John Battelle's Searchblog

I have not read yet, but thought the pointer was worthy...

So remember that prediction I made back in 2004, the one about mobile busting out in some kind of Web 2.0 way in 2005? And how it didn't happen, so I repeated it again this year? Well, I was wrong. It did happen this year, I just hadn't figured it out yet. And of course, it might get squashed before it gets off the ground (more on that later), but I certainly hope not. Here's the prediction:

Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious - will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search. The outlines of such an innovation: it'll be a way for mobile users to gather the unstructured data they leverage every day while talking on the phone and make it useful to their personal web (including email and RSS, in particular). And it will be a business that looks and feels like a Web 2.0 business - leveraging iterative web development practices, open APIs, and innovation in assembly - that makes the leap.

I think MakeBot is it. Or at least, what MakeBot points us toward is it. And the beauty is that a couple of code jockeys like Phil Torrone and his partner Sergio Zlobin can make it happen in a few days, using platforms (IM) and data structures (RSS) that already exist.

This all comes not from a major mobile company, or a hot new Internet startup, but from Make magazine, where Phil - who has been banging this drum for a long, long time - works. MakeBot points the way toward a possible end around the walled gardens of mobile carriers. (Caveat - I'm band manager of BB, and was Publisher at Large for Make, but honestly, I had nothing to do with the MakeBot, and pretty much missed it when it came out last month. It was just this week that I realized what this thing can do, thanks mostly to Boing Boing, which is partnering with Phil to do a BB feed via IM.)

What really blows my mind is how simple and obvious MakeBot is. In short, MakeBot is an IM chat bot - it looks like any other IM buddy. You can open a chat with it, and ask it things (based on any number of simple commands that the publisher sets up), or perhaps send it a magazine content search (powered by Google). You can also set up alerts for new items on the Make blog, for example (that's what the shot at left is showing). To showcase what it can do, Phil has even set up a BoingBoing feed through the MakeBot, so you can get Boing Boing posts in an IM window.

So why am I so on about this? Well, first of all, a mashup of RSS and IM is just a very cool idea. The medium of IM has been underappreciated by nearly everyone in the "media" business for one reason - the leaders of the business didn't use IM. But lord knows the rest of the world sure does. It's an extremely intimate medium, and efforts to push brands and marketing into it have mostly failed because they don't get why IM works - it's a conversation, of course. Most mainstream media attempts to turn IM into a commercial medium have been driven by a goal of forcing marketing content down someone's throat (a Tyson chicken recipe bot?!! I mean....who wants that?!).

But there are other types of branded content that makes total sense in IM: publications and personal web services. A great publication has an intimate relationship with its audience, it's a trusted source of information, a pal, a buddy. And blogs, as I've argued again and again, can be great publications. And great web services like local search have earned our trust, know who we are, and we know that when we ask them questions, useful answers will come back. No one wants a stupid chat bot that tries to be, say, Santa Claus, that gets old fast. But a chat bot that is useful? That can instantly deliver your favorite content to your mobile phone without forcing it through the crappy sphincter of your mobile operators crippled web interface? Or can answer questions like, say, "pharmacy 91106" with the speed and intimacy of an IM chat session?

Think about for a minute. The implications are vast.

In short, this points the way to what might just be the loophole we content creators (including search and web service companies) have been looking for to make mobile a truly open platform. IM works on nearly every phone, and there's no reason it has to be limited to person-to-person chat. Why can't it be how we ask the web questions, or pull down great web content? And once you open that channel, it can also become a channel for personalized, value added marketing messages, approved and requested by each of us, of course. I can only imagine that Google would love Adsense to be included in the search results for MakeBot's search function, for example. And I can't wait to work with FM's advertisers to figure out the best way to offer value added marketing to FM's author's IM feeds. The beauty of it is simply this - we can't do it wrong. The readers will simply delete the bot if we do!

Of course there are many issues and hurdles with this idea. It depends (at least initially) on the ability to open a robust web browser when links are returned in IM, for one (though there is no reason you can't send the entire text of a post out, just like in RSS). And folks are not used to the idea of having "buddies" that are services, as opposed to real people (though the idea is certainly not new). And most importantly, one can imagine the major companies - large mobile carriers, perhaps AOL and Yahoo and others - deciding that this particular loophole needs to be closed. I certainly hope not. I think that with a bit of time and a lot of open coding and sharing of resources, we might just have a chance to build something truly new and important in the mobile space.

OK, now I really am going to take the rest of the weekend off....

I can't help myself. I missed a few.

- Yahoo will focus on closing the monetization gap with Google, focusing on new approaches to ad ranking and algorithmic meddling. As much as it might wish to pursue the transparency route so as to differentiate from Google, it will not.

- Enterprise search will show us a few new approaches to consumer search, and vice versa. In fact, we may get to the point where the two are often indistinguishable.

- Hardware (as in the bare metal under the web) will matter again, big time.

OK, back to the Holidays.....

Watch mobile this year, I swear, some interesting things are happening. I saw something this week that blew my mind, but can't write about it for a little while. In any case, after grokking Medio, a mobile search client that federates many databases in one interface, SEW asks:

Will client software (remember, Google just launched a client for Google Maps) for mobile searching be a big story of the new year?

From Bloomberg:

The move to online advertising is happening faster than analysts anticipated as companies devote more of their budgets to the Internet than traditional media.

The market for online ads will increase 32 percent to $16.6 billion next year, fueling growth at companies including Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc., Credit Suisse First Boston analyst Heath Terry said in a research report. He had previously forecast 21 percent growth.

(cross posted from FM)

TechCrunch groks Magnatune. I like its model, reminds me of something....

Light week, I know, folks all over the blogosphere are looking for easy material that doesn't distract them from holiday pursuits. Hence, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing has posted an interview with me, and Performancing grills me on what Federated is all about. Just in case you're looking for a reason to drink this holiday...

By the way, Gary pointed me to details of a study on podcasting. Seems not many folks are listening. Do you all listen to podcasts? I'm wondering....

Worthy read.

I had a good conversation with Marissa Mayer this morning, who had the unfortunate task of clarifying the terms of Google’s recent deal with AOL. I say unfortunate for two reasons: one, I did sort of call her out after her post went up, and two, she’s on vacation right now, and who wants to deal with cranky reporters while on vacation?

In any case, she was good enough to speak with me, and what she had to say was worth repeating, so I've transcribed a slightly edited version of our conversation below (it was raining, I was in my car...).

The highlights: Mayer reiterated that Google is not going to fiddle with its organic results in any way, and that banner or animated ads will not appear on Google.com or on search results pages. However, she did say that such ads may well appear on other Google sites, noting that the deal terms specifically mention Google Video and Google Image search as obvious candidates.

We then got into the OneBox, which has always been something of a mystery to most. I'll let the conversation stand on its own on this point, but I had done some recent reporting which indicated that deals are indeed done inside the OneBox, which was not a surprise to me, per se, but it was news. I asked Marissa about this and the AOL deal, and she clarified how OneBox inclusion works below.

This may well be the heart of the deal, beyond the amount of revenue guaranteed (yes I asked, and no I did not get the answer). As Mayer pointed out, while the deal terms have been agreed to and announced, the final contract has not been written. I am sure when it is, the devil will quite literally be in the details. I've been in on these kind of deals. When the lawyers swoop in, things can go, well, astray. But I sensed from my talk with Marissa that in the end, this deal is between two parties who in fact believe they belong together. We'll all be watching, of course, as those devilish details begin to emerge over the coming months.

---------

Thanks for taking time away from your vacation. First of all, just to get it for the record, you clarified in the blog post that there is not shift to the organic results due to this deal.

Definitely.

Also you made a clarification about banner ads, but it was not clear to me if that applied to just Google.com or other Google properties.

So, with banner ads we are comfortable saying that they will not appear on the home page and that they will not appear on the result pages.

They might appear on Gmail or Google News, or somewhere else but not …

Gmail and Google News weren’t thrown out (as examples). What we actually agreed to and committed to in the contract is that we would experiment with showing banner ads on properties where we think they are more suitable. And the two properties that are specifically mentioned as an “e.g.” are Google Image search and Google Video. Which kind of makes sense - if you are looking at pictures or videos it makes more sense to have a picture ad or an animated ad

Or even a video ad, perhaps.

Exactly.

OK, let’s dive into the OneBox, it’s kind of a box of mystery. People are always wondering, “How are those links chosen?” Say for example, for the travel OneBox, how are those links to Expedia or Travelocity chosen? I’ve had recent conversations with folks there (at Google) and I’ve learned that sometimes deals are actually done for the OneBox. They are not money deals, I am told, but more traffic for data, for weather, for example. So deals are actually done for the OneBox, is that correct?

Not that I know of. I mean we signed a contract with Weather Underground to provide us…to give us a data feed, but I woudn’t think of it a deal per se…

There wasn’t a stipulation of value exchanged?

It’s almost like us licensing their data…instead of taking cash, what Weather Underground wanted was a link to them.

Of course, there are plenty of folks who want that…

I guess if you look at it that way you could call it a deal…but the agreements are not exclusive and it really is about us providing the best user experience. We wanted an actual feed of the data…and so we need to license it from someone.

That’s understandable…

But I’m not even sure there is a contract in place there…I’d have to check into that.

I’m not looking to nail (the Weather Underground deal) down, it’s all a way of clearing the underbrush to discus AOL’s inclusion in the OneBox. Since the OneBox has been something of a mystery to people, particularly business people who would kill to be included in it.

