ACLU: Great Movie. Bad Splash

This movie is thought provoking. The Database of Intentions gone wild. Too bad at the end, the page doesn't resolve.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:29 PM
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GOOG Earnings: After Market No Likey

GOOG is not doing well after releasing earnings. AP is calling it an "earnings miss."

Google reported adjusted earnings of $1.54 per share, well below Wall Street's forecast for $1.76 per share, even though it brought in higher revenue than expected.

Google shares were halted for the early part of the aftermarket session, then dropped significantly when trading resumed. Shares were down $68.17, or 15.8 percent, trading at $364.49 on the INET electronic exchange, from their close on the Nasdaq at $432.66.

From Google's release:

"We are very pleased with our results for the fourth quarter as we
achieved excellent performance across our businesses," said Eric
Schmidt, CEO of Google. "We generated significant revenue growth in
our core search and advertising business, driven by continued strength
in traffic and monetization. We will continue to invest significantly
as we develop innovative new products and as we extend our core
technologies to new user access points and to different channels."

Q4 Financial Summary
Google reported revenues of $1.919 billion for the quarter ended
December 31, 2005, an increase of 86% compared to the fourth quarter of
2004 and an increase of 22% compared to the third quarter of 2005.
Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis
without deducting traffic acquisition costs, or TAC. In the fourth
quarter, TAC totaled $629 million, or 33% percent of advertising
revenues.

Huh. I am not a stock picker, but I guess the fellow from Yahoo is feeling pretty smart about now.

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:14 PM
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Did Anyone Notice...

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:47 AM
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New Site Feature

Hey Searchbloggers - Thanks to FM's team of coders, I've installed a new feature, one I have always wanted to have. I'm calling it "Recent Comment Spotlight." It's up there on the left at the top. I read every single comment you all put on the site (including the ones left by knuckleheaded spammers,) and I love em all - and often, they get lost or overlooked. So to highlight one from time to time, I made the Spotlight section. Right now I'm highlighting a comment about MSFT and data privacy, but it'll change pretty frequently.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:39 AM
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More G Rumors: Napster

From BizWeek:

Shares of Napster Inc. skyrocketed in premarket electronic trading Tuesday, as investors responded to a report that the online music store is being eyed by Google Inc.

The Internet search giant, which is due to report fouorth-quarter results after the bell Tuesday, is considering an "extensive alliance" with, or possibly a takeover of, Napster, according to a published report.

The New York Post, citing sources within the music industry, said Google wants to "align with Napster' in lieu of creating its own music store.

This strikes me as fantasy. Why does Google need to buy Napster? The company could build a great music store by itself. Or perhaps....it's buying Napster's relationships....Reuters story. Original Post story.(reg required).

Update: Google is playing this down. (Thanks, OB)

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:33 AM
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Google Going P2P?

Spotted on Digg: The URL sharelive.com resolves to Google (www.sharelive.com/forums/ also resolves to Google, though to a non working page.) Odd, in that ShareLive used to be a file sharing site. From the Internet Archive: August 2002, June 2004, (something called oZone), Feb 2005 (back to ShareLive). Nothing after March of 2005. It apparently shutdown in May of 2005, due to lack of funding (and probably legal issues?). Could Google be getting ready to launch its P2P service? (Thanks, Andreas)

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:28 AM
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We Asked Microsoft...

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:07 PM
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Grokking Nexidia

A while back I had the opportunity to speak with the folks behind Nexidia, a company that takes a unique approach to solving the audio (and by extension video) search problem. Gary has briefly grokked Nexidia in the past, but this was my first chance to dig in and see what they have to offer. In short, it's pretty cool, and the implications, should the company scale and get access to large datasets (ie become a consumer property or inform one), are significant.

I spoke with Nexidia's SVP/Media, Drew Lanham. He told me Nexidia is already a profitable company, due in large part to its call center business. For that segment of the market, Nexidia provides audio mining technology that allows companies to identify patterns in customer contact, for example, and design better customer interactions (are you listening, Dell?).

