John Battelle's Searchblog

This morning reports came streaming in that "Google was freaking out." From a Slashdot thread:

"It looks like for the moment at least, all Google results are failing the malware checks and being listed with a warning 'This site may harm your computer,' including all pages from Google themselves. Users trying to visit pages at search results will only be able to proceed via manual manipulation of the search result link to remove the Google click-through (which is also broken). Until Google fixes this bug, it looks Google web search is useless."

Other reports claimed that Gmail was also affected, from a mailing list I monitor:

Just fyi, the problem also affected any mail coming into Gmail, wrongly marking emails as spam and putting a big red warning flag on
them.....So check your spam folders.

Screenshots here.

Google's Marissa Mayers, who I am sure did NOT have a pleasant Saturday morning, acknowledged the screw up:

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error.

A NY Times blog covers it here.

My favorite commentary out there on the boards?

Skynet - er, Google - has become self-aware and has deemed that the entire Internet is harmful to us power sour - I mean, humans, and is protecting us for some reason it has not divulged yet...

Gotta love them Internets.

So I write a longish post, thinking out loud, and tweet it. Then as an afterthought, I tweet that my cat was bad today, and I had to punish it. Do I spank the cat, I asked? Well, the response was pretty funny. Twitter is connected to my Facebook account, and most likley the longest comment thread ever on my "status" ensued. Within a minute, I had two status updates: One of my tweets is about the future of publishing, business, culture, the economy. Heavy shit. The other is about spanking a cat.

Which one do you think won in terms of comments and engagement? Yup. Lesson learned. When looking for traffic, spank your cat.

(And by the way, fix your permalink lameness, Facebook. It keeps you from being part of the real web).

Update: This is NOT ME spanking the cat! I mean, really. The video is hilarious, but it's a bit....twisted too.

(Second in an ongoing series, part one here)

I've been thinking a lot about the world of "print" lately. I'm not alone. Everywhere I look, another story declares newspapers and magazines dead or dying. I disagree that the essence of what print has stood for will die (in short, storytelling), but I do agree that the structures around that storytelling are ending a lifecycle. And that ain't all that's ending.

Besides coded communication (ie, words, grammar, language), print has been fueled on one big premise: Waste paper. Somewhere in the late 18th or 19th century paper became so cheap that entire economic systems could be built that presumed it was actually beneficial to use more of it than was needed. Paper was a revelation - there's probably a great story to be written comparing the cultural and economic impact of paper to that of the web (it's probably been written, and I missed it).

Take the book publishing industry, for example. As a recent Time piece on publishing put it:

Publishers sell books to bookstores on a consignment system, which means the stores can return unsold books to publishers for a full refund. Publishers suck up the shipping costs both ways, plus the expense of printing and then pulping the merchandise. "They print way more than they know they can sell, to kind of create a buzz, and then they end up taking half those books back," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of PW.

In a world where there was no alternative to paper-based communications, it made sense to waste paper. We all know that world has changed completely - instead of wasting paper, we now waste processors, pixels, and (to a certain extent) bandwidth to communicate with each other.

The Time piece does a good job of explaining how this shift has impacted book publishing, and has a very Wired-like take on the results: in essence, book publishers will emerge as packagers of high-value print products that have been validated by the web's frothy jungle of collective intelligence:

Not that Old Publishing will disappear--for now, at least, it's certainly the best way for authors to get the money and status they need to survive--but it will live on in a radically altered, symbiotic form as the small, pointy peak of a mighty pyramid. If readers want to pay for the old-school premium package, they can get their literature the old-fashioned way: carefully selected and edited, and presented in a bespoke, art-directed paper package. But below that there will be a vast continuum of other options: quickie print-on-demand editions and electronic editions for digital devices, with a corresponding hierarchy of professional and amateur editorial selectiveness. (Unpaid amateur editors have already hit the world of fan fiction, where they're called beta readers.) The wide bottom of the pyramid will consist of a vast loamy layer of free, unedited, Web-only fiction, rated and ranked YouTube-style by the anonymous reading masses.

I think Time is onto something here. I recall when Wired first came out. We shouted our Digital Revolution credo from the rooftops, and were often greeted with a smirk from reporters covering our new magazine: "If you are so digital, why did you make a paper magazine?!"

Our answer was always the same: If you're going to create something using paper, you have to justify it. The era of print as the presumptive delivery vehicle for information was over. From now on, if you're going to consign something to paper, you can't presume to waste it. In fact, you have to do the opposite: You have to add value to it to the point of it becoming an object people want to literally touch (hence, our approach to design).

Entire economic models have been built on the premise of free paper. Expensive printing presses, expensive distribution, expensive union reporters, hell, even paper is expensive once the advertising that made it seem like a marginal cost has migrated to digital. Those models are dying. But the narratives paper once supported aren't dying. They're exploding in variety, and accelerating in speed.

