John Battelle's Searchblog

I'm a seven, I think. Danny was too, but now, for some reason, he's a six. Mike's an eight. Google, natch, is a Ten (one of only two that Amit could find).

PageRank is the unofficial, and official, and semi-official, arbiter of value on the web.

And it's just deeply broken - not because there isn't data that informs all of our collective rank. But because we have no idea what that data really is, or how it's combined to determine value in the Google economy.

So please, Google, either give us more granularity, or just go dark and don't tell us anything.

Oh, and please, Larry Page, just as a tenth anniversary present, can you pretty please make BackRub for real? I'd really love to have it. So would a lot of others, I suspect.

Why I love Kevin's work, part umpty billion.

Elon Musk will be at Web 2 this year, and his SpaceX (one of three companies he's started since leaving PayPal, including Tesla and SolarCity) today had its first successful launch. More at BoingBoing Gadgets....

It may seem like a long way off, but the Web 2 Summit is in less than six weeks - right after the general election. And this year's Launch Pad, where we honor six of the best companies in the space, will close its application process this Friday. (The original deadline was Weds, but it makes sense to give folks till the end of the week.)

Launch Pad is a bit different this year, and I've heard anecdotally that folks are not sure if they should be submitting their companies because A/ They think they have to be looking for funding or B/ their companies don't match what we're looking for in terms of industry. So to clarify:

A/ Launch Pad companies are reviewed and judged by leadings VCs (Khosla Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, NEA, Omidyar Network, Panorama Capital, and Sequoia Capital), but there is no requirement of a "funding need." The goal is to honor six great private companies, not six great private companies who need funding.

B/ We are indeed looking for companies in a particular sector, one we call "Web Meets World." It's a pretty broad category, but it falls into two rough buckets:

1. Companies working in alternative energies, social entreprenuerialism, microfinance, developing economies, political action, renewable technologies, and the like (we'll be particularly interested in where these companies display significant cross over with the web, of course, but this will not be required.)
2. Companies addressing where the Web literally meets the world: cloud computing-enabled mobility, mapping and geolocation, sensor networks - anything where the Web and the real world intersect.

We've already got a pretty big group of companies who have applied, but I'm eager to have as many as possible join the process. There is no fee to enter, the Launch Pad is sponsored by VCs involved in the program. So if you're at a company working at the intersection of the Web and the World, please apply! The link to do so is right here. I look forward to seeing you at the conference, it's really shaping up to be the best in our five year history (more on the program and speakers here).

(image credit Marin IJ)
I've just posted my latest missive on the American Express Open Forum blog, where I Think Out Loud about my local hardware business, which just might be forced out of business. It's titled "Think Local, Act Conversational - It Just Might Save Your Business." From it:

Corbet’s Hardware is my neighborhood hardware store, it’s something of a local legend. Let’s see what happens when I put it into Google (I omitted the apostrophe, as most folks do).

Interesting. First up is a link from “zinsser.com”, which appears to be some kind of a shellac company (no, really, a company that makes shellac). Corbet’s probably carries their products - the Zinsser site lists its distributors - but man, what on earth is that doing being first? Clearly, Corbet’s has not exactly joined the conversation economy quite yet.

Put another way, the very first link for Corbet’s is not Corbet’s own website (the store does not seem to have one), it’s some random supplier of Corbet’s. This is not a good thing.

Second up is a very nice profile of Corbet’s in the local paper. Third is another link from the paper about the store moving. A credit to the store, for sure. But it’s not really very conversational (for more on why I think “conversational” is so important, read this).

Fourth is a link from “ziphip.com”, which looks like some kind of listings directory (or more cynically, an Adsense honeypot). Nothing really useful for a potential customer of Corbet’s - nothing conversational or particularly trustworthy.....

