John Battelle's Searchblog

On the road, postin' will be light. Next week I will start posting excerpts of the book every so often...

From MediaPost:

A JUDGE IN SEATTLE HAS temporarily prohibited computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee from working at Google. Lee had worked at Microsoft until earlier this month, when he gave notice that he would join Google to lead its China office. "The equities dictate that a temporary restraining order ... should be entered," wrote Judge Steven Gonzalez. He also ordered Microsoft to post $1 million by Tuesday, which could be used to compensate Google and Lee if Gonzalez or another judge later decides that Microsoft wasn't entitled to the injunction.

MSFT still has a page up for Dr. Lee.

Apparently Google has filed for a patent in "Incorporating targeted ads into information in a syndicated, e.g., RSS, presentation format in an automated manner."

Uh Oh. TechDirt reports on this disturbing idea. After all, many folks have been doing this for some time...

Patent here.

Update: Gary points out to me that Google filed for this 18 months ago. Still and all, I recall Feedburner doing this 18 months ago, and others. I hope this will not be an issue...

McKinsey sure can take a good idea and turn it into meaningless corporatespeak drivel. I was reading through CNET and saw this headline:

From Push to Pull: The Next Frontier of Innovation (from partner McKinsey)

That sounded familiar, I had written a post called "From Push to Point", and so I figured, hey, let's see what they have to say. Here's the "teaser":

* Most companies now mobilize resources by deploying push systems, in the mistaken belief that they promote efficiency.
* Push systems—characterized by top-down, centralized, and rigid programs of previously specified tasks and behavior—hinder participation in the distributed networks that are now indispensable to competitive advantage.
* More versatile and far-reaching pull systems—characterized by modularly designed, decentralized platforms connecting a diverse array of participants—are now starting to emerge in a variety of arenas.
* As pull systems reach center stage, executives will have to reassess almost all aspects of the corporation.

Oh. My. God. No way am I reading another word....

Wired is running an excerpt of my forthcoming book in the August issue, and it's online starting today.

I'm of two minds about the excerpt - the book has much more to it than the history of Google - but on the other hand, I'm deeply pleased that the magazine I helped start is, 13 years later, excerpting my first book. It's part of a cover package on the ten year anniversary of Web 1.0 (the Netscape IPO in August 1995 being the starting gun).

As with the entire book, I very much hope that any errors, omissions, or plain stupidity that is apparent in this work will be pointed out by you, the reader, and that I can address them here and in any future printings.

While you are on Wired's site, you must read Kevin Kelly's wonderful piece called "We are the Web." He nails what we all missed in Web 1.0, what we are striving toward in Web 2.0, and then journeys into the world of Web 10.0....as only Kevin can.

It's great fun to have two of Wired's three founding editors (Kevin was the founding Executive Editor) in the same issue at the same time.

AOL betas its personalization play today, striking a deal with Feedster in the process. MediaPost coverage.

It's a Hot or Not/Google Maps mashup...
(Thanks Oliver...)

IndustryBrains is a vertical ad network. Release here.

The LA Times (caveat, I spent a glorious three months there as an indentured servant before leaving to join the founders at Wired) recently attempted to push their own boundaries online by rolling out a "wikitorial" - in which the paper allowed its readers to comment upon and edit the Times' editorials.

It was a good idea, but poorly executed. The site attracted trolls and showoffs, and was quickly shut down. Dan Gillmor has a good overview of why it didn't work here, and adds his thoughts on what they could have done better.

But when I read about this, I instantly recognized a core problem with the approach: it was top down community, rather than bottom up. Michael Kinsley, who created the site for the Times, was attempting to force a considered, editorial structure onto a set of readers who had yet to identify themselves or their own interests in any kind of structured way. It was doomed to fail, because communities can't be created by editorial structures - editorial structures must be created by communities.

This is a classic failing of old school media thinking. Sure, folks could build on top of the Times' editorials, but then again, why would they? The reason folks build stuff is to build it together, and to do that, they have to know one another, have a shared set of mores, have a conversation that is already going.