Most stuff I've seen about audio and video search uses either text (ie closed caption) or tagging and metadata as a solution. So how does Nexidia work? In short, the company's technology reduces speech to phonemes, the most basic unit of language, and uses those base units in much the same way that a text engine uses words. This approach is not novel, but Nexidia has apparently figured out a tack that not only works, it also scales, which is critical to the problem at hand. From Drew's follow up notes to me:

" For example, if you assumed daily additions of 10,000 hours, a taxonomy of 10,000 words, and 50 dual processor boxes, it would take about 8.7 hours to index (produce XML for location of word, file name, quality of phonetic score, frequency of word, language, etc. to be combined with other relevant metadata). I find the 10K hours relevant because if you assume CNN broadcasts 16 hours of content per day, then it would be cheap to index all audio and video created across 600+ radio and television stations (a rough guess of all the spoken word content on a daily basis created in North America). As you know, 50 boxes is trivial."

Google showed us that when you push to a new level in scale, all sorts of previously unimagined applications can be found. Nexidia is already being used in call center applications, as I mentioned, and counts the "homeland security" industry as a client as well. But what gets me excited is the potential in media search, which is Drew's focus as well. Nexidia turns any search query (a text input) into a phonetic code, which is then matched against a database of audio and video files. The potential here is rather large - coupled with a smart query UI, one can imagine a new approach to finding relevant data inside non-textual corpuses. Imagine - search all podcasts for a mention of "Google China" for example. Or all newscasts for coverage of "Iraq War Oil". Should audio/video search become this easy, advertising models open up, as do commerce opportunities (show me every movie where "rosebud" is spoken...). And don't get me started about what might happen if you mix Nexidia with Skype....

For now, Nexidia plans to work as a back end supplier to consumer sites, but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to go it alone and try to become a consumer facing engine that crawled the web as well. I asked Drew about that, and he said only that the company wasn't going to take that option off the table. What I saw was impressive, though as faithful readers know, I am no technical expert. Regardless, this seems one to watch in 2006....

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:19 PM
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NYT v. Blogs, Prelim Report

From Kottke:

In 2002, Dave Winer of Scripting News and Martin Nisenholtz of the New York Times made a Long Bet about the authority of weblogs versus that of NY Times in Google:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.

I decided to see how well each side is doing by checking the results for the top news stories of 2005....

...So how did the NY Times fare against blogs? Not very well. For eight top news stories of 2005, blogs were listed in Google search results before the Times six times, the Times only twice.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:47 PM
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MSN and Kanoodle, Well...Kanoodle

Kanoodle is pleased to report it has snagged MSN Spaces as a text link ads partner. What this brings up for me is the question "Yeah, but for how long?" I've asked MSN before about its intentions to get into the syndication space (ie, to do YPN or AdSense). This deal seems to indicate it's at least a year away.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:01 PM
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More On What Google (and Probably A Lot of Others) Know

Searchblog reader Adam asked me:

1) "Given a list of search terms, can Google produce a list of people
who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or Google
cookie value?"

2) "Given an IP address or Google cookie value, can Google produce a
list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie
value?"

I put these to Google. To its credit, it rapidly replied that the answer in both cases is "yes." Just FYI.

All I will add is this: If you are an agent of the US Government charged with tracking domestic terrorism, might you have an interest in answering questions like the ones posed above?

As the Chinese curse goes (oh, the irony), may we live in interesting times.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:55 PM
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Go Sit In the Hot Seat? No Thanks!

This speaks for itself.

The leading US-based Internet companies are showing little interest in attending a Congressional briefing on worries that the firms are bending to the wishes of China's censors.

Microsoft and Cisco Systems have refused to attend the event, while Google and Yahoo are non-committal, officials said.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:39 PM
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Show Me The Data

So AOL, Yahoo, et al have given the DOJ a sh*tload of data. Here's an idea - show all of us what you gave them! BB posts about it here. I like it! (From an original Gilmore post).

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:17 PM
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Remove Results

I've been quite heads down on FM stuff these past two weeks, forgive me. But using Google lately (as a registered user) I've noticed something new, and readers are also tipping me to it. You can now remove results from future searches. I wonder how many folks are actually doing this?

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:11 PM
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Google Gets Social

Who says Google doesn't play the tagging, sharing, social search game? Not Google. Today it released a new version of its toolbar that's very....well...Web 2.0.

