Subversion Has Its Place: Forget the Deal, Use the Platform

People in big media companies sometimes ask me about YouTube and the content conundrum. In short: Should they post their stuff up there, or not? My answer comes back as sort of a koan - yes, of course, do both.

Mark Cuban, who is a consistent and very vocal YouTube critic, points out a few issues as to why. I have to admit, I think he is onto something here. (OK, I don't always agree with him, but I do always read him...). In short, Cuban says, use YouTube. After all, everyone else is.

There is something almost subversive in using YouTube as a marketing or promotional venue for content that can be found on another site. If you are a big media company, why, don't just post trailers, post stuff that you create specifically for the YouTube audience. If it gets your knickers in a bunch, don't post the whole thing (unless of course you have a deal you like). If you don't (in Cuban's example - the Oscars- there was no deal), well, use YouTube as the best promotion network ever invented.

If what you post works, Google will be motivated to quickly cut a deal on your terms to share revenues with your content. It's not like Google hasn't already proven it's ready to do so. It's just that big media companies have been afraid of doing anything until they get a Deal. But, getting a Deal means hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal fees and months (if not years) of wasted time. For now, strengthen your position by using YouTube as a way to promote what you already have. Is that so wrong? I'd be interested in anyone's opinion saying it is. Because in the end, the answer lies not in some theoretical argument, but in the attention given by the folks watching and reacting to what you post. If they hate what you do, stop doing it and figure out a way to give them what works. If they appreciate it as a way to navigate to your site, why, you've won. As Mark wrote:

Rather than sending take down notices, they should be leveraging the technology and medium and making it their own.

Hear hear. YouTube subverted your model, Big Media. Time to subvert it back. YouTube is a platform. Are you using it? Or are you waiting for the Deal? Forget the deal....figure out how to use what's already there! If you get good at it, well, the Deal gets a lot easier to do.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:27 PM
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Keane to CBS

Google is losing a senior ad guy, and a real nice fellow to boot, to CBS. SEL has the news.

Here's the release, as well.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:16 PM
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What, Numbers from Google?

Yes, indeed. Google's code blog has hard numbers on the number of calls to Google's Gadgets. It's clear Google is looking to promote these tools, as allowing numbers like these to get out is not common. In fact, I'd say it's a totally unnatural act for Google. The numbers are not aggregated in one place, but Radar has done some of it for us. From that post:

* Google Map - 4,861,113
* PacMan v2.0 - 8,114,344
* DIGG - 3,228,599
* My IP - 1,063,244
* Wikipedia - 27,314,972
* Countdown - 2,076,028
* Online Second Life Friends - 1,396
* Free Sudoku Puzzles - 4,450,349
* Memory Game - 647,151

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:07 AM
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Google Adds Real Time Traffic to Maps

Been waiting for this, Yahoo has had it for some time.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:24 AM
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Do You Think Google Is Dead Serious About The Ad Biz?

Yeah, it is. This post from Searchviews talks about a survey Google is fielding to learn more about what products it might create for advertisers.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:34 PM
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A Very Bad Day for Markets. What Does It Mean?

When was the last time the market dropped 500 points? Yep, right after 9.11. Today's events - we can blame China, but I don't buy it - I sense the US markets were waiting for a reason to head for the hills. It reminded me of a few events in the tech world - 9.11, the dot com bust, the Asian flu.

Each of those events predicated major changes in the world, and certainly in my life and the lives of tons of folks in our industry. But this time, I'm not sure. It's not like we have a ton of overvalued stocks out there in the web world, like we did in the late 90s, but....I'm still uneasy about where this might go. Are you?

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:47 PM
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Microsoft Goes Vertical

...with the purchase of a vertical health search engine, Medstory.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:47 PM
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Congrats, Steven and Outside.in

Pal and amazing author Steven Johnson, a founder of Outside.in, is now a funded entrepreneur. Congrats!

Outside.in is a local blog/web aggregator - a sort of town newspaper writ large. I love the concept, but that's been true of nearly everything Steven has dreamt up...

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:17 PM
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Humor Becomes Them

Become.com is a shopping search engine (previous coverage here). They rent space in an office complex that is now owned by...wait for it....Google. Their sense of humor was not appreciated by the new landlords, apparently...

