John Battelle's Searchblog

Save Searchblog roundups and a post or two from Melanie, and my predictions post, which I hope to do this weekend, Searchblog will be quiet over the next ten days, as I take a holiday. See you in the New Year!

Hitwise research reports that Google Blog Search passed Technorati in traffic for the first time last week. As a percentage of total US Internet Visit market share, Technorati moved to .0023%, and Google's Blog Search to .0025%.

Google Blog Search has experienced massive growth since October, when a direct link to it was placed on Google News--- to the detriment even of Blogger Blog Search, which slid from .0025% in October to .0019% last week.

Is 'Web 2.0' Another Bubble?

Content-Based Image Retrieval Review and Cameraphone Search

Aircraft Tracking and More Travel Info With FlightStats Mobile

Compare and Contrast: 2 Conversations With Jeff Bezos (2006 and 2002)

Yahoo India's Free SMS Backup Service

Boing Boing covers the demotion of many popular sex related blogs in Google's ranking. This reminds me of the great Florida wipeout...

Google's Matt Cutts explains what I thought was going on. Yahoo lost views due to Ajax.

Ever wonder how I ended up doing what I do? Andrew Keen got me to open up in this interview, if you've got the inclination. I enjoyed speaking with him. I did the interview a few months ago so some of the references and stats are a bit dated.

Set up is here.

Om has the scoop from a Bloomberg report:

Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology, the Chinese P2P video software company has confirmed that Google will become an investor in the company, according to a Bloomberg news report.

Om had the original rumor, as well.

Google.cn search for Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology.

Update: Om notes the original story was reported by Katie Fehrenbacher.

Google continues to test approaches to video ads, AdWeek reports on the beet.tv test which have been reported in the past. I was talking to someone today about Google and video ads. Besides tests like eepyBird and beet, Google is also buying inventory on some large, well known sites and reserving it for video, similar to the way they primed the pump by buying cheap banners and replacing them with AdSense back when that service launched. But so far, not many video ads are showing up, I am told by the site owners. I am sure that will/can change, but it strikes me it's a very different sell to fill video inventory than two-minutes-and-your-done text ads via credit card signups. This area will surely make my list of predictions for 2007. Stay, er, tuned.

Continue reading "Reader Dr. Pete Writes:" »

Imagine if you will that you are on a journey through time and space. A journey into your own mind, a ....wait. It's not Friday, and it's also not JAM (that's Joints After Midnight) time yet. OK, then let's think out loud for a second about Google Health. Inspired by an email exchange with Jacob Bastacky, a doctor who happens to have a child in the same school as mine and, more importantly, a doctor who has spent a fair time in front of an electron microscope, I present to you Google Inner Space, or, as it will be more mundanely known, (my totally unofficial version of) Google Health.

Just as you now can fly over earth like some vicarious Superman, so, with Google Inner Space (not Jacob's favorite name, but I kinda like it), you can fly inside of the very molecules which surround you - nay, inside of *our* very molecules. Want to see a map of a cancerous prostrate? Want to surf through an aorta, or pump through an adrenal gland? With Google Inner Space, you can.

All is information. And that includes information about who we are at the atomic, molecular, cellular, and organic level. This information can and will be displayed to you. Then we can tag, share, mix, and rip it. At least, it'd be cool if we could. What do you think, Adam?

Related

Not sure I have much to say about this yet. I have lobbed a mail to Jimmy Wales to see if he'd be open to talking here...

Jimmy Wales, founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is planning to build an online commercial search engine that would compete with Google and Yahoo.

The search engine, code-named Wikiasari, would combine open source technology and human intervention to deliver more relevant results than the algorithm-based systems used today, Wales said Tuesday. "Human intelligence is still the best thing we have, so let's let humans do what they do best, and computers do what they do best." Wikiasari combines the Hawaiian word for quick, "wiki," with the Japanese word "asari," which means "rummaging search."

Apparently Jimmy is planning on taking the Nutch engine and mashing it up with conversational media approaches like Wikipedia. So far, no idea exactly how, and he mentions a two-year timeframe...Hmmm...

I don't trust any metrics but this one will make headlines. From the Times:

Google, the search engine company, displaced Yahoo as the world’s second-most-visited Web site in November and closed in on the leader, Microsoft, a market researcher said yesterday.

Visitors to Google’s sites rose 9.1 percent, to 475.7 million in November from a year earlier, while those to Yahoo sites rose 5.2 percent, to 475.3 million, the researcher, ComScore Networks, said. Both sites trail Microsoft, which had 501.7 million visitors, ComScore said

Just in case the Googles of the world ain't paying attention:

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will provide a commercial solution to click fraud identification and prevention. The current existing solutions can not detect the so-called software click. This STTR project proposes a real time collaborative click fraud detection and prevention system to detect these software clicks. The approach draws on data mining techniques for fraud identification using detailed user activities. An accurate and efficient classification method based on association rule mining and data stream mining will be formulated to identify the click frauds.

The system will protect Pay-Per-Click advertisers from click fraud and improve their return on investment. The new data mining techniques discovered during the course of this research will be applied in multiple fields related to online business marketing, user analysis and other fraud identification processes.

(Thanks, Ross)

Stanford's HighWire Press Passes 1.5 Million Free Full Text Articles

Google Patent Searching Goes Live

More News and Info Sites for Your Mobile Browser

Google, NASA, SkylineGlobe, and World Wind

AOL Adds It's Social Networking Service to Its Mobile

Aaron argues yes. I say, if it works, do it.

Related:
2006 Predictions
2005 Predictions
2005 How I Did
2004 Predictions
2004 How I Did

As you all know by now, each year I prognosticate, and each year I judge how I did. This year, well, I have to say, if the only thing I got right was that Time was going to put Web 2.0 on the cover ("You" was a proxy for that, trust me), I'd be happy. But overall, I think I did OK, though I was a bit early on many things. Here's the rundown.

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.
Well, not exactly, but this was certainly the year the majors started very heavy petting with letting their assets up on the web, but they most certainly did NOT let them up for remixing. Save, of course, the BBC. And, come to think of it, this is in fact a major Big Media asset. I still think this model is viable, and I still think it will happen. Stay tuned for my 2007 predictions, coming next week.

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. ..
Again, not exactly, thought if you want my unvarnished opinion, the jury is still out on YouTube. The Big Media world is still extremely suspicious of Google, and supposed bribes aside, Google has yet to win them over.

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).

OK, I think I pretty much nailed this one, twice (once with the DOJ case, twice with AOL).

4. Google and Yahoo will both enter the video (nee television) advertising marketplace.
Google: Oh yes, indeed. Yahoo: Sure, but not like Google...yet. The company stumbled by trying a PGM-based approach with Lloyd Braun at the helm.

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

Oh man, I was totally, abjectly wrong. Microsoft LOST share. But the reason I was wrong was that Vista did not ship, which leads to my 6th prediction:

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....

I have it on very good authority, really, no really good authority, that it will ship early next year. In fact, Vista did "ship", but not to all us chickens. It shipped to Enterprise folks. So far, no search bump...

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.

Oh God, can I just gloat for a minute? I mean, really. As Time contributor Steven Johnson (a pal) wrote:

No doubt you've already seen that Time Magazine has cleverly named "you" as "Person Of The Year." They'd asked me a few weeks ago to write an essay for the issue about the rise of amateurism online and my own experiences with outside.in, and in asking, they mentioned that Web 2.0 was a candidate for the cover. They've chosen non-people before -- the computer was "machine of the year" in 1982, but as I was writing this piece, I kept thinking that putting Web 2.0 on the cover was going to be a little odd, almost like nominating "B2B Enterprise Solutions" in 2000. The way they've done it is much more elegant ..

