John Battelle's Searchblog

This is a Big Deal. Now, I want to know: how will Flash files be ranked? Any ideas? Adobe is a major competitor to Microsoft in this front. How will Microsoft make Silverlight searchable? And will Google index all both equally? (My take: Oh yes it will. If it does not, that spells trouble in any congressional hearing...)

Google rebranded its Performics affiliate network, which it acquired as part of Doubleclick, as "Google Affiliate Network," apparently sometime over the past few days.

I say "apparently" because I can't find any actual Google press release on the subject. It was blogounced, apparenty: Announced on Performics' blog, and possibly a few key blogs, like TC and a few others, were told about it, or possibly they just noticed that all of a sudden, Google had a page for the "Google Affiliate Network." Look, I love blogs, but we're not that good.

Interestingly, Danny at SEL has not weighed in. He'd be the first one I'd want to hear from if there was really news, given his deep understanding of the search-driven affiliate marketplace, which quite honestly is fascinating, but a saddled with the kind of kharmic weirdness often associated with the domain industry. (They are kissing cousins, in a way...)

Anyway, there's probably no official Google release because, as far as I can tell, there's nothing to talk about. This is a very quiet trial balloon. There's not word one about anything that might actually change in the Performics blog post. Well, OK, there's this:

Within the next couple of weeks you will see some exciting changes to the user interface reflecting the new brand.

To call this a new coat of paint would be to overstate the facts.

Now, were it to decide it wanted to, could Google change the affiliate marketplace in ways untold? Heck yes, it could. Is it? Nope. Not yet anyway.

Kevin Kelly makes the point, riffing on Chris's ideas about the "end of theory."

MediaWeek reports:

After taking several days to digest the news, the digital media world has reached the conclusion that the launch of Google’s new media planning product isn’t likely to bring upheaval to the Web metrics business. And it probably doesn’t represent the feared first step towards total advertising—and ultimately world—domination by the search giant either.....

“They need to add so many things, it’s not even a consideration at this point,” said David Smith, CEO, Mediasmith, who pointed out that Ad Planner lacks deep demographic data and a reach/frequency function. “It’s absolutely not ready for prime time.”

True for now, but don't get comfy thinking that version 1 of this product is going to be the last version...knowing David, I bet he's watching this pretty closely.

Update: Yep, David sure is paying attention, here's his story on Ad Planner in today's Mediapost.

From Dare's blog, a posit that folks are leaving Google for Microsoft, driven by his anecdotal observations and blog post from a guy named Sergey Solyanik:

So why did I leave?

There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement. There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid. I will not write about these things here because they are immaterial. I did not leave because of them. No company has achieved the status of the perfect workplace, and no one ever will.

I left because Microsoft turned out to be the right place for me.

First, I love multiple aspects of the software development process. I like engineering, but I love the business aspects no less. I can't write code for the sake of the technology alone - I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work.

Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!

Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them.

If you have the time, and the will, read this from Adam at Fortune. It's one Yahoo employee's rant about the ongoing turmoil...and it's really, really dark humor. Really, really dark.

As someone who has, in a minor key, been through really tough times as the head of an organization that is failing, I really empathize with the leaders at Yahoo. But I completely empathize with the employees, who, in a market that is, honestly, pretty shitty, can only hold on and try to laugh a little. From the note:

As for the Google deal, HOORRAY! Now, you might be thinking that we employees - particularly those in Search - who have spent most of our waking hours trying to do battle with Google might in some way be disappointed that we are now getting into bed with the enemy. Au contraire! We love it! Nothing indicates a job well done better than outsourcing your own job to the competition. Am I right, or am I right?

Google knows it has distribution. Distribution is the key to the old school method of media success. Think cable: We have a monopoly on getting programming into homes, so you have to go through us! Therefore, we make shitloads of money. Want more examples? OK: Newspapers. And magazines. And movies. And...well, just about every packaged goods media model on earth.

Well, on the web, distribution is a sort of different deal. Some will argue it's key, others will say search has obviated the economics of distribution.

