John Battelle's Searchblog

I couldn't pick three, so I went with four winners. I learned a lot from the hundred or so comments that came in, and I am busy preparing for the show next week. It was hard to narrow them down, but I had to. If you won, congrats!

I'll be reaching out to the winners via email for their free We2 passes, but here are the comments!

* Dominic Son says:
* # October 22, 2008 11:57 PM

"Besides Yahoo, how's everything going?"

(On Jerry Yang)

* Ian Kennedy says:
* # October 28, 2008 2:53 PM

Do you forsee a time when Intel will embed social features into its hardware? Microsoft tied it's activation to Windows activation. Would Intel ever offer the ability for users on Facebook and other social networks be able to uniquely identify itself to a social graph and the associated permissions via the Intel chip?

(On Paul Otellini)

* Mike Johnson says:
* # October 28, 2008 2:03 PM

The Live Strong movement (and they visual representation of the yellow bracelet) almost defined "virality" and community for this decade. The copy cats are rolling in to this day. What did you learn from that experience? What does it take to truly engage people to the point of action?

(On Lance Armstrong)

* Narendra says:
* # October 28, 2008 6:41 PM

While we'd like to think that all successful entrepreneurs have the fearless composure of a poker player like Phil Ivy, most of us behind a closed office door have found ourselves exhaling the words "holy shit." You've had quite a ride so far and it isn't over.

For fun, rewind just a bit, and tell us, what you might be doing right now if your were *not* building Facebook?

(On Mark Zuckerberg)

Just in time for my interview with Jerry Yang next week at Web2, this report from the Journal (via Reuters):

Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) could announce a decision to walk away from their search deal by the middle of next week, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The two Internet companies have so far failed to reach an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice on implementing their search advertising partnership.

I spent a very engaging hour or so with Jerry earlier this week and we discussed this deal, among a lot of other things. I wonder if we'll get confirmation by the time he and I have our chat Weds. afternoon.

I'm watching this unfold, OpenID, Facebook Connect, Y!OS, Microsoft support, Google support...it's supposedly a big group hug, but it feels like a war, folks. And it's not pretty. Note this:

A couple of hours ago, the Google Security Team posted an article claiming that Google’s made the switch to OpenID, joining Yahoo! and Microsoft in the ranks OpenID providers.

But it looks like someone may have been a bit to hasty to pull that switch (perhaps itching to get some of the limelight Microsoft has been receiving for adding OpenID to all Live ID accounts just the day before yesterday)… because whatever it is that Google has released support for, it sure as hell isn’t OpenID, as they even so kindly point out in their OpenID developer documentation

I hate to say it but watch this space.

Check it out. From the conference site:

The way to online success is through being easily found in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. While developers have historically thought of search as a marketing activity, technical architecture has now become critical for search success. Found is the authoritative place to discover best practices for this nascent industry and gain a thorough understanding of why search-friendly architecture is absolutely mission-critical to businesses of all sizes. No spammy tricks. Just solid foundational coding tactics and actionable data that will ensure search engines can easily crawl, index, and rank your site's content.

Continuing my crowdsourcing of Web2 conversations (and this is nearly the last one), on the third day, and just a few hours after Elon Musk, I'll be talking to Shai Agassi, founder and CEO of Better Place, and former President at SAP. Agassi is yet another example of a tech executive who left the IT industry to boil a new ocean, in this case, the automobile industry. Wired recently put Shai on the cover, his plan to "sell cars like cel phones" is audacious, and some say impossible.

Remember that I'm running a contest for best comments: I've decided to take three of my personal complementary passes to Web 2 - yes, even the Program Chair only gets so many - and give them to those who comment on my site about these Web 2 conversations. My decisions are entirely subjective, but I plan to pick the three best questions, and reward them with a fress pass - a street value of nearly $4000 each. Yes, commentators from the past six posts are already eligible:

Mark Zuckerberg
Jerry Yang
Larry Brilliant
Paul Otellini
Lance Armstrong

Elon Musk

So what would you ask Shai?

...which should not be a surprise to regular readers of this site. I am on a list of "CEOs for Obama" and have been donating to Obama's campaign. Why am I posting this now? To a media/tech site? Well, I was inspired by Tim.

Faced with these problems, we need a president who can harness the best and brightest our country has to offer, a president who is conversant with, and comfortable with, the power of technology to assist in solving these problems, a president who is good at listening, studying, and devising solutions based on the best insight available, rather than on narrow ideology. We need a president who can forge consensus, not just among the partisans in our own fractured democracy but around the world. We need a president who can inspire our citizens and our global partners to forgo narrow self interest and embrace the possibilities that we can achieve if we work together to build a better future.

I've been on about this one for years, my most recent post is here.

