John Battelle's Searchblog

And it's getting down to it.

Just a placeholder for a piece I'm trying to bang out tonight, ideally. I've been ranting about it to various folks all weekend long, has to do with the inflection point of being able to ask this question:

What are people saying about (my query) right now?

Yep, it has to do with Twitter, but also a lot more than that. Stay tuned...

I do this too much - post something short, as a note to myself and all of you that there is way more to say, then end with "I'll say more in the next post." Then I get busy and forget about that "next post" thing, and start posting on other stuff. What I really meant was, "in my next post on this topic."

Hope that clarifies things.

OK. So what was I talking about when I wrote: "Facebook had a "malfunction" today that reset all my email notifications. All of a sudden, I am getting Facebook notifications in my email inbox about all manner of things.

A conspiracist will claim this was on purpose. I'll explain why in the next post"?

Well, as many of your comments pointed out, both on Twitter and here, one could argue that this particular malfunction really helps Facebook - I'd wager that many folks, like me, turned off nearly all our email notifications way back whenever we set up our original Facebook account (mainly due to all the stupid app spam), and that has led to some problems when it comes to dealing with upstart, competitive services like Twitter.

What do I mean by that? Well, let's focus on Twitter. Every time someone new follows me, I get an email from Twitter. It's pretty much the only way I can find out who's joining my "social graph" on Twitter, and it drives a lot of traffic back to the site (to find out who the person is, read their tweets, then wander around and see what's going on, read replies, maybe tweet a bit, etc). Facebook, on the other hand, keeps your new friends in a queue you can check in on every so often, and all the platform app spam ("You've been bitten by a Vampire!") led me and I suspect a ton of others to turn off nearly all email notifications. Even when I do get notifications in email (I only got notices when someone "friends" me), I don't usually go back to the site -I know I can deal with that in batch mode later.

In short, Facebook is not a network driven by ambient awareness, it's more batch mode driven. And I have come to this startingly obvious conclusion: Social networks driven by ambient awareness will win. And, by the way, so will search solutions that can deal with ambient awareness - AdSense ain't there (yet - more on that in later posts, but that is a big big deal).

Because Twitter is an ambiently aware network, mail from Twitter means a lot more to me than mail from Facebook. And given that folks at Facebook have been staring pretty hard at Twitter lately (a $500mm deal was lost last week), well, as I said, a conspiracy theorist might find it far too coincidental that Facebook recently reset everyone's email notifications.

Having cleaned up the platform mess and focused developers on applications that add long term value to the Facebook ecosystem (more on that here), it is certainly time for Facebook to start acting, well, more like an ambient network. That means, among many other things, communicating again in a meaningful way via email. I have found that I have not re-configued my email settings since they were reset for me, and further, I have found that the emails coming from Facebook are pretty useful - for example, I never knew, before, when someone posted on my wall, or sent me mail inside Facebook mail. Now I do.

This is another step toward Facebook doing what Mark Zuckerberg talked about in our interview at Web 2 earlier this month - pushing Facebook out of its own domain and into the web itself. The issue, however, is keeping it two way - I can make Twitter my Facebook status front end, but I can't Tweet inside my Facebook status or see Facebook responses to my Tweets inside Twitter.

Yet.

That's the last line of a Times piece over the weekend on the increasing size of our digital footprints. Hmmm. But it is the basis of the American constitution. Read the Times piece, which, if you've read The Search and watched the "Web Meets World" meme (that was the theme for Web 2 this year), will not be new ground, but is a good overview of the issue right now.

Another Yahoo search rumor, as Om puts it - this one following the general outline of my suggestion way back when that search be spun off and run as an independent company with backing from Yahoo and Microsoft.

This comes from the Times of London, it seems that in UK, reporters are making a habit of, well, not doing any reporting. The use of passive voice makes my head spin. Listen to this:

It is thought that Jonathan Miller, ex-chairman and chief executive of AOL, and Ross Levinsohn, a former president of Fox Interactive Media, have been lined up to lead the new management team. Senior directors at Microsoft and Yahoo are understood to have agreed the broad terms of a deal, but there is no guarantee that it will succeed.

