Wired on Click Fraud

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

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:25 PM
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What Happens When You Mashup RSS, IM, and Publishing Services?

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....

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More Predictions? Sheesh.

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.....

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:57 PM
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Mobile Search

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?

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:05 AM
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Online Ads Accelerate

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)

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Magnatune

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

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:43 AM
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Podcasts and Interviews

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....

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:39 AM
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Anderson on MSFT and Zipf distribution

Worthy read.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:09 PM
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Interview: For AOL/Google, The Devil Is In the Details

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.

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It's YAL (Yet Another Lawsuit)

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

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:50 AM
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Year End Clearance

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:28 AM
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And I Was Overreacting?

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:19 AM
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Google Clarifies

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".

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:04 PM
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MSFT, Google Settle Dr. Lee Suit

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

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:57 PM
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Hacked? Hijacked? Nah, just a Glitch

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!

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:39 PM
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Wink Launches

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!

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:12 AM
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Graphics In AdSense

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.)

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:10 AM
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Hey, Is that Smudge Me?

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

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:36 PM
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Predictions 2006

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...

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:11 PM
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Dotcom Predictor

Matt calls me out. Hilarious!

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:38 PM
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Print, The Comeback

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....

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:50 AM
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Note to Bloglines Readers

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....

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:15 AM
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Ouch...

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

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:24 PM
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AOL and Google Make It Official

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:00 PM
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2005 Zeitgeist Is Up

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:10 PM
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Icahn: Beware Google "Disaster"

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.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:05 PM
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Googling Governments

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

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:55 AM
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NYT: Google Will Put Graphical Ads on Main Site

My, my, my.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:03 AM
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So, One Year Later, How'd I Do?

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

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:13 PM
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