From SEW coverage:

Google has enhanced its toolbar for Internet Explorer, introducing several new features that will appeal to regular users of the program.

The new features include enhanced "suggestions" that appear on the fly as you type a query, the ability to add custom buttons to search your favorite sites, the ability to create and save online bookmarks and to share web pages with others.

"One of the areas we wanted to focus on was to empower users more," said Sundar Pichai, Google group product manager.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:59 AM
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Can't Keep Up On China?

Nor can I. Thank God for Rebecca.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:02 PM
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fraught with clickfraud

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:54 PM
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Mazda Says: Thanks for the Idea

Remember how Pontiac was pushing its line of cars by asking you to "Google Pontiac"? (See here for the background). In my post, I wrote: Now, when I Google Pontiac, I see two sponsored links up top, both from Pontiac (if I were, say, Toyota, I might just think about bidding that keyword....but I digress).

Well, Toyota didn't take the bait, but Mazda sure did.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:33 AM
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The Real Irony Here...

...is that Google is, for the first time, being a content editor. I've written extensively about how Google, by its very DNA, does not like to be an editor of content. But in China, it's doing exactly that. (SEW)

Google's first big editing job? Deciding which sites to exclude because they might offend the Chinese government. There's still time to pull out, guys. I've read your rationalizations, and Uncle Bill's as well. I don't buy them. I don't buy that this is what, in your heart, you believe is right. Sure, I understand the logic. But, well....in your heart, is this what you wanted to do? No? Then why did you do it?

I was having dinner with some dear friends tonight. They asked me why did Google do this? My answer: I think they convinced themselves it was the right thing to do. They thought themselves into it. And deep down, they aren't sure they did the right thing. At least, that's what I want to believe. Sure, Microsoft is going to go in. Yahoo and IBM are going to go in. But Google? We thought...well, we thought you were different.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:28 AM
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So Much News

That this slipped by: Google AdSense begins rich media beta test.

In other words, "floating ads", interstitials, and expanding ads...oh my!

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:55 PM
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Kosmix

I'm speaking with these guys next week. For now, you can read about them here....(SiliconBeat)

Meet Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, two of the co-founders at Junglee, and who twice seriously considered acquiring Google in its early days, but decided their friend Brin was too bold, if not arrogant, to deal with.

Now they plan to officially launch an ambitious search engine company, Kosmix at the Demo conference to begin the week of Feb 6 in Phoenix. They've also raised $7.4 million in venture capital.

They are making an audaciously risky bet that they can crack the code on a vexing problem in search: finding the meaning, or at least the topic of a Web page.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:22 PM
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What Info Does Google Keep?

A reader asked me:

Does Google keep logs of searches correlated with IP address or
other personally identifiable information for users who have not
logged in?

I knew it kept parts of this data, but was not sure. So I pinged Google PR, which checked in for me (thanks!). The response was to quote Google's privacy FAQ:

Like most Web sites, our servers automatically record the page
requests made when users visit our sites. These "server logs"
typically include your web request, Internet Protocol address, browser
type, browser language, the date and time of your request and one or
more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser.

In other words, yes, Google does record this data. But, does it KEEP that data, I asked? The answer:

Yes, we do.

It's simple to stop this, of course, just set your browser to not accept cookies. But if you do, you lose out on the services that cookies enable. I for one keep my cookies intact. But know that yes, your data is kept by Google and yes, your searches can be correlated to IP data.

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:59 PM
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Ugh. This Just Doesn't Feel Good, Does It?

Who wants to have stories like this written? It just feels so ... wrong.

A day after Google's buggy censorship of sites for Chinese-users was revealed, the search giant has responded by fixing its filters so topics such as beer and jokes are no longer deleted.

An

investigation published Thursday by CNET News.com showed that Google's new China search engine not only censored criticisms of the Chinese government, but went further than similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo by targeting sites related to teen pregnancy, alcohol, dating and homosexuality.

On Friday morning, however, those previously verboten sites became available through Google.cn. That brings Google's filtering in line with blacklists used by Microsoft and Yahoo.

But it's worse. For more, read Gary, and Philipp. In short, Google used to have a page in its help area that said this:

But now it says this:
.