Right. Well let me tell you how we generally do the OneBox – (the weather deal) is actually novel. We have like 20 OneBoxes and that may be the only one I know of where we specifally license data as opposed to getting it for free or crawling it.

What we normally do on the OneBox, like on our stocks page or travel, where we have links to a few providers, we look at Media Metrix or Pagerank data, and generally they agree and corroborate themselves (as to) who are the top three or five providers. And those are who we generally look to include. We make sure to look at the overall user experience – you know do these people have a good page for us to click through to? So with the travel providers what we were looking for is do you get a results page that shows you flights? ... We looked at who was willing to provide us a page that was suitable and accessible…

So in the AOL contract, did you guarantee AOL OneBox inclusion?

What we committed to is that they will be included when they have a materially equivalent service.

Those guys at AOL didn’t pin you down on that one?

No.

Wow. That’s pretty good. That’s part of my skepticism about the deal – these guys were highly courted, (they were) able to say “you can’t really buy us with money, because Microsoft has lots of it.” So it seemed to me what they could extract from Google that they could not extract from Microsoft was the fact that you had such enormous brand power and such enormous traffic and so therefore it seems to me that they would want to nail you down on points like this. And if you are saying they did not….

What I am saying is that for them, you know, we have 20 OneBoxes and they are constantly changing shape and form - are we showing links, how are we showing links - those types of things. From their perspective they are looking at things like Google Book Search, (where the service links) are along the sides, and there are five places where you can go buy the books. Actually I don’t think AOL has a book buying service, but where there is a list of providers, (they can say) “We want to be on that list.” And we said “Hey this is no brainer for us, because usually when AOL does provide a materially equivalent service, it is one of the top five services…”

So the contract is not specific in that it says of “Of these 20 OneBoxes AOL will be included in these 5 or 6…”

Right. Because I think they wanted a broader provision, an agreement to include them. Because we add a new OneBox two or three times a month. We couldn’t specify all the future one boxes they wanted to be in or anticipate how we might change the OneBoxes we do have. In some ways it’s a stronger and safer future statement from them.

But I’ve dealt with lawyers like AOL’s, Marissa, and they always want to put specific language around (terms) - What does it mean when a OneBox comes out, and what defines a “materially equivalent service,” and all that kind of stuff, it can’t possibly just be…

You have to remember John, where we are in the deal. We’ve agreed to terms, but the actual contract is to be specified in the next 90 days.

So there’s some legal wrangling to be done…

I don’t know what is going to happen, but terms are usually short, and contracts can be hundreds of pages, and we haven’t gone through that process.

Got it.

So I think we know the terms, and the terms are general, and there is a possibility they will become more specific during the process.

Who drove this deal from Google’s side?

Eric will tell you that he was really happy with the way the deal happened, and we had an entire deal team. Eric was certainly out on point, he did a lot of the communication. He was the person who appointed the deal team. Larry and Sergey obviously were in a lot and were very engaged, but if I had to say which of the triumvirate took the lead here I would say it was Eric, and he had a group of people … that worked on this literally 24 hours a day for 2-3 days.

My sources, not that they are perfect or that you won’t clarify me on this, but I was told that MSFT was really ahead of everyone on this deal up until about ten days before you guys announced, and then something changed. Do you have any comment on what changed? Did Eric say “We cannot lose AOL?”

We tried our hardest on this deal all along. It felt Googley to us. So from our perspective it didn’t’ feel like a lot changed ten days before. The only thing I have to speculate on is pretty much what you have to speculate on, which is that some stories came out about AOL’s visit to Microsoft and some of the concerns that came from that. All I can do is read the same newspapers that you do. As far as what might have changed the climate, that’s the best guess that I have. (My note: I’m not sure I’ve read these stories, can someone clue me in? I've mailed Marissa and others for more...Update: Here's a Journal link, thanks Danny) Because we didn’t change our position or the deal terms during those ten days. We tried our hardest for the deal the whole time…We felt that AOL was a great investment. If anything (we) believe that they are undervalued...

In the deal we stuck with them in 2001 or 2002 we made a very big bet, a very big revenue guarantee.

I remember…

It caused a huge amount of controversy at the time because by some of the models that we had run, the deal was going to bankrupt Google. Like Jonathan Rosenberg actually got up on the table and jumped up and down about how much we shouldn’t do this deal because Google was going to go bankrupt. We had models, one said that we were going to go bankrupt, one which said we might break even… and one year into the deal what we saw was that by signing AOL and broadening the reach of our advertising network we attracted so many more advertisers, and RPMs (revenue per thousand pageviews) went up across the network and we outperformed our expectations by a factor of two, maybe even three times. And so here again we see deepening that relationship and broadening the reach of the network it will again have appeal to advertisers…

I agree with you - and I am sure Steve Ballmer agrees with you, because if there is one thing he needs it’s reach and breadth and new advertisers, because he’s so behind with AdCenter. But it seems he lost for understandable reasons.

One last thing, there are mentions in the filing but no specificity on the revenue guarantees. I am quite sure you will not tell me what they are, but I am curious that once they are disclosed whether you think they will be seen as extraordinary, or normal course of business.

I have to be honest, I was very active on the product side, but not on the revenue guarantee side. I don’t know a lot about the revenue terms. I am sure the team was very prudent on this, so to our eyes this will look like normal course of business, but this is a huge deal…so my guess is that to the general public those numbers will look very big.

Well, it is a very big business now. Thanks very much for your time.

Update 2: Danny's interview with Marissa (yup, she did the rounds!) is here.

Gary finds Google has been sued for patent infringement over Google Talk.

Hope your holidays are going well, mine are keeping me away from posting, but here are a few tidbits worth hanging out there before the year closes:

- As we end 2005, recall the leaked document which put the number of Google AdWords customers at near 400,000, for what it's worth.
- Yahoo released Travel APIs last week.
- Google foe Carl Icahn invested in HowStuffWorks.com.
- I continue to enjoy reading Xooglers. This post is fun, and poignant.
- Buzzingo mashes up Google and Yahoo's Buzz index. Clearly, we like pretty, well endowed girls.
- Soonr connects your mobile phone to your desktop. Cool. But I can't even make my f'ing Treo send mail, so it'll be a while before I try this.
- Gravee launched. The idea: Pay the folks who are in the index. I like the philosophy, not sure if it'll fly..... But at least they are learning from all the input!
- SEW rounds up all the year end search lists, and the blogosphere as well.

In the book I warned about abuses under the Patriot Act, but this is far worse. And here I thought maybe I was overreacting. From the Times:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

The article goes on:

...the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

From the book (page 200, and here's all PATRIOT references via Amazon Book Search):

By now, you might be a bit concerned about abuse of power
under the PATRIOT Act, but you’re not a foreign agent bent on
the destruction of the United States, and the law is really only in-
terested in foreign agents, after all. Most of this stuff doesn’t apply
to you, does it? In fact, PATRIOT changes the law so that govern-
ment officials no longer have to prove they are after a foreign agent
when they intercept communications. Now, all they have to prove
is that they feel access to your information might be valuable to
their investigation. That’s a pretty broad stroke. Fortunately, a pro-
vision was added that prohibits surveillance “solely on the basis of
activities protected by the First Amendment.” But how does one tell
the difference between your First Amendment right to do searches
about the tactics of terrorists, for example, and the searches of a
real terrorist?

That’s a hard one.

One might argue that while the PATRIOT Act is scary, in times
ofwar citizens must always be willing to balance civil liberties with
national security. Most of us might be willing to agree to such a
framework in a presearch world, but the implications of such broad
government authority are chilling given the world in which we now
live—a world where our every digital track, once lost in the blowing
dust of a presearch world, can now be tagged, recorded, and held in
the amber of a perpetual index.

On the AOL announcement.

I want to take this at face value. But that's not my inclination. Talking to Google in the next few days, and as usual, I am sure there will be clarity there. But for now, why am I skeptical? Because, well, I've negotiated with AOL. And talked to a lot of folks who have. And Microsoft pushed hard to win this, very hard. I find it difficult to believe Parsons and Miller settled for "help us get smarter about how to be indexed by you, Google. Thanks very much."

Watch the language on the Onebox, and also, the organic crawl. When Google says: "Indexing more of AOL's content. Our goal is to organize all of the world's information. When we say "all the world's information," this includes AOL's. We're going to work with the webmasters at AOL -- just as we work with webmasters all over the world -- to help them understand how the Google crawler works (with regard to robots.txt, how to use redirects, non-html content, etc.) so we don't inadvertently overlook their content."

I think to myself: Er, you've been an AOL partner - in a very major way - for more than five years. And you're NOW just getting around to this? AOL has never talked to Google about redirects? Indexing non HTML content? Robots.txt? I find that, well, hard to believe. Something is not quite adding up.

I know that AOL has had a non standard content management solution (I think it was called Rainman if I recall correctly), and I know that AOL has been a bit bipolar about whether content is on or off the open web. But....this strikes me as kerfluffle. There's something else going on. If there's not, well, OK then. Then AOL is deeply, deeply lame. And, honestly, so is Google, because it seems to me that before you decide to go scan every book in the world, you might drop a dime to your most important partner, and ask if you can help them index their content as well. AOL made its major "open web" announcement in the Fall of 2004. Just a thought, as I drop into Holiday land....