....But imagine, if you would, that Corbet’s had a blog, and used that blog to talk about its business. The folks at Corbet’s could post about weekly specials, tips on home improvement, best approaches to pest control, and all the stuff that brings customers into the store. Oh, and by the way, it could leverage all its built in good will to drive its customers toward the Larkspur City Council, who, in the end, will determine whether or not Corbet’s will continue as a business - if Corbet’s doesn’t get that zoning change, it can’t afford to stay open. Ouch!

Given how sparse and poorly connected the first few links for “Corbets hardware” currently are, it’s clear that such a blog would come in first, and possibly second, third, and fourth, in any Google search. Add a Twitter account, and you’re nearly guaranteed to be a major force in any web-based conversation around your business. (In fact, I’d be willing to bet that within a few weeks, this blog post may well rank in the top ten for a search about Corbet’s…).

In short, by joining the conversation, Corbet’s would get a chance to shape it. And by shaping it, it just might ensure its future. Which leads me to ask: Has your business joined the conversation? You might consider doing so, before it’s too late.

Read the whole post here...

Yesterday Danny posted a typically thoughtful piece on Google's success, on the occasion of its ten year anniversary. Titled The Google Hive Mind, the piece addresses an age-old question about Google: does it have a master plan?

Danny argues that, in essence, the company does not, and runs through a convincing number of examples that support his thesis.

But as with every argument, I think there's another side. Danny writes:

Rather than follow a rigid top-down master plan, the company's direction and success has been shaped by decisions often taken independently of how they'll benefit the company as a whole. But collectively, those decisions DO form a master plan, a hive mind that dictates what the company will do.

I don't agree with this. I think Google has made scores of moves calculated by centralized senior management to benefit the company as a whole, AND, at the same time, has green-lit scores of other projects which, taken as a whole, are in no way centrally planned. Examples of centrally planned moves? The AOL deal. The Dell distribution deal. Chrome. Gmail (I disagree with Danny that this was not a centrally planned move. Same with Checkout.) Book search (Google knew it was in for a legal fight and it engaged because it felt it was in the company's, and culture's, best interest.) YouTube (very much a central decision). Ummmm....going public.

In fact, the going public piece is perhaps the most important one of all. Google has to keep growing, and it has to keep shareholders happy. Growing on a large base is hard, so it's best to try as many new potential big hit markets as you can. That means taking some bets on stuff that might fizzle (Orkut, Knol) and others that might really tick off your best partners and customers (Orkut, Knol, Checkout, and many more).

I think Google has a central plan, and Danny's Hive Mind is a key part of it. As Danny writes:

Perhaps success on the fast moving internet means having a hive mind, a fuzzy business logic where you look more at products individually rather than how they contribute to a master plan. Or maybe that's what you do if you want to be a giant on the internet, offering more than one product.

The hive mind is a great idea, but it's not the whole story of Google. When it comes to key decisions, I think the hive mind that really matters is the triumvirate of Sergey, Larry, and Eric.

This will be interesting to watch:

To mark our 10th birthday and celebrate the spirit of our users and the web, we're launching Project 10^100 (that's "ten to the hundredth") a call for ideas that could help as many people as possible, and a program to bring the best of those ideas to life. CNN will be covering this project, including profiles of ideas and the people who submit them from around the world. For a deeper look, follow along at Impact Your World.

The site is here. I wish we could see the ideas streaming by and vote on them. It's too opaque right now. But this is VERY Web Meets World, which is the theme of Web 2 this year, and Larry Brilliant, the head of Google.org, will be our first speaker. Good timing.

I'll admit it, I have a Google Blog Search RSS feed for "John Battelle." Come on, don't you?

Ok, anyway, what I've noticed is that at least 10-20 percent of the hits Google Blog search reports back to me are spam, usually very popular stories in which I have been mentioned that are republished automatically by long tail Adsense and affiliate scrapers. It's part of the web ecosystem, whatever.

But this one story where Google's Matt Cutts, who works very closely on issues of spam and blogging, responded to my email about Twitter nofollow, is off the charts. Not a day goes by that some spammer (or five) isn't republishing this story (example).