"It is thought"? "Are understood to have agreed"?

Good lord. I'm not a full time reporter any more, but man, this one smells.

Facebook had a "malfunction" today that reset all my email notifications. All of a sudden, I am getting Facebook notifications in my email inbox about all manner of things.

A conspiracist will claim this was on purpose. I'll explain why in the next post.

Yahoo has rolled out vertical search lenses. TechCrunch is one of the first sites to employ it, SEL has coverage here.

I reported skeptically on this issue earlier, but let's call a spade a spade. Google used its contractor workforce to quickly scale without having to spend on permanent employees, and now, it's using that same workforce to cut back costs. I've heard from a fair number of "laid off" contractors, in particular in Europe, and the reality is simply that: Google's use of contractors outstripped the company's ability to leverage them to the bottom line, and something had to be done. How much of this has to do with slowing growth? Hard to say, but it's also hard to say that growth was not slowing. The world is in crisis, after all.

It's a smart move by Google (control operating costs without hurting core employee base), but from the point of view of the folks effected, it's layoffs nevertheless. Google most likely will grow past these cuts in its contractor workforce in the coming year(s), but the cutback is just that, a cutback. Cnet has more here.

My latest rant, up on the Amex Open Forum Blog. From it:

The debate is as old as the web itself – what is the role of marketing in a medium that is so clearly driven by interaction and communication? I have a lot of thoughts about this topic, but a recent Ad Age article roused me to address one of the most irritating myths out there: That somehow social media and marketing don’t mix.

Titled “P&G Digital Guru Not Sure Marketers Belong on Facebook,” the article quotes Ted McConnell, Manager of Digital Marketing Innovation at P&G in Cincinnati. The money quote: “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”

As I read on, I became certain that the article, which has gotten a lot of attention given P&G’s profile in the marketing world, took what was clearly McConnell’s nuanced view and gave it all the subtlety of a Michael Bay film.

“Social networks may never find the ad dollars they’re hunting for because they don’t really have a right to them, said Ted McConnell,” the article begins. It then goes on to lay out the reasoning behind such an assumptive lead: McConnell doesn’t like random banner ads, and Facebook’s targeting, which purportedly solves the issue of randomness, leaves him cold. Given those two things, Ad Age drew what I must say is an extremely lazy conclusion: Advertising on social networks doesn’t work – look, a senior guy from Proctor says so!

Well, I’m here to call bull on this myth. And I’m pretty sure McConnell would agree with me.

Let’s break it down. To begin with, the article makes this easy assumption: Social networks are “hunting for ad dollars.” That presumes a very traditional approach to media – that social networks have traditional packaged goods media assets (like, say, a television show or a magazine), and are out “big game hunting” – IE, trying to sell proximity to those assets to “big game” like P&G.

But as I’ve argued (over and over and over) social media “assets” don’t look like packaged goods assets, and neither should social media marketing. As McConnell rightly pointed out, you can’t barge into the middle of an intimate social situation, yell “buy my stuff!” and then leave. A brand that does that will certainly be remembered – as an clod.

Those who know me know I tend to prepare for my discussions with leaders onstage at Web 2. You may recall during my conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, I asked whether Facebook was going to buy Twitter. A round of blogospherian eye rolling ensued. "It's the sort of "speculative fun" that could give tech bloggers a gossip-overload headache for weeks to come" said Cnet.

Honestly, I rarely ask questions that don't have a point. As Kara reports today, turns out there were talks - and they were going on right when I asked the question. So far, nothing has come of them, but they got serious enough for a number to be thrown around - $500 million. Cnet was kind enough to give me a bit of credit here. Thanks. The interview I did with Mark is above.

I am not so sure about articles like this one, which claim Google is quietly laying off 10,000 workers (all contract but still full time), but has not a single direct source. If this is true, why, ping me here or in email. If 10K of you are "afffected" I am sure one of you can drop a dime.

Update: A few very interesting emails have come in, I will post them when I confirm they are real, meanwhile, you can reach me here. Email addresses are always kept in confidence.

Given the economic collapse, 2009 is widely seen as a lost year, it seems. But Google CEO Eric Schmidt's an optimist, here's his take on the year.
Google Blog write up here.