Hence the thesis behind FM: this new digital world of publishing needs media companies that act much as book publishers did back when paper was cheap and authors began writing novels to exploit this new reality. The best of the web's "authors" are indeed "crowd-sourced" - their ability to create and nurture significant communities sets them apart and makes them valuable. On the web, an "author" might be someone like Heather Armstrong at Dooce, but it also might be a platform or application like Mixx or Graffitti, or a "band" like Boing Boing or Silicon Alley Insider. As readers, we vote with our attention to and engagement with a site. In short, traditional print-based models of publishing may be dying, but publishing, as a business, has never been more vibrant.

It might suck to be a book publisher or a newspaper company right about now, but that's the reality of creative destruction and the cycle of business and culture. And it seems entirely clear that what is happening to the publishing industry is also happening to its industrial-era cousins - banking, energy, transportation, even the PC industry - all of them based on wasting something that once seemed a plentiful commodity - credit, oil, capitalized IT budgets.

There's a theme in there somewhere, and I hope to keep teasing it out. But it's Friday, and it's 5 pm. Enough for now.

Today is the last day for early registration discounts on this year's Web 2 Summit. The event is slated for Oct. 20-22 in SF, at a new venue. If you went last year, or are an alumus and are on our list, you got an email with a code you can use for the discount, which is significant. If you want to go but don't have that email or code, ping me: jbat at battellemedia dot com, and I'll get you hooked up. You can always request an invite as well, I review these personally and will make sure to take care of you if you mention you came via Searchblog.

We are finalizing the theme and speaker lineup for this year, we have a very clear idea of where we are taking it - and I think you'll find what we're doing intriguing. Last year I think we successfully navigated the massive issues roiling the markets, and pivoted toward a theme of "Web Meets World" which proved quite apt, I think. I can't divulge who is speaking this year, yet, but trust me, I take my role as Program Chair very seriously. This will be a very, very interesting year.

Yesterday at the NAPTE show TiVo CEO issued a call to action to the television business: get a new business model, or suffer the same fate as the newspaper.
I think he's right, and I've got some ideas about what that model should be. I'll be posting more on this, but the short overview is this: Television should respond to the exhaustive knowledge it has of our viewing habits, and create a model that trades value for engagement. I sketched this out a while back in my post "TV and Search Merge" but that was more than four years ago. A lot has changed, and I've learned a lot more about how marketing works. So look for another Friday sketch, tommorrow, outlining my more considered thoughts on the subject.

I wonder if Carol Bartz made this rabbit a condition of her joining - Yahoo beat estimates, despite showing a $300mm+ loss in the fourth quarter.

Reports of her first earnings call were generally positive.

I wonder what Kevin might say about this random tweet that came out of me: "Is Twitter the logical next step to a Borg hivemind? First books. Then blogs. Then Twitter. Then ... Borg? "

What I was on about was a habit I've notice I'm getting into - I've timeshifted my reading into another (more accelrated) phase. I read Twitter a few times a day, blogs every other day, and print a few times a week. I used to read blogs all day, and magazines/print a every other day. I remember when I did this with blogs, everyone was saying to me "how on earth can you keep up?!" But it was not hard at all, it was valuable to me, it fed my work and my life.
What happens when Twitter shifts to real time? Could we handle it? Could it happen? A microconversation in our heads, on all the time? I'm not sure we could. It is, however, what the Borg is all about, no? The delta between individual and social closed to no more than a blink? Very sci fi. Hmmm.

Google yesterday announced it would offer a repricing program for its options holding employees, a move that acknowledges and addresses the reality that Google's stock has sunk, like most others, well below strike prices. Google plans to take a $460 million charge for the move.

The WSJ picks up on the news and offers a perspective (the post is behind a pay wall):

...options are also meant to align interests with shareholders -- so if the price soars, both benefit. If the price drops, both suffer. If Google is going to reprice when things go wrong, it should also limit the upside to employees. It would be easier simply to pay bonuses instead, tied to corporate performance, with a portion in stock that vests over time to aid retention ... when shareholders do add up the cost of options, the answer can be shocking. Albert Meyer, president of money manager Bastiat Capital, calculates that since 1995, Cisco Systems has spent $30 billion -- or nearly half its free cash flow in that period -- buying back stock issued as a result of employee options exercises.

Update - more from Adam here. Good overview of earnings, notes only *100* new employees in the quarter, that is a major shift (on a base of 20K) and this:

Google is transferring almost half a billion dollars in wealth from shareholders to employees, and for what ….? Motivation and retention, says Google. This a well known farce, as old as the Valley, which tells itself first that it offers generous stock options as a form of incentive and then, when share prices plummet, moves the ball so its employees, whose incentives apparently didn’t work (as if the stock price were under their control) can be re-incentivized. Retention? Would someone please tell me where the average Google employee is going to go right now?

In conclusion, and as the headline says, Google is in good shape. Not fantastic. But plenty damn good. It’s also becoming more and more like other technology companies in so many ways.

Ad Age does a good job reviewing and comparing Google and Microsoft's earnings.

Google posted a 17% increase in revenue in the fourth quarter compared with the year-ago period and, in what appeared to be an attempt to temper expectations for a more difficult first quarter, called that the "easy part."

Look, I am partners with O'Reilly on Web2, so I am biased. But for my money, the best event out there to get a real sense of where the tech world is going is OR's eTech event, happening in March in San Jose.