Check out a Google search for the first half of the first sentance of Matt's post. Google has found 318 instances of Matt's post.

Huh.

Fortune gave this piece a Diggbait title:

Everyone Hates Comscore (I am quoted)

But the truth is more like this: Everyone Wishes They Shared the Same Reality.

The promise of online marketing is not yet delivered upon. Meanwhile, we have an arbiter that often seems disconnected from reality, at least from the point of view of website publishers.

There's alot of work to be done to bridge the gap, and it's not all Comscore's fault. I am looking forward to my interview with Comscore founder Gian Fulgoni at the upcoming CM Summit in October, where we can really suss some of these issues.

I will also be interviewing Twitter (and Blogger) co-founder Evan Williams, as well as Laura Desmond, the global CEO of Starcom (one of the largest media buyers in the world) and David Rosenblatt, who runs DoubleClick.

I'll grok this soon, but is anyone else tired of claims of "revolutionizing" advertising? From AdWeek:

Yahoo! executives are not setting low expectations for the company's forthcoming advertising platform, likening its effect on advertising to the advent of color television and introduction of the DVR.

At a press conference to unveil the newly renamed platform, now called Apt, Yahoo!'s top executives promised a sea change in how advertising is bought and sold across thousands of Internet sites. Yahoo! will introduce Apt widely in 2009, with its 784 newspaper partners using the system by the end of this year.

Thanks to Adobe, who sponsored this work, I pulled together some sketches for the book I keep talking about. It's blog posts from Searchblog, a talk I gave at Cisco, work I've done for the Amex Open Forum blog (which just won a Mixx award!), with Powerpoint and video. A nice package, in fact, and I'm proud to say it all happened thanks to a sponsor. Check it out here (download will initiate). Thanks, Adobe!

Doc outlines why Google Android Chrome Linux changes the game in mobile web.

Well, then the game changes. Remember back when Marc Andreessen raised Microsoft's hackles by saying Netscape would "reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers"? Netscape failed to do that, but Google won't. It's not just that Google is Netscape II, it's that Google has a platform here. At the bottom that platform is the OS of your choice. At the top is a browser built from the start to run apps and not just pages.

Here's Boy Genius' take on the first phone to use Google's Android platform.

But they are learning. From Larry's blog:

Russ Gooberman wrote to tell a happy story about Major League Baseball.
----------
A month ago, I created a mashup clip of some MLB's All-Star Game Home Run Derby. Specifically, I wanted to feature the record-breaking home run streak of Texas Rangers youngster, Josh Hamilton. So, I cut up some YouTube footage of his longest homerun of the contest, and set it to the audio of the final homerun sequence of the movie, The Natural. The next day, the mashup was featured on SportsIllustrated.com as their "Video of the Day." Here's My Mashup. The following day, MLB Advanced Media sent a trademark claim to YouTube, and had the video taken down.
....The interpretation of such an event in the public discourse is not for Major League Baseball to determine or influence. These events that affect our perceptions of our national pastime cannot be copyrighted. The discussion and dissemination of ideas relating to them cannot be censored. There are countless cases of MLB pursuing copyright infringements that go beyond their rights as copyright holders. Evidence of overzealous prosecution has been abundant. This Sisyphean struggle to stop any and all interpretations of MLB material will eventually fail.

Google settled a suit in the UK around the issue of whether or not religious groups can buy the keyword "abortion." Long story short: They now can (via NYT).

Expect a lot more of this kind of thing going forward. Google has the responsibility of being an arbiter of who can declare what online, and that responsibility will only increase.

It's not related to the content of this site, but I am so damn mad about the financial bailout, mainly because the folks who profited the most from this mess are getting bailed out. So when I saw this post from Fred, summarizing Tom, I had to pass it along. I agree totally.