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:33 PM
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Searchmob Roundup

Another Mobile Engine to Search Amazon.com

Special Section on Image Retrieval Included in New Issue of ASIST Bulletin

Google China - Picture Gallery

Page Is Wrong About AI

SEO Benefits from Digg & Reddit Frontpage Stories

• Posted by Melanie Colburn at 2:00 PM
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Quintura Launches New UI

Remember Quintura (some previous coverage), a visual search engine? TC reports a new UI launched today sporting tag clouds of a sort.

Now, the quick and easy way to grok an engine, not that it's in any way defensible, is to do a vanity search. But alas, you can't link to search results on Quintura. Fix that, folks! It does show the tag "king" for "john battelle". Hmmm.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:23 AM
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Quigo Gets Its Moment in the NYT Sun

Nice piece on contextual ad provider Quigo in today's NYT.

What Quigo offers is transparency and control in what can often be an opaque business: advertisers pay Yahoo and Google for contextual ad placement on a wide variety of Web pages, but get little say over where those ads run or even a list of sites where they do appear.

Quigo, by contrast, gives advertisers not only the list of specific sites where their ads have appeared but also the opportunity to buy only on specific Web sites or particular pages on those sites. It also allows media company sites like ESPN.com and FoxNews.com a chance to manage their own relationships with advertisers.

Although Quigo remains a small competitor, with less than 10 percent of the contextual ad business, its growing success has apparently persuaded Google, which is accustomed to calling the shots in all aspects of its business, that it has to change the way it sells the sponsored link ads in the future.

The key here is that in fact, Google *is* changing how it sells, and is pushing site specific and other approaches through its Adsense network. While direct response advertisers may not care about this, brand advertisers do, and it's those advertisers that Google is now going after...

Also - check out what Google continues to do in video, also in the NYT

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:35 AM
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Early Reports on Panama: Encouraging

I've made no secret of my view on Yahoo's Panama project: I'm rooting for it, because for any number of good reasons, the world needs at least one more scaled search monetization option beyond AdWords/Adsense. Last week Gian Fulgoni, the founder of Comscore, pinged me with some interesting (but embargoed) news: Comscore has been tracking clickthrough and conversion in the first couple of weeks of Panama, and the numbers looked encouraging. He checked his numbers with Yahoo, and together they agreed to release the news early this morning.

The release is here...From it:

Using the week ending February 4, 2007 as a baseline for sponsored search click-through rates (i.e. total clicks on sponsored search ads divided by total searches) before the ranking model launched, comScore studied the two subsequent weeks of click-through data to evaluate the impact of the new ranking model. comScore’s data indicate that for each of the two weeks subsequent to the launch (ending February 11, 2007 and February 18, 2007), Yahoo! Sites experienced a noticeable lift in its sponsored search click-through rate. The week ending February 11 saw a 5-percent increase, while the week ending February 18 showed a 9-percent jump.

Also:

Another anticipated result of Yahoo!’s new ranking model is a shift in composition of total click volume from algorithmic to sponsored. The “sponsored click composition” metric (i.e. sponsored clicks as a percentage of total clicks) is critical in understanding Yahoo!’s success in improving both monetization and user experience. qSearch data show positive gains in this area, with sponsored clicks representing 10.6 percent and 11.1 percent of total click volume in the weeks ending February 11 and February 18, respectively. These data represent increases of 0.5 and 1.0 points in the weeks following the new ranking model launch.

Comscore asked me to comment on this, my incredibly insightful response: "While still in its early stages, any good news for Panama is good news for Yahoo! – and this early study shows plenty of good news."

Yahoo's stock response can be tracked here. And because I imagine folks will ask, no, I don't own shares, and I make a point of not trading stocks in companies that I write about.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:44 AM
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Google Earth and Search

O'Reilly's Radar has two posts on Google's integration of search into Google Earth, the first explains it, the second points to a Directions Magazine interview with the CTO of Google Earth (did you know there was a CTO of Google Earth?!).

This is the first inclusion of Google's web crawl in Google Earth. It has had Local search for a while, but that comes from a seperate index. I think that this is just the beginning of different search types to be included in Google Earth. I don't see any reason why Google wouldn't continue to add geocoded content as layers. In the future I think that we can expect blogs, Orkut networks, geo-referenced websites (time to start using microformats!), and books (it has already added a geo-oreinted view to book search - example).
What would the goal be of adding more search types? Well for one this would continue to improve the product; search is powerful. Second, search can lead to ads which may lead to monetization of Google Earth

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:58 PM
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Tim Armstrong on Future of Google Ads

Ad Age reports from a BofA chat session.