Update: Google explains its policy of engagement here.

Update 2: Google's new explanation of its censorship policy is up (SEW).

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:01 PM
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But There's Always Music....

In a PDF report (download from Searchblog), Bear Stearns Analyst Robert Peck speculates that Google will launch a music store soon. Sure they will, and it will take lessons from video. Gary Price groks it here. From Peck's report:

Why is Google Tunes attractive to Google? According to Nielsen/Net ratings, unique visitors to Apple’s iTunes site
increased 241% YoY to 20.7M, for a 14% reach. Further, Nielsen indicates that iTunes users form a distinct target
audience with brand preferences along autos, alcohol beverages, magazines, and television.
*** We would expect Google to rollout a Beta service within 3-6 months. We note that Google has not confirmed our
expectations, and that our thinking is based on Mosaic theory. However, we do think this fits with Google's recent
moves and its ultimate goal of organizing the world's information.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:26 PM
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Video Store: Yeah, We Blew It

From the Seattle PI:

"We made a big mistake," Mayer, who oversees all of Google's search products, said Tuesday. "You can't come out and launch a product like Google Video and say 'CSI' and 'Survivor' are there if they're not on the home page."

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:21 AM
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Google China: Congress Wakes Up

I'm still thinking about this, but this is an interesting development. Yahoo and Microsoft can go into China no problem, but once Google does, then the US Congress gets into the act.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:20 AM
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Yahoo: All About My?

Om reports from a Yahoo retreat (I wanted to go, but had a school board meeting, sounds like it was really interesting!).

My contention is that forget search, because Yahoo has something better than that.

My.Yahoo.Com is no longer a portal page, but instead an “attention page” which can be and should be leveraged to become the aggregator site for complicated digital life.

I consider search the interface for all this, in fact. Om also notes that Yahoo's new Chief Product Officer, Ash Patel, is a recent Mac convert.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:07 AM
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HumpDay

Long week here in Searchblog land. And much, much happening. Here's my roundup. I am working on longer posts on Google/China and Nexidia (an interesting phonetic search company) but running out of steam for today. FM, the company we're building so that creating Searchblog-like sites is easier, is taking a lot of time right now, but I expect that to slow a bit later in the month. Meanwhile....

Andy finds an odd Googlebug. Seems to push IE users to download Google Desktop. More here.

Slate has fun with the Google/DOJ story - some good editorial cartoons. Click around (thanks Bill).

B2.0 names Google the smartest company this past year. But the company also is mentioned in the "Dumbest" category too.

Mary Meeker (MorganStanley) groks the DOJ implications. PDF download.

Google, Sun, others join "StopBadware" campaign.

Yahoo says, Are You Kidding? (In response to reports it has given up on catching Google).

The host of Xooglers gets busted for violating AdSense TOS. Oh, the wonderful irony.

TechCrunch has the scoop on new Windows Live services at MSFT's search champ camp.Speaking of which, MSFT announced two new labs (via SEW) as well, one focused on Search...

YPN (Yahoo's AdSense competitor) will be gearing up this Spring, here's a list of how.

Brin defends his position on China.

Dan Gilmor learns in public, reminds us why we like him so much

BigDaddy (Google's next big algo update?)

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:47 PM
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Pontiac Says: Google Proves It

GM says Google Pontiac. Perhaps the first time a major (and I mean really major) marketer has used search marketing so directly in a television campaign. From the MediaPost coverage: Television ads often stimulate Internet search behavior by increasing brand awareness or sparking curiosity, as often demonstrated by Hitwise. But this GM spot was significant because it ended with an unusual call to action: "Don't take our word for it. Google Pontiac and discover for yourself." And the ad ended not with a URL or phone number for a local dealer, but an actual Google screenshot with Pontiac typed in.

This is a regional campaign, and certainly demonstrates how Google has become an authority/integrity call to action for marketers. Screenshot here.