Rule #1: Cut salaries now

Part of the bailout bill ought to be that any organization which proffers securities for government purchase must agree not to pay any employee or contactor more than $1 million per year for the next four years. No cheating with trips to events on the corporate jet or other perks with draconian penalties TO THE RECIPIENT for violations.

Rule #2: No new golden parachutes

Some executives have contracts which entitle them to huge golden parachutes – especially if their pay is cut. These need to be annulled.

Rule #3: End payment on old golden parachutes

Payments on existing golden parachutes should be stopped.

Rule #4: No dividends for a year

This seems harsh to us shareholders who may have bank securities in our portfolio, but it's not. Clearly an organization which is being bailed out needs to conserve cash to survive.

(image)
After seeing the clearly obvious story about texting being a bad thing to do while driving (er, no sh*t), I just had to write that headline. Sorry. I text with the best of them. I love the concept and efficiency of short messaging.

But the interface is deeply stupid. I see these commercials from carriers extolling speed texting, and think to myself - "We've already invented an incredibly efficient way to get thoughts from our brains to others - it's called speech."

Why I can't simply say to my phone: "Text Michelle" and the phone gets ready to send a note to Michelle. Then I say "Mich I'd rather hit Left Bank than Ambrosia for din love you bye" and the damn text goes to Michelle?

Say Michelle is driving. Her phone buzzes with a text. She's driving, so she says to no one in particular "Listen text". There's my voice! Is this too complicated to make happen? Please. It's not. The problem is there's simply no culture of product development and entrepreneurial thinking in Carrier World. And Carrier World, alas, still rules here in the US.

Of course there are times when you want to use your thumbs, say, when you're in a dull meeting and want to text on the sly. But the fact that you can't text with your mouth is simply unacceptable. I think it's going to change, and soon.

From a Google Blog Post:

Thus, computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information. Today's Google search uses an early form of this approach, but in the future many more systems will be able to benefit from it.

The context is here, but honestly. Read that. Think about it.

Sergey Brin apparently has a blog.

And this post, where Sergey muses about his potential proclivity towards Parkinsons (I know a fair bit about it, as a close relative has it), might just move Google's stock.

Hat tip: TC

...but I don't think I am. Maghound has been compared to Netflix, a one stop monthly subscription service where you can pick and choose what magazines you get, and swap them monthly, just like you can movies at Netflix.

One big difference. Magazines are all about passion and loyalty. LOYALTY! Not switching. No one cares about sampling magazines via an online site. Do they?

I hope I am wrong, but I don't think I am. The idea is deeply flawed. It's from Time Inc., where, I'm told by folks who would know, morale is .... eh, not so good. Magazines, which were my first love and remain a staple of my diet, can't be saved by a website.

Once again, I ask, what business is Time Inc. in? Print? Then they are doomed. Publications? Then welcome to the present - FM represents 175 great publications, and we're growing, even in this crappy economy. As Time Inc famously said in the first cover of its print version of Business 2.0 (now defunct, so I can't find the damn image): Come on in, the water's fine!

...at least, some of them. I've been working on the program for the CM Summit next month, and it's turning from good work to fun work. I just got off the phone with a major brand (whose name I'll protect) who promised to pull no punches when it comes to the issue of measurement in digital media, for example. Join him and scores of other senior marketing execs at the CM Summit in San Francisco. And expect a few more surprises in the next couple of weeks....Register here!

Here's the release.

With my travel and flu, I've missed a lot that's been going on. Here's some of the stories I found notable:

The Search Engine Rap Battle (funny if you're in to that kind of thing)

Google invests in O3B Networks - "O3b's mission is to provide high-speed, low-cost Internet connectivity to the "other 3 billion" people in emerging markets in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East."

Jarvis on Google monopoly - Summary: Nope. But it has to be trusted. Yep. Been saying that for years. Apparently Google has more work to do to gain that trust. More here.

Microsoft cuts deal with RIM for Blackberry - It's ALL about distribution to try to outpace Google's reach.