Two news items from Yahoo: Glue, the content mix'n'matcher first tested in India, is now available in the US (though in a more limited form). And Yahoo has written off sold Kelkoo, a price comparison engine, TC reports.

So here we go - Google is jumping into the social media search world. "SearchWiki" is Google's answer to the question "Why can't I make search work the way I want it to work, and share/learn from others doing the same thing?"

But one wonders if Google searchers have that question to begin with. As I've argued elsewhere, Google search had become a bit like the morning newspaper of yore - social glue that all of us could depend on because the results were pretty consistent. I don't believe that search shouldn't change - I'm a major proponent of change, particularly in the interface. But as Mike points out, many folks may not want this kind of change.

From Google's announcement:

Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you're an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it's not there at all and you'd like to add it. Or maybe you'd like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.,,,Today we're launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results.

..The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link.

Clearly Google will learn a ton about search behavior through this new set of features, and presumably that will improve core search results. But what I find interesting in all this is what is says about what Google knows, and therefore decided to do. Google knows folks come to the site for repeat navigation - to find places they have already visited. And they know that they go there for discovery - to find things they've never visited but hope to find. A move like this seems to point Google toward bringing the two together, and potentially, re-portalizing the web.

What do I mean by that? Well, it's clear that Google is the starting point for a very large percentage of folks on the web. But while many of us start there, we don't spend much time there - we use Google as a way to jump from place to place. If, however, we can customize Google to become a one stop shop with all our favorite places, as well as comments and social connections, we may well change our behaviors and spend more time at that start place. While Google has never announced numbers, it's commonly assumed that its iGoogle start page is getting less than stellar traction. But iGoogle + SearchWiki? That just might do it. I'd like to post more thoughts on this development but the SearchWiki code has not propagated to my account, so I can't really test drive it. I'm sure when it does, more thoughts will come up....

News from the IAB (caveat, I am on the Board)...

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB ) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) today announced that Internet advertising revenues reached almost $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008, representing an 11 percent increase over the same period in 2007. While double-digit annual growth continues, the quarter-to-quarter curve remains relatively flat compared to recent past performance....

...The Q3 2008 figures, published in the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, are 2 percent higher than the Q2 2008 results. Set against strong economic headwinds in the U.S. economy, Q3 '08's $5.9 billion represents nonetheless the second-highest quarter results ever. For the first nine months of 2008, revenues totaled $17.3 billion, up from $15.2 billion in the same period a year ago and surpassing the record set in the first nine months of 2007 by nearly 14 percent.

The one everyone will be watching, and most expect will be very bad news, is the Q4 spend. It feels like there is a pause in the market as advertisers rethinking how they are spending, and what ROI means in a world of engaged media. Long term, this is a good thing, I think.

And the rumor is he's going to Microsoft.
Should that prove true, another reason to make that Yahoo/MSFT search deal happen. Details at All Things D:

Yahoo–which has stuck to its guns by staying in the search business, even though many think it is a losing game and should be sold off to Microsoft–has lost a key engineer in that arena to, uh-oh, Microsoft.

Sean Suchter, the VP of Search Technology at Yahoo, was also deeply involved in Yahoo’s efforts to open up its search platform, initiatives the company has touted aggressively as a bright spot in its not-so-lustrous landscape.

And thus, Lively dies.

Lots of speculation continues around who might be the right CEO for Yahoo, both on my original post here (I am honored by the readers who suggested it but, come on, guys, I am not the right person for the job), as well as across the 'sphere. Kara has some interesting ideas here, including David Rosenblatt, former CEO of DoubleClick, now at Google (see my interview with him at CM Summit here), former Viacom chief Tom Freston, and Richard Rosenblatt (see his presentation at Web 2 here).

I think all these are fine candidates, and Forbes called me today asking me for more. As I chatted with journalist Elizabeth Corcoran, some themes came out. It seems there might be three types of CEO candidates - leaders from "orthogonal" companies - not media or direct Internet, for example, but folks who grok the overall technology and business space. My candidate from here is Bruce Chizen, former CEO of Adobe, who has successfully competed with Microsoft and gets the B2C software/Internet as platform space (at left, and in conversation at Web 2 last year).