PS - From a UBS report (Ben Schachter) that just came in:

Google AOL: Additional Detail from the 8-K

July 1, 2008 potential liquidity event
Under the terms of the agreement, beginning on July 1, 2008, GOOG will have certain rights to register its 5% stake in AOL for sale in an IPO. Time Warner will retain the right to purchase that 5% stake for an "appraised fair market value" in lieu of an IPO. (See my previous post on this issue here)

5 key operational details not in previous press release
1) The agreement runs for 5 years, 2) There are revenue guarantees, 3) We believe the TAC rates remain at 85% (our est.), the same as under the previous deal, 4) GOOG also gets 15% (our est.) revenue share when AOL sells sponsored search listings directly to its AOL advertisers, 5) a GOOG Talk user will need to register with the AIM service in order to communicate with AIM users.

Details still to be negotiated
While AOL and GOOG have agreed to extend their strategic partnership pursuant to terms announced in their recent joint press release, many operational details remain to be negotiated. The 8-K states that these will be negotiated by 1Q06, and that any remaining issues will go to "binding expedited arbitration".

This is all I got, and email from Google PR:

As you know, a trial date had been set for Jan. 9 in the litigation between
Google, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee and Microsoft regarding a one-year non-compete
period. The parties have settled and have the following statements:

"Microsoft, Dr. Lee and Google have reached an agreement that settles their
pending litigation. The Parties have entered into a private agreement that
resolves all issues to their mutual satisfaction. The terms of the
agreement are confidential and all parties have agreed to make no other
statements to the media regarding it. We are pleased with the terms of the
settlement agreement."
- David Drummond, Google vice president corporate development and general
counsel

"I am pleased with the terms of the settlement agreement."
- Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, president, engineering, product and public affairs, Google
China

Many noticed this morning that my site was oddly...Chinese. Well, it was a glitch as we were moving to a new server, nothing more. Got some index files mixed up, but all is well now. Sorry about that!

I'm taking time off this week, I swear, but much is afoot. Wink launched, for instance. It's people powered search...much to say about it, will do so soon...Om has a write up here. Congrats, Michael and the Wink team!

It's cute, it's holiday-y, but...it's graphics in AdSense just the same. These images expire Dec 26th. But I'm guessing the idea will not....Will folks notice this over plain text? Of course they will! (Opt in, natch.)

"Bloke Finds Self on Google Earth" (The Register)

This post marks my third year of making predictions for the coming year. I'm emboldened by not failing utterly in the past two years (well, for the most part), but I am sure this will only ensure that these prognostications will prove immeasurably off the mark. But what the hell, here we go:

1. Someone, and I do not know who, will make a big pile of Big Media video assets freely available on the web - and not via Google Video. This will be a major studio, or television company, which will realize that once you free content, content will come back to you in mashed up and remixed glory that has - holy smokes! - real business models like advertising and retail attached. The deal will be simple: anyone can download, rip, and mix this video, but if you plan to make money from it - even selling ads next to it - you have to cut a deal with the mother ship. The company that does this will be heralded as either visionary, lunatic, or both.

2. Google will stumble, some might say badly, but it will be significant. How? My money is on its second or third major deal - something on the order of the recent AOL deal. It may well be a loss (perceived or otherwise) in the Google Book Search case. Or it might be the privacy issue. This is not to say the company is going to fail, or the stock, for that matter. Just that it will face a major test in 2006 that it won't pass with flying colors.

3. Speaking of privacy, there will be a major court case involving the database of intentions that gets legislators talking about "protecting the common citizen" (or somesuch) from "the perils of unprotected Internet data mining" (or somesuch).

4. Google and Yahoo will both enter the video (nee television) advertising marketplace.

5. Microsoft will gain five points of search share, at least. But...

6. Vista will launch, and its much anticipated and feared desktop search integration will be viewed as anemic. The whisper as to why? Fear of the DOJ....

7. "Web 2.0" will make the cover of Time Magazine, and thus its moment in the sun will have passed. However, the story that drives "Web 2.0" will only strengthen, and folks will cast about for the next best name for the phenomenon.

8. iTunes will begin to get the speed wobbles as the music industry decides it wants to control its distribution just like in the good old days.

9. The massive telephony industry will begin to crush mammals left and right as its core business model continues a long and painful death dance. "Mammals" are defined as anyone who happens to be in its way as it attempts - scarily but unsuccessfully - to force a two-tiered Internet onto all of us.

10. The pace of Internet startup acquisitions will not be as torrid as most entrepreneurs and VCs had hoped.

11. There will be one major new IPO that briefly gets the press talking about "the Next Google." But it won't live up to the hype.

12. It will be a long year of head scratching and simmering disputes in the "content creation" business as the major platforms shift strategy on RSS, in particular, and blogging, broadly. In other words, we won't get nearly as much accomplished as we hoped. At issue is how content creators export their business model through RSS aggregation platforms. Near the end of the year, though, there will be a breakthrough deal that clarifies business model standards in the RSS space.

13. Mobile. I repeat my mobile prediction from last year, in the hope that it will come true this year: Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious - will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search. The outlines of such an innovation: it'll be a way for mobile users to gather the unstructured data they leverage every day while talking on the phone and make it useful to their personal web (including email and RSS, in particular). And it will be a business that looks and feels like a Web 2.0 business - leveraging iterative web development practices, open APIs, and innovation in assembly - that makes the leap.

14. The China Internet Bubble will begin to deflate.

15. Tivo and NetFlix will merge.

16. I will not write another book, but my publisher will ask me to update the one I did write. I'll point him to this site and leave it at that....

17. My new business (FM) will grow in fits and starts. By the end of the year, it will either be close to claiming success, or a glorious and noble whiff. Either way, it'll be one hell of a ride....

As always, thanks to all of you for your feedback, your gracious insights, your not so gracious calling me out when I need calling out, and most importantly, for your support in what has been the most satisfying and energizing year of my professional life.

Happy Holidays and here's to a Wonderful New Year!

PS - Posting will be light through the New Year...

Matt calls me out. Hilarious!

Google Print, that is. Bizweek in essence wrote it off (or rather, gave folks a reason to write it off), but I'm not so sure it's RIP. It's a learning game, and Google seems intent on continuing....

There's some kind of bug in Bloglines which causes all my prior posts to be marked as "unread" each time I post anew, Bloglines is aware of the problem and working on it. Very sorry about that....

Kozuru's complaints continue....(previously here)

Journal reports (paid link):

Under the deal, Google would buy a 5% stake in AOL for $1 billion. AOL will continue to use Google's search technology and to share the revenue generated by ads appearing alongside search results. But importantly for AOL, it will now have the right to sell those ads directly to advertisers instead of directing advertisers to Google.

AOL will also sell some ads on behalf of Google and Web sites that outsource ad sales to Google. Meanwhile, Google will work to ensure that AOL's content appears among its search results, but says it won't compromise the integrity of its results. AOL will also receive advertising credit valued at about $300 million toward buying ads on Google.

AOL and Google will also make their instant-messaging software compatible. Google users will have to set up AOL Instant Messenger accounts to make the services work together.

The two are working together on video search and hinted that they may in the future collaborate on ways to digitize some of Time Warner's vast trove of movies, television and other content for the Web.

The Journal has a free link to a story on Omid, who gets credit as an "unsung hero."

I await clarification of how exactly this will effect paid results and inclusion of AOL content, but the counterspin from Google has been quite strong that results will not be affected. I buy that entirely as it relates to organic SERPS, but I have yet to confirm the same is true of the auction or the one box. More as I know more.

SEW coverage.

The official release.

From it:

Google.com - Top Gainers of 2005
1. Myspace
2. Ares
3. Baidu
4. wikipedia
5. orkut
6. iTunes
7. Sky News
8. World of Warcraft
9. Green Day
10. Leonardo da Vinci

Google News - Top Searches in 2005
1. Janet Jackson
2. Hurricane Katrina
3. tsunami
4. xbox 360
5. Brad Pitt
6. Michael Jackson
7. American Idol
8. Britney Spears
9. Angelina Jolie
10. Harry Potter

Similar lists from Yahoo, Lycos, AOL.

Yow. Though I have no idea if, honestly, anyone is listening to Icahn, it's still quite a quote. From the SF Chronicle:

In a letter to the board Monday, Icahn told directors they "may be on the verge of making a disastrous decision." Any agreement with Google that precludes a future merger or transaction with another company would be a breach of their duty, he said.

The NYT: Google Earth is troubling governments. This feels like, well, a story without a real peg, yet...

My, my, my.

Each year I make predictions. Each year, I review them and see how I did. Then, I make some more.

Alright then. Here's my 2004 predictions post, written in late December, 2004. As much as I might wince at the one or two clunkers, I'd say I did pretty well on most. Here's running commentary on each - original in itals, my comments in bold:

1. We will have a goat rodeo of sorts in the blogging/micropublishing/RSS world as commercial interests push into what many consider a "pure medium." I've seen this movie before, and it ends OK. But it's important that the debate be full throated, and so far it looks to be shaping up that way. I'm already seeing these forces at work over at Boing Boing, and I am sure they will continue. We'll all work on figuring out ways to stick to our principles and get paid at the same time, however, I expect that things might get more contentious before they get better, and 2005 may be a more fractious year in the blogosphere as we evolve through this process.

We've sure had debates about taking advertising this past year, and we've had important folks who have sworn they'd never read a feed if it had an ad in it (update: Dave contacted me and said he does read feeds with ads in them, but sure doesn't like em..). And we've had a lot of speculation about how much blogs are worth given all those eyeballs paying attention to them. I think I got this mostly right, but the debate is not at full throat quite yet.