I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Sure, if you have great content, search and the force of many will find it, and eventually you will end up with a Boing Boing, or an Ask a Ninja, or a Dooce or a Mashable.

But if you are from Old Hollywood, you don't want to wait for the force of many to find and validate you. Instead, you want to push your product, which you presume, because you are a beknighted Force of Hollywood, that the masses will want to see. (Gee, Mike Myers, how's that working out for you?)

So what to do?

Well, you could pay someone for distribution - Yahoo, Myspace, and AOL come to mind. Or...you could strike a deal with Google, and distribute your show through the Adsense network, which has wicked huge reach.

Yep, you read that right. I've written about this before, but the deal written up in the NYT today is probably the most high profile example yet. From the piece:

Google is experimenting with a new method of distributing original material on the Web, and some Hollywood film financiers are betting millions that the company will succeed.
In September, Seth MacFarlane, creator of “Family Guy” on television, will unveil a carefully guarded new project called “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy.” Unlike “Family Guy,” which is broadcast on Fox, this animation series will appear exclusively on the Internet.
The innovative part involves the distribution plan. Google will syndicate the program using its AdSense advertising system to thousands of Web sites that are predetermined to be gathering spots for Mr. MacFarlane’s target audience, typically young men. Instead of placing a static ad on a Web page, Google will place a “Cavalcade” video clip.

My prediction, and I could be entirely wrong here: This will fail utterly. Why do I predict this? Two reasons. One, context is everything. Until Google acts like a publisher, and works with sites specifically to place advertising that is relevant to them and integrated, Adsense is an afterthought to those sites. And second, the web is not organized top down. It's organized bottoms up. Distribution is not something you use to push shit AT people, it's something that happens when people organize TOWARD something. That's the whole point of the web, ain't it?

Now, the new "Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy" show could work no matter what, if it's good. If it's good, folks will want it, and they'll click on the Google ads, as well as find it through the collective hivemind that is always created in real time around good stuff. Folks will claim the Google experiment was a hit, and start to mimic it.

But it's NEVER about distribution on the Web. It's ALWAYS about quality. The next time Google tries this, if they are not working with a hit, it will fail.

Nifty toy or serious play? You never know with Google. Google has introduced the "Google Media Center":

a free Windows-only software that lets you stream photos, videos and music from the computer on to your TV.

Huh.

(A trail on Mt. Tam)

(Cross posted from the FM blog)
In the past few years, the weekend has taken on a new meaning for me. In short, it's now defined by work. The weekend is when I catch up on work I can't get done during the week, in particular work that requires long form thinking, the kind of thinking that powers drafting considered memos and strategy documents, even posting to this or other blogs.

It's also a time to clear emails and burnish out the odd To Do item that never quite Got Done during the week.

So lately I've been working about three to five hours a day on Saturday, and even more on Sunday, where I work a couple hours in the early morning, and then a shift of four hours or more at night. I check my mail constantly, either while at my desk or on my Blackberry while with my family.

In an odd and most likely not very healthy way, the weekends have become two more workdays, albeit workdays that have a slower pace and breaks here and there for French Toast making, family hikes, and date nights with my wife.

And guess what? It's not working out very well. Turns out that constantly having your mind in work mode can ruin a good session of French toasting. And getting an email bearing potentially bad news while on a date with your wife can really mess with your ability to be the gentleman she deserves you to be.

So I've decided to do something about it. I don't know if it's going to work, but it is off to a good start. Working with my senior team, we've created a weekend program we call "Take 48." The rules are simple, really. The three senior leaders of the company - the CEO, the COO, and the Publisher/CRO - have agreed to not send a single email to any member of the FM team from 6 PM on Friday to 6 PM Sunday. It's hard for us to do - we're used to managing by email, and particularly used to getting "caught up" in the weekend down time.

But there's nothing in the rules saying we can't DO email over the weekend, just that we can't SEND it during the weekend. If the servers blow up in Chicago, well, someone can pick up the phone, after all.