A far better approach would have been to create a platform for readers to create their own communities. Leaders will emerge, voices will break out, and conversations will get started. Then the community itself will have a sense of ownership of the media, and begin to moderate out the trolls. It's one thing for the LA Times to kill the trolls - that feels like censorship. It's another for the community itself to do it.

Seth (and Steve and Hank) on attention. This is pretty much the kissing cousin of the Database of Intentions.

You may recall my write up of Transparensee a while ago, I liked the approach founder Steve Lavine took to "fuzzy" search of structured data. Today I spoke with Steve again and he showed me a demo of his technology working on a real estate database. It's very much worth checking out, it's a cool visualization of how to make the web more useful. Head here, then fill in a few of the variables - price, zip, etc. Steve suggests 60014 for the zip, I think that database (greater Chicago) is populated. Click "enhanced search." The sliders are the cool part, as are the similar properties. This kind of technology had all kinds of applications....

PS - this works on the Mac only in Safari...

Danah Boyd notes that NewsCorp's recent purchase of MySpace gives Murdoch's empire a unique perspective into the cultural habits of a much sought after demographic.

Unlike the other YASNS, the value of MySpace comes from the data on media trends that is the core of what people share on that service. You have millions of American youth identifying with media and expressing their cultural values on the site.

True, but I had a conversation with an exec in the Big Media space yesterday who saw it a bit differently. What MySpace has that Newscorp wants is inventory, and a lot of it. Newscorp is, after all, an advertising business. Why did Dow Jones buy Marketwatch? NYT and About? Inventory. The secret is out: inventory is valuable again (I've called it "traffic of good intent" in the past), as long as it has a high quality audience and a strong community. Now it's up to these media players not to screw them up.

Boeing is bringing the Net to your airplane seat, and Yahoo is coming along for the ride. (via SEW)

AOL is bowing its Mobile Search Services today. Cnet coverage. Release is in extended entry.

Also, Yahoo and Motorola ink a mobile deal.

Continue reading "AOL Betas New Mobile Search" »

MediaPost reports that Ask's entrance into the space is imminent, Diller hinted as much earlier this year a the D Conference.

Currently, Google powers sponsored listings on Ask Jeeves. Reportedly, Ask Jeeves' paid search will look similar to Google's system. It primarily will be based on keyword bidding, but with some measure of relevance, such as click-through rates, factored into the advertiser's ultimate cost. The minimum bid will reportedly start at 5 cents.

Ask Jeeves' sponsored listings likely will co-exist with Google's, at least for the time being. Google's contract to power sponsored listings on Ask Jeeves doesn't expire until 2007.

I'm pinging sources to try to flesh this one out.

Update: I have it on very good authority that this report is accurate, in the main.

As expected, Yahoo integrated Flickr into 360 today, along with RSS (do I hear an echo in here?!) alerts, and other goodies. Details here.

First it was Brian Reid, who claimed age discrimination. Now it's Chirstina Elwell, who is claiming discrimination based on pregnancy. Elwell was a high ranking sales exec at Google based in NY. This looks like a terrible nightmare for all involved. I very much hope the allegations she makes are not true, in any case, it looks awful for Google. Elwell lost three of her quadruplets during her pregnancy and was fired, then rehired, then "constructively terminated," a term for being fired based on contractual interpretations, in this case apparently her own.

Elwell's boss, Google sales chief Tim Armstrong, allegedly called her an "HR nightmare." To be fair, I understand what he means by that, if indeed he did say it. I've had a few of those in my own experience as a boss, and it is really no fun to deal with someone who has convinced themselves that your company has screwed them over, when in fact they may be self destructing all on their own. The facts in this case are not known, all we have are Elwell's allegations - Google of course is not commenting, past the standard "this suit is without merit and we will defend it vigorously" line.

But a company needs to have its sh*t together to deal with these outlier cases, and apparently, Google did not. And what makes this worse is the loss Elwell suffered during the whole affair.

Gary Price has the full complaint at the end of his post here.

This time Fast Company on Google. A fine walk down We'VeHeardThisBefore Lane, but with a few zingers.