Speaking of Microsoft, I've said in the past the company was lying in the weeds. Reading this piece from Liveside, I still believe it. The company has so many apps, so much ripe low lying fruit. Apparently, "Wave 3" of Live is coming. Remember Windows version 3? Yep, that's the one where the company got it...right enough to win.

Marissa on the Future of Search. Folks have picked up on her claim that search is 90% done, given that most folks said it was only about 5% done just a few years ago. I think it's apples and oranges - 90% of the easy stuff is done, but when it comes to the hard stuff (which she covers in some detail), we have a long, long way to go.

Comscore has released August 2008 search share data. I got a note from Thomas Weisel on the data:

August 2008 qSearch data shows that Google's U.S. query share gained 60bps m/m to 59.1% and gained more than 8.7 percentage points from its 50.3% query share in August 2007. YouTube continues to be a big contributor for Google generating 2.49bn searches in the U.S., up 3.7% from 2.40bn last month and up 132% from 1.08bn in August 2007. YouTube currently represents 24.5% of U.S. Google site searches compared with 15.8% in August 2007. Yahoo's share declined 86bps m/m to 14.1% and was down nearly 4.2 percentage points from a year ago level of 18.3%. Microsoft's share declined 3bps m/m to 5.5% and was down nearly 1.7 percentage points from a year ago level of 7.1%.

I missed this blog post last week from one of Google's most senior VPs of Product, Susan Wojcicki. Titled "Ad Perfect" it starts:

Google's advertising business was founded on the core principle that advertising should deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. This is very similar to our mission in search, and, like our colleagues in search, those of us on the ads team are constantly striving to achieve better results. We have hundreds of thousands of advertisers who collectively have millions of products and services, and out of that vast amount of information our goal is always to show people the best ads, the ones that are the most relevant, timely, and useful (and, from the advertiser perspective, measurable). Achieving this ideal has been difficult since the early days of ads, but now, with the Internet, it is within reach.

Then comes the nut graph:

What does it take to do this? We need to understand exactly what people are looking for, then give them exactly the information they want.

Well...sort of. Perhaps that's the formula for the perfect "ad" - but the perfect ad is, by definition, imperfect. Advertising without marketing is, well, just a call to action. Only with marketing, a practice that I think is perhaps a bit underestimated at algorithmically driven companies like Google, can companies make any advertising they might do truly valuable. One tenet of marketing FM lives by is this: Add value to the customer's experience. Sometimes you can do that by matching customer intent with a database of ads. But other times you can't - you have to understand your customer in ways that are resistant to algorithms.

More on this as I write my next piece for the Amex Blog....

Still ill, but I can't help but read my email. This sounds very interesting:

GOOGLE AND GE EXECUTIVES TO DISCUSS SOLUTIONS TO ENERGY CHALLENGES

WHAT: Eric Schmidt and Jeff Immelt will discuss America's energy challenge and announce ways Google and GE will be working together to contribute to solutions. A fact sheet with additional details will be emailed following the call at 3pm.

WHEN: Wednesday September 17, 2008, 11:20am PDT / 2:20pm EDT

WHO: The following executives will participate in the call:
Eric Schmidt, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Google Inc.
Jeff Immelt, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, General Electric Company

Hard to write when you're slammed by the flu, back at it when I shake this off.

We've the CIO of the Army, Elon Musk, Chris DeWolfe and Mark Zuckerberg, Lance Armstrong, Al Gore, Michael Pollan, Paul Otellini, Larry Brilliant, Arianna Huffington, and scores more. What holds it together? Tim and I riff on this podcast.

This is a cool look at what we created at the Outside Lands Festival.

Running around the city, hard to update, if you have news for us to discuss, let us know in the comments...

Yahoo snags Joanne Bradford, Microsoft's ex-sales chief, who clearly was not happy running a startup. Joanne is a pro, this could do wonders for Yahoo's display sales.