Mashable reports on another advancement in the conversation interface:

Vlingo is an application that lets you perform various tasks on your mobile using your voice. Earlier this year, the company launched an application for Blackberry, allowing users to perform basic tasks like voice dialing, composing emails, and sending text messages, all through speaking. Today, that application is getting an update, allowing users to do a lot more, including update their Facebook Status and Twitter

Reminds me of my rant on "texting is stupid."

For the better part of a year, we at FM have been working on an innovative new project with Asus and Intel. Today it launched. WePC.com is an experiment in crowdsourcing an entirely new piece of hardware, and I'm very proud of the work we've done together.

Check out my first submission - the LowJackPC. The idea here is to gather the collective intelligence of PC users to help build a smarter, better machine. We've integrated all sorts of tools to help create a platform for ideas, including Grafitti, so you can draw it. But I'm terrible at drawing, so for now, my PC doesn't have any pictures. I should fix that.

Anyway, here's the release on the program. From it:

Consumers become product designers at WePC.com, a Web site launched today by Intel Corporation and ASUS. WePC.com is where consumers can collaborate with each other and with Intel and ASUS to design innovative new products. The plan is for the two companies to deliver to market what could be the world's first community-designed PCs.

This site is a very real example informed by a lot of thinking and theory around conversational marketing in the past few years. I remember my first even "aha" moment - nearly four years ago - when I suggested to a major computer manufacturer that perhaps it should consider gathering input from its customers before creating the next rev of its machines. The blank stares were palpable. We've come a long, long way since then.

Yahoo search share was up (that is new), Microsoft down (not new), and Google down 1/10th of a percent (that too is new), according to Comscore via B'berg.

Trend or hiccup?

I really enjoyed reading this, as someone who gets a few comments. But I have to say, I'm very pleased I don't get as many as TC does.

TechCrunch: Ten Comments You Think Are Cool And Insightful But Aren’t

My opening presentation at the CM Summit two weeks ago. All the video is now up from the event.

On the third day of Web 2 next week, I'll be sitting down with Elon Musk. Now, depending on your age and level of interest, Elon is either A) a co-founder of PayPal, b) founder of SpaceX, c) the guy behind Tesla, d) the guy behind Solar City, or e) the guy behind all four.

Elon is truly a "Web Meets World" kind of guy (and yes, that's the theme of Web 2 this year).

He's bringing his Tesla to the event, and participating in our auction to boot. I'm looking forward to what I am sure will be an eclectic conversation, in particular given that later in the day I'll be talking with Shai Agassi, who has something of a competing auto startup going in Better Place.

And remember that I'm running a contest for best comments: I've decided to take three of my personal complementary passes to Web 2 - yes, even the Program Chair only gets so many - and give them to those who comment on my site about these Web 2 conversations. My decisions are entirely subjective, but I plan to pick the three best questions, and reward them with a fress pass - a street value of nearly $4000 each. Yes, commentators from the past five posts are already eligible:

Mark Zuckerberg
Jerry Yang
Larry Brilliant
Paul Otellini
Lance Armstrong

So, what should I ask Elon Musk?

Next up in our ongoing tour of conversations at Web 2 next week is Lance Armstrong, the seven time winner of the Tour de France, who recently announced his "de-reitrement" and is going for an eighth win. This appearance, a dinner conversation on day one, is one of Lance's only public appearances since he announced his comeback. He's also an internet entrepreneur, having launched Livestrong.com, a health site, earlier this summer.

This should be quite a unique opportunity to talk to one of the world's most extraordinary people. Remember my new contest: I've decided to take three of my personal complementary passes to Web 2 - yes, even the Program Chair only gets so many - and give them to those who comment on my site about these Web 2 conversations. My decisions are entirely subjective, but I plan to pick the three best questions, and reward them with a fress pass - a street value of nearly $4000 each. Yes, commentators from the past four posts are already eligible:

Mark Zuckerberg
Jerry Yang
Larry Brilliant
Paul Otellini

So...what should I ask Lance Armstrong?

But if I were (Ok, yes, folks invest in funds on my behalf, have since 1998), I'd say, invest in entertainment. Because folks are looking for escape. Big time. (PS - I saw that tiny dog film. It was simply awful. But, yes, I saw it. I have daughters, after all.)

The idea that search influenced culture. Now, it just reflects it. Sometimes, not so nicely. From Digg, this story - a search for "terrorist costume" in Amazon brings up an Obama mask. This will be down by the time most read this, so here's a shot:

Great piece in the Times on a fellow who made his name hacking the wii remote and talking about it on YouTube. Now he's at Microsoft, after being wooed by nearly everyone.

Contrast this with what might have followed from other options Mr. Lee considered for communicating his ideas. He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others.

Small wonder, then, that he maintains that posting to YouTube has been an essential part of his success as an inventor. “Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself,” he says. “If you create something but nobody knows, it’s as if it never happened.”