2. Along those lines, things will not go as swimmingly as we'd like with regard to "monetization." As the majors get into the space and start throwing around their weight and lucre, some folks will make bad decisions, and others will freeze and make no decisions at all. It will get harder to innovate before it gets easier. We'll all be surprised by the lack of what we consider "progress" in the RSS/Blogging world, and expectations of major publishing revenues will not materialize as quickly as perhaps we think they should. However, we'll in fact be making huge strides in understanding the path forward, it just won't seem like it. By the end of the year, the world will begin to realize that "blogs" are in fact an extraordinarily heterogeneous ecosystem comprised of scores, if not hundreds, of different "types" of sites.

While I have not written about this much, I have to say, this is proving very, very true, in particular the parts about "it will get harder to innovate before it gets easier." Now that I'm deep into development with FM, and have been in conversation with loads of folks at partners, peers, and the Big Guys, I am convinced there is *a lot* of work left to do to create robust platforms for blog publishing. Not the publishing software, mind you, though that can always get better. But the professional tools like statistics, analytics, and monetization platforms. We're really, really early on all those fronts. One such place is RSS, where the majors have all made significant announcements, but it is entirely unclear what the business model will be for the content creators who drive value in the first place.

3. There will be two to five major new sites that emerge from "nowhere" to become major cultural influencers along the lines of the political bloggers of 2004. One of them will be sold to a major publisher/aggregator for what seems like a large sum of money, driving the abovementioned #2 and #1.

Well, hello MySpace, del.icio.us, Bloglines, flickr, and on and on....

4. Meanwhile, the long tail will become the talk of the "old line" media world. To capture some of that value, we'll see a slew of deals and new publishing projects from the established brands that seek to capture the idea of community journalism, affiliate commerce sales, and collaborative content creation.

I think Chris has managed a major media coup - he owns the idea of The Long Tail in mainstream culture, and *before* his book has come out. That's the power of a good blog (and Wired, of course). Meanwhile, the scramble to get into the citizen journalism and/or "user generated content" game has grown into an all out race, and the dire predictions from all sides about how the newspaper and even the cable business are threatened or near death now come daily.

5. Google will do something major with Blogger. I really have no idea what, but it's overdue. Six Apart will grow quickly but face a crisis in its implementation as its core users demand more features that are "unbloglike" like customer databases and robust publishing support tools. This (and other things) may drive Six Apart or one of its competitors into the arms of Yahoo or AOL or even - gasp - Quark or Adobe or Marcomedia.

OK, I am simply, entirely wrong on this one. Unless you count splogs as "something major."

6. Ask will continue to consolidate traffic by buying smaller search sites.

True, but then again, I didn't predict IAC buying Ask, did I?

7. Yahoo and Google will both test systems that combine local merchant inventory information with search, so that merchants can use search as a direct sales channel. By the end of the year, there will be no question that the search companies are in direct competition with the ecommerce companies, but it won't matter - there's room for them all. Paul Ford will continue to get droves of readers to his related, and very prescient, three year old post on how Google takes over the world.

I think I nailed this one. Local merchant info is now uploadable to Google and Yahoo local, as well as Base. And when Base launched, Ford's traffic went way up, I'm told....

8. Microsoft will lose search share before they gain it back later in the year when the integration of MSN search starts to scale with new versions of Office and IE . Net net, however, MSFT will gain total in total search sessions from last year, and its technology will get much, much better.

Recent figures show that my timing was off by a bit, MSFT is losing share right now, but will gain it back soon, I'd wager. And the technology *is* getting much better.

9. Firefox will near 15% of total browser share. Firefox faithful will wonder why it's not much much higher. But MSFT will release a very good upgrade of IE, see #8.

According to the latest figures I have seen, Firefox is right at about 15% market share in the US (10% worldwide). And MSFT planned a major IE update this year, but it's late (no kidding...). IE 7 is due next quarter.

10. A third party platform player with major economies of scale (ie eBay or Amazon) will release a search related innovation that blows everyone's mind, and has everyone buzzing about how it redefines what's possible in search.

Thanks Amazon, for that Alexa move last week, you made me look damn smart, and just in time.

11. The China question will become a critical issue to the search community. Defining the China question will in itself be a major task of 2005. How do search companies go in without being "evil"? Is the tradeoff worth it?

Well, this sure came up big time for Yahoo this year, and Google and Microsoft had a major China problem, but it was about hiring, not ethics. Google opened an office and went into business. So far, no hue, no cry.

12. By the end of the year, there will be no question that search is a media business, and that the major players in search are major players in the content business.

I think I gave myself a softball on this one...it was true then, it's true now...

13. Something major will finally happen at Tivo. We all hope that it's a sale to Apple, but if it is a sale, it will more likely be to Comcast or DirecTv.

Not a sale (yet), but deals with both that helped stabilize the company and give it some lift.

14. All year, Apple will be rumored to launch a video iPod, but it won't - it's still too early. By the end of 2005, we will just be starting to see traction in the video over IP market and its connection to search. Google will introduce Video search at some point in 05, but it will stay in Labs.

Holy sh*t, I was plain wrong on Apple, but right on Google Video - and yes, it's in Labs.

15. Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious - will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search. The outlines of such an innovation: it'll be a way for mobile users to gather the unstructured data they leverage every day while talking on the phone and make it useful to their personal web (including email and RSS, in particular). And it will be a business that looks and feels like a Web 2.0 business - leveraging iterative web development practices, open APIs, and innovation in assembly - that makes the leap. (More on this when I start posting again).

I think I was right in spirit - upon some reflection and with history's calm glance, this past year will go down as the year that mobile became the story on the Web. But I was ahead of the market in the rest of my prediction - this will take more time than I thought. I'm pretty sure the "Web 2.0" business I mention in the prediction exists right now, I just don't know its name, yet. Do you? Then let us know!

16. Perhaps most recklessly...I will finish my book. The reviews will be mixed, as my attempt to satisfy both the exacting audience of Searchbloggers and the more general audience of a major trade hardcover may fall flat. Many will say I tried to do too much, others that I didn't do nearly enough (how's that for airing my deepest fears in public?!). However, I'll be happy with the effort, and the book will do OK, thanks mainly to the support of this community. So, ahead of time, thanks for your support this past year. I learned more from this process than I ever thought possible, and I owe it all to you, who grace my site with your time and input.

Wow. I did finish it. And I'm pleased to say that I was largely wrong about the reviews - they've been really, really gratifying. As have sales, personal emails, my conversations with folks about the book, your kind words on this site....I'm going to have to stop now, I'm making myself all weepy. I want to do it again. Imagine that!

17. Lastly, I will be involved in starting a new business in the field of media and technology. It will start very slowly, and I'll screw up as much as I possibly can in the early stages, before imposing it on the rest of the world. Hopefully, you'll all be there to keep me honest as I try to figure out a few ideas I've been simmering for the past year or so.

I got this one right also, but I rigged that one - I knew I wanted to start FM, and now that I'm deep into it, I have to say it's just as thrilling and terrifying as the book, but more so - this time, I've got many fellow travelers, including, again, all of you. Thank you for a great year, and here's to the next one (and yes, my predictions for 2006 are coming soon....)

PS - Here's this same post (how I did on my 2003 predictions) from 2004

I first wrote about Google's investment in Current back in July. There's new news, thanks to reader Gary. From USA Today:

The utility TXU Corp. said Monday it will offer high-speed Internet service over power lines to several million Texans as part of a $150 million project aimed at improving its ability to monitor the power grid.

The "smart grid" buildout will enable what would be the nation's largest broadband-over-power line Internet rollout.

The 10-year partnership with Current Communications Group Inc., a privately held company in Germantown, Md., is not, however, expected to yield residental Internet service until the second half of 2006.

Consider: AOL and Yahoo made hay when Google went public. Both owned substantial stakes in Google due to earlier traffic deals, and both cashed out major paydays after GOOG's IPO.

Consider also: The success of Ask Jeeves, from the time it tied its revenue fortunes to Google at around $5 a share (July 2002) to the point at which IAC purchased them at nearly six times that. Google did not own a piece of Ask, but given that Ask's fortunes rose as soon as it did a deal with Google, I bet it wished it has asked for some Ask back in 2002...

So now consider this: Google is not going to make the same mistake. Why invest $1 billion in AOL? Well, should AOL go public, Google stands to profit - a lot. The company knows that by guaranteeing its business to AOL for the foreseeable future, it has in essence guaranteed AOL's bottom line, providing a healthy earnings forecast for AOL and Wall St., should Time Warner decide to spin its erstwhile child back out as an independent public company.

Will AOL be taken public? My conversations with AOL execs lead me to believe the answer is yes, as long as the numbers look good. This Google deal takes care of that....and why would Google invest in a subsidiary of Time Warner, unless they were promised some kind of liquidity event?

Consider: The strike price for Googe's investment is $20 billion. Google owns 5% of that, or $1 billion. So let's do the math (again, watch out here, check my figures...). Google is on track to do more than $6 billion in high growth revenues this year, and it has a market cap of $130 billion. AOL will have far more revenue this year (it did $2 billion this past quarter and more than $8.5 billion last year), but due to the subscription/access business, it is not growing nearly as quickly. But a market cap of $20 billion? On revenues of more than $8 billion? That's less than 3x revenues!

If AOL goes public and is seen by by Wall Street and others as the equivalent of a cheap ticket to Google revenue, it may well pop into Yahoo like valuations - to $50 or 60 billion in market cap or more. If that happens, Google's makes a cool $2 billion on its 5% stake - close to what it made when it first went public. And this time, they don't even have to do a road show....