Perhaps it's elegant, but it's Web 2.0, dammit, and it's the cover of Time (this week!), and I can gloat. I called it. And now, well, it's over. Even Time knows it, because they didn't call it Web 2 on the cover, the called it "You". But the essay by Josh Quittner, another pal, is as Web 2 as they come.

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.
I may have a hard time proving this, but I sense this is happening. We had a dustup about a Forrester report recently, and clearly the idea that Apple was vulnerable got some traction. This story will deepen in 2007. An analysis here from the Journal.

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.
This is clearly continuing. I cannot provide one succinct link about this, but I can tell you this - I have three good friends who have tried to do innovate mobile startups, and failed, due to the suffocation of the telephony industry. One of them said to me: "There is simply no innovation in mobile, we can't get traction, period." As for net neutrality, it's clear we have a multi-year fight on our hands.

10. The pace of Internet startup acquisitions will not be as torrid as most entrepreneurs and VCs had hoped.
I think this is certainly true. We've had a nice, linear line of acquisitions this year, but nothing torrid.

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.
There may not have been a big one, but man, the story is now all about how IPOs are coming back. I was just a tad bit early on this. Just a tad. The Dow hit an all time high, and the NASDAQ is resurgent...

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.
I think the first half of this is inarguable. But instead of RSS, it should have been video. Then the whole thing would have made sense. RSS is close, close, but in the end, not the point.

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.
Trust me, I was just about three months early on this, if not less. I have personal knowledge - under NDA - that this is going to happen soon. About f*cking time. This has been on my wish list for nearly three years.

14. The China Internet Bubble will begin to deflate.
Honestly, while I have heard anecdotal stories to this end, I can't say with any authority that things have calmed down there. I've got some calls in to folks who know better than I...

15. Tivo and NetFlix will merge.
Shit, there are ten days left. It's still a good idea....

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....
OK. I was 2/3rds right. I did not write another book (though I have an idea for one now, wait for the fourth installment of my PGM v CM series for that...). And my publisher *did* ask me for an update. But I failed, miserably, to convince him to just point folks to my blog, and I did write a new chapter for the paperback. Hey, it's a great chapter!

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....
My God, has it been a whole year? I won't gloat, but I will tell you all this: We beat my year's estimated revenues by nearly 30%, and this fall, we were booking well over a million a month in new business. By mid January or so we'll be announcing an amazing array of new sites joining FM, and I feel very confident that the model is viable. Perhaps FM won't be that model's ultimate expression, but I am so proud of what we've built - more than 100 sites, more than 300 million pageviews a month, a more than eight-figure annual run rate, and nearly 30 amazing people, all working toward one goal - making conversational media and marketing work for authors, entrepreneurs, and marketers. I'm very, very happy with how it's turned out so far.

And I'm also honored by all of you, all your comments, your emails, and your attention. It's been a crazy, busy year of growth in our industry, and I can't wait for next year. Thanks to you all, and happy holidays. Next week, I'll post some predictions for 2007.

Spock Networks announced today, in the company's first official press release, that it closed $7 million in Series A funding, in a round with Clearstone & Opus Capital. Spock is an ambitious people search engine company that both VentureBeat and GigaOm have mentioned before. Spock plans to launch a closed beta early next year.
"Everyone is curious about what is said about them online. Who hasn't googled their own name or someone they know?" said Ken Elefant, general partner at Opus Capital Ventures. "We were incredibly impressed with the Spock team with their tremendous experience. We believe they are approaching the challenge of searching for people in a very different and powerful way that will set them apart from the current general market approach to people search."

This is where things are going, folks. (via Digg)

I have been watching Google Checkout, and if you care about the space, you should too. Ebay is most likely VERY worried. They should be. Google is leveraging its cash, its brand, and its AdWords to push this new service. Watch this space. (B2).

Google has surreptitiously and summarily hacked-off the SOAP branch of its search API, directing developers to the AJAX API without even a blog post. O'Reilly notes that Nelson Minar, the originator of SOAP API at Google, says that this is part of the product discipline drive earlier seen with the ending of the Google Answers program. Perhaps it's needed discipline, but the developer community is necessarily unhappy with a replacement that won't fill the needs of the hundreds of applications now depending on the far more flexible SOAP API. Bug fixes for the SOAP API are discontinued, and it is not clear how long Google will support existing users.

I'm not really very fluent in this stuff, but when Tim Bray worries about it, and then I read this on a site he points to:

Forget about the SOAP vs. REST debate for a second, since most of the world doesn’t care. Google’s search API let you send a search query to Google from your web site’s backend, get the results, then do anything you want with them: show them on your web page, mash them up with data from other sites, etc. The replacement, Google AJAX API, forces you to hand over part of your web page to Google so that Google can display the search box and show the results the way they want (with a few token user configuration options), just as people do with Google AdSense ads or YouTube videos. Other than screen scraping, like in the bad old days, there’s no way for you to process the search results programmatically — you just have to let Google display them as a black box (so to speak) somewhere on your page.

I worry too. What do you think? Is Google killing its SOAP API for business, rather than technical reasons? And will others follow?

(image credit)

Bob Lefsetz at his swearingest best on Google and how it interacts with the entertainment industry. Read the whole thing.

SearchEngineLand Makes Its Traffic Stats Public

5 Ideas Google Could Give Us for Christmas

Ask Unveils Beta Design and SERPs Layout

Snap Debuts AJAX Image Search

Dogpile Releases Lists of Most and Least Searched Terms of 2006

A few reporters called me about Zeitgiest (WaPo) while I was at the airport yesterday, and talking to them got me thinking about what we see there.

The top list is not very revealing, save the instance of "rebelde" - a telenovela - or Radioblog - makes me wonder what the parameters are for their filtering. Obviously they filtered out sex searches. What else? What was the methodology? Google doesn't tell us.

Anyway, two other things struck me. One, how big the Web 2 world was. The term Web 2 made one of the lists, and wiki, blog, and podcast did too.

Second, I'm curious about all the pharma terms. Look at the "What is" list:

What is...
1. what is hezbollah
2. what is carisoprodol
3. what is acyclovir
4. what is alprazolam
5. what is tramadol
6. what is ajax
7. what is hydrocodone
8. what is vicodin
9. what is xenical
10. what is xanax

It's clear the world is totally confused by all the pharma advertising, and it's also clear that Google sees a big, big opportunity in providing health information. Hmmm. Let's hope that the two don't mix - big pharma is most likely one of Google's largest AdWords customers, but clearly, don't want folks finding out too much detail about the drugs they are pushing on us.

When/if Google launches Health, they will be placed in the position of choosing between the best information to customers, and the billions of dollars that pharma has to spend. Let's hope they don't blink.

I have a thought on what Health might look like. More on that in another post, later today.

Most share of market reports say Google has somewhere between 45 to 60 percent market share - dominant, but not terrifyingly dominant. Rich Skrenta, who has serious cred in the search world, says he believes it's more like 70 percent. He bases this on referral information from his and other major sites (he runs Topix).

What strikes me as a potentially gating to this conclusion is that referrals to major sites does not reflect the entire web of search usage. ...but it is striking nonetheless.

Philipp tracks the changes.

A for effort in terms of giving us a bit more to grok....