Via BeetTv...good background on Chrome.

Last Fall we took a big step at FM and launched our own conference series focused on the media business, in particular, the marketing piece of the media business. Called The Conversational Marketing Summit (CM Summit for short), our inaugural event was a hit - though it didn't sell out till the very last minute, leaving me a bit terrified no one would show up.

But given the speakers - Kevin Rose, Sarah Fay, Steve Hayden, The Ninjas, Suzie Reider and tons more - I should have known it'd be fine. We then repeated the event in New York this past June, and that was really a blast - we were joined by the CMO of GE, CEO of Ning, CEO of Hulu, and tons of case studies. And that one sold out early.

Now I'm proud to announce our line up for our second Fall conference, and offer SearchBlog readers a hefty discount to book. Here's a selected list of our speakers:

* Jay Adelson, CEO, Digg.com
* Miles Beckett, CEO, EQAL (that's the lonelygirl15 folks)
* John Byrne, Executive Editor, BusinessWeek
* Bill Capodanno, Director, Central Marketing, Microsoft
* Justin Curtis, VP Creative Director, Grey SF
* Laura Desmond, CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group, The Americas (brand client list to die for)
* Mark Dowley, Partner, Endeavor (if you don't know these master agents, you should)
* Rick Farman, Principal, Superfly Presents (think Bonnaroo, OutsideLands, CrowdFire....)
* Jeff Flemings, SVP/Renaissance Planning, VivaKi (think GM and a lot more...)
* Gian Fulgoni, Chairman, comScore (let's get serious about measurement, shall we?!)
* Porter Gale, VP of Marketing, Virgin America
* Seth Goldstein, CEO, socialmedia.com
* Scott Heiferman, CEO, Meetup
* Mark Rolston, Chief Creative Officer, frog design
* David Rosenblatt, Vice President, Google (the CEO of Doubleclick prior to the merger)
* Marc Ruxin, SVP, Director of Digital Strategy & Innovation, McCann WorldGroup
* Dan Scheinman, SVP & General Manager, Media Solutions Group, Cisco
* Deborah Schultz, Strategic Advisor, Social Media and Emerging Technologies (working with P&G)

* Michael Theodore, VP of Member Services,Interactive Advertising Bureau
* Joseph Turow, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania (he'll be debating Michael, above, on privacy and advertising policy)

And we're still adding speakers. Now to the discount. Regular price for the event, which runs two full days at the lovely Golden Gate Club in SF (at left), is $1095. But I've got a code just for Searchblog readers that will get you $400 off. All you have to do to get this pricing is CLICK HERE.

It's only good till Sept. 15th, so as they say on late night TV, act now!! See you in October!

And it's getting very serious about addressing the issue. New terms for Chrome, new terms for IP addresses, new terms for Google Suggest. But there's more to do...

....that what it knows is scary. Hence, this move. From the post on the Google Blog:

Today, we're announcing a new logs retention policy: we'll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.

If you don't think this is keeping the folks up late at night over at Google, you're wrong. And if they are NOT up late at night, sell your shares. From the Journal piece:

The Justice Department has quietly hired one of the nation's best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, for a possible antitrust challenge to Google Inc.'s growing power in advertising.

Mr. Litvack's hiring is the strongest signal yet that the U.S. is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo Inc. The two companies combined would account for more than 80% of U.S. online-search ads.

Have you read John Heilemann's excellent book on the impact of the Microsoft anti-trust deal on that company's culture and business? It's worth another look. Yeah, it's called...Pride Before the Fall.

It's Google Books for Newspapers! Wonder what the Adwords spreadsheets looked like before they greenlit this badboy?

Here's the full list so far.

There is always a backlash against anyone calling anything the Web OS, mainly because, as folks point out quite accurately, the term "operating system" technically applies to the stack on top of PC hardware that interfaces between that hardware and a user's intentions.

