mike, since this interview, TiVo has announced new advertising products along the lines of what we discussed.

TITANS OF TECH
When the Network Meets the Net
TiVo's Mike Ramsay wants to plug viewers into more than cable and satellite -- and bets his digital video recorder can make the connection.

By John Battelle, April 2004 Issue

TiVo (TIVO) is under siege. From Hollywood to Madison Avenue, the word itself is almost a curse. And those who aren't muttering it are copying it. In the latter camp are most of the cable and satellite companies, which are mimicking TiVo's groundbreaking digital video recorder -- the Internet-era successor to the VCR that finds the TV programming you want, when you want it. Some 830,000 Time Warner (TWX), Comcast (CMCSK), and other cable subscribers now use cheap DVRs from Scientific-Atlanta (SFA), which has orders for hundreds of thousands more.

You'd think all of this would spook CEO Mike Ramsay. But Ramsay, a veteran of Silicon Graphics, is ready for the fight; he cheerfully mentions that TiVo has already battled Microsoft (MSFT) and won (Microsoft canceled UltimateTV, a competing DVR, in 2002). He's bolstered TiVo's subscriber ranks to 1.3 million with the help of DirecTV; half of them now come through the satellite-TV company. And he's suing EchoStar, the other major satellite provider, for patent infringement.

Ramsay's offensive plan is even more interesting. He's trying to make friends on Madison Avenue by putting tiny video commercials, similar to movie trailers, in TiVo's programming guide. (Fox and BMW are among the advertisers that have tried the new format.) Nielsen is adding TiVo viewers to its ratings panels. Despite the common wisdom that TiVo was toast, the little company based in Alviso, Calif., has thrived: Its stock has soared from a low of $4.50 a year ago to nearly $12 today.

In January, TiVo raised $74 million from big investors, and in February it cut prices on its entire DVR line. But Ramsay can't outspend his cable competitors; he knows he'll have to out-innovate them. In February he purchased secretive networking startups Strangeberry, whose engineers are working to take the DVR a step beyond, making its user-friendly interface the window into content downloaded over any wire, whether coaxial cable or high-speed Internet. Can Ramsay hook up broadcast and broadband? Expect TiVo to generate new business models, new forms of video content, new regulation, and a lot more controversy in the coming years. However it ends, we'll be replaying this episode for years to come.

Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction was the latest in a string of high-profile "TiVo moments." So why aren't there more TiVos in the world? Are you the next Macintosh, with Comcast as Windows?

We have been conditioned over the last five years with the Internet that if something's hot, it gets into millions of homes overnight. But until recently TiVo's been expensive. It's also a brand-new idea -- and history tells us it takes time for the average consumer to get used to a new idea. It's sort of like when the PC first came out.

TiVo is a hard-to-explain thing. When you first describe TiVo, people say, "Well, all right, that's great, but isn't that just like a VCR?" And you go, "Well, no, actually it's not." Then there's a five-minute conversation. You can't describe TiVo in 30 seconds. You need TiVo to describe TiVo. In the past we've gotten a lot of mileage and effectiveness out of PR and product placement, generating word of mouth. Today there's a whole lot more elasticity. Bring the price down, sales go up. Get the word out, do more promotions, sales go up. In February we unveiled a $50 rebate. And you'll see more of that going forward.

To protect their advertising and pay-per-view business, won't cable companies create "TiVo lite" -- DVRs that they control, in essence?

Yes, but they are motivated by satellite -- they are scared that satellite is taking business away from them. And to the extent that satellite has embraced DVRs, they have to respond.

Is the 30-second spot dead, and is TiVo responsible?
(more via link below)

That's one school of thought: The 30-second commercial is dead because with DVRs you just fast-forward through them. That's true. Time Warner Cable does half a billion dollars a year off advertising. If they have a DVR that skips commercials, then they're somewhat compromised.

But advertisers are looking for what's next. And the secret is that DVR-based advertising can be targeted to individual people, and you can get a direct response. That kind of direct marketing is something that has never been done on television. That's a big deal. TiVo has just over a million subscribers, so we're still pretty small, but this new form of advertising has turned out to be a reasonably significant part of our business.

What kind of new advertising models do you see emerging on the DVR? Will BMW, say, give viewers a month of free TiVo if they agree to watch a commercial?

I don't think that would fly. But there are various things that I think could be quite attractive. One is giving an advertiser the ability to throw a banner up when somebody is fast-forwarding through a commercial. So let's say you're watching a Coke commercial, right, and you're fast-forwarding through it, and up comes a banner that says "Free Coke," and you can hit on that and it sends you coupons.

Right now TiVo gets its content from cable or satellite. What's next? And how does Strangeberry factor in?