I must say, the amount of info Google knows, versus what it gives back to us, is just silly. Look at this chart of "Dancing With the Stars vs. American Idol vs.Project Runway"

All relative values, no real data. But what do they really know about this, and, oh, every other entry in the Database of Intentions? A shitload, for sure. This Zietgiest is the best ever for giving us more to check out, but it shows just how little the rest of us know about what, for Google, is knowable.

PS - I'm on the road - 18 hours each in NY and Chicago. Way too many folks I want to see, but too little time to do it all. Posting to resume when I get home....

So, read this headline from I Want Media, and tell me what's deeply wrong with it:

Cingular Plan to Let Users Post to MySpace Blogs

Cingular Wireless customers will be able to access the content from MySpace, under a new plan. Cingular cellphone customers will be able to post to their MySpace blogs while also sending and receiving e-mail. Cellphones are more and more becoming mini-entertainment devices.

Yep. The whole "Cingular to Let..." concept. I mean, my God. Since when do I give a shit about what Cingular will or will not let me do? It's so damn typical of gatekeeper distributors. Ugh. MySpace best beware. Cutting too many of these deals with the dumbass devil, and the folks who made you # 1 will abandon you for someone who understands the value of open networks.

Although the cooperative partnership between Google and NASA, first announced in September 2005, quickly faltered on initial setbacks, today the two institutions announced the relationship was indeed secure and that their joint efforts would be publicly announced 'soon.'

The first partnership project will involve making NASA data available online. From Cnet:

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement that "soon" there will be Google Earth flyovers available for the surfaces of Mars and the moon. Additional data will include real-time weather forecasting and visualization, as well as tracking of the International Space Station and space shuttle activity.
Other noncommittal hints even alluded to a possible NASA-Google joint space mission.

DMOZ Founder Says "Time to Shape up or Ship out'

New Research Prototype From Microsoft. AURA: Advanced User Resource Annotation System

Time Magazine's 2006 Tribute to YouTube

Health Information Study from CDC: Reducing Information Pollution in the Internet Age

Learn About the National Geospatial Digital Archive

I started my last missive on Packaged Goods Media (PGM) v. Conversational Media (CM) with an overview of the tectonic changes in leadership at the digital units of major media companies. One day later, Yahoo announced its own radical reorganization - COO Dan Rosensweig is leaving, and media unit chief Llyod Braun, a master of PGM (Desperate Housewives, HBO), also saw the writing on the wall. Rosensweig left, in my estimation, because while he bought into the new Yahoo organization overall, he realized that his place within it was diminished by CFO Susan Decker's anointment as Semel's #2 (watch where he goes, I am sure it will be interesting.).

Braun left, on the other hand, because there wasn't a place for him to begin with. Yahoo has always struggled with its true role as a media company - should it create its own media, or should it be a platform to aggregate the media of others? Braun's departure indicates that Yahoo will not pursue the vision of itself as a creator of traditional Packaged Goods Media - Braun struggled to figure out how to make "hits" in a platform-driven world of YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr. So what kind of media might best be made in such an environment?

Yes, that was a straw man for this next meditation: the answer is Conversational Media.

But what, exactly, does that mean?

Toward the end of my last riff, I wrote:

It seems clear to me that the folks now charged with running the interactive assets of NBC, Viacom, Time Warner, and Newscorp - four of the largest Packaged Goods media companies in the world - are charged not only with growing their own Conversational Media assets, but also with protecting the Packaged Goods Media assets of their bosses. And those assets are based on several heretofore unassailable pillars:

1. Ownership or control of Intellectual Property by the corporation.
2. Ownership or control of expensive distribution networks.
3. Established business models based on highly evolved approaches to advertising and subscription models.

Each of these three pillars - and I may stumble upon others as I keep thinking out loud - seem to be either irrelevant or significantly shifted in the world of Conversational Media.

A few commentators took this as me dismissing the value of each of these three pillars overall, but that's an incorrect reading of my intent. In fact, these three pillars are essential to PGM assets and PGM-based companies. My argument is simply that in Conversational Media-based companies, these pillars are not central. Therein lies the conflict between the models: If you have a major company based on PGM, succeeding in the world of CM is going to be exceedingly difficult, because it forces you to embrace entirely unnatural acts. Not owning or controlling the content? Not owning or controlling the audience? Not having total control of your advertising and subscription revenue? Impossible!

The Economics of Packaged Goods Media
Why? This has been explained better in other places, I am sure, but it's worth a quick review nonetheless. The reason media companies must own or control their content, distribution and advertising relationships comes down to simple economics - it's extremely expensive to build or buy access to audiences in the PGM world. When you spend tons of capital to create and distribute intellectual property, you must control that property in order to justify your capital expenses.

Take a look at the economics of nearly every traditional media business, and you will see that the majority of its operating costs have to do with either consumer marketing (acquiring audience), or manufacturing and distribution (creating the package - not the content, mind you, but the package the content is in - and delivering that package to the audience). Content creation - the actual product - represents a minority of operating costs.*

In the publishing business, for example, editorial costs are rarely more than 15-20% of operating expenses. Consumer marketing costs - the expense of acquiring and maintaining an audience - can run from 20% to 75% of operating expenses, depending on the life cycle of the product (circulation costs are highest in the first few years of a product's lifecycle). Manufacturing and distribution costs run another 20% to 35% of total expenses.

In other words, marketing, manufacturing and distribution of Packaged Goods Media usually swallows around 70 to 85% of total expenses. And those expenses are large - at Wired and the Industry Standard, for example, our budgets for these line items were in the tens of millions each. For traditional newspapers like The New York Times, it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars. With those kinds of investments, one needs necessarily to control the intellectual property at the heart of it all. To not do so would be economic suicide.

But Conversational Media assets demonstrate a very different economic pattern. First of all, finding massively scaled Conversational Media companies is a rather difficult search (pun somewhat intended). Given that conversational media has been around only a decade or so, it's unclear whether CM companies will mature into massive conglomerates like Time Warner. But for now, let's examine the characteristics of Conversational Media.

Attributes of Conversational Media

1. Conversation over Dictation.

Not surprisingly, conversational media is driven largely by the give and take between the author and the audience - and oftentimes, the

audience is the principle author (we often hear this called "User Generated Content" or "Social Media"). The conversation is the content. In addition, I would posit that the advertiser can also be part of this conversation, but that is the subject of another post. Packaged Goods Media, on the other hand, is driven by the creator's dictation of a highly produced package of content meant for consumption. In CM businesses, the "editors" are never really sure what might be on the home page (see Digg, for example). In PGM, the very idea of not dictating what's in your product is anathema. In Conversational Media, it is central.

2. Platform over Distribution.

Conversational Media are driven by their platforms - the architecture of their platforms are key to differentiation and success. These platforms are by their very nature ignorant of distribution - they need not be concerned with it because it's close to free (save hosting costs**). Hence, economic differentiation based on the control of distribution - the very heart of PGM-based business models - is irrelevant in CM-based services. They key in CM is to create a killer platform, not to control distribution. PGM products, on the other hand, are driven by distribution, and their platforms - television studios, printing presses - are expensive, but not very differentiated.