I go to connect to the people who I know will be changing my world, sometime in the not so distant future.

It's just really, really good.

So this year I asked them to give me a discount code that I could pass along to all Searchblog readers. Here it is: et09jbat. Use it when you register here and get 10% off. Trust me. It's worth it.

Update: The discount is now **30%** - thanks eTech!!

More soon. News here.

Or perhaps I should say, lazywebbing out loud. I have been thinking about the connection between Twitter and Facebook (many folks, including myself, have noticed how once Twitter updates your status, comments increase in Facebook, but it's a one way experience). In short, Twitter is a Facebook application, but Facebook is not a Twitter application. It should be. But will FB Connect be enough to make it so? Sure, I know you can import your social graph and profile info, but can you import comments on status? IT'd be cool if you could. And what can you do with the data? Has Twitter taken a stance on FBConnect? Is it going to build it in? Should it? I'm running to my last set of meetings in NYC this morning and will check in on this thread before hitting the airport. I think there's something in there worth picking apart....

YouTube as a reference site and search king (yes, video is grammar).

Microsoft's (and others') Plot to Kill Google. Good luck with that.

A survey underwritten by MSFT finds advertisers are wary of Google. Despite the source, I can't imagine this isn't true. If only they also weren't wary of Microsoft.

Google Knol isn't working. Yes it is. Maybe it is.

Search is off 8 percent quarter to quarter in Q4. So says one source. I'm waiting till the real numbers come in.

Google tests preferred site preference.

I'm in NYC in back to back to back meetings, but thought I'd note some news of the day.

My in box greeted me with this from Cowen Jim Friedland analyst this morning:

We are updating our U.S. online advertising industry projections to account for the weakening macro outlook. We expect the online ad market to shrink by 1% in 2009, compared to our prior projection of 3% growth; we are projecting paid search growth of 5% and an 8% decline in display advertising. Our estimates are based on the assumption of a 10% decline in the total U.S. ad market in 2009. We continue to believe that search will eventually account for 10-15% of total ad budgets (up from 5% in 2008) and that Google will continue to gain share. Although upward number revisions are unlikely in the near term, we believe that Google is attractively valued based on our downside scenario of 0% revenue growth in 2009.

We expect online advertising to account for 9.6% of total ad budgets in 2009, up from 8.7% in 2008. The one consistent message we are hearing from our industry checks is that advertisers are shifting spending to search at the expense of traditional media (we have also heard that display ad budgets are being shifted to search in the weak macro environment). We expect this trend to continue, regardless of how much the overall advertising pie shrinks in 2009, given the higher returns generated by search compared to other media.

We continue to believe that search will eventually account for 10-15% global ad budgets, up from 4-5% today. We expect online advertising to eventually account for 25% of the total U.S. ad market, which is the level achieved by the television ad market at maturity. Paid search accounts for 60% of online ad spending, and we expect the ratio to hold, or increase, given that search offers higher returns than display ads; 25% x 60% = 15% target share.

In other words, it's all going to hell, but folks will push money to search, because search performs. I think this misses the way media markets work, which is to say, one can only harvest so much demand, before one needs to create it, and to create it, you need to build brands. And to do that, you need to figure out how to engage with potential customers online. More on that when I'm not traveling.

I'm traveling to NY for a few days this week, and alas, will be on a plane during part of the inaugural speech. But I am very excited that a new era is dawning, and I hope we have both patience and high expectations for our new government.

Danny asks a very good question here:

Yesterday, we got a new news search engine which taps into Twitter that Yahoo’s excited about, as it uses their BOSS system. That kind of annoyed me. Why didn’t Yahoo just build the service themselves? Or a regular Twitter search service, for that matter? And where’s Twitter search from Google?

Well, my answer is simple: Competition.

The reason there is not a "Twitter search" from Yahoo or Google is because both companies want to own Twitter, or at least, they want to own the phenomenon of real time search Twitter represents. If they were to create a Twitter search, it would validate Twitter and give the company way too much power. Yahoo has a deep memory of essentially creating Google by using Google as its main search engine during Google's early rise. If any company has a shot at beating Twitter, it's Yahoo, to my mind.

And Google is likely viewing Twitter as a competitor, and is probably noodling the addition of Twitter-like functionality to Blogger (if it hasn't already, I'm not following the service too closely). The reason? TweetSense. I am certain Google wants AdSense to be TweetSense, and I am equally certain that the Twitter team will want to build its own version of a scaled ad platform that matches consumer intent, as declared through Tweets and search, to marketers' paid listings.

We are seeing the same movie over at Facebook. It's going to be fascinating to watch.

They are talking again - Yahoo and Microsoft, and many are claiming a deal in which MSFT buys Yahoo search is imminent. But we've heard this before. I don't think straight out selling Yahoo search to MSFT makes sense. Jerry is right - the piece notes his view that advertisers want to buy brand with search - and as I've written in the past, search gives a company like Yahoo extremely valuable data - consumer insights that help drive product development.

Instead, there's a third way.

Recall my 2009 predictions:

1. I predicted that Yahoo would buy AOL, then MSFT would work a search deal for the combined entity
2. I predicted that Microsoft would gain 5-10 points of share this year.