Another type of candidate might be folks from major ad platforms. David Rosenblatt falls in that category, but he's got a very big job at Google, and I'm not sure he'd want to go boil another ocean. But what about Brian McAndrews, who sold aQuantive to Microsoft? (Web 2 video).

A third type of candidate might be a visionary in the space of open platforms, where Jerry - rightfully I believe - has pushed Yahoo in the past year. It's harder to find easy candidates for this category, because most leaders in the world of "open" are more visionaries than operators. But it led to to wonder about folks who might be inside great companies like Dell, HP or IBM, leading huge divisions. After all, those companies have seen the impact of open - Linux in particular - and closed - Microsoft - and have learned lessons that could really guide a maturing Internet world.

That's when another name struck me - Vyomesh Joshi, EVP of HP's Imaging and Printing Group (at left and in conversation with me here). Widely seen inside HP as visionary, VJ (as he is known) is also an accomplished operator - he runs a $30 billion business, after all. But does he have knowledge of Yahoo? Yep - he's on the Board.

Whoever ends up running Yahoo, I think, will not be someone to come in, fix it, and sell it. Why? Because honestly, besides Microsoft, which has declared it's not interested, who else is a buyer of *anything* right now? And I may be showing some bias here, but I believe Yahoo is a great company that has lost its way, not an asset to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder in a low market. The right person can come in and prove that. I wish whoever it is good fortune.

SEL reports on a Journal piece:

The search collaboration that Ballmer referred to would presumably be similar to the search (as opposed to acquisition) deal previously offered to Yahoo — essentially to have Yahoo outsource search and SEM to Microsoft in exchange for guaranteed revenues over a several year period. Danny did a detailed post on the prior Microsoft search offer to Yahoo (compared with the now defunct Google deal).

That offer, as with the larger acquisition offer itself, was previously rejected by Yahoo as undervaluing the business. It was also rejected because it was seen by Yahoo as removing a strategic component of the company’s larger suite of advertising capabilities.

Circumstances have dramatically changed since Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer.

I have believed in a deal like this for a long time. I think it may well come to pass now. But I think the key is how to integrate the two offerings (Yahoo's is generally seen as more battle tested and robust, and has a far longer history of monetization) and how to tie both companies' massive traffic to the engine.

Another example of Google as a publisher. "Ads In New Places":

If you're based in the U.S. you may already have spotted or clicked on the different text and image ads we’re testing on the results pages of Google Image Search. And last week you may have noticed we launched Sponsored Videos on YouTube — a great example of matching ads to content.

In addition, we are today launching text ads on Google Finance in the United States. We're also looking at how best to show display ads on Google Finance. And later, in the very near future, we will start testing text ads on a small number of news refinements within Google Search — so if, for example, you type "iPod" into Google.com and then click on the news link on the upper left-hand side, you might see text ads alongside those results.

Readers of this site will recall my ongoing insistence that voice will be the new search interface (and honestly, the next interface for much of the web). Earlier this week, a step toward that reality was taken by Google. It's going over well. From Cnet:

The new voice-activated Google Mobile app for the iPhone is finally here. Whatever the reason for the delay, it was worth the wait. As we wrote last week, the search app knows when you bring the phone to your face to speak into it. It beeps, you talk, and it executes a Google search on what you said.

Previous coverage of voice search on Searchblog.

I'm fascinated by this question, spurred by a dialog with James Gross, one of our many stars at FM. As I tweeted:

"What can't we do that we wish we could? IE, before YouTube/Flickr, we wished we could upload/share our video/photos easily."

News flash, more to come.

Google and Adobe today reached some official detente on measurement of "stuff that happens inside the world of Flash", (my own attempt at summarizing this Google announcement.)

Recall that earlier Google announced it was crawling PDFs and then Flash, this is one more step toward what I think may come - Google and Adobe uniting as a company against Microsoft. Yes, you heard that right. But on a meta level, it makes a lot of sense.

From announcement:
Today, at the Adobe MAX Conference in San Francisco, in a joint collaboration with our friends at Adobe and a few ace third party developers, we announced a simplified solution for tracking Flash content for everyone, called Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash.