3. Service over Product.

Conversational Media is best viewed as a service, rather than a product. This plays into the shift of other types of packaged goods products - like computer software - from shrink wrapped units ("Office 2000") to ongoing software-as-service models ("Office Live"). The New York Times on paper is a product, but the New York Times online is increasingly a service - albeit still one bounded by the constraints of its larger, PGM-based economic models. Yahoo is far more of a service than a packaged product, and Google is clearly a primary example of a conversational media company as service. Google, in fact, takes every pain it can to deny that it is in the content business (though one can reasonably argue that Google makes these claims to appease its pals over in the PGM world...). I see conflict coming down the pike as large CM-based platforms are consolidated by large PGM companies (think MySpace, YouTube via Google's deals with PGM companies, and others). The Terms of Services for these platforms make PGM claims over the CM-based intellectual property, and that strikes me as a train wreck in the making. Again, the subject of another post.


4. Iteration and Speed Over Perfection and Deliberation

Conversational media values speed and iteration over process and deliberation. By its nature, Packaged Goods Media is all about the process of creating and shipping a highly produced package of media. In CM, the key is to create, launch, and then constantly iterate your service, which is the platform for the content - the conversation. This plays into Tim O'Reilly's Web 2 idea of "perpetual beta": CM services are always in beta. But PGM products are always shipping product, one after the other. The idea of beta is alien to PGM companies - it's either ready to ship, or it's not.

5. Engagement over Consumption

Related to #1, it strikes me that the model of interaction with audiences in CM is one of engagement - what early models of "new media" called "lean forward media" as opposed to "sit back media" meant to be consumed. Even if you are consuming this blog, you are consuming it in the spirit of engagement - it's rather like talk radio - you want to hear what the callers are going to say as well. On this site, for example, there are far more comments than posts, by a ratio of about five to one.

In Summary
As I read back over this, I realize a few things. First, I'm at nearly 1500 words and anyone who's made it to this point deserves some kind of a medal (thank you!). Second, much of this feels obvious - I'm restating stuff that many of us have been discussing and debating for nearly ten years. But for whatever reason I feel compelled to try to keep restating it till it feels...more right.

When I read traditional media interpretations of "user generated content" (last weeks New York Times piece proclaiming 2006 the year of "You Media" comes to mind), I feel extremely dissatisfied. These pieces focus on the wrong thing - they judge Conversational Media by the standards of Packaged Goods Media, then find themselves smugly satisfied that CM doesn't measure up. However, it's clear that CM is here to stay, so writers from the PGM world struggle to make it fit their worldview. "Now we have to figure out what to do with it," The Times piece sniffs. "Ignore it? Sort it? Add more of our own?"

A line clearly written by someone who doesn't engage much in the world of Conversational Media. But that's OK. I'd never argue that CM makes PGM irrelevant or that folks who don't participate in CM are somehow better or worse than folks who do. But that's not the point. The point is that people find the process of engaging in Conversational Media fulfilling in its own right. Tens of millions of us love following the conversations on our favorite blogs, reading and participating in community-driven sites or social networking services. And where tens of millions of people go, profitable business models follow. In my next post, I hope to explore those models. And a caveat - I probably won't be able to avoid talking about FM, at least in theory....

As always, your responses and thoughts encouraged. This feels like the first draft of what will be a very long conversation piece...

---------

*There are significant exceptions to this rule - the filmed entertainment business comes to mind - and those exceptions are worth exploring at a later date. In fact, I am speaking to various folks in that business over the next few weeks.

**Clearly with massively scaled platforms like Google this is not the case, but still, the costs as a percentage of operating expenses are lower and scale well behind profits for successful platforms.

Like many others I know, I manage my work life through the window of my email. Last night, as I was preparing to head out to FM's staff holiday party, I managed to delete my entire inbox (it's complicated, don't ask how). I had about 25 messages sitting in that box, each of them an action item, a task I needed to execute. And then BLAM, they were gone. It feels like I have some kind of temporal amnesia - all these things I needed to do, sitting forever in my lost inbox.

Of course I'm working with our IT folks to see if we can rebuild it, and going through my sent mail and such to reconstruct my memories, but if you sent me mail in the past week or so and expect a response, well, help me out and resend it. Thanks!

David Rumsey Map Collection Adds More than 1148 Digitized Historical Maps

Aerial Imagery on MapQuest

Google, Click Fraud, and Invalid Clicks from Google's Shurman G.

iPhone Will Be Announced on Monday - Gizmodo

Google PageRank Checker for 700 Datacenters

Yesterday, Google announced an innovative program, called the Transferable Stock Option (TSO), to allow employees to auction off their eligible stock options to financial institutions.

Morgan Stanley will coordinate the auctioning in TSO, which will take effect the second quarter of 2007. Only options issued after Google went public are eligible and Google's Executive Management Group will be excluded from participation. Options transfered under the TSO will be valid for two years or at the conclusion set in the original grant terms, which ever is first.

Henry Blodget asks: If anyone has figured out the drawbacks of Google's new transferable option plan, please weigh in, because at first glance it looks like a win all around. (Which begs the question: Why haven't other companies done this? Why does Google seem to be the only Valley company dead-set on innovating?)

Today Yahoo & IBM unveiled OmniFind Yahoo Edition, an unstructured search for enterprise. The product, which relies on Yahoo's basic web search, is made free and downloadable to the public. As Yahoo and IMB VPs explained in a preview on Monday, you can download it to your laptop easily and it will begin indexing your files right away--although it's meant for a server.

OmniFind Yahoo Edition will index 500K file documents gratis, and customers can increase the file capacity with a paid upgrade. Other features include a customizable search screen, as well as the ability to create synonyms and to highlight documents. Upgrades are also available to integrate IBM's more advanced enterprise solutions-- which include taxonomies and other advanced features.

As mentioned, the system relies on Yahoo search. The index was developed from the opensource Lucene, mixed with IBM's internal OmniFind technology. "The software uses the Lucene search library and UIMA is also used in the software, however UIMA is not exposed, meaning people can't actively use the UIMA annontators to connect other software." There will also be synchronization issues when combining the Yahoo and the IBM results-- the partnering companies say they're already working it.

Battelle posted an excerpt from the press release of this exciting announcement. And ZDnet has a comparison between OmniFind and Google's Enterprise, its competitor.

How Safe are the SERPs for Popular Terms

Virgin Mobile USA Taps JumpTap for Mobile Search & Advertising

Another Round of News, Info and Job Search Sites Optimized for your Mobile Browser

Google's Library Project Turns 2

decipho: New Social Search Engine

Over at Read/WriteWeb, a roundup of innovations in search.

More when Melanie, who was in on the briefing, posts, but here's the corporate line:

Earlier this year Yahoo! and IBM got together to ask a simple question --- how can we make enterprise search easier to install, use, and maintain. The result of that question is IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition which we believe will enable employees, partners or customers to find answers that they know are sitting on their file-systems, their intranet, or their public website. And because an answer to your question may be on the Web, we have integrated Yahoo! Search directly into the search results. So, if you are searching the enterprise, the Web, or looking for a local business you can do that in one unified experience.

Is to innovate in how to give employees liquidity. Matt Marshall explains it here.

While Google's stock price defied gravity through January this year -- there are strong signs it may stall going forward (see graph below). It means that an employee hired a couple of weeks ago got their options at a price of $500, but now see the stocks valued at $481. If there's little hope the stock will rise much, what's the point of staying (aside from the apparently fun work atmosphere, which may be enough for many people, granted)?

That conundrum may be why Google has just introduced the options market, an online trading site that lets Googlers sell their shares to institutional investors -- who are often willing to pay more than the current market price for an option to buy those shares in the future.

One day goes by, I get all wickety about not posting. I'm in year-end crunch on FM, and have not been posting today. Forgive me. There is much news, SearchMob has a lot of it....