The two clearly work together.

But what I think is interesting, or could be, is the creation of a third party search company that is owned by Yahoo and Microsoft. I guess I will keep banging the Soverture drum. I wrote this piece back in March of 2007. From it:

Everyone knows how difficult it's been for both Yahoo and Microsoft to beat Google at its own game - search. Yahoo has been beat up for years over its lackluster monetization efforts - after initially gaining plaudits for its bold purchase of Overture. And over at Microsoft, search is still at the Windows 1.0 phase, and the rumblings I'm hearing out of Redmond are not encouraging. People are leaving, search share is dropping, and recruitment is tough.

But then again, both companies bring a lot to the table. Yahoo did a great job combining several engines into one solid organic search performer, and early reports on Panama are also solid. Microsoft has an innovative approach in its demographically-driven AdCenter. Both companies have significant traffic of good intent. For building search companies, Yahoo is in the right location. Microsoft has huge market cap and cash. Both need to do something, quickly, to prove to Wall St. that they can compete with King Google.

So why not join forces, like back in the good old days when Overture fed both Yahoo and Microsoft? Such a venture solves any number of tough problems

I'm enjoying listening to Ze Think Out Loud about audience and collaboration over at a new-ish site he's calling The Explicit. It might be a bit - academic or insular in tone for many of you, but I thought I'd share. Thanks to Andre for pointing it out to me.

For filing an amicus brief on the repeal of Prop 8. I saw Milk last week and it's a very strong reminder of how far we've come as a culture, and how far we have yet to go.

One of my predictions in 2009 was that Twitter is going to continue to take off. When I read on TC that Pierre Omidyar is fascinated with the service to the point of investing in a related company and even acting as an exec, I have to feel a tad bit validated. A caveat - Omidyar Networks is an investor in my company FM.

Like Dodgeball, Google Video Uploads, Jaiku, and Google Catalog, and ... I am not keeping track. But this is the evidence of Sergey's comment months ago that Google was doing too much...

In any case, I think the spin Google gave on Google Catalog's closing is a bit .... well it's spin. We all do it. Let's revisit the launch of Google Catalog, courtesy Danny's SEW, which was deep into reporting mode when Catalog launched. (Danny has moved on to SEL).

My first thought upon seeing the service was "Why?" Of all the things Google could choose to make searchable, why target mail order catalogs? Shopping-oriented searches do make up a significant chunk of any search engine's queries, so launching some type of shopping search service does make sense. But why not instead target online merchant stores?

The answer from Google is that mail order catalogs provide more comprehensive product listings than can be found online and that making catalogs searchable was something it could do easily.

"A number of people [at Google] thought offline catalogs are much better than online shopping sites," said Urs Hvlzle, Google Fellow and member of Google's executive management team.

Explaining further, Hvlzle said a major drawback to print catalogs is that you generally only have a few in your home and there's no way to easily "search" within them. Google Catalogs solves this by letting you search through a virtual library of catalogs.

I guess not many folks really wanted to do that, given that the web itself, in a way, is already "a virtual library of catalogs." Back in 2002, however, it was arguable that there was way more structured product data in catalogs than there was on the web. Now, well, not so much.

Google of late has been contracting its contract work force, but today the company announced real layoffs, in its HR group, no less - the folks responsible for hiring. 100 people will be laid off or redeployed, and as SAI notes, it's a very clear sign that the company is feeling what all of us are feeling - a very significant recession.

When Google catches a cold, it's a sure bet a lot of other companies have pneumonia, or worse.

When I saw this Mashable post, I almost spit my wine (yeah, I am drinking wine, hell, it's 8.50 pm) onto the screen. Here's the headline:

Did CNN Live Snub Twitter in Favor of Facebook?

"What the f* are we, in high school?" was my first response. Then I realized how important it is to some folks that "traditional" or "old" media like CNN validate "new" media like Facebook or Twitter.

Honestly, I don't get it.

And then again, I do get this: that absent a centered strategy, a network like CNN is going to cast its lot on any given day, or story, with whoever seems to be best suited to give it the most appeal, the most cred, and the most, well, arm candy.

And then it hit me. When it comes to the media business, we're in high school all over again. The CNNs are the jocks, and the hot apps like Facebook and Twitter are the Cute Girls.

Now, it all makes sense.

What Fred said.

Not a lot of media experience in this choice, reported here by the WSJ. Kara had speculated on this previously.

Bartz has a lot of experience in other parts of the technology world, to be sure, and is widely respected. And I love that her former company, Autodesk, is in Marin, where I founded FM. But it does strike me that Yahoo needs a stronger suite of media-savvy executives now that Weiner and Rosensweig are gone.

If we are ever going to crack the biological barrier (IE, make real intelligence), we can't have this kind of inefficiency in our machines:

"a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds."

Ten seconds!!! Man, that's slow. It takes us, what, about two orders of magnitudes less, if not three, to conjure up a thought, right? Kevin?