We tried it out last weekend, and by golly, it really worked. Emails from senior staff usually creates orders of magnitudes more email from other staff members, and it folds into itself. But last weekend, it felt as if FM, as an institution, was taking time to breathe, to contemplate, to relax and feed itself. Maybe even take a nice hike on Mt. Tam.

Here's to more of that, not only at FM, but in every organization running hard at a Very Big Goal.

I'm not saying that we need to stop working, even if it means working on the weekend. But perhaps weekends should be sacred when it comes to intruding in the lives of others. Do your work, if you must, but when it comes to asking others to do your work with you, Take 48.

Increasingly, when I talk to folks in the industry, and they ask me my view on search, I say the above. In search, it's over, Google wins. WIth Yahoo flailing, and Microsoft hiding in the weeds, search is slouching toward a natural monopoly. We may as well call it. Sure, there are really interesting startups. But....nothing that interesting.

So now what? Well, the situation is ripe for disruption, ain't it? It was during a terrible recession that Google made its name (2001-3). What might be next?

I miss the luxury of thinking hard about ideas, as we got to when editing Wired, or I got to when writing The Search. This piece reminded me of those glorious times. Of course, Kevin has made an entire career of it.

I noticed an interesting comment on my previous post on the launch of Google's AdPlanner, from Gian Fulgoni, Founder and Chairman of Comscore, a company that has gotten hammered in the aftermath of Google's launch. I asked if he'd elaborate, and here's the interview:

In your comment on the Searchblog post noting Google's Ad Planner, you noted discrepancies between publisher's server logs and Google's numbers. Can you say more? Why is this?

I suspect the main reason is that traffic numbers from server log data are inflated because of cookie deletion whereas panel metrics don't rely on cookies and so aren't affected by cookie deletion. As an example, Google Ad Planner shows mlb.com as having 9 million UVs in a month. comScore shows mlb.com as having 11.9 million UVs and mlb.com themselves have claimed they get 19 million UVs based on their server logs.
Separately, I've noted comments on the blogosphere from several site operators saying that their Google Analytic UVs are twice as high as their Google Trends UV numbers.

Are you concerned about Google's new product? What are you telling your apparently startled investors?

We think that Google's products and ours are designed for very different purposes. Theirs appear to represent a point solution aimed primarily at driving ad dollars to Google sites or sites in the Google Ad Network. In contrast, comScore's products are designed to be used for media planning and analysis on a Web wide basis. We believe that ad agencies, advertisers and publishers (especially any publisher that competes with Google) will continue to insist on the use of objective, third party sources of data such as comScore's. Nobody wants to see the fox guarding the chicken coop.

comScore offers a broad portfolio of solutions for media planning and analysis that include:
§ Home vs. work vs. university
§ Dictionary hierarchy of multiple levels: property, channel,
subchannel, etc.
§ Ad network view, custom views for companies that represent a
collection of sites.
§ Measurement of duration or time spent
§ Measurement of sessions
§ Measurement of day part
§ Segmentation by heavy, medium and light users
§ Segmentation by content consumption: finance, sports, health,
entertainment, etc.
§ Segmentation by Prism code, PersonicX code, customized customer
segments
§ Source / loss
§ URL level detail
§ Custom entities on the fly
§ Buying power index
§ Ad Impressions
§ Reach / Frequency
§ Advertising effectiveness, including branding, latency and offline
impacts
§ Video Metrix - reporting of online video consumption

Do you trust Google as an arbiter of where ad planners should put their money? If so, why? If not, why not?

My personal belief is that Google hasn't built these products with the objective of entering the market research industry and being an "independent arbiter" of where ad planners should put their money. Rather, they appear to have built tools that help facilitate the movement of display ad dollars to Google and its Ad Network. Nothing wrong with that if you're in the business of selling advertising. But, can you be that and be an arbiter at the same time? Perhaps Sarah Fay, CEO of Aegis North America, put it best when she said: "For an advertiser, the last thing you want to do is to have your adviser be the same person you are spending your money with."

From the Journal:

Yahoo Inc. announced plans to centralize is product development to drive more global revenue as it tries to beat back concerns about its ability to compete as an independent company.