The man credited with inventing the WWW posts his first blog entry.

From the Times coverage:

Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.

If this is true, AOL will once again be the ramp over which a major company jumps the shark.

Update: Or, is this just a trial balloon?

Update 2 - There's still time for the deal to fall apart, but it certainly seems set. Saul updates his story here, and even quotes me. From that:

"This is Google's first test as a chess player in a major corporate battle," said John Battelle...."They are saying, 'We will take some of our pawns and block the move to our queen by Microsoft,' " he said. "Until now, Google has said, 'We don't think about our competitors. We spend all our time building better products for our users.' "

And more details on how the deal unfolds:

Google has been providing Web search and search ads for AOL since 2002. In the new arrangement, Google will offer promotion to AOL in ways it has never done for another company, two executives close to the negotiations said.

If a user searches on Google for a topic for which AOL has content - like information about Madonna - there will be a special section on the bottom right corner of the search results page with links to AOL.com. Technically, AOL will pay for those links, which will be identified as advertising, but Google will give AOL credits to pay for them as part of the deal. They will also carry AOL's logo, the first time Google has agreed to place graphic ads on its search result pages.

....Google will also provide technical assistance so AOL can create Web pages that will appear more prominently in the search results list. But this assistance will not change computer formulas that determine the order in which pages are listed in Google's search results.

Google will also make a special effort to incorporate AOL video programming in its expanding video search section and it will feature links to AOL videos on the video search home page. These links will not be marked as advertising.

An executive involved in the talks said Time Warner asked Microsoft to give AOL similar preferred placement in advertising and in its Web index and that Microsoft refused, calling the request unethical.

Also very very interesting but not that played up:

Under the current arrangement, Google sells all the search ads that appear on AOL's sites. This year, Google's revenue from ads on AOL will be roughly $500 million, estimates Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. Of that, Google will pay AOL about $430 million.

Under the new deal, AOL's sales force will also have the ability to sell search advertising that appears only on AOL's sites, even though those ads will compete for placement with those sold by Google. AOL's sales force will also have the right to sell some display advertising that will be placed on the vast network of Web sites for which Google sells ads.

From here (paid as usual):

Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Google Inc. have entered exclusive negotiations over a deal that would have the search giant pay $1 billion for a 5% stake in AOL, deepening their advertising partnership, according to a person close to the situation.

The talks shut out Microsoft Corp., which has been wooing AOL since January.

As part of the deal, AOL would be able to sell advertising among the search results provided by Google on AOL Web properties. AOL's sales staff would also sell display ads across Google's network of Web publishers.

Fascinating: AOL selling display inventory across Google's network - in other words, AdSense. Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm.........Now does Google have the right to let AOL sell my pages, if I am an AdSense publisher? Hmmmm. I guess I'd be OK with that if AOL reps know who I am, and what ads are endemic, and why my site works, and all that. But....will they? Or is this a land grab of sorts? Is this Google buying its way into having a real sales force?

Interesting.

A Fortune Small Biz reporter, Justin Martin, called today and among other questions asked one that I did not have a ready answer for. But it seemed like a very good question, and it'd be neat to have an answer. In short, he asked, how big is the Google economy? We bounced it back and forth, and what he meant by that phrase is the aggregate amount of direct economic impact Google has on businesses large and small. Not an easy thing to nail down, but often you can create useful proxies if it's Friday and you're trying to avoid real work.

I was thinking that you might take Google's gross revenue number, which is projected to be more than $6 billion this year, and then the estimated number of AdWords customers, which I realize I don't have a reliable number for. The last time I wrangled something out of Google was two years ago, when it was about to cross 200,000. So, assuming decent growth (say 25% a year), we're now at what, nearly 300K (OK, 281K, but for all intents and purposes...).

OK, stay with me. I'm not a quant, which is why I'm doing this in public. I know there are quants out there reading, and there are folks with access to better base case numbers, not to mention better ideas about how to do this.

In any case, if you do the division, you have $6 billion / 300K which equals roughly a $2000 spend per AdWords advertiser, if I've kept all my zeroes in place.

OK, so what were the *results* those business got based on that $2000 annual spend?

*That's* a key stat I wish I knew. The average return on an AdWords investment. Anyone care to speculate?

Sure, OK, I will. Let's assume that for every dollar they put in, they got more than one dollar back in sales. Say it's a 10% bump. So that would mean for the $6 billion they gave Google, $600 million in increased sales was created in their businesses. Or, put another way, every AdWords advertiser drove $200 in marginal revenue from their investment in Google.

If that figure is negative, well, Mountain View, we have a problem. If it was 150%, why, I'd like to know that too. Any of you SEO/SEMs out there with a large client base care to give us a clue?

Of course, the other way to measure the Google economy is to simply look at a stock chart....

Now *this* is good news.

The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans' privacy, dealing a major defeat to President Bush and Republican leaders.

In a crucial vote Friday morning as Congress raced toward adjournment, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to garner the 60 votes necessary to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.

From Dan Miller at MacWorld:

Walter Ritter is the developer behind pearlyrics, a nifty little Dashboard widget. It did one simple but very useful thing: It searched the Internet for the lyrics to the song you were playing in iTunes, displayed those lyrics on the Dashboard, and copied them into the song’s iTunes Lyrics field. It certainly wasn’t the only lyrics widget out there, but it’s the one that several of us here at Macworld liked.

Unfortunately, pearlyrics is no more. Last week, Ritter received a letter from Warner Chappell Music—“one of the world’s largest music publishers,” its Web site proudly proclaims—telling him to cease and desist. Being a modest freeware developer with no legal budget, he did.

As I say, there are plenty of lyrics widgets out there. Ritter has heard of only one other developer who’s received a similar cease-and-desist letter. So big whoop, you say, a couple of minor-league widget-makers must turn their hands to something else. But I think it’s weird: Why is one of the world’s largest music publishers bothering to go after a couple of lowly widget makers?

..Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation... has a theory. This may just be “a dry run for a much broader campaign in New Year.” The target of that campaign? Web sites that publish music lyrics.

... von Lohmann isn’t just being paranoid. The Music Publishers’ Association has said it wants to crack down on lyrics sites.

Dashboard widgets are for Mac OS only, but this is an interesting case in that the search engine is being blamed for infringing. So, if this company can sue on this principle, they best sue Google, Yahoo, and MSN next. Right? Right? G*damn assclowns. (Hey, it's Friday, I'm allowed a rant).

Now this would have been a very interesting deal to be on the inside of. I can only imagine the back and forth and the stakes being raised. If what the Journal is reporting (Paid reg) is true, somehow Google has outbid/outmanuevered Microsoft. This says a lot about what Google views is important. I can say it in one word: Traffic.

From the brief article:

Time Warner Inc. has entered exclusive talks with Google Inc. over a partnership with AOL, apparently shutting out Microsoft Corp. and other suitors, according to people familiar with the situation.

The news comes following weeks of speculation that AOL would choose to drop Google, its current ad partner, in favor of a deal with Microsoft, which had worked aggressively to try to woo the foundering Time Warner unit away from the Internet search giant.

The contest illustrates how far companies are willing to go to secure a chunk of the quickly expanding market for Internet advertising....

Update: Journal report alleges $1 billion for 5%. That's a healthy but not crazy $20 billion valuation for AOL. Reuters story.

From the AP:

Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are setting aside their bitter animosity to back a new Internet research laboratory aimed at helping entrepreneurs introduce more groundbreaking ideas to a mass audience.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. also is joining the $7.5 million project at the University of California, Berkeley. The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems, or RAD, lab was scheduled to open Thursday and will dole out $1.5 million annually over five years, with each company contributing equally.

Staffed initially by six UC Berkeley faculty members and 10 computer science graduates, the lab plans to develop an array of Web-based software services that will be given away to anyone who wants it.

In other news, Yahoo plans to open a NY-based research center, and Google's expanding in Pittsburgh (via SEW, near CMU).

Last week the MIT Enterprise Forum gathered leaders from GYM (Google Yahoo Microsoft) for a panel discussion. The sold out event is now up as a podcast. From the site:

The panel, led by Safa Rashtchy, includes leaders in Search from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, and will be balanced by long-time Search pioneer and researcher, Oren Etzioni of the UW Turing Center.

Panelists
Urs Hoelzle, Google Fellow, VP of Operations
Gary Flake, Microsoft, MSN Technical Fellow
Eckart Walther, Yahoo!, VP of Yahoo! Search Products
Oren Etzioni, UW Professor, Madrona Venture Group

But as per usual, Google's approach is to not have business deals with anyone around the intent of researching, finding, and obtaining music. I honestly think that at some point this will change. SEW has a good write up with comparisons to other engine's approaches.

In the book I spend a few pages comparing how Yahoo does music search vs. Google. The one box shortcut was a big difference, as was the fact that with Yahoo, you can actually buy the music. Google has now addressed the one box, and is also making it easy to buy music, though from partners they seem to have chosen at random (the best or the most popular music sales sites on the web, much as they have with travel and other categories).

Google's blog post.

Matt and Jeremy are having a swell disagreement and we all get to watch.

The topic: Selling links.

Jeremy: I've experimented with AdSense an YPN in various forms. I've tried paid job listings (never worked out, which is a story for another day). I've used Amazon.com's affiliate program. I've even tried AdWords. And each time along the way it's been a useful exercise. Sometimes it works well, other times not. My success rate has been rather mixed so far.

However, my latest test (sponsored links) seems to have stirred the pot a bit. ...

I'm a little (but not completely) surprised by this.