More and more info coming out on Yahoo's big Panama release. From a Bloomberg roundup:

Yahoo! Inc., the second most-used Internet search engine, released new advertising software to all U.S. customers in a push to close the gap with Google Inc.

Clients can sign up for a new account and use the upgraded software today, said Steve Mitgang, a Yahoo senior vice president. Customers who already have accounts are being switched over to the software, called Project Panama, he said.

In response to what I noted below, Matt accuses Yahoo of stealing Google's approach to displaying ads. Be careful, Mattt... Jeremy can respond with proof that Google ripped off Overture...

More on what's new here.

Jeremy wonders.

VentureBeat has the news on Xcavator.

Wapo:

Seeking Iran Intelligence, U.S. Tries Google
Internet Search Yields Names Cited in U.N. Draft Resolution

Zoho Keeps the Pace Up Enhancing It's Web-Based Word Processing Service

Go Mobile With Flickr

Ants, Dolphins & Information Retrieval (No Fooling)

'Ask City' Debuts for Local Maps & Search

61 Online Video Sharing Sites Feature Comparison

Early in my ponderings around Google Book Search and the library program, I wondered:

First, who is making the money? Second, who owns the rights to leverage this new innovation - the public, the publisher, or ... Google? Will Google make the books it scans available for all comers to crawl and index? Certainly the answer seems to be no. Google is doing this so as to make its own index superior, and to gain competitive advantage over others.

Well, the early results are in, and as Tim O'Rielly (a major publisher and a partner of mine) puts it, "Book Search Should Work Like Web Search." But it doesn't.

...maybe eventually, Google, and Microsoft, and Amazon, and the Open Content Alliance (OCA), and everyone else scanning books will come to parity, with all books included in all search engines, just as all web search engines with independent spiders converge on a roughly complete search index for the web. But scanning books is slower and more costly than spidering web pages, and in the meantime (and likely for a long time to come), the situation outlined above is likely to prevail.

In other words, book search is broken. The other piece to consider has to do with how book content is ranked (or not). From an old Sblog post:

But all this new Print material, well, it's never been on the web before. It's Google who is actively bringing it to us. How, therefore, does Google rank it, make it visible, surface it, and..importantly...monetize it? If a philanthropist were to drop the entire contents of the Library of Congress onto the web, Google would ultimately index it, and as folks linked to the content, that content would rise and fall as a natural extension of everything else on the web. But in this case, Google itself is adding content to the web, and is itself surfacing the content based on keywords we enter. This is a new role - one of active creator, rather than passive indexer.

FWIW.

Several blogs have noticed a large Firefox banner on Google's homepage, but it seems to be in limited production at the moment. This ad follows Google's previous promotion, but this one is bigger and at the top like a traditional banner.

That's one of the searches in this parody of what Dick Cheney's search history might look like, from Vanity Fair. I like seeing this kind of stuff in mainstream culture, it means the very concept of clickstreams and Database of Intentions is seeping into our consciousness....

(Thanks, David)

Gary has the scoop on two approaches that take their cue from ant and dolphin behavior. Press release fodder or breakthrough? You be the judge.

What to do?

Google is now hosting landing pages for small businesses. Yahoo already does this, the Yellow Pages as well.

...That's new MSN chief Steve Berkowitz, late of Ask.com, in a revealing NYT profile by Saul Hansell. In it Steve acknowledges that Microsoft has lost its way in search and other online services, that the Live brand is confusing, that his job is made more difficult by Ray Ozzie's famous memo, and much more. It's worth the time.

Hey, here's an award for the best blogs on search! Nominations are now open! Er....hint, hint.

The Coming Age of the "Cellcast" or "Mobilcast"

Updated and Enhanced Web Research Tutorials Now Available from Intute's Virtual Training Suite

New "Briefing Paper" Looks at Digital Preservation

Internet Archive's Wayback Machine Announces Size Increase

New From United Nations: First-Ever Global Web Accessibility Survey

Trailing the web search market, Compete has a monthly update showing that Google regained ground from October, up 3.5 points, to a high of 66%. While Yahoo lost share, 3.6 points, to fall under 21%. Meanwhile, Ask maintained recently elevated levels, closing at 4.8%.

Jeremy Crane has the Compete post, with an amusing introduction.

Hey Searchbloggers:

Some of our most avid readers are having problems with the "human detector" on Searchblog, and can't post comments. In fact, I can't post myself! I'd like to get to the bottom of this, so can you guys help? Can you try to post a comment on this post, and if it works, great, we'll see that. If it does not, can you send me an email (jbat @ battellemedia dot com) with your OS, browser type, and the comment body text? I'd be very grateful. The "human detector" is doing a great job stopping spam, but lately, it seems to be doing a poor job at detecting humans. Thanks!

Update: Thanks for all your help. I think I may have figured this out, or at least, we're closer. Seems that if a commentor posts a comment with three or more URLs, his or her comment is automatically labeled "junk" - and that kicks in all sorts of other complications. Have to pry apart the various throttling technologies like Akismet from the human detector, but for now, I think that's the main issue. If you post a comment, please keep URLs to one or two, until I figure out how to fix it...thanks.

(Image cropped from the NYT) Susan Decker gets called out for praise in this NYT profile:

Throughout that challenging period [after the crash], Ms. Decker played a leading role in helping reset expectations on Wall Street and inside the company. She was also instrumental in helping recruit a management team that put the company on a path to renewed growth.

Those accomplishments earned her a healthy dose of credibility and loyalty, according to people inside and outside Yahoo....

..“It would be difficult to find a job for which she is not intellectually capable,” said Geoff Ralston, Yahoo’s former chief product officer, who left the company in April. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of challenges for her. But she is one of the clearest- thinking minds at Yahoo.”

Google has released more info on their plans on the AdWords Blog.

Google Audio Ads brings efficiency, accountability, and enhanced ROI to radio advertising by providing advertisers with an online interface for creating and launching radio campaigns. You'll be able to target your customers by location, station type, day of the week, and time of day. After the radio ads are run, you will be able to view online reports that tell you exactly when your ad played.

Over the last year, we've been partnering with both terrestrial and satellite radio stations across the U.S. so that our advertisers have many options for broadcasting their ads -- whether it's a Country station in Tyler, Texas or an Adult Contemporary station in New York City. Currently, there are hundreds of stations to choose from and we hope to grow the list over the coming year. Our broadcast partners are looking forward to making their ad inventories available to thousands of new advertisers, especially since they aren't easily accessible today.

"Audio Ads" FAQ

Searchblog was down for a while this morning, sorry about that. We're tweaking the settings and will get it right soon.

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Yell.com Unveils Major Redesign

New Legal Search Engine

Yahoo Confirms New Directions, Priorities & Goals

MS Live Book Search Releases First Beta

Tactics Used to Rig Social Sites - Cnet Exposes

Remember back when Netscape was charging for its browser, and Microsoft came out and made Internet Explorer free?

Well check this out:

To celebrate the holidays, Google is processing your Checkout sales for free

As you may know, for every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 of Google Checkout sales for free. Just in time for the holidays, we're giving you even more by processing your Google Checkout sales for free through the end of 2007! Here's how it works:

* From November 8, 2006 through December 31, 2007, we'll process your Checkout transactions for free, even if you aren't an AdWords advertiser. If you're already an AdWords advertiser, we'll process your Checkout transactions for free regardless of what you spend on AdWords.*
* Valid Checkout orders you receive during the promotion will automatically qualify.
* You can take full advantage of this promotion by encouraging your buyers to use Google Checkout on your site.
* Other applicable fees (e.g. chargeback fees) may apply. This promotion is subject to the Google Checkout Terms of Service. Google may revoke the promotion for accounts that do not comply with these terms.