For the past few years, but in particular in the past year, spammers, or one very focused spammer, have been posting bogus comments on Searchblog, hoping to leverage the authority of this community to promote a commerce site called oyuncambazi dot com. Well, here's my response: oyuncambazi are spammers, spam, spam, spaaaaammmmmmers. Oyuncambazi = Spam. So please stop, Mr. Oyun. It's tiresome and time consuming. STOP. Ideally, those wonderful Googlebots will pick up this post and start relating oyuncambazi with SPAM.

Update: I got an apology from someone for spamming, and a promise to not do it anymore. We'll see!

Update 2: The person responsible claims to be a 17 year old from Turkey who, though it's hard to understand his English, seems to be quite regretful. We're trying to hav a conversation on email. He's been doing this all over the web, clearly. Now this post is #2 on Google on a search for his site.

Noting this piece which positions Tivo as the Google of TV. More to say on it, but from it:

Announced this week at CES 2009, the new TV search works similarly to the search bar in the Firefox address browser. You type in the first few letters of a show in the 'discovery bar' and relevant recommendations of shows on TV satellite and broadband networks come up. At the same time, you get a nice looking new column arrangement of information about a show, including episode description, rating, and relevant art.

The new appearance, according to TiVo reps, was created to fit to the longer length of HDTV's. The old swivel search had no visuals and didn't provide immediate information that could help a user choose efficiently. Still, this is a feature that is most helpful during passive browsing – if you're the type that already knows what you want, the new search will look much nicer but it won’t make a huge difference.

Recall I've earlier noted that search on TV is really broken, and is a real opportunity. And don't think Google doesn't want to be the Google of TV. I think the company presumes it will be. For any number of reasons, including the "webification" of television in general. Once the web hits TV, Google comes along, though it will have to keep doing distro deals with the likes of Comcast, which are not going so well (Yahoo took Google's biz here).

If ever there was a better realization of what I meant when I wrote about "a new kind of blog publishing", I don't know where to find it. This post, series, and site is exactly what I meant. Sure, I've known about The Hype Machine for some time, but this series is a publishing masterpiece, part authorial intent, part crowdsourcing, and part the confluence of great tools, platforms, models, and policies (you can play the music! you can buy the music!).

The top 50 albums of the year. Check it out.

I'm just back from a few days at CES in Las Vegas. The annual Consumer Electronics Show has become a white hot core of the marketing world, certainly for technology, but also now for nearly every major brand. Consumer electronics, after all, is the medium through which brands communicate and converse with consumers. If you care about your brand, you're at the show.

This year, of course, would prove to be different. Gone was (most of) the ebullience and chest pounding; a more somber tone was prevalent, and most certainly the network of hotels, casinos, and convention centers that makes up the CES ecosystem was .... more sparse. It's clear companies had cut back travel and thousands of folks simply did not come. Everyone remarked on that - cab lines were shorter, halls and walkways between events less crowded.

But there was something else in the air, and after some reflection, I think I know what it is. I'll call it The Ground. I got the distinct sense from the marketers, developers, and publishers I spoke with that they had, in the main, found The Ground - they had been falling, out of control, for a long time, and finally, they've found themselves on the other side.

I think we all were worried that when we hit the bottom, we'd splat like a bug on a windshield. But we're realizing it's rather more like Alice or Tik Tok, falling through a long, confusing hole, and emerging, blinking, into a baffling new world. Strange, certainly, but at least there's gravity and sunlight: We can get up, dust ourselves off, and look around to see what might come next.

The world we're seeing is quite different indeed. For those in marketing, it's a world where the assumptions of the past are no longer reliable. There are strange new creatures, and odd new lands (Twitter? Facebook? Blogs?). The practices which worked for the past 50 years are crumbling. Combined with the harsh reality of a deep recession, it's clear we have our work cut out.

But here we stand, ready to do the work. That is what I sensed at CES. The journey will be difficult, there are losses still ahead, and we'll be continually be tested. We will be forced to question our assumptions and deal with situations which on their face might be challenging, or even preposterous (a Cheshire Cat? Forests of Metal?!). But we can either hide from this new reality, or embrace it as an important narrative upon which we must embark.

And at least with the people I spoke to at CES this week, it's clear they are starting to see things from the latter point of view.

This, to me, is very good news, and gives me great optimism about the future.

(This post will be part of a series I'll be writing on print, publishing and journalism. I'm not sure where it's going, but I really do want to Think Out Loud about this stuff.)

If you care about journalism, and I certainly fall into that category, then don't feel bad if you're confused. There's been no shortage of contradictory reporting about the state of reporting. Take this piece, for instance, which come to us courtesy of I Want Media:

Deloitte report claims traditional media 'more popular than online'

IWantMedia's summary of the piece, which is pretty much what most folks read (unless they really want to learn more, and click through), reads this way:

Traditional media -- print, television and radio -- remains more popular than online, according to research from business advisory firm Deloitte. Some 73% of consumers say they prefer reading print magazines even though they know they can find the same information on the Internet.

But if you do click through, you find out this is an article in the UK edition of PrintWeek (where I am certain there is no bias toward, er, print), and the findings are solely for the UK market, which is a very different publishing economy than, say, the US or Asia. (Print distribution in the UK is far cheaper than in other markets due to the abundance of urban newsstands, the abundance of choice in UK newspapers, and the abundance in appetite of UK consumers in the reading of newspapers, in particular newspapers with a very sharp political point of view. Regardless, online is already in the process of doing to the UK's print hegemony what its done to others like the US).