But it made me wonder if he's going to be happy there. A very long time ago, I read a ton of search papers (as part of prep for the book) and noticed they were all pretty old, and that once academics got hired by Google or competitors to Google, they sort of stopped innovating out loud.

Just a thought.

From the man (yes, my partner on Web 2 Summit, so I am biased) who helped start the meme:

... value is migrating to a new kind of layer, which we now call Web 2.0, which consists of applications driven not just by software but by network-effects databases driven by explicit or implicit user contribution.

As you all know by now, I'm asking for your help in preparing to interview folks on stage for Web 2 next week. Your responses have been inspiring, and I am compiling them all into documents I use during the interview process. Previous Web 2 Conversation posts:

Mark Zuckerberg
Jerry Yang
Larry Brilliant

Next up is Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel Corp. Intel is arguably the most influential technology company in the world. There are so many things to talk to Paul about, I really don't know where to start. So I'll start by asking you - what do you want to hear from Paul?

To spur you all along, and to thank you for all the work you've helped me to so so far, I've decided to take three of my personal complementary passes to Web 2 - yes, even the Program Chair only gets so many - and give them to those who comment on my site about these Web 2 conversations. My decisions are entirely subjective, but I plan to pick the three best questions, and reward them with a fress pass - a street value of nearly $4000 each. Yes, commentators from the past three posts are already eligible...

Thanks for helping me out! Now keep helping me (grin!).

Larry Brilliant, the Executive Director of Google.org, is the face and mind behind Google's philanthropic entity. Here's a snip from his bio:

Larry is an M.D. and M.P.H., board-certified in preventive medicine and public health. He is a founder and director of The Seva Foundation, which works in dozens of countries around the world, primarily to eliminate preventable and curable blindness. He serves as a member of the strategic advisory committee for Kleiner Perkins (KPCB) Venture Capital and also sits on the boards of The Skoll Foundation, Health Metrics Network, Omidyar Networks Humanity United, and InSTEDD, an organization bringing technological tools to improve disaster response.

In addition to his medical career, Larry co-founded The Well, a pioneering virtual community, with Stewart Brand in 1985. He also holds a telecommunications technology patent and has served as CEO of two public companies and other venture-backed start-ups.

Talk about web meets world!

Google.org has already invested in scores of projects and companies (a full list is here). It's a varied, impressive, and extremely ambitious list that includes goals like finding renewable energy that costs less than coal, changing the face of global health care, developing country IT infrastructure and entrepreneurs, and much ore.

I am kicking off Web 2 by interviewing Larry. So what you you ask him?

Gang, I'm interviewing Jerry Yang in two weeks at Web 2. You all have read the news this past year. It may seem obvious what to ask him, but help me out: what do you think I should ask him? I rely on your comments!

This story was the straw that broke my camel's back in terms of paying attention.

Lala has been around for around two and a half years, and it’s kind of hopscotched from one music-related business model to another. It began as a service for swapping CDs by mail. Then it bought Woxy.com, a popular online radio station in Cincinnati. Then it tried free music streaming. So my instinct is to be cautious about the company’s attention span. But this latest incarnation of the service is downright amazing–I can’t imagine anyone who loves music not going gaga for it.

Tonight I helped my daughter with homework. No big deal, right? But tonight the assignment came from her fifth grade teacher: Define these related words:

Ballot
Campaign
Civil Rights
Democracy
Incumbent
Issues
Nominee
Poll
Platform
Register

Now, the teacher said there were two ways my daughter could find out the definitions. One was to use a dictionary. And the second was to "talk to your parents about it."

What I found telling was that while my daughter has been trained in using a dictionary, she found it entirely cumbersome. Now, I am all for cumbersome, as I find using a dictionary forces all sorts of new learnings (ie, the definition often has words that have to be looked up as well). I have already been through the process of forcing my kids to learn how to use the dictionary, and I sensed a new kind of learning opportunity. So I asked: "Have you tried using Google?"

"Yes," she replied. "But my teacher said it's not very good, and we shouldn't use it."

"Why?" I asked.

"It doesn't work very well," she replied.

"What did you ask it?"

"Well, I dunno, I typed in something like "what is the meaning of polls" she replied.

And true enough, when you type that in, Google fails, particularly for a 5th grader who is not quite "search literate." Not that most folks who use Google are any more search literate, of course. Most folks don't use advanced search functions, and certainly that applies to my daughter. (Turns out, Google does do pretty well for "meaning" related searches, but not as well as advanced search...)

"Well, have you tried to use Google's define function?" I asked her.

Blank stare. (Of course!)

But imagine if our schools taught that function!

The next half hour, we had a great time touring the define: function in google. And I must say, it was a true Learning Moment.

I just wish our schools would learn along with us. It's time to renew a call for search literacy. In the age of Google, Webster's is...well, the province of a diminishing class.