The new blueprint shifts more responsibility to two senior executives who will lead two newly created groups. Ash Patel, a longtime company executive who has been overseeing Yahoo's efforts to open up its sites to third-party developers, will lead an Audience Products Division overseeing the development of new products. Hilary Schneider, who currently oversees the company's sales operations and publisher network, will be in charge of activities for the U.S....

More when I get out of meetings...

Two notable search startups had news in the past day:

Kosmix launched horizontal topics, quietly at first, then TC caught on.

And SearchMe is mining new visual search approaches. Marketing Pilgrim has more.

Google Ad Planner has its own secret sauce, Danny finds. And that is troubling, at least in some ways. Where's the data coming from, asks Danny, and then TC. So far, no answers. That's not going to stand.

From Mike:

We’ve got multiple sources at both Yahoo and Microsoft telling us that official talks are back on between the two companies. But we’re hearing something different than CNET - the talks are about a full buyout again, not a sweetened search-only deal.

Seems everyone today is talking about why Google News isn't growing as fast as most other news sites. I think the answer is easy: There's no business model. If Google were making money off Google News, I bet it'd be growing pretty darn fast. Simple. When something adds value, value get added back to it.

I've long thought that Google News should have a business model. But that would mean Google act like a publisher.....

Is it what people say they value publicly, or what they search for in the privacy of their home? Man, that's a tricky one.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

I don't know how long ago it was I begged Google to do a version of Comscore that publishers actually could agree with. (Actually, thanks to site search, here's my plea). Anyway, here's a Marketwatch/WSJ story that claims it's on the way:

Google Inc., the dominant player in Internet searches, is planning to unveil a new service that measures Internet usage utilizing data from Web servers, the Wall Street Journal reported late Monday, citing sources who have been briefed on the plan. The new tool, which can be launched as early as Tuesday, is intended to help advertisers find the best places to buy online ads by showing them the Web sites where their target audiences visit, the newspaper said.

Such a tool must be neutral and not bias advertisers toward buying on Google properties or those that have Google ads, which of course is going to be a perceived bias in any case. Such is the price of being Very Big.

Update: Google Ad Planner announced today. Not sure if this is really a Comscore killer. Sounds like a tool to help folks buy Google Ads to me.

OTOH, the markets are punishing Comscore stock...

Members of Congress yesterday announced another hearing into the Google-Yahoo deal, as well as a deal between NebuAd and Charter that tracks searches at the ISP level. Watch this space. There are five hearings so far plus a Justice department inquiry. From Ad Age:

This week a House Small Business Committee panel is to hold a hearing on "the impact of online advertising on small firms," which is supposed to highlight the benefits and challenges on small business' use of advertising techniques. Additionally, the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel, the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection panel, and the Senate Commerce Committee have announced plans for separate hearings. While the Judiciary Committee's examination is only about Google/Yahoo, the rest are broader.

"There are increasing concerns about data collection for online advertising practices across the popular websites and search engines, the sharing of information and the ability of users to control their personal information," an aide to U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said regarding the Senate Commerce Committee hearing.

This feature was a long time coming. From Mashable:

Google has announced a new feature of Google Maps called MapMaker, which allows anyone with a Google account (therefore, everyone) to edit Google Maps Google Maps . We’re not talking editing your or your friends’ version; we’re talking about the real thing. You can now edit and moderate roads, lakes, parks, POIs, cities and other local features as you please.

For now the feature, called MapMaker, is limited to some pretty odd choices: Antigua & Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Trinidad & Tobago. Why? According to Google: "The existing mapping data for these countries could benefit tremendously from local knowledge and expertise that you and other map makers posses, and we're excited to see how you put that to use." Google's primary example: Mapping Myanmar for relief efforts, an application that Google already executed.

That's very, very cool, of course, but if you think Google is doing this entirely out of the goodness of its heart, then you must also think Google AdWords is a philanthropy effort. As with nearly everything Google does, there's always a reason that sounds like a gift to the world, and a reason it makes sense that's a gift to Google. Allow me to bold the word in the Google announcement that might be the latter:

Map Maker allows you and your peers to add, edit and moderate most features you see on maps including roads, lakes, parks, points of interest, businesses, cities and localities. You will be able to trace many of these features using satellite images; as you trace, maps are immediately updated.