Here's an example of what I mean - A Web OS? Are You Dense? In this story, the author, who I don't know but I certainly do respect, gives Arrington a ton of shit for "not knowing anything about computers." Well, color me dense because, yes, in fact, there is a Web OS, and it will be built on top of the Windows/Mac/PC OS, and that's just fine with me, because I could care less about technical purist theories of what an OS is. I don't care if it's built on top of Windows, which is a "classic OS". In fact, Windows, as I recall, was built on top of DOS for most of its career, so what does that make Windows? Not an OS? And DOS was built on top of some arcane machine language, I am sure. And we can keep dancing on the head of definitional pins, but to me....

To me, operating systems are computer-mediated realities that help us get stuff done. And to my mind, that makes Chrome an OS. A system that lets me operate sh*t. End of story.

Oh, I've kinda heard of that. Sounds familiar. Think I saw it somewhere, at some point.

From the NYT piece:

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

Not content to lease data from others who have satellites, Google today launched its own satellite into space. Via BeetTv, thanks Andy.

Talk about web meets world....this is yet another indicator of the integration of virtual and physical. And it brings Google one step closer to what I think could be the company's Waterloo - a viral meme that Google is sensing too much, knows too much, and is too powerful. It may not be rational, but no one ever accused humans of being entirely rational.

Update: Apparently Google does not own the satellite, just the data....

I agree with Rae!

Update: Matt Cutts responds here.

The spam issue is a real one for all social applications, which includes search, of course. But I hate the baby with the bathwater approaches. I think we need to get to the next level of validation with social media - we need to start getting more granular. As humans, we're pretty good at weeding out who is a normal person worthy of whuffie, and who is a skeezy slimeball out to take advantage. Can't we do the same on Twitter?!

In the past two weeks nearly every press outlet on the planet has called me asking for thoughts on where Google is going and how Google got to where it is. The reason? Google turns 10 years old, according to most estimates, this weekend.

I've talked to as many folks as I can (after all I was a journalist covering technology for quite some time) but I did have to turn down a few given how busy life gets after the summer holidays. In any case, I'll post links to all the Ten Year stories I find here (not just ones I'm quoted in!), starting with the Daily Telegraph in London:

Ten years of Google - Telegraph

Spin Around Google's Decade - BBC

Google Looks to the Next 10 Years - Also BBC

Google reigns as world’s most powerful 10-year-old - Boston Herald/AP

Happy Birthday, Google - Marketplace Radio

Wither Google As It Turns Ten? - CBS Early Show (yeah, that's me)

Google Ten Years From Now - Guardian

A World Without Google - Technologizer

Google At Ten - Om

The Today Show - (Yeah, that's me too)

As Google turns 10, advice for its next decade - LA Times

New Media Age

An Anthropology of Google's Search Experiments (with all data exposed, of course).

Never will happen, but we get some tantalizing hints in this post on the Google blog:

At any given time, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments on Google sites all over the world. I'll start by describing experimental changes so small that you can barely tell the difference after staring at the page, and end with a couple of much more visually obvious experiments that we have run. There are a lot of people dedicated to detecting everything Google changes - and occasionally, things imagined that we did not do! - and they do latch on to a lot of our more prominent experiments. But the experiments with smaller changes are almost never noticed.

I was wondering what data was sent to Google from Chrome users. Matt has the answers, and so far, seems innocuous.

Make no mistake about it.

Why launch Chrome (Google's new "browser") when Firefox, Google's favored son, is doing so well? Because Google needs its own. Using a comic book to introduce it is fun, and certainly, there's always room for new approaches to platform and interface, and Chrome looks to have a lot of neat new features and a fresh approach. But what this really tells us is that Google is dead serious about the distribution business, for one, and dead serious about the operating system business, for another. Reading through the book, I am struck by how similar the language is to traditional operating system overviews. Multithreading, stable development platforms, etc. etc.

With the IE 8 in beta, and Firefox going strong, it looks to be a good season for innovation on the Web.