Update: Nice furtherance of the meme from Cyrus here.

Continue reading "Reader Niall Writes..." »

I am interviewing a lot of interesting folks starting two or so weeks from now at Web 2, Chris DeWolfe, Edgar Bronfman, Larry Brilliant, Lance Armstrong, Paul Otellini, Jack Klues, Michael Pollan, Elon Musk, Shai Agassi, and many more.

But I thought I'd start by asking you all this one question: Mark Zuckerberg is coming back (check the video of our interview here). What should I ask him this time? I have a lot of thoughts, but thought I'd start by asking you all....

Well, if you're wondering what I've been doing, it's simple - my back is back. Ten years ago, when I was three years into a rocket ship new company, my back blew out in a huge way, and it took me months to get back. I was never the same again (goodbye, contact sports), but I did find yoga as a religion of sorts, and learned all sorts of things about what was important in life. Three years ago, I blew out another part of my back - C3-5, for those keeping score (goodbye, extreme skiing), but that setback was, in a way, a chance to learn even more.

Fast forward to now. Three years into another rocket ship (FM), my original back injury - L5 S1 blown disc, for those of you still keeping score - has returned with a bit of vengeance (see the MRI at left for those who are morbidly interested). I'm not exactly crippled, as I was last time, but it's serious enough that I have to curtail any kind of work that is not entirely essential - at least for a while.

This time, it's a bit more personal. I feel much more centered in my work, and I've been good to myself, so this setback gives me pause. Have I been holding too much on my own shoulders and not letting my team do more? Is it just part of getting old? Should I have taken the surgery route back in 1999? Just a few months ago, I was chopping cords of wood. Why is my back complaining now?

Well, it doesn't matter. Every time your body throws you a mess of pain, it's a time to reflect. Especially when it comes to your back, which I truly believe is the rosetta stone of the mind. Stop, breathe, be patient. It never, ever, hurts to do that. But as you might expect, my writing here might suffer a bit.

I am speaking in koans, but there is a longer post in this. Wanted to get it out:

Just a note, I'm not posting (clearly) as I am recovering from CM Summit and prepping for Web 2, as well as doing some writing this weekend, when that is ready, will post about it here.

Well, Nick, sorry, but here's at least one study backing up my contention:

A new study suggests that searching online could be beneficial for the brain. Searching online triggers areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.

A study at the University of California, Los Angeles, measured brain activity of older adults as they searched the Web.

"There's so much interest in exercising our minds as we age," said the researcher, Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. "One result of this study is that these technologies are not all bad. They may be good in keeping our brains active."

To study what brains look like when people are searching the Internet, Small recruited two groups of people: one that had minimal computer experience and another that was Web savvy.

Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning, according to Small's study, which appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

I like how Larry puts this in today's Journal:

This war must end. It is time we recognize that we can't kill this creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using these tools to create, or make them passive. We can only drive it underground, or make them "pirates." And the question we as a society must focus on is whether this is any good. Our kids live in an age of prohibition, where more and more of what seems to them to be ordinary behavior is against the law. They recognize it as against the law. They see themselves as "criminals." They begin to get used to the idea.

That recognition is corrosive. It is corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law. And when we reckon the cost of this corruption, any losses of the content industry pale in comparison.

Last up in my crowdsourcing of CM Summit conversations is Gian Fulgoni, Founder and Chair of Comscore, the controversial and defacto measurement service for the Internet.

Gian is no stranger to these pages, I've interviewed him recently here; posted about his company here, and here. Comscore is the company "everyone loves to hate," according to a recent Fortune piece.

My own view of the company has become more nuanced in the past year or so. I am on the board of the IAB, and Comscore, along with rival Neilsen, have agreed to undergo an MRC audit to address, once and for all (we hope), the discrepancies between their panel based measurement systems and what publishers see in their own logs. Fulgoni has been vocal in his defense of Comscore's weighted approach, which he says takes into consideration factors that internal logs don't - in particular multiple IP addresses and cookie deletion. Sound boring? It's not, if you care about the future of the entire marketing ecosystem.

My questions for Gian include:

- Explain cookie deletion and multiple IPs - why are your estimates of web traffic so much lower than ours?
- What do you make of the upstarts looking to overtake your business - Quantcast and Compete?
- Google AdPlanner?
- How does one measure rich and streaming media?
- What about more complicated stuff like CM?

So what do you want to ask Fulgoni?

Other CM conversants, still eager to hear your questions (the conference starts Weds. morning):

David Rosenblatt (CEO DoubleClick, now at Google)

Laura Desmond (CEO Starcom)

Joel Hyatt (CEO Current)

Evan Williams (co-founder Twitter)

Next up in the star lineup of conversants at the CM Summit this week is Evan Williams, the co-founder of Blogger, which Google acquired in 2003, and current co-founder of Twitter, which I've written about recently (TweetSense, anyone?).