What if your TiVo were connected not only into broadcast but also to the broadband Internet? Strangeberry has developed some exciting stuff that I'm really keen to see happen. But with television, you've got to keep it simple. In the early days of TiVo, we banned the use of technical phrases. We decided it had to be really simple, and that's how the TiVo user interface came about. Slowly but surely, people came around to this idea that simplicity was the key. That's a challenge: To go from stand-alone TiVo to broadband Internet, you're going down a path that can easily add complexity.

Once you're connected to broadband, then you can ask how would you make that a real TV experience from the Internet, and how could you build an advertising business on that. Our ads, for example -- today they're stored on your TiVo at home, but they could be stored on a website, and anybody could create one.

The cable companies would hate that.

Well, they could either hate it or love it. They are trying to find a use for broadband. To that extent they should love it. But to the extent that it takes away from their broadcast revenue streams, they would hate it. Say I'm looking for Martin Scorsese movies, and I search for Scorsese on TiVo. Back comes all this stuff that's on television, but there's also some website that's got an interview with Martin Scorsese that's never been shown on TV. Say we can index that and it will show up on our program guide, so if you choose it, it'll start to "record" -- download over broadband onto your TiVo.

We've got the ability to integrate broadcast and broadband in a way that doesn't change the user interface one bit. The paradigm is exactly the same. There is no shortage of ideas around this stuff. For example, there's no doubt in my mind that in 5 to 10 years video-on-demand and pay-per-view and physical video rental will all collapse into one thing.

In taking on Napster, the music industry seriously damaged its relationship with consumers. Could that happen with Hollywood and TiVo?

Definitely. It took the music industry six years to get what the Internet meant to their business, and then they panicked and their response was to litigate. I think video and film content holders are looking at that experience and they have learned something. Plus, the practical limitations are greater -- downloading movies is not easy. There's an incredible paranoia in the media industry over the ability of one individual to take content and put it on the Internet.

Do you buy into that paranoia? Anybody with a Linux box, a cable feed, and a little bit of programming chops could rip video to the Web. But so far, we don't have a video version of Napster.

They can, but it's not easy. We believe in the concept of fair use. What does concern us is that as time goes on, the concept of fair use is being narrowed. And we hate that. It's our job to broaden the concept of fair use while still giving the industry good protection for their content. And I think that's a technology problem.

The analogy is not that dissimilar to copying a page out of a book, which is generally not regarded as a violation of the book's copyright. But if you copy the whole book and sell it, then that's a different issue. So there's no logical reason you shouldn't be able to copy a short clip. But you can't. And we face even more ridiculous issues. For example, I can time-shift and record onto a TiVo, but say I want to copy that onto another TiVo in another room to watch it there. Am I violating copyright? Well, I think most people would say no. But technically, the content holders could argue that I am, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

What is the media industry afraid of? Do they really think their customers are all pirates?

They're terrified of change. The model they have for their content is fragile: It relies on multiple sources of revenue. If any one of them is broken, they have a problem. In the movie business, most of the money is made in rental. What if that went away? That would be a huge disruption. A lot of people look at that and they go, "Technology's not doing us any favors here because if we change our business model, we're going to lose a lot of money." I don't think they think the world is full of pirates, and I don't think they think they're going to save their business models by suing 12-year-olds. But they may be able to be in denial for a little while longer.

John Battelle is a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of "The Search" (Portfolio, late 2004).

Find this article at http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,599229,00.html

©2004 Business 2.0 Media Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

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Update

Sorry for the light posting day. I spent all day in meetings, and then an hour on an NPR program. There is lots to get caught up on, in time, I will. I met this morning with Rajeev Motwani, one of the professors who mentored Larry and Sergey during their Stanford days. I then had lunch with a source who wishes to remain anonymous, but who shed a lot of light on the ongoing search and ecommerce wars. Then on to meet Rich Skrenta, whose latest creation is Topix. More on that in an upcoming post. Then the NPR show, "On Point," which was, as one might expect, obsessed with Google obsession.

Lots of news over the past 24 hours, expect posts on that as well. And if you want the weekly newsletter, a reminder to sign up in the box at left.

Have a great weekend.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:23 PM
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MSFT & Search: Europe, Ballmer

CNET reports that MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer got animated when the subject of search came up at the company's recent advertising forum.

"People say that Microsoft does it all, but this is the case where we didn't do it all," Ballmer told an audience of marketing and media executives on Thursday, here at the software giant's fifth annual advertising conference. Then, like an eager football coach pumping up the team for the second half, Ballmer reasserted that Microsoft is still in the game and plans to win.

"You'll see a lot of good competition in the area," he said emphatically, at one point throwing his pen.

In other news, the Merc reports that the recent EU ruling against MSFT may stymie the company's plans to integrate search into Windows.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:26 PM
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Shopping.com IPO Is A Search IPO...