Matt: Just to be clear: it’s Jeremy’s site. Of course he can try any experiment he wants (YPN, AdSense, BlogAds, AdBrite, Chitika, Amazon affiliate program, selling links with nofollow, selling links without nofollow, offering flying lessons to the 10,000th visitor, selling pixels, auctioning lemurs, etc.) to make money. Many such experiments cause no problems for search engines. But if a web site does use a technique that can potentially cause issues, it’s understandable that search engines will pursue algorithmic and manual approaches to keep our quality high.

Matt says selling PageRank is wrong. I agree. But arguably Google is penalizing folks who might *appear* to be selling links, as well as folks who might be selling links for perfectly good reasons. This I think is bad. In short, one could argue that Google is penalizing folks who don't use Google for paid links. The debate rages on....

(Thanks, Joseph...)

Several readers have sent me mail telling me how they've purchased The Search as a Holiday gift for office mates or family and friends. A couple have even sent boxes of them to me so I can personalize them for the office. That makes me a happy happy author.

It struck me that I should perhaps promote the book as a good Holiday gift right here on my site. After all, if anyone might appreciate such a plea, it'd be you guys. So here's my offer. If you want, buy the book and then let me know you did. In the body of the email, write a short inscription you'd like printed on a book plate (a sticker/label) and I'll print it on the label, sign it, and mail it to you (include your mailing address as well). That solves the problem of sending the book back and forth, now I just have to mail a label to you. Then you can stick the label on the inside cover or first blank page of the book. Voila, a personalized holiday gift!

If you think this sounds cool, why then first buy the book on Amazon or wherever, then email me with your address, message, and perhaps a snippet of the purchase confirmation email (so that I can see that you actually bought the book). I promise to do as many as I can before Christmas....

PS - The Search is being published in 13 countries so far, including Brazil, Latvia, Hungary, France, Germany, Spain, China, Korea, Japan, and the UK. Wow!

Update: The Economist has named The Search as one of the best books of the year. w00000t!!!!

Yesterday I got a chance to talk with a room full of eBay folks, and it was a bit different than my time at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, or Microsoft. I've always viewed eBay as a more buttoned up and, well, corporate company, perhaps because Meg Whitman is such a Wall St. icon.

After I ran through some passages of the book and told a few stories, we got to a pretty robust Q&A (one attendee, Alan Lewis, wrote it up here). A lot of questions about Google, not surprisingly, given the Base announcement.

One interesting question was "What should we (eBay) be doing that we're not doing right now?" I thought for a while and it struck me that the answer was "experimenting." Google has a whole culture based on that idea, and Yahoo has been doing a lot of it lately. And Amazon, well, Alexa's news was very keenly watched in the halls of eBay yesterday.

Where the real experimentation is happening on eBay is with its developers, who are building all sorts of interesting companies on top of eBay's web services APIs and platform. But the company itself is not well known for creating interesting new web widgets. With the purchase of Skype, however, and the need to grow beyond its core offerings, I sensed from my conversation there that this may change, and soon.

As seen on Mediapost:

WEB USERS CONDUCTED MORE THAN 5.1 billion search queries in October--marking a 15 percent increase from June, according to a Nielsen//NetRatings report released Tuesday. Google maintained its leadership position, garnering 2.4 billion search requests, or almost half--48 percent--of all searches. Yahoo! accounted for 21.8 percent of all searches, followed by Microsoft's MSN, which was responsible for 11.3 percent of search activity.

A colleague reminded me that Marchex, the public company roll up of online advertising plays, recently purchased Name Development, a company that owns a couple hundred thousand URLs. (SEW thread here). The price was $165 million.

The business model for Name Development is drop dead simple: they own a bunch of URLs, and when internet users type a word into the address bar (expecting it to resolve to something useful) or misspell a legit URL, often times one of Name Development's URLs comes up as the resolved address. Name Development then sticks a sh*tload of AdSense or Overture links on the resulting page, and voila, free money!

This is called the "type in" traffic market, and it apparently is much, much bigger than most folks might think. According to folks I've spoken to, Name Development gets 17-20 mm uniques on its 200,000 domains, and is a profit machine.

Here's an example of what one of their sites looks like.

These sites are often confused as clickfraud pages, and in fact, the do look exactly like robot or Indian click farm fodder. I would not be suprised, in fact, if some percentage of same folks who are playing the "type in traffic" game might also be dabbling, perhaps on the side, in some click fraud as well. I've seen these kind of honeypots (yes, that's what they are) used for what clearly is click fraud, and when I asked Google and Yahoo about them, they said they were legit because they were "type in" traffic sites, and the ads actually served a useful, directory like purpose.

Feels slightly shabby to me. Can this model last? Will folks keep navigating by the address bar? Am I being too, well, patrician in my view of this model? What do you guys think?

Update: B2 has a good article on "domainers."

Today I left the wonderful new offices of Federated Media and ventured south for three meetings - first a talk at eBay, then a catch up with Jeff Weiner, who heads up search and marketplace at Yahoo, then to Google for their annual holiday press bash.

Whew. It was a platform trifecta...and very interesting. More soon.

(Update: Alexa platform is now live)

Every so often an idea comes along that has the potential to change the game. When it does, you find yourself saying - "Sheesh, of course that was going to happen. Why didn't I predict it?" Well, I didn't predict this happening, but here it is, happening anyway.

In short, Alexa, an Amazon-owned search company started by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle (and the spider that fuels the Internet Archive), is going to offer its index up to anyone who wants it. Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index - about 100 terabytes of data. It's best known for its toolbar-based traffic and site stats, which are much debated and, regardless, much used across the web.

OK, step back, and think about that. Anyone can use Alexa's index, to build anything. But wait, there's more. Much more.

Anyone can also use Alexa's servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things - perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example. Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or ...well, whatever creative folks can dream up. And then, anyone can run that new service on Alexa's (er...Amazon's) platform, should they wish.

It's all done via web services. It's all integrated with Amazon's fabled web services platform. And there's no licensing fees. Just "consumption fees" which, at my first glance, seem pretty reasonable. ("Consumption" meaning consuming processor cycles, or storage, or bandwidth).

The fees? One dollar per CPU hour consumed. $1 per gig of storage used. $1 per 50 gigs of data processed. $1 per gig of data uploaded (if you are putting your new service up on their platform).

In other words, Alexa and Amazon are turning the index inside out, and offering it as a web service that anyone can mashup to their hearts content. Entrepreneurs can use Alexa's crawl, Alexa's processors, Alexa's server farm....the whole nine yards.

Does this change the game? Because I was embargoed and could not really talk to anyone about this, I have not had a chance to talk to folks who are smarter than me about this. So my analysis is limited to my imagination. And that itself is limited by the pricing structure - I do not know if using this service will be cheaper for developers and entrepreneurs than rolling their own. But I can only imagine that indeed it is, or Amazon would not be doing this.

So what has been a jealously guarded secret - the contents of the entire index - is now available to anyone who wants it (of course, this assumes Alexa's index is comparable to the big guys - honestly, I have no idea). The costs are modest - a few thousand bucks to process the entire web, Gilliat told me. How might that change the game? You guys are smarter than me - what do you think?

I am quite sure this means that Yahoo and Google will have to stare hard at their own (somewhat limited) search services and APIs, and think what they might do to compete, that much is certain. And if this starts to gain traction, all of a sudden, Amazon is a major search player, right next to Yahoo, Google, MSN, and IAC. A9+Alexa+web services= hmmmm....

Again, what do you think? Will this be like A9, a groundbreaking development that fails to get traction with a wider audience? Or might this just start something?

Wired News (not up yet) and the WSJ (free link) were also briefed on this news.

So says Murdoch's Harper Collins....

From a WSJ (paid reg) article today:

In the latest salvo in the fight over the future of books on the Internet, one of the country's biggest publishers said it intends to produce digital copies of its books and then make them available to search services offered by such companies as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com., while maintaining physical possession of the digital files.

News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers Inc. hopes to head off the prospect of these big Internet companies taking charge of books that it has purchased, edited and published.

I'd like some way to confirm this, but if it's true, as has been claimed by the company, that MySpace has 10% of all available advertising inventory on the Web, then Murdoch got a deal at $600 million or so. The web is surely worth more than ten times that number...and MySpace is a very, very desired demographic by marketers.

Watch GOOG today. It was added to the NASDAQ 100. It's not the S&P 500, but it's a start. Also added were Expedia and Red Hat. When I posted this, GOOG was up four bucks.

Well color me stunned...from the NYT:

As Time Warner nears a decision on a big alliance with Google or Microsoft for its America Online unit, Stephen M. Case, the co-founder of AOL, has spoken out against the plan, aligning himself with the thinking of the financier Carl C. Icahn, who has pushed for a breakup of Time Warner.

Mr. Case, who recently resigned as a Time Warner director, wrote in an essay in The Washington Post on Sunday that "although I played a key role in bringing AOL and Time Warner together six years ago, it's now my view that it would be best to 'undo' the merger by splitting Time Warner into several independent companies and allowing AOL to set off on its own path."

BTW, the Times linked the words "Washington Post" in the snippet above to this (the Times' summary of financial info on the Post company). Bad form, folks. Link to this, of course (the actual Case article).

This is fun stuff. Bruno used to be our man in Europe (at the Standard) and he's taken my scenario and gone much further. Now *this* is the kind of stuff that just might get Hollywood fibrillating. (Fun, folks, fun...)

The list of companies that look interesting but that I simply do not have the time to grok is growing very, very long. Here are some highlights:

Clipmarks. Interesting bookmarking, sharing, bloggy app.Review here.