On January 1, 2008, the standard transaction fee will apply again. Also, if applicable, your regular free transaction processing (based on your December, 2007 AdWords spend) will resume.

Using Google Checkout to increase sales and lower costs during this busy holiday season has never been easier. If we can do anything else to help, feel free to drop us a line. Happy holidays from Google Checkout!

OK, a few things. No. 1, anyone who buys this has *anything* to do with "celebrating the holidays" ought to put down that mug of eggnog. This has everything to do with taking share from PayPal.

Next, I spent some time this week on the phone with Tom Oliveri, the fellow who manages Google Checkout. He very patiently explained how I managed to get myself into such a tangle when I first used the service, and promised to help me fix my account so that I could use it again. I'm looking forward to doing that, and continuing my explorations. He also addressed some of my privacy/use of info issues, but honestly, no company is addressing them the way I'd like to see them addressed. He did patiently listen to my rantings on the subject, which is more than anyone might expect.

On the Yahoo blog, Yodel Anecdotal (nice name), Semel posts some thoughts on the changes at Yahoo (I love that comments are open, are you listening, Google?). It seems clear to me, though I have no particular insights here, that Dan Rosensweig left because he did not like the idea of running the Audience group, which seems an equal to the new Advertising group run by Sue Decker. What I wonder is whether this new approach will work - will whoever runs the Audience group have the freedom to truly create great products? Or will it be subservient to Advertising's demands? This is the great, central conflict of all Packaged Goods Media companies. Stay tuned, as they used to say.

Denise is a dear friend, and today she launched her book, INTERVENTION: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet.

Denise was pretty much Searchblog, Techcrunch, Web 2.0, Wired, and the Industry Standard all rolled up into one person back when no one else was paying attention. I attended her Digital World conferences in the early to mid 1990s religiously, and read all she had to write. She since has focused her considerable talents on the study of risk and science, and I can't be happier for her that this book is out. She's has also started a blog, focused on her writings. Congratulations, Denise!

TechCrunch is reporting that #2 Dan Rosensweig is out at Yahoo. I'll have more to say on this when I know more....

Update: SEL has more news, so does the Merc, and Yahoo has issued a release, which SEL has in full.

From Reuters

Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile , Research) on Tuesday announced a reorganization that marks Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker as a likely successor to the current CEO and simplifies the Internet media company's structure.

Decker will take the lead of a new unit focused on advertising, Yahoo's main source of income, while media, communication, and other product groups will be merged into a unit focused on user activities.

Chief Operating Officer Daniel Rosensweig, a possible rival to Decker for the mantle of successor to Chief Executive Terry Semel, will leave the company in March.

Yahoo, a 12-year-old Internet pioneer, said no layoffs are planned as it restructures the company.

Update 2: Llyod Braun is also out. This is not a surprise.

Tactics Used to Rig Social Sites - Cnet Exposes

Google ClickFraud Extorter: Case Dismissed After 2 Years

Ted Leonsis SEO Contest is Misguided

coull.tv Launches - First Intelligent Online Video Search Site

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In the past month or so, three senior executives charged with running the interactive units of major media companies have either been shown the door, or have left on their own accord because they found their jobs no longer fit their character.

Jon Miller, who took AOL from death's doorstep to a new model which stole a page from Google and Yahoo, was summarily offed in mid November. Ross Levinsohn, hailed as a genius within Newscorp for engineering that company's purchase of MySpace, has decided that it's more fun to build a new company than run one inside Mr. Murdoch's empire. And Larry Kramer, until recently the head of CBS's interactive unit, saw the writing on the wall when Les Moonves installed a new boss above him (Kramer remains an adviser to CBS).

What does it all mean? I know each of the three men reasonably well, and I've spoken to many folks around them, and it all points toward a trend that I've been itching to think out loud about: Major media companies are realizing that their digital assets are far more valuable than they initially thought, and they are reacting by putting folks in charge of those assets who they believe will protect the company. Not the *interactive* company, mind you, but the company that owns the interactive products. Why?

Let's take each in turn. The general vibe on AOL is that Time Warner believes it's time to treat AOL like any other major advertising-driven media business - put in someone who lives and dies by advertising. So they install Randy Falco, a respected television executive with deep relationships with major brand advertisers.

Over at Newscorp, the folks I've talked to say that Murdoch viewed Ross as an M&A guy, and not an operator. It's time to *operate* these assets, now that Ross has assembled them, and the new guy - Peter Levinsohn, another seasoned TV executive - is more of an operator than Ross (they are cousins).

And at Viacom/CBS, head honcho Sumner Redstone was apparently livid over his lieutenants' failure to buy MySpace. So they have installed Quincy Smith, a seasoned technology/media M&A banker in the media space, to run Viacom's digital assets (and to buy their way to the table, as one can see from the recent hiring of a senior Yahoo corp dev executive). Kramer, who ironically is more of an operator (he ran Marketwatch for 12 years), apparently left because he didn't want his job to be about buying companies, and he was not that pleased with having Smith inserted between him and Moonves, who had been his boss before Smith showed up.

One might argue that a supreme shuffle could have solved all of this - put Miller in Ross's job (Miller turned AOL into an ad property, maybe he can do the same for MySpace), put Ross in Kramer's job (he can buy stuff well), and put Kramer into Miller's job (he can operate a big site like AOL).

But there's more to it than that. All three of the departed execs are, in their own rights, extremely seasoned interactive executives. And while their replacements have some digital experience, it's mostly in negotiating deals between traditional media companies and new the new digital world. And while I may get beat up for saying it, I must insist: Things are different running interactive properties. Deeply, importantly, significantly different.

In each case - Viacom, Time Warner, and Newscorp - the media moguls have installed folks who have no significant operating experience in the interactive world. (One can also argue that installing Beth Comstock as head of NBC Universal late last year - a very impressive executive who nevertheless came from a marketing background at GE - was a similar move).

What does this tell us about how these major media companies are thinking about interactive? Well, I'll go out on a limb here. I think the moguls are thinking along these lines:

1. Interactive is now a very important, profitable, and growing business.

2. We can't afford to not view this as strategic to our future.

3. We need someone running theses sites who is not an interactive "cowboy," it's time to grow up and treat it like any other major piece of our conglomerated business.

4. Therefore, I need "one of my own" running these businesses, and I expect them to deliver just like the folks who run my radio, TV, print, and/or other major asset groups.

5. "One of my own" is someone who lives and breathes my world - the world of Very Large Media Companies that Own A Boatload Of Intellectual Property Assets and have Massive Investments In Huge, Controlled Distribution Networks.

A perfectly logical and reasonable train of thought. And I'm not about to predict that AOL, Fox Interactive Media, or CBS Digital are going to fail because they've hired new blood. I am sure the folks who are now running these properties understand the depth and breadth of the shifts occurring in the Major Media Company businesses - but are they going to be empowered to do what they need to do to truly win in their respective markets?

What do I mean by that? Well, that's the focus of my next TOL (thinking out loud) post. But the synopsis goes something like this:

There are two major forms of media these days. There is Packaged Goods Media, in which "content" is produced and packaged, then sent through traditional distribution channels like cable, newsstand, mail, and even the Internet. Remember when nearly every major media mogul claimed that the Internet was simply one more media distribution channel? They were right, but only in so far as it pertains to Packaged Goods Media. Over the past few decades, massive media conglomerates have built on the deep DNA of Packaged Goods Media.