The piece turns on the "Can Google Stay Ahead" meme:

Ten years from now, could Google be a vanquished champ while a newer contender takes over its campus? Silicon Valley is a notoriously brutal place. It's incredibly hard to maintain a lead in technology. As Brin plays in the sand at the "Googleplex," could there be the next Brin waiting five miles away at the Stanford campus -- another obscure but brilliant computer-science graduate student who'll swiftly reinvent the digital realm? Will slower-moving giants like Microsoft get the time to catch up?

The author, Alan Deutschman, goes on to answer this question, or rather, let Brin and others answer it. (Caveat, I used to work with Alan - he wrote for Wired).

"We're in a target-rich environment of interesting problems," says Alan Eustace, one of Google's handful of vice presidents of engineering and its head of research.

Golly, no kidding. And to his credit, Alan calls Google on it.

Of course, Google is far from the first Silicon Valley powerhouse to cultivate a reputation as a place for the most brilliant engineers. Like its predecessors -- Microsoft, Oracle, Apple -- Google can be elitist and a bit haughty. Nelson Minar, a midlevel Google engineer, starts off well by saying, "At Google, a lot of people are motivated by the beauty of what they do. A key thing in the engineering culture is a lot of pride in the technical challenge. Larry and Sergey have set the tone that we're in this for the long run." But then he realizes too late that he's sliding into arrogance when he says, "At Google, my assumption when I meet new engineers is they are as good as I am or better. When I worked at other places, the first question was, Is this person worth my time?"

Oops.

(Thanks for the pointer, Kurt.)

It's true that for search/platform companies like Google and Yahoo, answering the "What business are you in" question has never been harder. Potential partners ask: Are they media businesses? Software businesses? Services businesses? All three? (Answer: Yes). And as a media business, are they simply a distributor, a content licensor, or a content creator? (again, the answer is: All three). It's also true that when the mainstream press attacks this question, they are supremely conflicted in their analysis - after all, Yahoo and Google are both the enemy (stealing advertisers) and the ally (pushing traffic their way). The recent cover story in Fortune in a case in point. It gives a good overview, but...something is missing. I dunno. In the end, the story seems to turn on how Yahoo is going to give the media business competitive fits. My view of that is...and? This is a new idea? I'm far more interested in what Yahoo is actually going to do. We know that Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN and the rest represent a new kind of fused media play. But what might they do next? That part of the equation is still unanswered....

Last night multiple Searchblog readers alerted me that Google is now supporting personalized content on its personalized home page services. Google already supports RSS in GMail, but this "Add Content"-"Creat a Section" part of the service is new. In essence, it's an RSS reader. Bloglines, My Yahoo, you got served.

Google's Blog entry here.

A PVR (aka Tivo like device) which records *everything* and lets you choose what you want to watch. UK only, and only 5 channels, but Kryder's law can fix that soon enough. File in the "What to do with all that cheap storage" department. Via BB.

Funny item from Boing Boing: seems that inadvertently, MSFT has turned back the clock on Apple's campus, perhaps to the good old days when Windows ruled the world....

Jeff McManus of Yahoo emailed me to tell me of the deal. Konfabulator makes cool widgets for the Mac OS. I've asked him to expand on the deal for me, will update as it comes in.

Now, I don't want to go off on too much of a Web OS riff here, but this sure smells a lot like the late 80s, when small, interesting utility companies were being bought (or destroyed) by MSFT. These days, folks are building companies to sell them to Yahoo, Google, and MSFT. It's good to have three options ... more like five, really, with AOL and IAC. Picasa, Keyhole, Konfabulator, Bloglines....

Update: First off, I was reminded by a cast of thousands that Konfabulator works with Windows too. Sorry. And Jeff has this to say in response to my question:

So the plan is to make Konfabulator free (which we did on Monday), to expand the audience for widgets from thousands to millions. Next step is to do more to support and expand the already-tremendous developer community that this product has attracted, and greatly extend the number of widgets powered by Yahoo! (and the APIs that make them possible). This will make Yahoo! better for users because it will let us go beyond the browser, creating an always-on user experience that lets you get to your Yahoo! data in a way that makes sense to you.