Anywho. I think this is a great new feature, and if it eventually allows for crowdsourced local AdWords, so much the better!

Brad Garlinghouse, author of the Peanut Butter memo, is out. So is head of search Vish Makhijani. And others. Who will be left? What a mess. Sad, sad mess. Word is that another re-org is on the way. Has to be, because there's no one left to run it, so it all needs to report to one place. Yahoo is very close to being a distressed property, it feels like. Or is it already?

From MediaPost:

Text messaging, blogging and social networking have reached critical mass, with more than half of adults now relying on at least one of these so-called Web 2.0 platforms for communicating with friends, family, or colleagues on a regular basis, finds the latest installment of an ongoing tracking study from Interpublic's Universal McCann unit. The research, which comes from UM's ambitious "Media in Mind" study, one of the first to show that things like blogging were becoming a meaningful personal communications platform several years ago, now finds that among digital media's bleeding edge - adults 18-34 - social media now is the dominant form of personal communication media, with 85% of this influential demographic group relying on one or more Web 2.0 platforms to stay in touch with others.

Stewart and Caterina are leaving Yahoo. I also have heard about at least one other high level departure, but I cannot report that yet. Scores of lower level folks are leaving, most too junior to merit reporting, but very significant anyway. If Yahoo's board is not in emergency session right now, coming up with a plan to fix this, I'd be amazed.

That's the title of my latest post for Amex's Open Forum Blog. From it:

In my experience starting businesses, and in my study of other businesses that have succeeded wildly (like Apple, Google, or eBay), every great business is founded in a thesis, a statement of what should be true. It’s then the business’s job to go prove that thesis - in essence, the business becomes the argument that proves the thesis.

Read the rest and tell me what you think at the Amex blog...

Reader Jeremy Writes: [Yahoo] couldn't get off the crack pipe...the Paid Inclusion model. It failed *everywhere*. [It] still can't get off the crack.

Continue reading "Reader Jeremy Writes..." »

Earlier I posted about Mike Homer and his fight with CJD, a brain wasting disease. Yesterday the fight widened with the announcement of a YouTube channel in conjunction with UCSF, and more. Om has a nice writeup here. From it:

UCSF along with YouTube have launched a comprehensive Internet video channel dedicated to the improved understanding of incurable neurodegenerative brain diseases. The YouTube channel is part of an overall Internet campaign that will help UCSF’s researchers and clinicians reach out to a global audience.

It was inspired by the “Fight for Mike,” an initiative by Silicon Valley leaders to save the life of former Apple/Netscape marketing ace Mike Homer, who was diagnosed last spring with CJD and is being treated at UCSF. Since June 2007, the Fight for Mike has raised more than $7 million for CJD research at UCSF. Maybe you want to join hands and help support the cause.

Probably not surprising to readers of this site (ars):

Google managed to spank the rest of the mobile search world during the first quarter of 2008, according to data from Nielsen Mobile. The search giant managed to capture 61 percent of the mobile search market in the first four months of the year, with Yahoo! taking a very distant second at 18 percent. MSN sat at third place with a measly 5 percent.

The main reason: the iphone.

This is a major loss. I am a big Jeff Weiner fan. As Om said, Ouch. Clearly I missed this, and Jeremy's exit as well.
Wow, those were two of the guys I really respected there. There are others, of course, but from what I can tell, they are on the way out too.

Wow. What a tragedy.

....and it will take me some time to get my head back to Real Time. Bonnaroo was, simply, amazing. I never thought I'd want to go to a Metallica concert. As I said on Twitter: Where else can you walk around and in one hour see the likes of Cat Power, BB King, !!!, Phil Lesh, Jackie Green, My Morning Jacket. And to that I'd add Pearl Jam, Chris Rock, the Raconteurs (wow...), Iron & Wine...the amount of music I took in is overwhelming. I feel like a massive pipe cleaner has been taken to my head.