Now, when I Google Pontiac, I see two sponsored links up top, both from Pontiac (if I were, say, Toyota, I might just think about bidding that keyword....but I digress). In any case, since many folks have no idea that those blue shaded links are in fact ads, I am sure that they are going to be making Google a lot of money over the course of this campaign. Innaresting.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:14 PM
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Here Comes Google China

As reported earlier, Google decided to go into China a while ago. I spoke to Sergey about this very question a year ago, and he expressed his reservations and his thinking - on balance, Google in China, even if it's playing by the Chinese government's rules, is a good thing. Weds, Google will make it official (Seattle PI). They're in - they're not standing up to the Chinese government. (Apparently, the DOJ and Wall St., Google can say no to. China....not so much.) The site will be google.cn (not live yet).

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:47 PM
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Head Fake?

Via Hawk: Yahoo Giving Up on Quest for Search Dominance.

I don't know ... this quote sure ain't in character with the folks I know at Yahoo:

"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

Thoughts?

Update: Hawk covers Caterina's response: Blathering bullshit!

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:37 PM
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Yahoo's Jeremy Is Disappointed, I'm Bewildered

From his post:

I'm disappointed in the government for wanting to use the online behavior of millions of people in an attempt to justify a law that many of those million are likely against. I'm disappointed in them for making people even more fearful of "being tracked online" and the Bush Administration's attempts to keep an eye on the public.

I'm disappointed in those companies that appeared not to put up a fight, notify their users, or explain what happened in a timely fashion. I'm disappointed in them for not providing an opt-out mechanism. I guess that's everyone but Google so far.

Is it too much to ask, I keep asking, to ask our online services to provide us:

- Access to a record of all the information they keep on us and how they use it
- The ability to challenge that data's accuracy, and edit it for accuracy
- The ability to opt out (with a clear understanding of the resulting loss of services and opportunities that might result)
- The ability to set permissions as to who else might see the data
- The right to maintain a user copy of that data for archival purposes
- The right to share in the value of that data on negotiated terms

Is that so freaking hard to do? I sense that, increasingly, there is a market opportunity in doing this. I bet 95% of the public will never edit, or even view the data more than once. But the sense that the control panel is there, just in case, will be invaluable to establishing trust.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:31 AM
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Ask Bows New Image Search

This is Ask's first "internally created" image search. I've played with it a bit, looks good, will update with more when I can....

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:17 PM
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BBC On Google

When I was in London a while back, I got the chance to spend time with the BBC. These guys are fun to talk with. Then they came by my offices (in Ross, before we moved to Sausalito), and that ended up on the Money Programme, which takes an indepth look at Google.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:03 PM
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Google News Outta Beta

Well, it's finally happened. It's only been four and a half years, but Google News is out of beta. They have new personalization widgets (see Greg's take here), and some other features like story history and feeds.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:33 PM
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Earnings Whispers

It's been a not so great quarter for earnings in our world, and now comes news (via SBeat) that a Yahoo employee (Amr Awadallah) is posting musings about why he thinks Google might be in line to miss earnings, or, at the very least, has employed tried and true tricks to increase its revenues in the past, and is not doing so this time.

This is why I love the blog world. You keep finding gems like Amr.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:07 AM
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MSN: What We Gave the Govt.

Here's MSN's response. In short: We gave info to the govt, but there was no personal info released.

Last night I watched Enemy of the State, which was one hell of a programming coup for ABC given the recent news. When it came out I was told it was a paranoid fantasy, by folks I know who would be in a position to know - at least back in 1998. But it's a fantasy that I sense is shared, in a perverse way, by a lot of folks in the current administration. If only we had those kind of tools....

It's been seven years since that movie was made. What's happened in seven years? Well....Google, for one thing. And warrantless wiretaps, for another. And a major move from the ephemeral to the eternal. Fasten yer seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:59 PM
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More On The Slippery Slope

The last graf of Steven Levy's Newsweek piece:

Though the government intends to use these data specifically for its COPA-related test, it's possible that the information could lead to further investigations and, perhaps, subpoenas to find out who was doing the searching. What if certain search terms indicated that people were contemplating terrorist actions or other criminal activities? Says the DOJ's Miller, "I'm assuming that if something raised alarms, we would hand it over to the proper [authorities]." Privacy advocates fear that if the government request is upheld, it will open the door to further government examination of search behavior. One solution would be for Google to stop storing the information, but the company hopes to eventually use the personal information of consenting customers to improve search performance. "Search is a window into people's personalities," says Kurt Opsahl, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney. "They should be able to take advantage of the Internet without worrying about Big Brother looking over their shoulders."