Evan's knack for conversational social media applications is obvious, but as Twitter settles into its place as a Web 2 favorite (and punching bag), one key question does remain - what's the business model? How might Twitter work with marketers? With Blogger, Google saw a model - AdSense (and data, of course). Will lightening strike twice?

Rather than list additional questions here, I thought I'd just open this one up, knowing that Searchblog readers have *a lot* to ask Evan. So...have at it!

Other CM conversants, still eager to hear your questions (the conference starts Weds. morning):

David Rosenblatt (CEO DoubleClick, now at Google)

Laura Desmond (CEO Starcom)

Joel Hyatt (CEO Current)

Last to come (will post later today or Tuesday): Gian Fulgoni, founder Comscore.

Continuing my crowdsourcing of questions for one-on-one conversations at this week's CM Summit is Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current. Founded in 2005, Current is "the only 24/7 cable and satellite television network and Internet site produced and programmed in collaboration with its audience." The company has grown to nearly $64 million in revenues (2007) but has yet to hit profits, early this year it filed a public offering ($100 mm in proceeds), which has not completed due, one presumes, to market conditions. Still and all, a cable channel that counts more than 50mm potential viewers is a serious asset, and current.com, its online presence, is a vibrant community as well. It doesn't hurt that the company courts a difficult to reach demographic - young, educated adults.

Current has been at the center of a lot of innovation in media, a recent example is "Hack the Debate", a partnership with Twitter (co-founder Evan Williams will also be speaking at the CM Summit).

Current is an ambitious project, backed by serious players, including Al Gore, who serves as Chairman. Hyatt, who runs the company day to day, also serves on the board of HP and the Brookings Institute, and has been quite involved in politics, serving as National Finance Chair for the Democratic Party in 2000. Previous to Current, he co-founded and led Hyatt Legal Services, which provided low-cost services to middle and lower-income families.

So what would you want to hear from Joel in a fireside chat? My questions include:

- Current has a pretty new model (for television, certainly) but still a lot of its value is in the TV play. Are you still held hostage to that? Will the online portion of Current ever be bigger than the television piece?

- How is the economy impacting sales, both offline and on?

- Clearly this is not a time to go public. What are the financing options for a large media play like Current in this environment?

- Tell us more about the deal with Twitter? What does it portend?

- What's broken with how we get our news? If you ran a major news outlet (IE CBS News), what would you do differently?

- What have you learned working with marketers at Current? Give us some examples of innovation that might spark discussion?

- I can't let Joel get off stage without getting his take on the election, given the timing....

What would you ask Joel?

Previously:

David Rosenblatt

Laura Desmond

Remember a couple months back when I promised you guys I'd post on this?

Well, thanks to a deal with LookSmart, I finally got a chance to write it. It's over here. From it:

But here's the rub: There's a critical difference between curation based on algorithm (Google News) and curation based on human insight (Digg or Wikipedia) - and that difference can be summed up in one word: Voice. In short, sites that allow people to be part of the curation process have voice, and sites that are driven by algorithm, don't.

No matter how hard we try, we can't come up with an algorithm that creates a truly human voice. Sure, we can mimic it, but until we solve the Turing Test, the only computer that can create a human voice is, well, a human. And when you put lots of humans together, and give them all a chance to express their voices, you get community-driven media.

Now, how does this all relate to Google Maps and Wikipedia?

In my earlier post, I said "Google Maps isn't very good." That was kind of a cheap shot, because in fact the application is great - if what you need is a Map. But the promise of Google Maps goes well beyond looking at a map - currently you can get driving and walking directions, find businesses nearby, calculate traffic delays, and the like. But it's the promise of what might be layered on top of that where things get really interesting.

This stuff is going to get real, soon. From Google's latest Technology Roundtable Series:

[This] video, "Applications of Human Language Technology," is a discussion of our enormous progress in large-scale automated translation of languages and speech recognition. Both of these technology domains are coming of age with capabilities that will truly impact what we expect of computers on a day-to-day basis. I discuss these technologies with human language technology experts Franz Josef Och, an expert in the automated translation of languages, and Mike Cohen, an expert in speech processing.

BTW, isn't it funny how so many VP level people (note the guy introducing the piece) at Google says "Google" exactly the way Larry and Sergey say it, and not at all the way most of the rest of us say it? There's this funny, compressed, geeky inflection on the "ooooo" sound.