Meanwhile, while I was gone, Yahoo did the deed with Google.

Mark it, folks. We'll be talking about this again and again, as either the beginning of something at Yahoo, or the end. I'm going to wager it's the end. I'm hoping to be wrong. But this is too little, too late. And no amount of spin will change that.

Oh, and by the way, the whole "This isn't about Microsoft" BS is so, well, BS.

Today marks the start of Bonnaroo, and like last year, that's where I'll be. Posting may be light, or it may be torrid. I have no idea. I am excited that this time, I go as a partner with the folks behind Bonnaroo, on the Outside Lands festival in August.

I will admit, I was entirely biased upon reading this story from Nick Carr, who has a knack for writing pieces that get a lot of attention by baiting his hook with contrarian link chum. Heck, he's really good at it, and I have a lot of respect for Nick. So I'll take the bait.

His piece starts by conjuring HAL, the famous AI which manipulates humans, then makes his case by citing his own "feeling" that Google has changed his attention span to somehow prove that search and web browsing in general is making us stupid.

Balderdash. What Carr is really saying is this: People are not reading long narrative anymore, and that makes me and my pals sad. So let's blame the Internet!

Sounds an awful lot like the complaints we heard about TV making us stupid. Did TV make us stupid? I dunno, ask Steven Johnson. I bet he has an opinion on this piece as well.

Carr writes: "Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure."

So because Nick hasn't come up with a singular thesis as to what the "Net's intellectual ethic" is, we must declare it's making us stupid, eh?

Huh. He goes on to claim that Google is, in essence, an industrial style factory driven by a philosophy that is mechanizing our collective intellect much like factory automation mechanized our collective workforce - in short, Google is turn our minds into nothing more than collective cogs in some borg like hive mind. We're fucked, and it's all Google's fault.

Puuuuuuuhhhhleezzze.

Here's another quote: "The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."

Right. And that's why Google encourages its workers to spend 20% of their time on passion projects. OK.

His conclusion: "As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."

Good lord. Somehow Carr seems to presume that there's simply nothing valuable occurring in our minds when we engage with the extraordinary new medium of the web. Because we're starting to think in different ways, it must be bad. Right? Carr may believe that search and the Internet make us stupid, but I will counter his personal, anecdote-driven conclusions with one of my own: when I am deep in search for knowledge on the web, jumping from link to link, reading deeply in one moment, skimming hundreds of links the next, when I am pulling back to formulate and reformulate queries and devouring new connections as quickly as Google and the Web can serve them up, when I am performing bricolage in real time over the course of hours, I am "feeling" my brain light up, I and "feeling" like I'm getting smarter. A lot smarter, and in a way that only a human can be smarter.

And I have a feeling I'm not alone. What do you guys think?

Should be a light early week of posting as we're hosting the CM Summit today and Tuesday. FM will have plenty of news today, I'll update here when it breaks. Others will have news as well, will do the same.

Update: It's late, the releases hit the wire in the morning, but FM announced today we signed all sorts of new authors, including Kanye West, Steven Covey, Harry McCracken, DevShed, Anandtech, and tons more, as well as a new CM Toolbox measurement platform. Links when the releases go live....

Here's the release on the CM Toolbox.
Here's the release on FM working with Harry McCracken
And here's the release on FM working with LMCD, partner to Anandtech among several other great sites.

In all, FM has added 28mm uniques and 131mm pageviews to its stable in the past two months.

Well, the no. 1 image search for my name pretty much sums it up. Link.

Google just opened a data center in Lenoir, NC (no Google ads on the home page, must fix that guys). The Governor, the County Commish, the Mayor, and hundreds of citizens showed up for a ribbon cutting and a BBQ. What I could find on the county was that it had a lot of lore about ghosts, and the local paper covered Nascar pretty well. Now, that's pretty much Every County, USA (and as someone who ditched school for a semester to drive around the country, I love Lenoir already). So why did Google choose THIS parish? Hmmm?

PS - the main street looks just like the set of that town in Back to the Future, don't it?