In other words, in no way should you form an opinion on the future of print based upon that summary in IWantMedia*. And while I do not blame IWantMedia for this, I do think is reflects an issue with how we consume news and information on the web - we depend on summaries, aggregations, and pointers, we create our own bricollage of comprehension on the fly. Every so often, we go deep into a source we've decided to trust, often one that is far more conversational (like this site is) than a traditional news outlet. The traditional print hegemony - editors, publishers, executives in the newspaper and magazine business - seem unwilling or unable to respond to this new reality in a way that can save their businesses. But I think they can.

Let's take a spin through some recent print-related news as a thought exercise. I've already done a quick overview of the End of Times piece in The Atlantic. A similar piece in Fortune has gotten a lot of pick up (all of it online, of course): Google News: CEO Eric Schmidt wishes he could rescue newspapers. Wishes, but apparently, not willing. As I've argued a few times in the past, I do think Google has both the means and the model to help the news industry, but let's set that aside and grok what Eric has to say.

In the introduction, the editors state that Schmidt and Google possess "a passionate desire to lend a hand" to the struggling industry. He mentions the various services Google has to drive traffic and revenue to online versions of newspapers, but admits those can't solve the basic economic issue - it costs too much to print and distribute the product, and the product itself is one fewer and fewer people actually want. I think there's a lesson there, but more on that in another post.

The question is then posted: What about Google buying newspapers? The answer is interesting: "The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don't think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question we're in this uncomfortable conversation." He goes on to state: "To me this presents a real tragedy in the sense that journalism is a central part of democracy. And if it can't be funded because of these business problems, then that's a real loss in terms of voices and diversity. And I don't think bloggers make up the difference. The historic model of investigative journalists in any industry is something that is very fundamental. So the question is, what can you do about this? And a fair statement is, we're still looking for the right answer."

I don't think we're all that far from the right answer. I can tell you this,however: It won't look much like the old answer. The problem that no one seems to want to admit is the way newspapers are organized, they way they leverage their most precious assets (journalists and readers), and the way they approach their businesses in general is simply a non starter in the online space. The newspaper as an institution does not graft to the web. It doesn't. The sooner newspapers realize this, the sooner they'll start to get healthy again. As I wrote before:

I can't tell you where I heard this, but trust me, it's from a good source: Up until recently, the Chronicle had 400 journalists working at the paper. FOUR HUNDRED! When I wrote for the LA Times, I often wrote two stories a day. Is the Chronicle pumping out 800 stories a day? Is it breaking all sorts of amazing stories and being a leader in the community with those 400 journalists? Hell no! 400 reporters and what is the paper DOING with them? Not much, I'm afraid. The paper should OWN the Valley Tech story. Does it? No. It should OWN the biotech story. Does it? No. It should OWN the real estate/development story. Does it? No. It should OWN the California political story. Does it? No!

Why? Well, maybe it has THE WRONG 400 journalists working for it?! And the wrong tone/approach/structure? Just maybe?

I hate to be the one calling bullshit on an industry I love, but really, honestly, how on earth can you want to save an industry that requires hundreds of journalists to fill a paper that has about 50-100 stories a day in it, half of them wire copy taken from AP or other syndicates? The newspaper industry has a GM problem, if you get my drift. Too many expensive workers doing too little work on products not enough people actually want to buy. And minor shifts in strategy - HORROR! selling ads on the front page - are not going to right the course. I concluded:

I agree that Google and others should be more engaged in helping shore up and - GASP - evolve the fourth estate. But assuming the way to do it is to support more of the same - the approach that gave us a bloated newsroom that puts out a product fewer and fewer people want to read each year - is to ask for tenure over evolution.

And evolution is already happening - at thousands of small and large media sites on the web. In short, I am convinced that journalism will not die if and when major print based journalism outlets die. I have to run to more CES meetings but I plan to write more - a lot more - about this in the coming days/weeks.

*I should note, PrintWeek is sourced in I WantMedia's summary.

Brian Morrisey scratches an itch for anyone who's ever doubted industry forecasts:

The problem: these figures are used by companies to justify strategies to investors and the press. Yet nobody asks whether they're valid. For fun, I decided to hunt down an Internet ad forecast from years ago to see how the gurus did. Sure enough, Jupiter projected in August 1999 robust Internet ad growth, enough to reach $11.5 billion in 2003. Guess where it ended up? $7.3 billion, according to the IAB.

Brian was smart enough to pick a time (1999) when, given the dot com collapse, it's a pretty sure bet that five year forecasts would be wrong. I wonder, however, how wrong they've been over time? It'd be really interesting to see a scorecard of sorts, a spreadsheet of two columns, with forecasted and actual numbers over the past ten years. Anyone seen this?

If there isn't one, shall we make it?

Remember the miserable failure GoogleBomb? It's back, in a way, or it will be back. Danny Sullivan explains it here, and asks the Bush administration to fix it.