Looklater. Also a bookmarking site with some neat features.

Relona. A new search engine with some interesting interface hacks.

OhNoRobot. A comics search engine inspired by passion for web comics.

Opinmind. Blog search.

I've not reviewed these, but they look interesting....

Many things went down this past week whilst I traveled. Here's a roundup of what I missed:

Windows Live Local launched (good coverage from Gary and Mike). So did Squidoo, which is either brilliant, or an AdSense honeypot scheme, or both. In any case, I know and have spoken with founder Seth Godin, and he's not one to take lightly. Speaking of launches and potent founders, Grouper has launched version 2, and it's quite well received. Congrats to Josh Felser....

UPDATE: I was too flip in describing Squidoo as a "scheme" and the word "honeypot" does have negative connotations - what I meant to say was, it's built to attract search crawlers and to rank well in search, increasing the value of Adsense and other monetization schemes (there's that word again) such as affiliate networks. That's not a bad thing, of course. I did not mean to give the wrong impression....

Sun unvieled its Niagara servers. (Sun release) Why do you care? Because Sun claims these new, 32-hardware-thread servers are the future of web bare metal. Is the company right? Hard to say - I'm certainly not a hardware geek. But I spoke with Scott McNealy for my Business 2 column, and he confirmed that these new servers are pretty much purpose built for the datacenter demands of massively scaled services like search. Watch this space.

Yahoo announced POTS integration with its VOIP service. From the Merc: With the new service, the estimated 82 million people worldwide who use Yahoo instant messenger will be able to call any traditional fixed or wireless phone number in 180 countries. They will also be able to purchase a phone number with which to receive calls. The service comes with a free voicemail box.

Xeni at BB had an interesting post on her interview with director Steven Soderbergh. What I found compelling was his vision of "video mashups", an idea I really believe will take off next year (yes, my "predictions" post is coming...).

Has Gmail learned to empty the trash? Philipp wonders. Elsewhere, folks are wondering if Google News will soon be "monetized" and if the company will snap up Riya.com.

Clearly hiring is on the minds of the execs at Google. Eric pens an article about his "Ten Golden Rules" for Newsweek.

More Google: The company released a transit planner.

Ingenio and Infospace hook up on pay per call.

The Times reports on the ongoing scrum for the AOL business. Headline: AOL is probably not for sale, now that Gates and Google are willing to pad Time Warner's bottom line to secure AOL's search business. No kidding!

You know, Google buys companies, Yahoo buys companies (a lot lately), but...Microsoft ain't playing, really. Have I missed their acquisitions? I remember back when they ruled the OS roost, they bought a lot of companies, and/or they did due diligence and then built the idea into their OS. What gives? Have they forgotten how to buy teams?

Of course I'm the last to link to it, but here's my interview with Eric Schmidt, up on B 2.0 (and not pay walled).

I had four chances to speak with interesting audiences this past week (yeah, I'm hoarse). Ever wonder what the hell I'm talking about? I do too. Here's some coverage of my talk at iMedia, and here's coverage of my talk at the MPA.

Mike has the scoop. Here's Joshua's take.

Congrats to Fred and to Joshua. Here's Yahoo's post on it.

Update: Sources peg the acquisition price at around $30-35 million....similar to the size of the Flickr deal. If this is the case, it's pretty rich. I don't recall the size of del.icio.us's user base, but I doubt it's 250,000, which was the reported user base of flickr when it was acquired. If it *is* that size, then wow, it's grown much faster than I realized!

Second Update: OK, now I have *more* sources that say yes, the deal is similar to Flickr, but *that* deal was not really at 30-35 million, it was more like $17-19 million.

And - this is simply amazing to me - del.icio.us has 300,000 users. Holy sh*t.

And quotes our dialog here to boot. From the piece:

Opponents long ago painted Wal-Mart, Microsoft and a handful of other behemoths into a rogue's gallery of too-powerful corporations needing government restraint.

Now, a brash upstart with a "don't be evil" mantra may soon join them: online search giant Google.

In just seven years, Google has emerged as one of the most influential companies of the 21st century, a multinational whose recent forays into classified ads, book publishing, video, Wi-Fi and telecom make its data empire ever more powerful. That's pushing it into a growing buzz saw of competitors, such as Microsoft, and lawmakers worried about data privacy and protection.

"Google could easily become the poster child for a national public movement to regulate data collection," says Jeff Chester, head of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocate.....

....Other observers wonder, too. Search engine expert John Battelle's tech blog lit up with comments last week after New YorkMagazine reported a "seismic shift" in public sentiment, "from unalloyed Googlemania to gathering Googlephobia."

From this Infoworld article:

Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) Corp. will share a part of its advertising revenues from its search engine with users, the company's chairman Bill Gates said in a panel discussion on an Indian television channel.

Gates said that search engines like Google (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc. get their revenues from advertising because people use these search engines. "Google's business model is not based on free software," Gates said. "Their business model is based on advertisements from which they make a lot of money."

But they don't share these advertising revenues with the end users who help them get the revenue, Gates said. "Google keeps all of the money with itself," he added.

(Through its AdSense program, Google does share advertising revenue with Web site publishers who carry ads that Google sells to advertisers.)

In its bid to share revenues with users, Microsoft may give free software or even cash to users, said Gates, who did not discuss further details.

(Thanks Richard.)

...yesterday. Blog post here. Service here. More when I can actually grok....

...who spoke at an investor conference yesterday.

From it:

-- On negotiations wtith AOL: "AOL is obviously one of our largest and long-time partners and I'm not going to provide any other comments or color."
-- On Google Print Ads: It's a "category in very nascent stages. ... We've done all sorts of tests her; there's a danger looking at the tests and saying, 'oh, it won't work.'"
-- A warning: "Don’t focus on the limited number of things you can see." In other words, when you see a certain kind of ad, it may be just a test, not a new direction.
-- Hiring process has changed: Google is hiring so many people it's halted the process of having every resume reviewed by CEO Eric Schmidt and his staff; instead it's been divvied up between engineer and non-engineer resumes for groups withinm senior leadership to review. Rosenberg says Larry Page still reviews them all.
Pay per call: "Interesting model. ... Our general experience has been the more we show advertisers specifically the results we're delivering the more they spend. ... I think we will see cost per call increasingly more successful."
Google Book Search: "Print is kind of another example of one of these big category shifts. I like to think it's like Kennedy talking about putting men on the moon ... "

Just finished a book talk at Google New York, where more than 400 folks work (and more are coming in each day). The office is split between Ad Sales and Engineering, for the most part, as was the audience - about 200 or so were there. Again, I was struck by how open and conversational the group was, and eager to hear an outsider's perspective. We spent some time on the privacy scenario, and got into a discussion of my proposed solution - that companies like Google give us access, editing, co-ownership, and notification of how our data is used (I have not written this up yet, but that's the general idea).

We also talked - a lot - about the media industry, as one might expect given this town. Needless to say, the ongoing and seismic shifts in media business models is near and dear to the minds of that crowd.

Afterward I got to sign scores of books, and the Google library got one copy as well. My inscription? "Scan This Book!"

Posting will be light (should say has been and will continue to be light) as I dig myself out of two days of airports and bad or non existent connectivity. Stay tuned...

From the reg required story:

Time Warner Inc. is closing in on an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to build an online-advertising service designed to compete with Google Inc., say people familiar with the negotiations.

After months of on-again-off-again negotiations, the two companies are now focused on a deal that would combine advertising-related assets – with minimal, if any, money changing hands. An agreement is expected to be struck sometime before year-end, but it is still possible that AOL could choose instead to deepen its relationship with Google at Microsoft's expense.

...that eBay processes as many searches a month as Google (around 2 billion, they claim)? Yup, it's true. For more, see this investor presentation, page 18 (pdf download). I met with Greg Isaacs late last week, and that was one of many fascinating things I learned. Greg runs the eBay Developer's Program. I'll have more to say about that at a future point...

UPDATE: A good source notes that Google is doing WAY MORE searches than eBay's reported 2 billion a month. I tend to agree (the last reported number I heard from sources at Google was 250 million a day - and that was two years ago. That'd be - er - around 7.5 billion a month - again, two years ago). But given that Google refuses to disclose real numbers, this all remains in the realm of speculation...

Ahead of its Internet conference, investment banker SG Cowen (caveat, I'm giving a speech there this week in NYC, they are buying books for the event) released a survey of the US online advertising industry. The bank also surveyed US Internet users and found a few interesting tidbits. As with Piper, the report is not online. Irritating, eh? So here it is as a download, and here is Piper's to boot. From SG Cowen's report:

This strikes me as a good idea/model. From the Seattle PI:

RealNetworks is moving today to increase the visibility of its Rhapsody music service, hoping to gain more paying subscribers with a greater presence on blogs and other Web sites.

The company is rolling out a Web-services platform that will allow third-party Web sites to link directly to albums and songs on Rhapsody. A blogger writing about a new song, for example, could post a link to a track that, when clicked on, will begin playing in a pop-up window.

In a report called "The Tipping Point Is Approaching" Piper analyst Safa Rashtchy predicts that online advertising will hit $55 billion by 2010. The report (his "Silk Road" newsletter) is not up yet, but it will be soon.

A significant development, noted by SEW over the weekend.

Just in time for the holiday shopping season and interesting move from MS. You can now search MSN Shopping and find items up for auction or for sale on eBay and still get access to many of the refinements available on the actual eBay site.