Reminds me of vague memories of towns that lobbied to have the railroads run through them. Check out this thread, where locals argue over whether or not local government offered too many tax incentives/breaks to lure Google to the county...

Here's a quick poll: When composing something on your computer, do you use your word processor's spell checker, or do you just keep the web up in the background, and use search to check the proper spelling of a word?

I realized today, as I was working on a presentation offline (I was on a plane), that I hadn't used Microsoft Word's spell checker for more than a year. I don't trust it nearly as much as I trust the collective intelligence of search. The Word spell checker is a top down approach to spelling, and search is a bottoms up. Even when Word tells me, via a red underlining, that I've spelled a word wrong, I'll cut and paste that misspelled word into the Google toolbar, rather than ask Word's spellchecker for a reference. That alone I bet means a significant portion of searches lost by Microsoft to Google. I know Microsoft is working on integrating Live search into its Office applications, but since I'm offline at the moment I can't check that. No matter what, the UI has to be easier than highlight, cut, paste, return, which is what I do now. I've always got the search bar in the background close to whatever work I'm doing. It's just not Microsoft's toolbar.

In short, Google is stealing my spelling searches from Microsoft Word (and Powerpoint as well). Interesting. Never thought of it that way before. Though of course it's consistent with the idea of work that used to be confined to apps and single machines migrating to the cloud.

So, how do you spellcheck?

Danny argues that Google is unfairly dominating the Firefox toolbar. I think he's right. Microsoft is not even among the choices, and Google is the default. Google, of course, represents the majority of Mozilla's revenues (Mozilla is the company behind Firefox).

Danny's most interesting point is how hard Google fought to keep Microsoft from making Live search the default in Internet Explorer. But Google's actions with Firefox are making it increasingly likely Microsoft will act to change that stance. That's what I meant when I said Microsoft is "lying in the weeds" a few months ago.

Heading to NYC - spending the weekend there before our CM Summit, which is officially sold out. Really looking forward to it!

Odd that Google would be anonymous in public documents regarding eBay and the Australia market. No matter, the anonymity was outed, and now it just looks like the company, which competes directly with eBay's PayPal via its Checkout, is being sneaky.

This can only further drive eBay, one of Google's largest customers, into the arms of Yahoo and Microsoft.

Marketing exec Ian Schafer has gotten folks talking (in particular, over at Mashable) about his move to sell his Twitter background on eBay. This is clearly an experiment, as much as I like following Ian on Twitter, I doubt his pageviews support anything other than a super endemic, non scalable campaign. That said, it got me thinking, how might Twitter make money? It's got the attention of a lot of people. But it's also got the Facebook problem - millions of hours of attention, fractured in millions of ways. Not exactly the one to many model so loved by traditional approaches to marketing. I pinged Evan Williams and he said his focus was not on figuring out this problem at the moment (and I am certain that is the right answer - after all, he's got other oceans to boil).

For me, one answer to the Facebook problem was the launch of the platform. That provided cool applications and services that started to feel like publications - Watercooler, Graffiti, etc. And Twitter has so much potential. Perhaps it should launch a platform as well....

Those of you who read this site regularly know I've talked about how much I love Bonnaroo, and how excited I am that the producers of that event (which, yes, I am going to again next week) are producing Outside Lands here in my backyard. I mean, it's only the first time in history that a band is playing at night (three days and nights!) in Golden Gate Park, and oh, by the way, it's Radiohead. And Wilco. And Beck. And Broken Social Scene. And Jackie Greene. And Rodrigo Y Gabriela and Tom Petty and Jack Johnson and Steve Winwood and Primus and Ben Harper and Steel Pulse and ....anyway.

Well, more coolness. My company, FM, has struck a deal with the producers of Outside Lands. We are partnering to create a collective, crowdsourced media campfire of sorts before, during, and after the festival. It's called CrowdFire, and it's going to be very, very cool. More when we're ready to talk more about it, but it's a merging of the human, physical energy of a music festival with the human, virtual energy of conversational media. I'm really stoked to be working with these guys, they are total princes. When work = fun, life is good.