...in an inept attempt to defuse the Googlebomb, someone in Bush’s White House moved his biography to the page used by the current US president. That means when Bush goes, the next US president (Obama) inherits the problem

..Aside from turning Bush’s search engine problem into a legacy issue for future presidents, the change is also misleading the US public and others. The redirection from the old bio page should lead to the new bio page, not require those using old bookmarks to guess at where the new location is at.

Michael Hirschorn, who I have worked with on failed print endeavors (Inside, the magazine, back in 2000), writes a thoughtful piece on the end of print journalism, and in particular the New York Times, in - irony alert - the Feb. issue of the Atlantic, which - double irony alert - I read online and would never have seen otherwise, given I no longer subscribe to the print version.

The NYT Co. is an investor in my company. I wish them only well. But I do differ somewhat with Michael when he writes:

Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company.

I believe the print edition will continue, but in a very different form. Print, as I've been saying since the days of Wired, will continue in the digital age, but it will have to pass new tests of value before it can survive. Print has to justify the costs associated with print, now that there are options for information beyond print.

The key issue Michael raises is "how will great journalism get done without institutions like the New York Times?" He goes on to answer that the model of journalism itself is due for an overhaul, and I cannnot agree more. In fact I'd go way, way further than he's gone. More on that in an upcoming post.

I've been saying this for quite sometime, that you cannot be half pregnant when it comes to marketing - if you do search, you must do branding, and vice versa. Here's yet more proof:

Display and search are directly correlated, judging by a Specific Media study of comScore data. Brand- and segment-related searches (for cars, automakers and vehicle classes) jumped by more than 100% in several categories after consumers were exposed to display ads for those brands. ...Search clickers exposed to display advertising were 22% more likely to produce a sale than those who were not exposed, according to a September 2008 study of Microsoft’s Engagement Mapping system by Atlas Solutions.

In these hard times, advertisers often focus on DR - direct response - the harvesting of demand. But if they don't sow seeds, well, no more demand can grow.

Sent to me from Gary Price, a presentation on Adwords from the Berkman center: Google’s AdWords system serves ads alongside about a quarter of all web traffic. In the process of serving those ads, Google actively processes the user browsing data in order to target its advertising, making AdWords one of the world’s most extensive processors of personal data. Hal Roberts presents on how Google’s use of the AdWords data seeds a network of grey surveillance that may not have direct effects on the individual surveillance subjects but does have important effects on our modes of creating and consuming content online.

A few (older) things I wanted to post before heading to CES:

The head of the IAB, Randall Rothenberg, on measurement (I am on the IAB board). In essence, he says we are measuring too many things. I am not sure I agree, but I see his point. At FM, we are measuring a lot of different things, including what we call amplification and engagement. I think these things are really, really important. Sure, they might all roll up into "reach and frequency" if you will, but not paying attention to them is nuts.

Three Tips For Discipline In A Nomad Life by Scott Belsky, writing on the Digital Nomads site (a site sponsored by Dell). I was struck by the calendar image. I almost wanted it to be reversed: THINK five days a week, DO two days. Unless writing, which I consider thinking, is actually doing...huh. Also like The Paradox of Face Time from Hugh. Creative work requires loneliness.

A not so cheery piece on the ad "depression" via All Things D.

I always read the Google Policy blog, find interesting things there. Google is doing a lot of work on policy, and this post, early last month, responding to the telcos' claim that Google is "unfairly consuming bandwidth" was sharply worded and fun to read.

Yesterday's (well, technically, Sunday's) predictions 2009 post drew the single largest crowd ever to Searchblog in its five-plus year history. More than 50,000 people came to visit it, thanks in large part to Twitter and Digg.

I'm honored and pleased as punch, and it really makes me want to write more. In fact, each of the predictions could be a long post, and perhaps they will be. Also, I have more to say that I could not get into the post I wrote Sunday before heading up to the top of Tam. Sometimes, fate gives you a nudge. Thanks for coming, all.

Continue reading "Reader Ed Brenegar Writes..." »

Related:

2008 Predictions
2008 How I Did
2007 Predictions

2007 How I Did
2006 Predictions
2006 How I Did
2005 Predictions
2005 How I Did
2004 Predictions
2004 How I Did

In each of the past five years I've written a predictions post - usually at year's end or by the first of January. This one is late, and I'll admit it's because I found it hard to write. The world is showing itself to be predictable in only one way: bad news begets bad news. I've spent a lot of the past two weeks, where I was ostensibly "not working," thinking about what this year will bring. And I'm not much further from where I started: this is going to be a very difficult year, for a lot of people. But I do have a fair amount of hope. I think times like this force all of us to make honest choices about what we do with our energy, our resources, and our lives. And in the end, that brings long term health to markets.

Last year I wrote my predictions as something of a narrative, and when I looked back to check how I did, I found it somewhat difficult to mark the scorecard. So this year, I'm going to try to be focused, brief, and calculable. Keep me honest, will you?

1. Macro economy: We'll see an end to the recession, taken literally, by Q4 09. In other words, the economy will begin to grow again by the end of the year, but it won't feel like we're out of the woods till next year at the earliest. That's because Q4 08 was so damn bad, Q4 09, rife as it will be with government stimulus, will look much better. But until we have another year or two to really find our footing, it's going to feel like we're treading water.