Working at Google over the past couple of years, I've had the opportunity to work with with many of our top clients to implement Google Analytics, who have found the power to identify and analyze trends on their web sites highly useful. But, one of the most common implementation challenges has been tracking Flash content on their pages. In the past, Flash tracking was not provided out of the box, and every implementation had to be customized. Moreover, there was a lack of standards, and new developers who tracked Flash had to create their own processes to get it working. With this launch, tracking your Flash content has never been simpler

Adobe market cap: $12.1bb
Google market cap: $94.5bb

Today Boing Boing launched Boing Boing Offworld, a very Boing0ish take on the world of games. Congrats to the team, and to Intel, whose sponsorship made the launch possible.

It's been a long, odd transition to Fall from Summer. And I've been a bit quieter than I'd like here. But I hope that will change, for the better, soon. Web 2 is over, it was extraordinary. I am moving house, as they say in England, and will be too busy to write this week. But that will change, and I hope you'll stick with me as it does.

...Time for mental Google!

Check it out: so far Doerr, Meeker, Lessig and Brilliant are up, Yang coming soon.

For your consideration:

The part that people don't yet fully understand is that "vertical ad networks," at the end of the day, are still ad networks. Ad networks are a vital part of the online media ecosystem. They provide publishers with additional revenue on inventory that isn't otherwise fulfilling higher CPM sponsorship programs, and they provide direct-response marketers with additional reach at cost-efficient rates. Vertical ad networks offer a bit better targeting because they focus on a smaller set of sites.

While vertical ad networks may improve efficiency for direct-response advertisers, who determine success based on some variation of cost-per-click, they are not solving the needs of brand advertisers. Ultimately, vertical ad networks serve advertisers and will compete with everyone else who serves DR advertisers, from Google to the other ad networks. The excitement over "vertical" ad networks will erode as CPMs on those networks chase the DR metrics.

Facebook with loads o ads:

The author Andrew Chen notes that with "experimental" ad budgets (ie stuff like Facebook's nascent "engagement ads" and the like) getting slashed, this might be what Facebook looks like soon.

Release:

Yahoo! Announces Termination of Services Agreement by Google

SUNNYVALE, Calif., November 5, 2008 – Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that Google has terminated the advertising services agreement the companies announced in June. Yahoo! continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court. Google notified Yahoo! of its refusal to move forward with implementation of the agreement following indication from the Department of Justice that it would seek to block it, despite Yahoo!’s proposed revisions to address the DOJ’s concerns.

While the implementation of the services agreement with Google would have enabled Yahoo! to accelerate its investments in its top business priorities through an infusion of additional operating cash flow, this deal was incremental to Yahoo!’s product roadmap and does not change Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation and growth in search. The fundamental building blocks of a stronger Yahoo! in both sponsored and algorithmic search were put in place independent of the agreement.

Google's blog post

I just learned my next piece is up over at the Looksmart series. It's a rumination of sorts....

In ten short years, Google has become our social glue - we all presume that two people, asking roughly the same question, will get pretty much the same answer, and that answer will be correct. For most of the past decade, that was a pretty fair assumption. Google has become a universal search resource, reliable, accurate, and ... consistent.

But for a variety of reasons, that assumption is no longer true. The ongoing goal of all search providers has been to personalize search - to tailor answers to the individual who is doing the searching. Search no longer takes one signal - your query - and finds results against the entire web. Instead it takes many signals - your search history, your geographic location, things you've clicked on in the past, files on your hard drive (if you allow it), and many others - and processes those signals against probable sub sets of data that have a higher chance of providing *you* the best answer. And that answer, increasingly, will be quite different from someone else's, even if that other person asks exactly the same question.

Along the way, I think, something has been lost. It's the same thing my mother lamented as she watched my generation abandon the newspaper - common ground, common spaces - a common set of facts around which we as humans can gather, debate, and connect. And therein lies an opportunity, I sense, to create a new kind of search that is in fact *not* personalized, but rather socialized - shared and common to all.