"Consumers are on 24 hours a day, you should have all your products available to them," Mr. Armstrong said. He said he couldn't "think of any companies where there isn't room left to grow with us."

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:07 AM
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Searchmob Roundup

Search Powered Predictions

New Tech Reports From MSR: Making a Blogroll "Smarter" & Social Medadata and Email, Hello SNARF

Compare "Text Stats" for Amazon.com "Search Inside the Book" Titles

Search Engine Roundtable Gets Complete Makeover

Accepted Papers: First International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

• Posted by Melanie Colburn at 1:20 PM
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Reader Marc Writes...

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:37 AM
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"Chill Out, Big Media, We're On It"

Eric Schmidt in a Reuters story today:

Google Inc., racing to head off a media industry backlash over its video Web site YouTube, will soon offer anti-piracy technologies to help all copyright holders thwart unauthorized video sharing, its chief executive said on Wednesday.

"We are definitely committed to (offering copyright protection technologies)," Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in an interview. "It is one of the company's highest priorities," he said.

"We just reviewed that (issue) about an hour ago," Schmidt told Reuters when asked what Google was doing to make anti-piracy technologies widely available to video owners. "It is going to roll out very soon ... It is not far away."

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:30 AM
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News: Google Biz Apps - No More Pretension, Google Goes for MSFT's Throat

Let's not pretend anymore, shall we? Google is looking to take Office out back and shoot it in the head. From the release:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., February 22, 2007 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG)
today introduced Google Apps Premier Edition, a new version of
Google's hosted services for communication and collaboration designed
for businesses of all sizes. Google Apps Premier Edition is available
for $50 per user account per year, and includes phone support,
additional storage, and a new set of administration and business
integration capabilities.

Google Apps TM, launched as a free service in August 2006, is a suite
of applications that includes Gmail TM webmail services, Google
Calendar TM shared calendaring, Google Talk TM instant messaging and
voice-over-IP, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable
home page on a specific domain. More than 100,000 small businesses and
hundreds of universities now use the service. Google Apps Premier
Edition now joins Google Apps Standard Edition and Google Apps
Education Edition, both of which will continue to be offered for free
to organizations.

"Procter & Gamble Global Business Services (GBS) has enrolled as a
charter enterprise customer of Google Apps, a successful consumer
product suite now available to enterprises. P&G will work closely with
Google in shaping enterprise characteristics and requirements for
these popular tools," said Laurie Heltsley, director Procter & Gamble
Global Business Services.

"So much of business now relies on people being able to communicate
and collaborate effectively," said Gregory Simpson, CTO for General
Electric Company. "GE is interested in evaluating Google Apps for the
easy access it provides to a suite of web applications, and the way
these applications can help people work together. Given its consumer
experience, Google has a natural advantage in understanding how people
interact together over the web."

Google also today announced that all editions of Google Apps now
include Google Docs & Spreadsheets TM. In addition, Google Apps now
supports Gmail for mobile on BlackBerry TM handheld devices.

Sounds like an Office killer to me. BTW, ZDnet tells us why they don't think this will dent Office. I disagree. Google can and will address the issues raised here...

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:19 AM
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Startupping

Mark Fletcher, who started Bloglines among other stuff, has created a blog to help folks start up companies. He asked me to help him with his first post. Check it out here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:22 PM
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Searchmob Roundup

Briefs #2: New Version of Hakia Released; PARC Licensing Natural Language Technology to Powerset

GPO White Paper: Web Publication Harvesting

MyFeedz.com, A Personalized Feed Reader, Officially Released on Adobe Labs Site

Interview with Czeslaw Jan "Chet" Grycz from The Internet Archive

Apart from the Horrible Name & Logo, I Like It

• Posted by Melanie Colburn at 5:05 PM
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On the Road Again

It's my kids' winter break, so of course I'm traveling for business. Will be a light week, once I return from this trip, posting will be intermittent...check out Searchmob, Gary is really ripping it up over there...