Thanks, Jeff!

Start a video network, of course. From MediaPost coverage:

The Associated Press late last week announced plans to launch an ad-supported online video network for U.S. newspaper, TV, and radio Web sites. Expected by the fourth quarter, the network will be available through AP member Web sites to help AP and its members keep up with streaming video's growing demand.

Reuters is also working on this, but with a direct model.

Watch this space. It's (finally) heating up.

If you are, the folks at Jupiter are doing a survey, your input will help the market get smarter...

Of SEW, on publishing Google Power. Sounds like the kind of book all of us need to have!

Google not only announced record earnings (OK, the real story would have been if they did not announce record earnings), it bought a Brazilian company as an R&D lab, and ... it launched in China.

Now Google and China has been something of a fascination of mine, but I sense this is sort of a non issue now. And in any case, given that Google stole a key guy from MSFT, and then MSFT sued Google, and now Google is suing MSFT back, well, that's certainly taking the headlines away from the whole "Is it evil or not to be in China" question.

Beyond Google's moves, we had Yahoo's earnings, which were inline, leading some to speculate that Yahoo's results were disappointing (its stock did dive after). In a research report I just received (not online yet) Safa Rashtchy notes that the real story in Yahoo lately is how the company is monetizing across many revenue lines. "Over-reaction to Yahoo’s recent inline Q2 results provides an attractive buying opportunity," he wrote. "Yahoo has shown consistent page view monetization growth over the last 10 quarters, increasing from $0.15 of revenue per average daily page in 1Q03 to $0.28 in 2Q05."

Yahoo also launched a new rev of its index, more on that here.

Meanwhile, today MSFT launched MSN Virtual Earth, its answer to Google Earth. I love that we have massive companies competing to give us Superman views of the tops of buildings.

There's much more, but I have to run for the morning. More soon. It's good to be back.

When I was in college I spent a few summers pretending to know what I was doing as a counselor at UC Berkeley's summer family camp. Now I take my own family each year. In 2003, as I recall, Yahoo bought Overture while I was at camp. Last year, my computer died upon my return. I hope this year all camp brings is news of Google's earnings, which are slated to be announced while I am away. Here's a link to what I am sure will be a spate of stories on the blessed event.

I'll resume posting next Sunday. Happy summer!

Slashdot has the news.

On Nasdaq. Coverage in SiliconBeat.

Earlier this year I had the distinct honor of giving the commencement address at Berkeley for SIMs (the School of Information Management and Systems). SIMs graduates tend to be interdisciplinarians, and often end up at places like Google, Yahoo, or other Valley companies. While I was there, Marc Davis, a professor there who I had spoken to a few times during my tenure at Berkeley, sidled up to me and told me some news I have had to keep under my hat till now: he's teaming up with Yahoo to lead a joint research effort. I'm very pleased that a SIMs prof is heading up this endeavor, as it means Yahoo's research will be pushed across many fields, not just engineering. I'm looking forward to seeing what he might do.

The Journal does the obligatory "Googlers are getting rich and screwing up the housing market" story.

A new human edited directory: Zenome. (Er, haven't we tried this one before?)

The Economist rips Google for its investor relations approach.

From the flash-from-the-past department (via PCWorld and SEW):

That banner ad you see today on a Yahoo Web page may have been triggered by a search you did on the company's search engine two days ago.

That is because Yahoo tracks users' queries on its search engine and, based on that information, tailors the graphical ads it beams at them later throughout its network of sites, a Yahoo official said Thursday.
....
Yahoo Impulse tracks queries through users' Yahoo cookies and serves up the subsequent graphical ads for 48 hours afterward, a company spokeswoman said. Yahoo Impulse has existed for about four years, but ads previously were triggered for only a 1-hour period after the user's search session, she said.

This particular incarnation of Yahoo Impulse, with the much longer 48-hour ad tailoring period, was launched about three months ago, she said. Advertisers sign up for the program, but it's not an opt-in program for users, she said.