The second major form of media, is far newer, and far less established. I've come to call it Conversational Media, though I also like to call it Performance Media. This is the kind of media that has been labeled, somewhat hastily and often derisively, as "User Generated Content," "Social Media," or "Consumer Content." And while the major media companies are unparalleled when it comes to running companies that live in the Packaged Goods Media world, running major companies in the Conversational Media field require quite a different set of skills, and consideration of radically different economic and business models - models which, to be perfectly frank, conflict directly with the models which support and protect Packaged Goods Media-based companies.

It seems clear to me that the folks now charged with running the interactive assets of NBC, Viacom, Time Warner, and Newscorp - four of the largest Packaged Goods Media companies in the world - are charged not only with growing their own Conversational Media assets, but also with protecting the Packaged Goods Media assets of their bosses. And those assets are based on several heretofore unassailable pillars:

1. Ownership or control of Intellectual Property (ie content) by the corporation.

2. Ownership or control of expensive distribution networks (so that the content can reach the audience).

3. Established business models based on highly evolved approaches to advertising and subscription models - models which themselves are built upon the presumptions of #1 and #2.

Each of these three pillars - and I may stumble upon others as I keep thinking out loud - seem to be either irrelevant or significantly shifted in the world of Conversational Media. Note that I am not dismissing these pillars are they relate to Packaged Goods Media - far from it. But basing your Conversational Media business on these pillars is, frankly, entirely missing the boat.

In the next post, which I hope to complete sometime this week, I'll focus on why. I'll review the models of Packaged Goods Media and Conversational Media, highlighting the differences between them. As always, your input and criticism encouraged....

(note: I updated this on Dec. 16th, writing through it for clarification but changing no meaning/intent)

I keep a vanity Google Blog search in my RSS reader, and lately I've noticed a bunch of new splog entries - I think that's what they are - that quote my book. They always quote the same passage from my book, and then mention perfumes. Like this:

John Battelle’s new book says the interface of commerce is changing, and Google’s poised to control it. Unfortunately, I need to be careful with it as a replacement bottle is not easy to come by. NAVY Perfume by Coty DUSTING POWDER 4.

The links never resolve to anything, but this is a sample link:

http://www.mumble-4.info/perfume/?p=484

http://www.mumble-4.info/ looks to be a splog directory. But there's no content.

I'll admit I am not sure how this helps a splogger. Any insights from my smarter-than-me readership?

Please. Please. PLEASE stop using this word (WPP boss Martin Sorrell on Google yesterday). Why? I hate it. Isn't that enough? No? Ok, well, perhaps stop using because it's a cop out - a way of not dealing with a company that represents in a nutshell the need for major media companies to confront shifts in their audiences, content producers, and business models. Leaning on words like "frienemy" and patting oneself on the back for coming up with them (and please, the word is as old as the hills) is simply a delaying tactic. (NBC has taken to the word as well, ahead of WPP, if anyone is counting). I hate this word nearly as much as I hate the word "Coopetition". There's no such thing. You are competing, period. Perhaps one way you compete is to partner with them, so as to keep them close. But don't tell me a competitor is your friend.

Are here.

Two things.

1. I find the "hostess" deeply irritating, even if it's just an introduction. I'm coming to rifle through information and draw my own conclusions (ie, I'm in Internet mode), not be yammered at in vapid TV grammar.

2. Interesting timing, Yahoo doing this on Dec. 4th. The year has nearly a month left. An attempt to get a leg up on all the others?

This will be worth watching for sure. Om's post.

That's the gist of Bear Stearns' latest pronouncement, covered on Eric's blog here.

Early in my research for the book, I noticed that the practice of academic publishing in the field of search seemed to have tapered off after the late 1990s. I speculated that this was due to the privatization of the field - companies were starting to jealously guard what they discovered because there was money to be made. I worried about this on my site, and even started a project to prove the trend that I had only noticed anecdotally. But I am not an academic, and like so many streets my research went down, this one turned into a dead end.

But a faithful reader remembered my earlier posts, and provided me an interesting datapoint from a recent search related conference - the ACM Fifteenth Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. Turns out, of all the papers submitted at this conference (conferences tend to be where most academic papers are presented), ten came from Microsoft Research, ten from Yahoo (one in concert with Micrsoft), and none came from Google.

The site only lists the papers and authors, so my trusty reader source (who wishes to remain anonymous) did the legwork matching authors to companies. ACM has the final say on what papers get accepted, but I doubt they'd bong papers from Google (though Larry and Sergey's paper on PageRank was denied at first by a conference in the mid 1990s!).

Submitted as a datapoint and not an indictment, but it is interesting nonetheless. I've shot Google an email to ask if they submit papers elsewhere, though the ACM tends to be the place you see most of the interesting search research....I've also asked Gary to chime in, as he really watches this space closely...

Update: From Google PR (and a few readers in comments too!):

Here are some Google-specific papers for reference:
http://labs.google.com/papers/

And here is a more comprehensive list:
http://labs.google.com/papers.html

Giving back to the research community is extremely important to us and we make a lot of research public by publishing papers. On the more comprehensive list I count 63 papers from Googlers in 2006, alone;-)

OK, let's start from scratch. What is AskCity?


OK. Here we go: AskCity is a new local search application from Ask.com. You can find it in one of two ways: through the AskCity link on our homepage, our automatically, at the top of our standard results page, in response to your local queries.

AskCity is the fifth major search vertical we've launched this year, following Image, Maps, Blog/Feed, and Mobile search, and we're really proud of it. It stands out from the crowd because it seamlessly integrates four types of local search - business/service, events, movies, and maps - with the best local content on the Web, along with ergonomic design and features, to form an "all-in-one" resource. AskCity users won't have to bounce around to multiple sites in order to find, and take action with local information. In short, we get you from Point A to Point B faster.

Local has been around for ages. Why now?

Very simple. Local accounts for 10% of all Ask.com searches, and yet it is the vertical on our site, and in the overall search category, with the lowest user satisfaction. Our research showed that people felt that recent local products launched by our competitors focused too heavily on maps, or on "cool" fly-through graphics, and not enough on helping them dig deep into local content, or into helping them accomplish tasks. AskCity fixes that and then some.

Upgrading our local capabilities will hopefully serve our users needs better, increasing their likelihood to adopt Ask as their primary search engine in a very competitive environment.

I really like user reviews/testimonials. Will AskCity have this feature?

We found in our research that one of the biggest causes of dissatisfaction with local search is an over-promotion of and over-reliance on the map, and limiting information to mere links. It reminds me of the over-reliance on comparison shopping in product search, as opposed to product research, which is 80% of online shopping. 
 
In response to this, with AskCity, we went deep on information, incorporating over 25 companies from across the Web directly into the product. We not only feature full editorial profiles of each business, but we include 10 years worth of reviews, both from IAC companies like Citysearch and ServiceMagic, as well as non-IAC companies like Yelp, Tribune, OpenTable, RottenTomatoes, TripAdvisor, InsiderPages, JudysBook, Fandango and others. 
 
An important differentiator with AskCity is the fact that we return these reviews right within the results, just beneath the full profile of the business, service, locale, movie, etc. We even have reviews of the movie theaters themselves.
 
Speaking of which, its important to note that AskCity is much more than just an online version of the yellow pages. Yes, you can use it to find businesses. But there are four types of search in the product - business/service, events, movies, and maps/directions. And we plan to add more next year.