Microsoft has a quiet test running in its research labs that may be of interest to some of my search geek readers. It requires registration, alas, but it might be fun to check out. Called "U Rank" here's a snip from an email sent to me from Microsoft:

Some of the interesting features of U Rank include:
Create the perfect search results for you: Put results in just the right order and add images and video results for added context.
Annotate results: Write notes to summarize important information under each URL.
Short-cuts: Move your favorite sites up; then put an ! in front of the query and go straight to the top result.
Lists: Keep lists while you’re researching (“hotels for my next trip”, “DSLRs for me”)
Collaboration: Share URLs with friends (“related projects”, “our reading list”)
Recommendations: Tell your friends what you like (“best books,” “favorite restaurants”)

The goal of the research project is to learn more about “how” people use search technologies, like whether they take advantage of the ability to edit search results and how they share the results over time with friends and family.

Update: Microsoft contacted to to clarify: it has no intent of implementing this until they learn from the test and if the test goes well...

Just a short rant on what makes me the most angry about the current financial crisis, over at the Amex blog.

I still plan on posting about the other main speakers at CM Summit next week - Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current, Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, and Gian Fulgoni, founder of Comscore - but some stuff has come up and I may not get to it till the weekend. Posting will be light to non existent Friday as I take care of some personal stuff.

Back as soon as I can be. Meanwhile, try not to watch the markets and remember this too will pass. As did the good times.

You always have to go back to the question to get the right answer. Just wanted to get that down in writing.

Perhaps when the top result is the best result - and it's a paid link.

Look at the image of my search results above.

I just now wanted to find the NLCS playoff schedule. I like baseball. I follow the National League, (NL) for the most part. Just about every fan of baseball (and there are millions of them) knows that "NLCS" is code for "National League Championship Series.

So I typed "NLCS playoff schedule" into Google. The results were terrible. The first result was for 2007, and it's October! Playoffs, you know? Happening now? Google was pretty good at giving me the right results when I typed "Olympics" in last August. So I thought it was pretty safe to assume I'd get 2008 playoff schedules when I typed in that query. Alas, it was not to be.

So just in case Google was feeling a bit addled tonight, I added a "2008" to the end to clarify: NLCS playoff schedule 2008.

The results are above. Of the *organic* results, the first is a blogspot blog - not worth clicking on, I mean, I wanted the official sked, right?This one is just for the Dodgers, and I'm a fan of blogs but...I didn't want the Dodger's sked, I wanted the whole NLCS. The second result was worse - an article from a baseball site, and it's about player health. Huh?

The third site is a attempt to sell me tickets.

Google, am I not being specific enough for you? I very much doubt that your algorithms can't figure out how to deliver exactly what I was asking for, especially during the playoffs.

But, wait a minute, there is one result that, should I click on it, will give me the answer I wanted. It's at the top, and hey, look, Google even HIGHLIGHTED it for me!

Oh wait, doesn't that highlight mean it's a paid link? Oh well, never mind that. It's the first link, and we all know that everyone clicks on the first link. Google may have failed at organic search, but it saved its bacon - and paid for it - through AdWords. Let's just hope for Google's sake that folks continue to ignore that "I'm feeling lucky" button. Unless, of course, it's routed through a paid link.

Listen to these quotes (from Ad Age):

"Brands are the solution, not the problem.....Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."

"Brand affinity is clearly hard wired....It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."

Interesting. I wonder, does that mean there's an algorithm for brand affinity? Hmmmm.

Self promotion alert: Check out our totally revamped self service platform, unifying all FM inventory. We're supporting it with our own CM campaign, the Online Marketing Idea Exchange. ClickZ coverage here.

Second up in my series of crowdsourcing the CM Summit conversations (first up was Laura Desmond) is David Rosenblatt, former CEO of Doubleclick, now a VP at Google. David is something of a DoubleClick lifer, having joined the company in 1997 and rising from tech lead to CEO of a company valued at more than $3 billion when sold to Google in 2007.

Readers of Searchblog will recall the industry charlie horse that the DBLCK deal caused - Microsoft lobbied mightily against it, US and European governments took their time approving it, everyone else went on a drunken ad network buying spree, and one could argue that the deal set the painful decline of Yahoo in motion - here was Google, taking square aim at Yahoo's one remaining stronghold - display advertising.

It's been so long since the deal was announced - a year and a half - it's easy to forget it didn't really get final approval till March of this year. The integration, in other words, is still in its first six months, and Rosenblatt took a portion of this summer off before rolling up his sleeves and getting back to work.

I've spoken to David several times since the deal closed, and like Laura, find him both candid and real - he knows Google's strengths, and he recognizes the company's weaknesses when it comes to the brand side of marketing - where DoubleClick has done the lion's share of its business. So I'll be particularly interested in his take on where Google might take its fledgling efforts in non-algorithmic media.

(To register for the CM Summit - nearly 350 already have - please head here).

My questions for David include:

- With YouTube and DoubleClick, Google's spent $5-6 billion to get into the branded display business. Yet 98% of its revenue is in AdWords/Sense. How will that bet pay off inside a corporate culture obsessed with scale and algorithms?