This means that users aren't asked for their permission to have ads tailored to them based on their search queries. However, the spokeswoman pointed out that this type of ad-customization activity is noted in Yahoo's privacy policy.

A bit inside baseball, but Google has made some important changes to the process by which AdWords terms are approved for use in its paid search network. In short, the company has simplified the system, and from what I can glean, it seems the move will both make advertisers happy, and improve the chances of harvesting value from long tail terms. SEW has a write up here.

Ad Age reports (reg required).

My decision to write the book came largely from seeing the first ever Google Zeitgiest back in early 2002. Now a reader has brought that service into Web 2.0 with the GZeitgeist RSS Feed.

It's done via screen scrape, so I'm not sure it'll be there for long...

A meta search engine based on the insights gleaned from adware is coming from Claria. Before I leap to judgment, I'm going to be talking with the Claria folks in the next week or so.

From the article:

Assuming Schmidt uses his company's services, someone with access to Google's databases could find out what he writes in his e-mails and to whom he sends them, where he shops online, what's stored on his PC, or even what restaurants he's located via online maps. Like so many other Google users, his virtual life has been meticulously recorded.

The fear, of course, is that hackers, zealous government investigators, or even a Google insider who falls short of the company's ethics standards could abuse that information. Google, some worry, is amassing a tempting record of personal information, and the onus is on the Mountain View, Calif., company to keep that information under wraps.

Danny nails the issues here, for more on this.

My. God. Jet. Blue. S*cks.
Light posting today, I'm, er, in the airport.

Update: I should elaborate. I usually like flying Jet Blue, but when I got to JFK yesterday, my flight was literally not on the board. It had...disappeared. Odd. I tried using the computerized cheeck in, and got a slip of paper that said something like "Oops! We can't complete your transaction, go see any agent." Well, the place was a zoo, and no agent I saw had any clue why my flight was no longer in the realm of the living. I called my office and was told the flight was still shown on the JetBlue website. I kept asking around, and after being directed to the wrong place three times, was finally put in a line for lost souls (at least they had one). That line was 30 minutes long, and in it I learned - from my fellow travelers - that not only was my flight cancelled, but so were about eight others. Why? Weather. I looked outside. It had been raining in the morning, but it was clear as could be at 3.30 pm, when the cancellation news rippled through the line . What gives? (Oh, and why didn't they tell us?I mean, they have my cel phone, my email, and my office number.)

Anyway, I won't bore you with the details of the surly and unhelpful person at the head of the line, or JetBlue's inability to recognize that if they put me on one flight that was already two hours delayed, I'd miss my connection, etc. etc.etc. I left the terminal and bought a ticket on Delta. JetBlue may be great when it's working, but when a bug gets into the system, it breaks big, and it breaks hard.

I asked the Delta agent why it was that JetBlue cancelled 8 flights due to weather that had happened 8 hours beforehand, and Delta was barely affected. He told me it had to do with FAA pecking order. Huh. Interesting.

I wrote a piece for AdAge (reg required) which ran this week. It's here, and I'm told that soon I can link to it outside of registration. I'd love your feedback.

ARE YOU BECOMING IRRELEVANT TO YOUR CUSTOMERS?
Why Marketers, Agencies and Media Execs Need to Understand Disintermediation
July 12, 2005

By John Battelle

Disintermediation is overrated.

Those who fear disintermediation should in fact be afraid of irrelevance -- disintermediation is just another way of saying that you’ve become irrelevant to your customers. It doesn’t mean there isn’t a customer, or middlemen of some sort who service that customer, or that the core proposition of your business has disappeared. It just means you’re in a bit of a rut, and as much as you might pine for the past, it’s probably time to rethink things before it’s too late.

Put another way, disintermediation happens for a reason. Rather than staring at its result (and shaking our fists at Google and TiVo), let’s start at the beginning. What’s really going on here?

(continued here)

SEW has a good summary of how Americans search, from a Harris Interactive study.