But can **I** post a review?

Are you some kind of review monger?

No, but I do like to hear what folks have to say...

You don't write reviews directly on OUR site, but that's not our job. Instead, when you post it on Citysearch, Yelp, InsiderPages, etc., we will crawl them and post the top ones in AskCity. We also tell you how many reviews exist on each one of those sites for that particular business, and link to them. We also have 10 years worth of editorial reviews from Citysearch, which adds a different flavor.

We’re not currently a place where you can write them yourselves. But we are crawling those other sites constantly, so as soon as you write it there, they’ll be searchable on Ask. And the bottom line for this version of AskCity is that we’ve gone further than any other site to incorporate review content directly into our results.

How long did it take to pull this together, and is this the start of Ask.com becoming the "connective tissue" of IAC?

We worked on AskCity for the better part of the year, really turning up the heat over the summer, after our initial relaunch. With Local being such an important part of search, and something we weren’t doing very well, it was an obvious place to make an effort to do something really good and really original.

I look at the connective tissue thing a bit differently, in that to date I think people have assumed that meant we’d stick a bunch of links for IAC companies all over our homepage. But that’s not what people want from search, and going back to Pathfinder I don’t think that’s a model that’s worked well. Even today, we’re being used more and more for what you might deem “portal” content, because people find it easier to use a search box than navigate a page with dozens of services on it and going through a separate experience. If they can get it, people want one, cohesive experience. So instead of looking at Ask as the glue, I look at us as a chef that is remixing IAC into our own recipe, to create new, valuable products that didn’t exist before. AskCity is a great example, but IAC has leading brands in many other categories, so you’ll see us create new recipes for things like shopping, real estate, travel, etc. We develop things with a “quality over quantity” mentality, however, so it may take a little while to get there.

I know you've answered similar questions (see Om), but how does this change the positioning of Citysearch, which was a local search destination?

It doesn’t change anything. We’re the doorway, they’re the destination, and we both have well over 20 million users per month, respectively. With AskCity, we’re incorporating more of their content directly into our results than other search engines do, and that helps people make more informed decisions more quickly. This will raise the water level for both Ask and CS at the end of the day, and that’s why the Ask and Citysearch teams worked so well together on this one.

How important a launch is this for Ask.com - what are your expectations?

Very important from the perspective of doing a lights-out job on 10% of our searches, where we formerly had a pretty high failure rate. Any time you can do that, you build your foundation for growth. That’s been a key to our success all year against a very strong headwind, with a company that has few, if any, structural advantages over our competition. Image Search has been the fastest growing part of our site on the back of critical praise and industry-leading relevance. Even our Mobile search, launched last month, has been growing like gangbusters – well beyond my expectations – with almost no real press coverage. With Local, I expect even more. The product deserves it, because it delivers.

I'll have an interview with Ask CEO later today, but for the news: (via SEL)

Danny Sullivan and I got a demo last week, which was impressive. At the level of functionality and usability the new Ask City is a dramatic improvement over the former Ask Local. It brings more horsepower but also some greater complexity for users. Ask Local was a very basic presentation of Citysearch data beside an associated map – simple and potentially effective for a business name lookup but not as helpful for a category search.

The new Ask City combines data and content from a range of IAC sites and third-party sources, including Citysearch, Ticketmaster, Evite, Trip Advisor, Yelp, InsiderPages, Judysbook and a number of other sites. It's broadly organized into four content areas: business listings (i.e., yellow pages), events, movies and maps & directions.

Gary (who is at Ask) has a nice roundup too...

AskCity.

From TechCrunch:

A new and unannouced Amazon Web Service to be called “SDS” is referenced on [a now pulled] Amazon web page discussing customer YouOS ....and is being tested with a select few Amazon partners. After a little digging, we heard that it may stand for “Simple Data Service” and will be launching sometime this year, although another source said that the name is incorrect. A representative from Amazon would not comment on whether the service exists or not.

...on the wall for these discussions/debates. To wit (via BizWeek, but reported here and here and here and loads of other places....)

Google (GOOG ) and YouTube are dangling nine-figure sums in front of major programming and network players—that is, the Time Warners, News Corp (NWS )s, and NBC Universals of the world. Google calls these monies licensing fees, according to executives who've been involved in the discussions. But some of them characterize the subtext like this: Don't sue us over copyrights. Take this (substantial) payment, and trust us to figure out how we'll all make serious money once we get advertising and revenue sharing worked out.

The offer, and YouTube's rapid rise, force the titans of a time past to make a very big decision quickly. If you're a network, you can't ignore YouTube's reach. (Some 23.5 million unique visitors went there in October.) But if you're a network, you also believe you can't give up your stuff lightly. Your copyrights, and insisting on your programming's premium value, underpin the entire business model.

The questions that matter:

- Are they exclusive to YouTube/Google, so that no other online outlets can have the content?
- Do they include any sharing of ad or future subscription revenue?
- Can the media companies pull their content for breach? And what is breach?!

And on and on...wow, this has got to be the full legal employment act for most of the media counsels around the country right now.

...worry about the MPAA.

From Techdirt:

A few months back, of course, you'll recall the big scandal over HP's use of "pretexting" to spy on various people to figure out who leaked some information from the board of directors. Pretexting is a nice way of describing a basic form of social engineering identity theft. Basically, you call up a company pretending to be someone in order to get their information. It seems pretty clear it should be illegal, and while Patricia Dunn was eventually charged with crimes over the practice, there were plenty of questions as to whether or not California laws actually made pretexting illegal. This surprised many people, who then started trying to push through such laws, which haven't really gone very far. In fact, there were similar laws that politicians had tried to put in place earlier that had failed as well.

A bunch of folks have submitted this morning that a Wired News investigation found out that the California law to make pretexting illegal had strong (nearly unanimous) support... until the MPAA killed it. Apparently, MPAA lobbyists explained to California politicians that they need to use this identity theft method to spy on file sharers.

Adam Bosworth made a lot of waves when he joined Google, given his background in highly ambitious OS and database projects at Microsoft and BEA. For a brief while, his every utterance on his personal blog caused fibrillations across the industry as we all speculated that Adam was going to run Google's answer to Microsoft Hailstorm/Vista/Windows.

But a funny thing happened. Adam stopped posting on his blog, and Google got a bit cranky when asked about the whole OS thing, and even crankier when asked about Adam's blog.

Now, Adam's re-emerged, with a new mission: Health. More from his posting, his official posting, I should say, on the Google Blog:

Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. Today it is much too difficult to get access to one's health records, for example, because of the substantial administrative obstacles people have to go through and the many places they have to go to collect it all. Compare this to financial information, which is much more available from the various institutions that help manage your financial "health." We believe our industry should help solve this problem.

As the Internet increasingly helps link communities of people, we also think there is an opportunity to connect people with similar health interests, concerns and problems. Today, people too often don't know that others like them even exist, let alone how to find them. The industry should help there, too.

These are some of the health-related problems we're thinking through at Google.

I completely agree that health information is a huge problem to be addressed, and I'm pleased as can be that someone as smart as Adam has stepped up to lead the charge at Google. But I wonder where this is really going to go. Google loves to bite off problems that are extremely hard to chew - Books comes to mind - but this one might prove undigestable for all sorts of reasons. Number one to my mind is the clusterf*ck that is information rights. Strikes me Google might attempt to address that issue first, which might clear the way for all sorts of progress, in health, certainly, but in consumer rights as well.