Interesting how the landscape is shifting, first Yahoo and MSN hook up on IM, now eBay and MSN on shopping. Hmmmm.

As Jon Miller said at Web 2.0, video is one place AOL plans to lead. Release here.

A tagging workshop is slated for the upcoming WWW conference, Gary notes. I keep wondering if this tagging thing is going to go big. For things like photos and videos, I can see it. But I just can't see my mom tagging much else. Am I wrong? I think implicit tagging - ie using our clickstream and other actions online, will be big...

As I mentioned in my last post, I get asked about privacy a lot. I am not an expert on these issues, but I've stared at them just enough to formulate a few opinions. I am guessing that my readers know more than I do, so instead of assuming I've got it all figured out, I thought I'd just toss out this scenario and see what you all think. I've mentioned it a few times to reporters who've called, and also laid it out at Yahoo, and it seemed to go over OK.

So the set up goes like this: as I've written elsewhere, there is a ton of information about all of us that we willingly (social networks, registration data, search history, etc.) and sometimes unwittingly (clickstream data) leave, forever, on third party servers.

Now, we may trust those third parties not to mess with our data, and not to do evil things, and for the most part, I am quite sure they won't - if they do and they get caught, they'd be crucified, and the competition is just one click away. And it's pretty much out of their control if the government decides it wants access to that data - they have to give it up, and stay quiet about it (more on that here and here.)

But...Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, etc. are not small companies. They are made up of thousands of individuals, a few of whom just might be...well...a bit off balance.

So this scenario involves one of those types of folks.

Imagine that an engineer at a major Internet company decides he has a thing for young blond women. Imagine further that he works at a place that has local search, social networking, blogging, search history, registration, and email all in one place. A company like, oh, Google, or Yahoo, or Amazon, or Microsoft.

Imagine further that this engineer has access to, or can figure out how to get access to, pretty much all the information he wants on all the young blond women that use his company's services near where he lives (by zip, keyword, etc.).

Over a period of time, this engineer compiles an extremely detailed dossier of information about scores of young blond women, including addresses, personal emails, photographs, blog postings, social network connections, search histories, etc. This dossier is rather carelessly collected on his own personal PC at home, where he's protected it in a folder with the password "hot young thing".

Now let's set the story in motion. In this engineer's hometown, a series of unsolved rapes begins, all of which involve young, pretty blond women (why did I choose pretty blondes? Because the national media machine LOVES stories where pretty blondes are in peril, of course). Local officials and politicians, not to mention fearful parents and families, raise a cry to find the "Blonde Stalker", but local police are flummoxed. The local media picks up on the story, but so far, it has only been mentioned in passing in the national news.

Then, one of the victims is found gruesomely murdered. Another follows. The national press pounces, and the pressure to find the killer intensifies. Every day pictures of the pretty victim are splashed across MSNBC and CNN, not to mention Fox, where Bill O'Reilly personally pontificates on how inept local police are, and how he'd personally pay a bounty of $50,000 to whoever finds and turns in the culprit.

Meanwhile, a co-worker of our dossier-creating engineer notices how strangely the engineer has been acting lately, making odd statements about women, missing work, acting, well, just generally creepy. The co-worker mentions this to a manager, who, to cover his ass, tells the police.

The police, hungry for any lead, obtain a search warrant for the engineer's home, and while he is away, they comb through his apartment, finding little evidence linking him to the crimes. But they take his home computer, and through relatively simple computer forensics, manage to unlock the password protected folder, unearthing the trove of information contained within. It is a shocking dossier of scores of young women, and the most unsettling thing about it is how simple it was for the engineer to compile it.

Someone at the police department tips off a local reporter that the engineer is the killer, and that the password he used on his dossier of his victims was "hot young things."

The national and international media absolutely go batshit over "The Hot Young Things Killer" and set up a 24-hour-a-day satellite-truck-infested mediapalooza outside the engineer's employer. Every possible story angle, every speculation, every movement of anyone involved in the case is scrutinized, live, 24/7. It's the Scott Peterson, OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson media scrum of the moment.

And the main hook of the story? How easy it was for the killer to identify, track, and manipulate his victims because of the data he had access to at his workplace. A privacy nightmare! Who KNEW that we we so exposed?! Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. are FLOODED with requests about their privacy policies: What information do you have about me? How can I see it? What do you use if for? Come on, tell me EVERYTHING! Who else has access to it? How can I edit it? Protect it? Delete it? Manage it? The companies are caught off guard, and, at least initially, do not have adequate resources to manage the demands of the tends of thousands of users who are flooding their phone and email lines. In fact, some of them simply CAN'T promise that they can find or even delete the information, leading to even more outcry.

Sensing an opportunity, a cadre of congressmen whip up the USA PROTECT Act (I'll figure out what that stands for later) which, in essence, is about as stupid and ill thought as the PATRIOT Act.) In short, it makes it nearly impossible for the Internet industry to do just about anything with individuals' data unless they expressly agree to it, in writing. The debate is brief, the act passes nearly unanimously. Innovation and new product flow withers, search and search-driven progress stalls. A fearful public begins to use the Internet just a little bit less....worried that until the companies with which they interact can guarantee their personal privacy, the trade off is simply too great.

Now what?

Or rather, what can be done to mitigate such a scenario?

I have a few ideas, but that will be in the next post. This one tired me out, and it's Saturday, after all. (Oh, and by the way, anyone in Hollywood reading this, the screenplay is in the mail....)

If my posting was light yesterday, it was due to my trip south to Yahoo, where I finally got a chance to speak and speak with the folks there, thanks to the kind invitation of the folks in the Technology Development Group (thanks Chad and Jeremy). Jeremy wrote up my talk here. Very kind.

I really like having the chance to interact with so many smart folks who are deeply engaged in the story of search. It's an honor.

During the Q&A I was asked about privacy, and issue which is asked by every single audience I've ever spoken with, and every single press interview I've done in the past three months of the book tour. Yesterday at Yahoo I managed to give my "nightmare scenario" a full public airing, and folks didn't laugh me off the stage, so my next post will sketch it out in full.

Adam Lashinsky, he of Fortune fame (read his latest on craigslist here), pinged me the other day and asked if I had seen the MySpace classifieds. Why no, I had not in fact. Then I took a look.

Goodness me, Mr. Murdoch. You're building out a craigslist clone, aren't you? Clever.

With its desktop search, Google integrates your desktop info into Google's interface, but of course your data isn't really *on the Internet*. Or....is it?

...thanks to Philipp, we can.

This is an interesting and unusual meditation, a slice of Valley life. I'm rather surprised it made it to the light of day.

It's about the author's (John Flowers) attempts to negotiate a sale of his answer/search company, Kozoru. From a portion of it:

Still, there's something about people laying around on beanbag chairs and staring at huge, well-projected screens and talking with one another over Naked juice and Odwalla that one finds a little unsettling. Google is also nestled snugly into the old Silicon Graphics campus, which - if you've ever been there - adds to the otherworldly vibe one gets while tromping between buildings, through open-sand volleyball courts and around the ten-kinds-of-free-meal cafeteria they've created.

Everything we saw and heard and felt seemed like we were getting along great with everyone there. Everything, that is, until three weeks ago when - without warning - they stopped responding to e-mails or returning phone calls. They did, however, take the opportunity to log into our private interface and see what we were doing (after we shared it with them), even after the calls stopped and the radio silence continued.

I'd remove their access, but I like Megan and company and assume... some day... they might actually call back saying something like, "This is really cool."

..

I'm wondering if this kind of behavior (the not calling back part of it) is standard operating procedure for the Gubble, as I've heard more than one person say, "They threw out a tentative offer, about $1MM per engineer, and we didn't fall to their feet and we never heard back from them."....

...Until then, I'd appreciate at least a courtesy call, folks. I mean, seriously.

I was on the PBS NewsHour yesterday. Transcript is here....

This is relatively old news (the trial has been going for a while) but yesterday the computer consultant who was charged with killing his wife (and using Google searches to figure out how) was convicted.

From a Nov 11 TechWeb story: Prosecutors claim a Mac specialist on trial in connection with the killing of his wife did a Google search for the words: "neck snap break" and "hold" before she was killed.

From today's story: Petrick, who's already in prison on fraud charges, pointed out that the searches weren't linked to a user name and therefore couldn't be pinned on him. He said his wife could have looked up some of the material because she had studied martial arts. He said someone who liked to fish or sail could have looked up the lake information. Investigators said they couldn't find other fishing or sailing-related searches.

His defense didn't work....

Remember this riff? He's back, with a riff on the concept of the Universal Library. Honestly, I'm not as enamored of this piece, but at the core, I think Dyson is arguing that Google is, in fact, actively laying down the foundation of the first AI. Exahaaaaaaaaale. (Of course, I argue as much in my book...)

The Library, indeed, contained everything, Borges explained, including "the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue..."

Even in the Age of Search, we still need authors to find the meaningful books!

Yesterday Mozilla announced version 1.5 of its Firefox browser, which by many accounts is now near 15% of market penetration in the US. Google is the built in search engine for Firefox in the US, but Yahoo and Mozilla announced that Yahoo will have that spot for China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. This shows that while many feel Google owns the world of search, Yahoo in fact has more weight to throw around in certain key markets.

Mitchell's post (CEO Mozilla) is here.

From the release:

AOL® Mobile Search Services ... ‘right-siz(es)’ the Internet for small mobile screens. The new services use transcoding and content analysis technologies from InfoGin Ltd. to automatically adapt search results and Web pages for browser-enabled mobile phones.