I'm gathering up my stuff and driving over to SF this afternoon. I'll be hosting Web 2 for the next three and a half days, and I imagine posting will be light here. You can follow me on Twitter and also follow Web2Summit.

A reader sent me this:

In September, we reported online sales were holding steady across our client base. As November begins, the situation has become bleaker. Across much of our client base, we see significant signs of the economic slowdown.

For background, our agency manages search for over 100 clients, mostly online retailers, mostly B2C. Our clients spend about $100 million combined on paid search clicks annually.

Here are total PPC-driven sales, aggregated across all our clients, from Monday, June 2, 2008 through Sunday, October 26, 2008.

This is a chart that gives pause. There is a lot more analysis in the post, I urge those interested in these issues to read on.

From a Weisel report emailed to me just now:

On Monday (11/3) after the close, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and Yahoo have submitted to the Department of Justice a revised version of their proposed search agreement. While we see little legal reasoning behind blocking the deal, we believe the DOJ is basically saying that Yahoo can't be trusted to do the right thing for its business over the long term.

Shortened Duration: The reported revised plan shortens the partnership from 10 years to 2 years, forcing Yahoo to avoid lowering its search monetization capability if the company can't rely on Google for a decade.

Cap on Outsourced Revenue: The revised deal would also place caps on the revenue that Yahoo can generate from the partnership to 25% of Yahoo's search revenues (or around $1bn annually based on our 2008 estimates). Given Yahoo had originally identified search revenues of $800mn that would be addressable for Google suggests again that the DOJ would want to put fail safe measures in place to limit Yahoo from getting too aggressive and outsource beyond the tail keywords which it had previously highlighted.

Here is a Reuters piece:

Yahoo Inc and Google Inc have drastically scaled back the scope of their search advertising deal, a person close to the discussions said on Monday, in a last-ditch effort to win U.S. antitrust approval.

The move comes after Google appeared to be on the verge of walking away from the partnership, which was announced in June to foil Microsoft Corp's takeover attempt of Yahoo. The deal has since drawn scrutiny from U.S. regulators amid a growing chorus of criticism from advertisers.

The two Internet companies have submitted a reworked proposal to the U.S. Department of Justice that shortens their partnership to just two years from 10 years, the source said.

Jerry and I sit down to talk on stage Weds.

Check this out from the AdSense blog:

When we notice a spike in readers who are interested in a specific topic, we like to address it as soon as we can. There's been some interest in filtering ads from publisher pages, so here's a quick refresher on the filtering tools we offer:

Competitive Ad Filter

You can restrict contextually-targeted and placement-targeted ads from appearing on your pages by adding the URL of each ad to your Competitive Ad Filter. After logging in to your account, click the AdSense Setup tab and visit the 'Competitive Ad Filter' page. You can also find full instructions and tips for entering in specific URLs in our Help Center. To determine the URL of an ad, try the AdSense Preview Tool or follow these steps. Please keep in mind that it may take several hours for the filter to take effect.

Look, I run a network of high end publishers, and many of them use Google and other remnant networks to backfill ad inventory. So I see this too. And I can give you exactly one reason why this came up. For those of you too lazy to click the link, Google came out against Proposition 8 a while back, and I applaud them for doing so. And the spike they are referring to? Most likely (I have not confirmed this) it's because the Yes on Prop 8 folks are aggressively spending on Google right now, and a ton of publishers are seeing Yes on 8 ads on their site, and they don't want to allow those ads.

For the record, I am openly against this proposition. If that means another group of readers (yeah, I am for Obama too) stop reading me because they think my views don't fit theirs, well, sorry to see you go, folks. Most likely, most of you left me already given my views on the presidential electon. Somehow, I sense, in a decade or two, this will all seem like a pretty stupid debate.

Onwards.

Amr has a fun analysis.

The Facebook Lexicon is a very nifty tool which analyzes the frequency and associations of words in Facebook wall messages for profiles, events, and groups. The first graph below shows that Obama is mentioned significantly more frequently than Mccain, and, more importantly, the second graph shows that the mentions for Obama have more positive sentiment (e.g. “I love Obama”), versus negative sentiment (e.g. “I hate McCain”).

Link to Lexicon on sentiment.