How? Besides my own bias that all of ecommerce is driven by search, see this excerpt from a story on Shopping.com's $400 million IPO:

Shopping.com's biggest customer, responsible for 38% of its revenue, is Google. Shopping.com's agreement with Google is expected to continue, although the market is highly competitive. The Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) e-commerce site has launched a new price comparison service, and Google is planning to launch its own price comparison service, Froogle.

And, ahem, let's not forget Amazon...

Here's the Shopping.com filing....(BTW, they filed in 2000 but never got out...)

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:59 PM
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Early April Fool's Post at MediaNews...We Hope

Matt over at The Standard points me to this parody of Yahoo's CAP program, which gets just about nothing right in terms of the presumptive pay for performance approach that it parodies, but is a pretty funny riff on what would happen if News Search was opened up to any bidder...

Organizations that are willing to spend the most will achieve the most prominent positions on the news pages, remaining in place until they are outbid by competitors. Although there will be no revenue payoff for news stories that rank high up the pages and gets lots of clicks, the program is certain to touch off a "share of mind" battle among news organizations--and, for the first time, allow the man on the street to tell his story without interference from editors.....

...Historically, professional journalists who were trained to separate wheat from chaff and remain utterly objective have decided what constitutes news stories and which ones deserve the most prominent "play" in newspapers, newscasts, and increasingly, online. That is, when they are not making up news stories, because it is easier than gathering the facts--and with some creative flare, can lead to prestigious journalism prizes. The Yahoo! "News Search" program essentially eliminates editors as gatekeepers to what constitutes news.

The piece includes some funny false headlines:

GIRLS SMARTER THAN BOYS - A study today released by Wellesley College is said to provide the first incontrovertible evidence that..

PEEWEE GOALIE TURNS AWAY 12 SHOTS - the son of billionaire George Soros yesterday turned away 12 shots on goal in a 23-4 loss to the..

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:31 PM
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UPDATE: It's Brandt's Bomb

Someone over there (I assume) is having fun at Google's expense - check out the top result for a search on "Out of Touch Executives" on Yahoo's Search page...

UPDATE: The Register has a story on this bomb, which clearly affected Google as well as Yahoo, and was perpetrated by Daniel Brandt, of GoogleWatch (and now Yahoo!Watch as well...he's a busy guy).

(thanks, Phillip)

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:36 AM
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Yippee! Jeremy Rants Again!

This time, it's his employer's travel service (that'd be Yahoo) that gets the honors...who hasn't had this experience online?

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:32 AM
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WaPost On TV: Shift Coming

Good to see major papers getting on board with the "broadcast is dead" meme: Media Giants Need To Learn to Sing A New Tune (reg req'd).

Excerpt:

....it is only a matter of time before millions of consumers will be doing things like creating custom concert videos of their favorite artists. They'll mix and match video from TV shows and DVD recordings which they (hopefully) will have acquired legally -- much as music fans have been creating custom music discs and tapes for years.

But as with music, it's also possible that the rip-and-mix generation will actually wind up buying more recorded video than before, all the better to fuel their digital creativity.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:18 AM
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Upcoming WWW Conference: Loads O Search

Resourceshelf has culled the upcoming WWW conference for selected references to search. There's also a whole track on the Semantic Web.

The complete list is a Who's Who of search stars and a telling map of who's doing interesting research in the area. Included: Intel, University of Washington, IBM, Yahoo (Understanding User Goals in Search), National University of Singapore, MIT, Microsoft. A9's Udi Manber (who I did meet with, but can't go into our talk quite yet) is giving a keynote.

OK, I think I have to go to this.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:00 AM
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Silverstein Rides Again

Interviewed in ZDNet, Craig suggests that voice-activated search is not so far away. Recall that his model was, at one point, Star Trek. Google Labs has a rudimentary application based on this idea here. And, as I noted yesterday, Opera has integrated it already into a version of their browser (using IBM speech technology).

Silverstein said he believes that within a few years Google could have a voice interface for everything from driving directions to help you finding the aisle for a particular food in your local supermarket.

"That's something you would never think to ask a search engine. You're not likely to be using your laptop in a supermarket, but in the future I think search will be far more accessible -- you won't be tied to your desktop, you will be able to do it from your mobile phone or PDA -- and you'll start to see search used in fundamentally different ways. The kinds of things people want information about when they are walking around or sitting in a bar is very different to what they want while they're at home," he said.

Thanks, Beal...

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:00 PM
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There Are Two Primal Forces In Comic Parody...

Sex, and....this. (Warning, not for the feint of stomach).

(You will thank me for NOT including an image, as is my custom).

(hat tip to Phillip)

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:51 PM
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Kanoodle News

Kanoodle announced that is has snagged MSNBC.com distribution today, here's the press release. Earlier it announced "ClickFactor" - a new ranking system for its ContextTarget paid search system. Forgot what Kanoodle's deal is? Here and here....

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:40 PM
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NewsJunkie