What are people searching for? Most people (88%)said they were researching specific topics—specifically, information about hobbies. And women (61%) were more likely to search for health and medical information than men (35%). Surprisingly few people researching specific topics are looking for job or career information (28%).

Other common things people use search for include:

* Getting directions/maps - 75%
* Looking for news - 64%
* Shopping - 51%
* Looking for entertainment web sites - 47%

Mediapost notes that M&A is up in the interactive media space....

According to a Jordan, Edmiston tracking study of 11 media and information sectors, during the first half of 2005, 266 M&A transactions were completed. That represents a 15.2 percent jump from the same time period in 2004, totaling nearly $27 billion in value.

Posting will be light today, heading NY way....

It's Friday, so I can tell you this random search story. In the post below about Paul, I made an offhand remark about social networks being useful for one thing, getting laid. I then noticed that Paul was, in fact, wearing a lei in his Yahoo 360 picture. I decided to note the joke in an updated post. But I was not sure how to spell "lei" and furthermore, how to turn it into a verb (I settled on "lei'd"). In any case, to check the spelling of "lei" I plugged it into my Firefox Google toolbar. It confirmed the spelling, but also did a currency conversion for me, which is a new feature at Google. Turns out, the lei is unit of Romanian currency (though yahoo says it's a "leu").

But only Google would do a conversion that looks like this:

Happy Friday.

Now you can add your gripe. (Thanks, Andre)

From the site:

Most of the time, you punch what you want to know into Google, and you instantly get what you're looking for. But have you ever had that experience, where you try query after query and no matter how hard you try, you just can't find what you're looking for? That's what this site is for -- because the things Google can't find is more interesting than the stuff Google can find. Click New Entry to add your own entry to our collection of Can't Find On Google.

This came in my mail and I thought I'd share it with you, as there's a lot of data in here, and I'd not seen anything from SGCowen - an investment bank - before. You can download it here. Shows increase month to month in keyword prices, and projects that paid search will be half of all online ads by 2009, among many other things.

So says Steve.

Paul Levine, who runs Yahoo Local, made the trek up to Marin earlier this week and we had a chance to chat about any number of things. I've been a fan of Yahoo Local for some time, it was the first from the big three, and remains the best, as far as I can tell. Google is on it, of course, and has very cool features, but with 360 and MyWeb, Yahoo has social network integration, and I think this is an important distinction. After talking to Paul for a while, I became convinced that A/Google may well dust off Orkut and actually make it useful for search, B/Google may finally figure out why it bought Blogger, and C/Yahoo can succeed if it really does open up its 360 platform to accept data from all comers. In fact, if 360 has hooks that let developers feed data in, and pull data out, it may well become the first social networking platform with a killer app beyond getting laid (I see Paul, above, did get lei'd...) - and that app will be search.

As I've said before, I have no interest in building yet another social network. However, if doing so will offer me a significant benefit - like really personalized search, and/or search based on my friends preferences, posts, and input - well, maybe I'd be motivated. I still don't want to invite them all in, though, and go through that whole Orkut baseball trading card craze. So if someone hacks up a neat integration tool for Linked In, Apple's address book, AIM, etc., why, I'd be in for it. And if Yahoo opens up 360 APIs to allow that, why, I imagine someone will do just that.

Secondly, I found myself becoming curious about the odd competitive issues surrounding all this social network and local data that is accumulating around Yahoo Local and 360. Clearly it's to Yahoo's benefit to rank well in Google for all that content. Paul showed me a review he did of a Valley auto dealership called Boardwalk Auto Center (hey Paul, is your review linkable? It should be! All I could find to link to was the dealership page on Yahoo Local, where your review is included). Anyway, as I looked at his review, I thought to myself: "Huh. I wonder if that review will be spidered by Google, and come up in Google's index as relevant content when someone does a Google Local search for, say, "Boardwalk Auto Center" or "Nissan dealer Redwood City". Seems to me if Google was truly trying to find the best local content, Paul's review on Yahoo Local would be very pertinent.

What you do find, after a couple of clicks, is some CitySearch reviews. Huh.