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:58 AM
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Larry Page on AI

You know I trend toward the mystic when it comes to the emergence of AI, and in the book I explored the idea of Google using brute computation and comprehensiveness to allow AI to emerge in its network. Here (Cnet video) Larry Page discusses this very idea, ending with "it's not as far off as many people think." Thanks KK.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:11 AM
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The War of Words Continues: "Mafia Shakedown"

That's what anonymous sources are calling YouTube/Google's approach (Reuters) to cutting deals with big media companies.

YouTube, owned by Google Inc., plans to introduce technology to help media companies identify pirated videos uploaded by users. But the tools are currently being offered as part of broader negotiations on licensing deals, they said.

The move contrasts with YouTube's biggest rival, News Corp.'s, popular Internet social network, MySpace, which said on Monday it would offer its own version of copyright protection services for free.

YouTube's "proposition that they will only protect copyrighted content if there's a business deal in place is unacceptable," a spokesman for Viacom Inc., owner of MTV Networks and Comedy Central, said this week.

Google counters that its technology requires cooperation with media partners, I can see their point. But I can only imagine the negotiations happening right now.

The Times has a piece on all this here - outlining the attempt to make a YouTube rival by NBC et al. From it:

It is hard not to conclude that the media establishment’s threats to start its own rival to YouTube — as well as Viacom’s yanking of its popular clips from the site — amount to posturing. What it might really be about is securing a lucrative deal from Google that would end hostilities in exchange for guaranteed cash and a healthy split of revenue from any advertising the company derives from their video content.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:02 AM
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A Brief Interview with Michael Wesch (The Creator of That Wonderful Video...)

Michael Wesch, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. If you've been reading Searchblog, then you know him as the guy behind this amazing video.

After I saw the film, I had to talk to the man who made it. Michael is a very thoughtful fellow, as one might expect, but he comes to "Web 2.0" from an entirely different perspective than your typical Valley entrepreneur (yet he seems to know more than most of us!). For more, read on....and keep in mind the Michael has agreed to answer your questions in the comments field, should any come up!

You did your fieldwork in a Melanesia, and teach at Kansas State. How did you end up making such a compelling video, one that resonates so deeply with folks like, well, those who read Searchblog?

For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization.

My friends in Papua New Guinea are experts in relationships and grasp the ways that we are all connected in much more profound ways than we do. They go so far as to suggest that their own health is dependent on strong relations with others. When they get sick they carefully examine their relations with others and try to heal those relations in order to heal their bodies.
In contrast, we tend to emphasize our independence and individuality, failing to realize just how interconnected we are with each other and the rest of the world, and disregarding the health of our relationships with others. This became clear to me when I saw a small boy in a Papua New Guinea village wearing a torn and tattered University of Nebraska sweatshirt, the only item of clothing he owned. The grim reality for me at that moment was that the same village was producing coffee which eventually found its way onto shelves in my hometown in Nebraska, and this boy may never be able to afford to drink the coffee produced in his own village.

So if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind. I’m not being overly utopian and naively saying that the Web will make this happen. In fact, if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.

So that’s some of the more personal and philosophical background behind this video. I wanted to show people how digital technology has evolved and give them a sense of where it might be going and to give some momentum to the all-important conversation about the consequences of that on our global society. I did not know it would reach so many people, but I had hoped that for those it did reach it would spark some reflection on the power of the technology they were using. Because without proper understanding and reflection, “the machine” is using us – all of us – even those that don’t have access to the machine at all.

Your video was quite sophisticated about how the web works, and the production quality was quite high as well. Where did you pick up those skills?

I made my first website in 1998 using notepad and HTML while I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. It was slow- going but I saw a tremendous potential for transforming the way we present our research. Since then I have had a passion for exploring the latest technologies and how they an be used to communicate ideas in more effective ways. I like to learn these technologies on my own through trial and error, because sometimes the errors turn out to be new uses for the tool that I might not have discovered through formal training. I’m always looking for ways to use tools in ways other than for what they were intended. The great thing about our current era is that the tools are not only easier to use (as evidenced by an anthropology professor being able to learn them in his spare time), they are also more flexible than ever, allowing for some creative uses that seem to re-invent the tools all over again.

What tools do you use out there on the web that you find useful? Are you a devotee of any of the "Web 2" tools?