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:10 PM
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Felten on Google and Privacy

He riffs on DRM and Video, which I find interesting in any case, but it's the last two grafs of this post which really nail it:

Privacy is for Google what security is for Microsoft. At some point Microsoft realized that a chain of security disasters was one of the few things that could knock the company off its perch. And so Bill Gates famously declared security to be job one, thousands of developers were retrained, and Microsoft tried to change its culture to take security more seriously.

It’s high time for Google to figure out that it is one or two privacy disasters away from becoming just another Internet company. The time is now for Google to become a privacy leader. Fixing the privacy issues in its video DRM would be a small step toward that goal.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:56 PM
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ABC News Tonight

ABC News will broadcast its news tonight from Google headquarters. This was planned well before the DOJ kerfluffle, though I imagine that news peg only helps. I find it intriguing that as a "news event" Google now ranks - alongside hurricanes, wars, and earthquakes - as worthy of having an entire newscast based on location.

ABC came to FM's offices earlier this week to talk to me about the company. I have no idea if they will air anything, but FYI...set yer Tivos.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:37 AM
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What's the Big Deal?

...in the Google v. DOJ case? Well, I've argued it's the slippery slope. But reading through the subpoena, it's clear that from where Google stands, there's something else at stake.

Remember this whole goat rodeo (on the size of indexes)? Remember how slippery both Yahoo and Google got when we tried to figure out exactly how many documents were in their indexes? Well, turns out, that's pretty much what the DOJ is trying to do as well. Hence, Google's defense on a "trade secrets" basis.

Apparently, the subpoena originally asked for a lot more than just a million addresses, as reported Thursday. From the motion the DOJ filed to force Google to comply with the subpoena:

"The subpoena asks Google to produce an electronic file containing '[a]ll URL's that rea available to be located through a query on your company's search engine as of July 31 2005."

and

"all queries that have been entered on your company' search engine between June 1, 2005 and July 31, 2005."

HELLO. You think Google is going to give that over? Me no think so.

This is why Google originally fought the order. The DOJ then narrowed its request to a random sample of one million URLs and agreed to not ask for personally identifying info on the search queries, but it still wants all search queries for a one week period. No way in hell Google would give that up, given the company's penchant for secrecy. Sure, the DOJ might guarantee that the data would not enter the public record, but, once in the DOJ's hands, it's out of Google's control.

So how to fight it? Well, standing up to the DOJ and getting major praise for doing so is a very smart strategy, in my book. As much as I'd love to believe Google is fighting this for heroic reasons, I'd wager that the data has more to do with it.

Also, just a note, but it's interesting to note that Google now has its very own DOJ case, just like Microsoft did.

(Gary has a thorough overview of the docs in the case here).

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:54 AM
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Salton, Evslin, and Punch Card Search

A wonderful trip down memory lane...

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:30 PM
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Hey, Your Content Chocolate Is In My Portal Peanut Butter!

And the mashup continues.

SEATTLE - Amazon.com Inc. plans to broadcast on its Web site an original show hosted by Bill Maher and featuring performers and authors touting new releases — which, not coincidentally, will be for sale at the online retailer.
ADVERTISEMENT
click here

The 12-episode Webcast series, which will begin airing June 1, is the first offering in what the Seattle company says is a broader plan to add more original programming to its Web site.

Next up: Yahoo sells books, and Google sells videos. Oh, wait, that's already happening...

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:17 AM
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Guess How Many Videos Google Has Sold...

No, I don't know...but I do wonder, how many videos Google will sell in its first month? Anyone care to start a wager? Recall that when iTunes launched, Apple pretty much queered the market for secrecy: it proudly tells us when it sells it's millionth, ten millionth, and so on, of any thing (including videos). Will Google do the same?

I'll toss out a wager and say Google will sell less than 100,000 videos in its first month. After all, they have limited inventory, and the product is getting a slow start. No, wait, we have to be specific, to win. OK, Google will sell 95,567 videos in its first month. What do you say? If Google ever does tell us, I'll send the winner a signed copy of my book. How great is that?

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:10 PM
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