2. The online media space will be hit hard by the economic downturn in the first half, but by year's end, will have chalked up moderate gains over last year in terms of gross spend. I think it's possible that Q1 09 will be lower than Q1 08, marking the first time that has happened since 01, if I recall correctly. This will cause all sorts of consternation and hand wringing, but in the end, it won't matter. The web is where people are spending their time, the web will be where marketers spend their money.

3. Google will see search share decline significantly for the first time ever. It will also struggle to find an answer to the question of how it diversifies its revenue in 2009. Search is the ultimate harvester of demand, and Google has become search's Archer Daniels Midland - wherever a seed of demand might pop its head through the web's soil, Google is there to harvest it. The media business is more than a demand fulfillment business, and Google must learn to create demand if it's going to diversify. That means playing the brand game - a game that has long been owned by what we call "traditional media companies." With these companies in a paralyzing economic death spiral (and their new media brethren, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo, in continued strategic sclerosis), Google has a unique opportunity to become a new kind of branded media company. It will fail to do so, mainly for cultural reasons.

4. Despite #3 above, Google stock will soar in by Q3-4 of 2009, mainly because demand will pick up, and when demand picks up, it's like rain on a field of newly sown wheat. This after the stock tanks when the first half of #3, above, becomes apparent.

5. Tied to #3 above, Microsoft will gain at least five points of search share in 2009, perhaps as much as 10. This is a rather radical prediction, I know, but hear me out. I think Redmond is tired of losing in this game, and after trying nearly every trick in the book, Microsoft will start to spend real money to grow share (IE, buying distribution), while at the same time listening to the advice of thoughtful folks who want to help the company improve the product. However, search share is half the game, as we know. The second half is monetization, and Microsoft will continue to struggle here, unless it manages to buy Yahoo's search business. Which it won't, because....

6. Yahoo and AOL will merge.

7. However, in the second half of the year, Microsoft will buy its search monetization from the combined company.

8. Apple will see a significant reversal of recent fortunes. I sense this will happen for a number of reasons (yeah yeah), but I think the main one will be brand related - a brand based on being cooler than the other guy simply does not scale past a certain point. I sense Apple has hit that point.

9. Major brands will continue to struggle with the best way to interact with "social media." They will take budget reserved for media spending (IE buying banners and building out branding campaigns) and start to become publishers in their own right. This is not a new tactic (many marketers, in particular technology companies, have published magazines, for example, and many consumer brands create or co-create television series), but given the plastic and social nature of online media, many marketers will see these efforts fail, in particular when the efforts are executed in partnership with major media companies. The reason has to do with putting the cart before the horse: in order to truly succeed in conversational media, the company must itself be fluent in that conversation. A partner with tons of traffic, but who is not fluent, will not be the "translator" major brands need.

10. Agencies will increasingly see their role as that of publishers. Publishers will increasingly see their role as that of agencies. Both can win at this, but only by understanding how to truly add value to real communities - not flash crowds driven by one time events. I don't see a conflict here, long term. As opposed to simply being creators of media, media companies have realized (or will soon) that their job is to create platforms for communities to make media. Publishers are agents for communities, agencies are agents for brands. They need each other. It takes both agents to get good media made.

11. Twitter will continue its meteoric rise. This is a very hard prediction to make, because so much depends on the company's ability to execute two crucial - and exceedingly difficult - new features: The integration of search into the service, and the monetization of that integration. I think Twitter's management team (and its backers) will want to keep the service independent through 2009, both because prices are down but also because I think they want to prove something (this will not keep nearly every major web media company from trying to buy Twitter). The company has a tiger by the tail, and two really defensible assets: a passionate, committed, and growing community, on the one hand, and a valuable, growing, and meaningful database of realtime conversations on the other. Note I did *not* say they have algorithms. That will come. But the key is the community and the conversation that community is having. By the middle of 2009, the integration of Twitter's community and content will become commonplace in well-executed marketing on third party sites.

12. Facebook will do something entirely shocking and unpredictable. I am not certain what, but it won't have a "status quo" year. It might be a merger with a traditional media company, a major alliance with Google, hiring a head scratcher as CEO, or something else at that level of "WTF!?" As I think about it, it might be as simple as making Facebook Connect truly open, and changing its policies to make it drop dead easy to get data out of the service. Also, Facebook will build a Twitter competitor, but it will never leave beta and will ultimately be abandoned as not worth the time. Instead, Facebook will "friend" Twitter and the two companies will become strong partners.

13. Lucky #13 is reserved for my eternal mobile prediction: 2009 will see the year mobility becomes presumptive in every aspect of the web. By that I mean what I wrote back in 2007: "Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious - will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search"

14. Lastly, I promise, I will have sold my book and will be hard at work on it. And yes, still running FM too. I think I have a way to do both, given I wrote 15K words last year without even knowing it....

Happy New Year, Searchblog readers, and thanks for caring enough to read my musings. Here's to hard work, smart choices, and learning from our mistakes....