Levine told me that in fact, a lot of Yahoo Local content has matriculated into the Google index, and that he's sure that will continue. Search, especially Google search, is a critical distribution channel for his products. As Google, MSN, and Yahoo fire up their competitive engines, I wonder how long each will be willing to spider the others proprietary content. Worth keeping an eye on.

We knew it was going to happen. Steve points it out here.

One of the things I like about Google is its penchant for stuff that's, well, a bit out there. Like IP over power lines. It actually works, though. And it's a bit more realistic than, say, carbon nanotubes to the moon.

From an Reuters report:

Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Hearst Corp. are investing about $100 million in Current Communications Group, a start-up that offers high-speed Internet connections over electricity lines, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

Current Communications, of Germantown, Maryland, uses a technology that sends Internet signals over regular power lines, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the situation.

Current's site is here.

If you ever had the sneaking suspicion that your online navigational habits have gotten into a rut, this site will confirm it. dontclick.it.

(Thanks Dave)

Mark gives contextual a review, noting pros and cons for publishers.

Yahoo seems to be taking a cue from Indeed and Simply Hired. Ouch. (Thanks, Richard)

So says Om.

Google and Yahoo both introduced mapping APIs last week, which is a good thing. Not surprisingly, this Yahoo fellow (Jeff McManus) likes his API better that Google's. That raised the ire of Google's Kevin Fox. Ah, competition. It's good for ya....and good for developers and, in the end, all the web.

Fascinating stuff, if you're fascinated by how much the VCs made...

Steve Jurvetson has posted a shot of a whimsical "Google Master Plan"whiteboard he saw at the Googleplex. You need a flickr account to see the best bits, but it's worth checking out in any case. (Via GMSV)

Tweney points us to "Guess the Google" - a good way to screw around during conference calls.

The site throws up 20 seemingly random images and you try to guess the keyword that generated them.

Seth posted it a while ago, and I finally have read it. It's worth your time. From it:

Our actions, expressed as Attention, establish networks that connect us, our family, our friends, our colleagues and our affinities. 

The net currently has a schizophrenic but unique way of remembering bits and pieces of these attention streams:  Not all data is captured; the consumer has no central attention management tool; and most companies don’t want you moving your history between their networks anyway. 

Despite these points of friction, more and more applications are being built upon our attention streams.

Innovations in internet media are like handfuls of white flour dropped over the invisible outlines of consumer intention.  At times, user behavior drives media construction directly, but at other times the original user behavior evolves beyond the ability of the media to engage it.  These hollow shells of former behavior are being swept up constantly by domain, banner, click-thru and lead brokers who recycle the detritus into more usable (aka monetizable) impressions.

And that's before he gets into the role of worms, real worms, in understanding new media and search, and then turns one of my favorite stories, The Phantom Tollbooth, into a lesson:

This weekend maybe I will sit down with [my son] outside, on the grass, dig into the soil with my hand and pick up a worm.“Do you remember that scene from Phantom Tollbooth, where they are selling words?  Well, when the words go stale and nobody wants them, do you know what happens to them?”  I am not sure how he will respond.  But I will take the worm, put it in his hand, and say  "The worms eat the words.”  And he will probably look at me like I am joking and being the smartie that he is, will ask “And what do the worms do with them?”  And I’ll tell him frankly “Why, the worms feed the words to Google.”  And he will laugh, and I will laugh. 

But I wont be kidding.

Google eyes Baidu....I got a call on this, and honestly have no idea if this is true. But you've been reading my opining on China and Google for some time now.

Google Toolbar for Firefox coming. Cnet has the scoop.

SEW finds an interesting study which tracks usage of Google.

And more Google/Clickfraud news: Last May Google "quietly" won a judgment against former AdSense partner Auction Sense. As you all know, Google and others are being sued for click fraud, SearchBlog reader Eric Goldman has an analysis here.

Well that was something to come home to...a story about how this site helped me write the book. I spoke to the reporter weeks ago, and had pretty much forgotten about it. It must have been a slow news day - ah yes, the Fourth of July!

...hope you all have a great weekend. I'm in the Eastern Sierra....hoping no one announces anything....