- Google made its brand on not owning and operating media sites. But with YouTube, Knol, Gmail, and now apps, that seems to be changing. What does that portend for branded media plays in the future?

- What is his view of Yahoo and other competitors - Microsoft, AOL?

- The Yahoo/Google deal - does it have a display element? Will it clear the antitrust hurdle?

- Many in the advertising/marketing community call Google "frenemy" (Sorrell). What do you make of this reputation?

- Display is now about a $1bb business inside Google - in other words, very small. Where will Google be in terms of share of display revenue in five years? How will it grow?

- How will DoubleClick as we know it now change and be integrated with other Google products - analytics, apps, AdWords....and how will you deal with the issues of data privacy and transparency?

- Are you seeing the effects of the economy yet?

These are the first questions from the top of my mind. What are yours?

It never fails to surprise me, though it shouldn't, how a simple question can elicit amazing responses. Late last week, on the advice of folks at Linked In and as a way to help guide my work as program chair of the CM Summit, I asked this simple question:

What's the smartest marketing you've ever seen online?

I didn't know what to expect, I've seen these questions stream into my inbox from my Linked In connections, and honestly unless it hit a nerve with me, I didn't really respond to them.

But clearly, this one hit a nerve. Not yet halfway through the seven days that questions are allowed to stay up, this one has 109 responses and counting. And the answers are really thoughtful, they range from Microsoft's MVP program to Mini's work, from subservient chicken to the US Army.

I've decided to take this list, which at the current rate will have 200 or more responses by the time the question closes, and chose ten finalists, then let folks vote on their favorites. Then we can announce the winner(s) at the CM Summit next week. It might be the start of something, who knows?

So many things to miss when you're not reporting news anymore - some of these are old, but they stood the test of time:

Larry Page, Google, Watch these White Spaces, and Prop 8 in CA Is Deeply Dumb and cel phones suck, we can reimagine them, right because after all, we are already reimagining sustainability, see?

When Google starts arbitrating fact from interpretation, we must all think deeply. This is about Yahoo and Google. More here.

Yahoo could be the next platform. If only it could get out of its own way. Oh, and it should own display too, wait, doesn't it already? After all, digital marketing is recession proof, right?

One man anecdote machine declares the storm of the century. Welcome to every seven years, Robert. Funny how Jason agrees.

Good piece on Merus Capital, started by folks who used to be in Google corp dev.

Merus Capital, as it happens, is itself a new Google product. Or, to be more specific, Merus Capital is the product of a new Google phenomenon. Call it the Google exodus, the Google diaspora, whatever--in almost any given week, blogs and business sections perk up with news that key figures at Google are leaving. It happened last October, the day word leaked about Salman Ullah: ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER KEY GOOGLER DEPARTS, read the headline on VentureBeat. Ullah and Dempsey, who resigned at the same time, ran Google's corporate-development group. This meant they were in charge of buying and assimilating new companies, spending billions on YouTube and DoubleClick, among others. They also witnessed some of the initial stirrings of restlessness, the trickle of defections and departures that seemed to them a harbinger of the future. Since the late nineties, when they worked together at the top of Microsoft's corporate-development office, they'd considered becoming venture capitalists. But the timing had never seemed right. By the middle of 2007, about three years after having joined Google, the timing seemed urgent. They became convinced that their departing Google colleagues were going to dream up some truly special projects, and they wanted in. So, along with Peter Hsing, who had previously worked with them at Microsoft and was currently that company's managing director of corporate strategy, they abandoned some of the best corporate jobs in the world in order to go into business for themselves.

Merus Capital, both a product of the Google diaspora and an exploiter of it, has become an important node in the increasingly complex web ex-Googlers are weaving around Silicon Valley. The firm's first entrepreneur in residence, and the first beneficiary of Merus funds, was Gokul Rajaram, perhaps the highest profile recent Google departure, a man whom Fortune magazine identified as "one of the godfathers of AdSense" for his role in creating the targeted advertising service that is one of Google's prime revenue sources. Rajaram's start-up, Chai Labs, which is still in stealth mode, was incubated at Merus. In just the past couple years, ex-Googlers like Rajaram and Ullah and Dempsey have started about two dozen new companies and invested tens of millions of dollars in other start-ups. As

Mac OS on a Dell. Wonder, does this fix all the poewr management and battery issues I have with my MacBook? (Thanks Andy)

FM's third CM Summit is just two weeks away (register here), and as I have in the past (and will with other speakers as well as folks I'll interview at Web 2), I turn to the collective intelligence of Searchblog readers to help me prepare. I'll be having conversations with Evan Williams (co-founder Twitter), Gian Fulgoni (founder Comscore), David Rosenblatt (CEO DoubleClick, now at Google) and many others.