One can think of the Web as a place where multiple overlapping global conversations are taking place simultaneously. To keep up with these conversations I have established my online home at Netvibes, which allows me to integrate almost all of the tools I use and organize them into different “tabs” in a way that fits with my online life. I have a tab for blogs and comments which allows me to track multiple online conversations, along with a blog search module that updates whenever somebody posts something related to the topics I am currently interested in.

To keep up with parts of the global conversation that might not have a simple RSS feed, I use feeds from social bookmarking services like Diigo and Del.icio.us. As a visual anthropologist I also need to monitor parts of the conversation taking place in photos and videos. Sites like Flickr that allow photo tagging make it easy to monitor the photos, and with new video services like Viddler, Mojiti, and Bubbleply that allow users to tag, comment, and create their own content within and on top of existing videos, it will soon be possible to be alerted the moment somebody uses a tag to describe any particular piece of an online video. On the other end of the media spectrum, it is now easier than ever to keep track of traditional paper-based journals as well, as many are now providing RSS feeds and putting the articles online. This has created tremendous potential for Cite-U-Like, a social bookmarking service for academic journals, which I use to alert me whenever somebody uses a certain tag, or when somebody with similar interests as me tags anything.

The best tools are those that are flexible enough to be used beyond that for which they were intended. The more a web service can build this kind of flexibility in, the better, as it can tap into the collective intelligence of those using the service to extend its possibilities. Netvibes has this built right in by allowing users to create their own modules. With the help of an “API maker” like Dapper, we can create almost anything we need and integrate it into Netvibes, further extending our ability to keep track of those parts of the global conversation that interests us the most.

As a university professor I have also found Facebook to be useful. I was inspired to use Facebook for teaching by something I saw while visiting George Mason University. Like many universities, they were concerned that the library stacks were rarely being accessed by students. Instead of trying to bring students to the stacks, they brought the stacks to the students, placing a small library right in the middle of the food court where students hang out. We can do the same with popular social networking tools like Facebook. Facebook is not only great for expressing your identity, sharing with friends, and planning parties, it also has all the tools necessary to create an online learning community. Students are already frequently visiting Facebook, so we can bring our class discussions to them in a place where they have already invested significant effort in building up their identity, rather than asking them to login to Blackboard or some other course management system where they feel “faceless” and out of place.

Would you be open to answering any other questions readers might have in the comments section of my site?

Sure, sounds fun.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:48 PM
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Google Buys AdScape

Of note....see TechCrunch's coverage.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:20 AM
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Google and Wikipedia

This augurs further action on the part of Google (via Digg). I can't imagine it will stand. From the original posting on Hitwise:

The percentage of Google's downstream traffic going to Wikipedia increased by 166% year over year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06). Last week Wikipedia was the #3 website in Google's downstream, after Google Image Search and MySpace.

Regardless of posturing, no business likes to send that much traffic to a third party site without some kind of value coming back. Will Wikipedia start running AdWords? Watch this space. I could imagine some kind of approach that drives revenue to the Wikimedia foundation....

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:10 AM
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Feedburner and Google

Feedburner just integrated Google's reader and personalized hompage into its stats, and my readership went up nearly 50%. Huh.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:01 AM
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Where's The Edge of the Web?

Today is a good day, because later this afternoon I'm sitting down with Tim O'Reilly, my partner on the Web 2 Summit, and spending a few hours with his team thinking out loud about themes and ideas for this year's conference (It'll be Oct. 17-19, in SF again). Last year (the third one) was amazing, but we all got the sense that Web 2 had gone mainstream. While we had a lot of innovators at that event, this year we want to focus on the edges - the place where the web has yet to become mainstream, or the places where the mainstream will once again be upended due to innovations on the margins. Our goal is to find and introduce those edges into the conversation this year. From something we wrote up to introduce the concept:

(image)

Where are the greatest opportunities, and the greatest risks? At the Web's edge - the places where the Web is just beginning to take root: the industries, geographies, and applications that have yet to be conquered by the web's wide reach.

For the past three years, the Web 2.0 Summit has explored ideas which have already begun to slip into the mainstream. This year, we'll highlight news from unusual suspects- the enthusiasts and dreamers touching the edges of spaces not yet conquered by the Web, as well as established players who are looking to expand into new and previously unimaginable realms.