It happens - the phenomenon of similar ideas all hatching at the same time. The latest seems to be synchronous web experiences. I've heard about three or four of them in the past few weeks, the latest being Microsoft's Search Together. From a page explaining the research project:

Search, of course, has become ubiquitous for enabling users to find Web content, but existing search engines have been designed for use by an individual. Search interfaces don’t support collaborative search. Collaborating on search generally means one person at a keyboard while another makes suggestions, or two people using instant messaging or a phone while each is viewing a Web browser. It can work, but it’s not optimal.

While using SearchTogether, though, users can collaborate locally or at different locations, working in tandem or at different times.

Cool idea, but you have to use all Windows and MSFT stuff (Messenger, Live ID, etc) to make it work.

Om reports:

YouTube’s head of monetization, Shashi Seth, has now left the company to become the chief revenue officer of Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup Cooliris.

Om continues:

Despite being the largest video-sharing web site, YouTube is still finding it hard to make money. My sources say that YouTube made around $80 million in 2007, a number that could grow by more than 50 percent this year to around $125 million. A Bear Stearns report estimated YouTube revenues at around $90 million for 2008. I’m not sure if $120 million-$125 million is going to make Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has been publicly talking about YouTube and its money-making potential, happy.

What stands between YouTube and money is the lawsuit by Viacom, as it makes owners of legitimate content a tad nervous.

It's true that the Viacom suit is a major issue. But I don't think it's the only one. I think looming even larger is the culture inside Google, one that does not support traditional approaches to supporting brand marketing. In other words, YouTube is a very large branded media play inside a massive engineering/direct response machine. YouTube is a major conversational media platform. But unlike MySpace, which reports into a media culture at Newscorp (Rupert Murdoch made this point at D last week), YouTube reports into a technology culture. I think it makes a difference.

The company Shashi is going to looks like a competitor to Microsoft's Photosynth and Silverlight (not directly, but it looks like a market implementation of those two technologies). It just announced a deal with YouTube. Interesting!

BB notes:

Swedish ethnologist Erik Ottoson of Uppsala University studies how people browse at flea markets, wander through malls, window shop, and even dumpster-dive, to understand the psychology of "searching." Specifically, Ottoson focuses on "serendipitous searching," what he defines as "open browsing for anything that awakens the person's interest."

Link

As Barry Diller (I think) said at D last week - "Oh Icahn, he's just looking to make himself a few hundred million dollars." From the Journal:

"It's no longer a mystery to me why Microsoft's offer isn't around," he said. "How can Yahoo keep saying they're willing to negotiate and sell the company on the one hand, while at the same time they're completely sabotaging the process without telling anyone."

Mr. Icahn said he is convinced that executives of Microsoft, which withdrew its takeover offer last month for Yahoo, no longer trust Mr. Yang and won't make a new bid -- as Mr. Icahn and many investors are hoping for -- unless Mr. Yang and the company's board are ousted.

"I'm very cynical about many of the boards and CEO's in this country, but even I am amazed at the lengths that the Jerry Yang and the board went to entrench themselves in this situation," Mr. Icahn said.

Two headlines grabbed my attention this morning, both in the "Dog Bites Man" category, but reassuring for those of us in the digital media space:

AP: Digital media growing fast, study says

and VNU: Web advertising to 'defy' economic crisis

Wikia launches features on its poorly reviewed but theoretically interesting search engine that allow folks to hack the results and share them with everyone. More at Cnet. For now, this is pretty much a test, as it's only on about 30 million results.

Microsoft announced this today:

Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has won a key distribution deal with HP, the world’s largest PC manufacturer, to install a Live Search-enabled toolbar on all HP consumer PCs planned to ship in the United States and Canada, beginning in January 2009. As part of this deal, the default search engine setting in the browser on all HP consumer PCs will also be set to Microsoft Live Search.

I think this is a very big deal for Live search. It's the only way to win share. Google has owned Dell and Firefox, this is a way to fight back. I am sure it cost a pretty penny....

As you might recall, I am writing over at the American Express Open Forum Blog as part of a sponsorship. Here's my latest post, on becoming a web conversationalist.