But first up in terms of thinking out loud here is Laura Desmond, Chief Executive Officer, Starcom MediaVest Group, a unit of the Publicis Groupe. For those of you who might not follow the world of marketing too closely, SMG is one of the largest and most influential marketing services companies on the planet, its clients include Kraft, Allstate, Kellogg's, Walt Disney, GM, Coca Cola, Proctor & Gamble, RIM (Blackberry), and on and on. The company collectively controls billions of dollars of marketing spend, including a significant chunk of the monies that fuel the Internet Economy.

In other words, Laura is one Very Important Person in the world of the web, even if you've never heard of her.

Given what I do for a living, I've come to know Laura and find her extremely candid and refreshingly absent the marketing-speak that sometimes creeps into top executives' vocabulary. GIven the economy, it's an extraordinary time to have a conversation. Here are some of the topics I plan to cover:

- SMG's clients represent a comprehensive sampling of the largest marketers in the US and global economy. Given the economic crisis, what are they saying to you now about their plans for spending? Are they going to continue to shift to digital, or are they going to pause or move spend to places where they've lived in the past (IE TV, print)?

- CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands are just starting to lean into digital. What have they learned, and how far do they have to go before they view online as central to their plans, if ever?

- How has the digital world changed how agencies within SMG do their work? (This in light of my writings on CPG vs. Conversational Media, here).

- Lastly, I've asked Laura to bring examples of work done by SMG agencies. I'm looking forward to the show and tell.

But here's where you can help: What else should I be asking Laura? Chime in in the comments!

I think the business model at Twitter is going to be really, really interesting, and I think it's going to leverage search, but search as a proxy for data and pattern recognition. We get an inkling of it at Election 2008, Twitter's mashup of Tweets relating to the election, but there's a lot more to think through. First off, Twitter is using its real estate to promote its deal with Current, which is a first, from what I can tell. The "ads" are on the right, right below each users' profile. I remember covering every new pixel as the Google homepage caved to promotional reality, it's interesting to watch it happen at Twitter, too, which I think has a lot of similarities to Google in terms of potential models.

Also worth watching is the hash function, where you can tag any topic (IE #redsox, as Churbuck pointed out). This function is not likely to catch on with my mother (I can't imagine her adding hashes to her tweets, much less tweeting...yet), but what it enables certainly could. The problem is, when you create a site to pull hashed stuff out into a stream the result is often less than useful (as Churbuck noted in his post).

This is where the role of curation and editors is paramount. Voice, as Fred pointed out. There is voice in editing, voice in curation. And voice adds value. And where value is added, marketers can play, both on Twitter (imagine a cars.twitter.com, with auto advertisers on the right rail and at the top, perhaps using contextual TweetSense - yes, it's owned, by...), and off (think about a feed of contextual Tweets and TweetSense next to conversational sites like Digg and, well, millions of others, as well as sites created simply from Twitter feeds on popular hashes...).

Just a (half) thought....

PS - why isn't search.twitter.com, where you can see hash streams, even promoted on the home page of Twitter? Am I missing something, as I usually do?

That's how Fred describes Google's new blog search, a supposed "Techmeme (or Technorati or Blogs.com) - killer".

It's a very good description of Google's services.

I've wanted a time axis for the web for, well, for ever (OK, since 2003 when I got the idea).

Google has given us at least one point on that axis, 2001. What a nutty time.

Check out a vanity search for me back then. This is before Searchblog, natch.

Over at the Amex Blog we're starting a conversation about how this financial crisis effects small business. The site has given me a chance to think more deeply about what it means to run or be part of a small business - none of us here in the Valley like to think of ourselves as "small" but by nearly every definition, we are. And FM works with nearly 200 other "small" businesses. Join the conversation, we all might learn something. From my post:

...But that doesn’t mean I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, worried about what might be coming next. Many of us in the Internet industry are veterans of the last big bust - 2000-2002 - and we can still feel the pain of losing it all (as I did with the Industry Standard), or at the very least, having to cut back to the bone and wait it out. And this time, something feels different. This crisis is not limited to an overinvestment in telecom and Internet, this time our entire financial system has been brought to its knees. How can you not be worried when Congress is in an extended session to determine the best way to spend nearly a trillion dollars, money that, in fact, we don’t actually have (we’ll be borrowing it, given our national debt)?

It’s a well worn saw that as goes small business, so goes the economy. If all of us start laying off employees and cutting back expenses by a third, our economy will go into a deep funk. If, on the other hand, we all declare faith in the future and start acting accordingly, our businesses will become the engine of economic recovery.

So what do we all need to move away from fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and toward faith and optimism in the future? I’m really eager to hear your thoughts and stories. What are you doing to deal with the current economic situation? Given your business and industry, what actions do you want government to take? What stories do you have to tell about how today’s environment is changing your business outlook? Perhaps if we start to talk about this, and share our knowledge, we can start to effect change - one story at a time.