How is the Web infiltrating new beachheads in areas we never thought it could--or would? What are the majors doing at the edge, at the loony "ten percent time" at Google, in the labs at MSN, IBM, etc., that might inform entirely new applications, opportunities, even threats? What are the edge startups promising to redefine the center? What are the things we wish or know the Web can do, but so far, is failing us? What are the edges in terms of policy, politics, and morality?

This framing context came to me as I considered how long its taken the web to truly swallow and morph mobile, for example. Even traditional media of all kinds - books, movies, TV - has taken longer than most of us thought. But we're also interested in new approaches to markets (S3 comes to mind), new areas of early lock in (Navteq comes to mind) or late market innovation (Flickr is a good early example of innovation in a space that seemed pretty crowded). And Tim has been thinking about this forever, as he said in this podcast:

We're really in that stage with the Internet, where the Internet has become widely deployed and we're now saying "Wow -- what can we do if we really understand the power of the Internet?" And I think we're not there yet, all the way there yet. And all this innovation is still exploring what gets better as it becomes networked.

One of the new models Tim notes is now possible, for example, is pay-as-you-drive auto insurance. That's a pretty new idea...

I've always depended on your feedback to guide the process of programming Web 2. So will you help again? Where is the web's edge for you? What might it be able to do that we have yet to accomplish? What early signs do you see? What aspects of our culture might the web never touch? Pls let me know in comments here, or in email!

PS - This is for the Summit, not this April's Expo, which is shaping up really nicely! I'm interviewing a few folks on stage for that, including Eric Schmidt and Jeff Weiner.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:17 AM
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I agree.

Fred notes Ted Stevens, Mr. "Series of Tubes!", is sponsoring a bill to ban blogs, social networks, and anything else conversational from schools and libraries. "An Idiot", Fred calls Ted. I agree.

(image)

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:13 AM
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A Profile of Sergey

From Moment. Well done.
What's interesting is that Sergey let the author talk to his parents, even visit his home. That was off limits a few years ago.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:49 AM
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Not For Sale? Build, then...

Promote the hell out of it....

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:20 PM
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Build? Buy?

Build.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:19 PM
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YellowPages.com Gets It

Last year I was asked to address an annual meeting of senior executives in the yellow pages business (I ended up doing two more after that, in fact). They were a bit concerned about Google, Yahoo, and Web 2 in general. Was their business imperiled?

Ummm....yeah, I told them. But they had the resources to address it. Among the recommendations I made to them was one I thought deeply obvious - let your readers/users on your online services rate the merchants, and use those ratings to start a conversation with your merchants that helped them turn all their businesses into conversations - I argued that with search, all business is a conversation, and only those who could engage would win in the end. They had thousands of sales reps on the street - train them to help merchants engage with audiences online.

I was struck by the response - one exec raised his hand and said, and I paraphrase - "You're asking me to tell my advertisers to invite criticism? You're asking me to actually create a platform that lets that criticism happen? Are you nuts?"

General nodding and murmurs of assent followed.

"Er...yes," I answered. "Yahoo already does. And Google does too (though not as well....). You better also, or you're...well...toast."

Well. Imagine my surprise to read this news.

YELLOWPAGES.COM ( http://www.yellowpages.com/ ), a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) , today announced it has rolled out User Reviews to its national site, enabling consumers to share opinions on local and national businesses from caterers and pool cleaners to jewelers and pet groomers.

Wow. I get the sense that you were listening, Yellowpages.com! Thanks!

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:59 PM
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How to "monetize" YouTube? Ask Sashi

Shashi Seth, that is, who just moved to YouTube, GigaOm reports.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:16 PM
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Searchmob Roundup

Fox TV Stations Using Collarity to Help With Web and Site Search

Selling Shovels to Web 2.0 Gold Miners

SingingFish Says So Long, Now Redirects to AOL Video; Truveo Redirects to SearchVideo

How to Create RSS Feeds for YouTube Clips

Yahoo! Pipes - A Community Effort

• Posted by Melanie Colburn at 2:26 PM
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Krugle Powering Yahoo Developer Search

More here...

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:44 AM
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Did You Mean Googe? Yes, In Fact, They Did.

Is the stem the L? I dunno. I think Google needs a spell checker. Oh wait, they have one?!

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:31 AM
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