John Battelle's Searchblog

Today was a good day. I got to meet with serious leaders of the Internet economy, think Big Thoughts, and push my understanding of the world a bit. In short, I spent the day with folks I'll be interviewing onstage at Web 2 next month, but also, with people who run companies that in one way or another are key partners and players in the ecosystem I love and in which my company (FM) works.

I started with a private meeting with a fellow who is taking time off from Google. Can't say much more than that, but it was a great conversation. From there, I met with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. Now, I've got a lot more to say about Adobe, which recently purchased Omniture, but for now, trust me when I say, keep your eye on Adobe. Next, I met with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. And then, I met with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

I noted an anecdotal observation to Sheryl - that I would write something here, tweet a notification of my post on Twitter, and that notification would then update my Facebook status through an app.

Then, I'd watch what happens. And what happens, more often than not, is that I'll get as many if not more comments on the Facebook status update - inside Facebook - as I do on this site or on Twitter. And more often than not, those comments on Facebook are as thoughtful if not more thoughtful than the ones here. On Twitter, responses to posts here are more likely than not retweets, which is great, but not the same as a comment.

I asked Sheryl if she thought I was an outlier, expecting her to agree that in fact I was. But instead, she said the opposite: people like to comment on links referred through friend networks, and for good reason. It's one thing to comment on blogs like this one, in relative anonymity. It's quite another to comment in the context of Facebook, where those comments are seen by a group of folks with whom you have a social relationship.

I'd like to close that loop - show the comments locked in the Facebook domain on the site here - and I'm looking into getting that done. Let me know if you have any insight on how I might automate it.

Regardless, the implications are rather vast. Facebook has become a defacto leader in distribution of attention - just as Google was back in 2004-6. And everyone - trust me, everyone - is paying attention. Twitter is also a major distributor of attention, but Facebook dwarfs Twitter in terms of social media sharing. I've got a lot more to say about this, but let me mark it this way: With search, we declared private intention, then chose our links to click.

With social media, we publicly declare our intentions and our links. It's a shift of models that is very, very meaningful. More on that later.

And, by the way, Sheryl and I spoke about a lot more than closing the loops on comments. But for more on that, you'll have to wait for Web 2!

Thanks to the BingTweets program, I've been asked to opine on search and decision engines. I'm kind of proud of my third and final post, which riffs on the first two and goes a bit, well, meta. I'd love to know what you guys think of it. I'll repost the first half here, and link back to the whole post on the original site that commissioned the work.  

Over the past two posts I’ve outlined my hopes and frustrations around search and decision making, using my desire to acquire a classic car as an example of both the opportunity and the limitations of web search as it stands today. As an astute commentator noted on my last post – “normally a 30 minute conversation is a whole lot better for any kind of complex question.”

Which leads me to my last post in this series. What is it about a conversation? Why can we, in 30 minutes or less, boil down what otherwise might be a multi-day quest into an answer that addresses nearly all our concerns? And what might that process teach us about what the Web lacks today and might bring us tomorrow?

Well the answer is at once simple and maddenly complex. Our ability to communicate using language is the result of millions of years of physical and cultural evolution, capped off by 15-25 years of personal childhood and early adult experience. But it comes so naturally, we forget how extraordinary this simple act really is.

I once asked Larry Page, co-founder of Google, what his dream search engine looked like. His answer: The computer from Star Trek – a omnipresent, all knowing machine with which you could converse. We’re a long way from that – and when we do get there, we’re bound to arrive a with a fair amount of trepidation – after all, every major summer blockbuster seems to burst with the narrative of machines that out think humans (Matrix, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, 2001, I Robot…you get the picture).

But I have hope. Given this is my last post in the series, allow me to wax a bit philosophical. While we in the search and Internet industry focus almost exclusively on leveraging technology to get to better answers, perhaps we might take another approach. Perhaps instead of scaling machines to the point of where they can have a “human” conversation with us (a la Turing), perhaps instead (or, as well), we might leverage machines to help connect us to just the right human with whom we might have that conversation?

Continued...

What more can be said about Carol Bartz? Her appearance at the helm of Yahoo has certainly energized the company and given both its supporters and detractors plenty to talk about. But beyond the colorful language and straight shooting demeanor lies one of the most challenging turnarounds in Internet history (at least from this observer's point of view).
Last year I interviewed Jerry Yang, and by most reports, it didn't go so well. Well, let me put that another way - it was great to watch (and to be part of), but many said that interview was pretty much proof that Jerry needed to find someone else to run Yahoo. Which is why I am both impressed and a bit trepidatious that Bartz agreed to sit for an interview - will she think I'm trying to drive her to the brink of quitting?! Well, the answer there is no, but I will want to ask her the hard questions. And that's where you come in.
What do you want to hear from Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo?
Others we'll be interviewing (and I've asked for your help):

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Qi Lu, Aneesh Chopra, Sheryl Sandberg, Jon Miller, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Shantanu Narayen, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. Again, an amazing lineup.

If you want to come, I can still get you a Searchblog discount (for about another week). Just ping me here.

Jeff Immelt is the CEO of GE, one of the largest enterprises in the history of the world. Let that sink in for a moment, it's not a trivial concept. One of the largest enterprises ever devised by mankind - General Electric. The Microsoft, nay, the Google of the 20th century, and not content with that success, Immelt and his team of hundreds of thousands of employees is bending toward the task of once again redefining the nearly 150-year-old company.

Witness this speech, recently delivered to the The Detroit Economic Club (Immelt was announcing a new R&D initiative in Detroit that will bring 1100 new jobs to the devastated Detroit economy). In it, Immelt does not pull punches. From the text:

I am proud to work at GE, a great American company since the 1800s. Since I joined the company in 1982, GE has earned $230 billion – more than any enterprise in the world. We have paid $130 billion in dividends to our investors – again, more than any company in any country. Today, we have over 300,000 global employees with about half here in the United States.

We are the oldest remaining company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This is not because we are a perfect company; it is because we adapt . Through the years, we have remained productive and competitive. We have globalized the company, while investing massive amounts in technology, products and services. We know we must change again. When the current economic unraveling began, many hoped it was merely a harsher version of past cycles. But now it’s clear that a serious and difficult transformation is at hand, not just another turning of the wheel.

I met with Jeff in his office last week in New York, and I found him engaged, thoughtful, and totally aligned with the theme of this years' Web 2 conference (Websquared). I'm pleased and very honored he's coming and speaking with us, and I seek your questions and input on what you'd like to hear from him.

Meanwhile, a few more zingers from his speech:

As a nation, we’ve been consuming more than we earn, saved too little and taken on far too much debt . Growth in research and development has slowed. Our country has made too little progress on some of the defining challenges of our time – like clean energy and affordable health care. Our budget and trade deficits have reached levels that are clearly not sustainable.

While some of America’s competitors were throttling up on manufacturing and R&D, we de-emphasized technology. Our economy tilted instead toward the quicker profits of financial services. While our financial services business has performed well, I can’t tell you that we were entirely free of these errors. We weren’t .

What has been the impact? Unemployment is at the highest point in 26 years. And, as a percentage of S&P 500 earnings, financial services expanded from 10 to 45 percent over a quarter-century. Compensation systems have fallen out of balance. You know something is wrong when a mortgage broker is pulling down $5 million a year while a Ph.D. chemist is earning $100,000.

Average real weekly wages have declined since 1980, meaning that we have been unable to provide a rising standard of living for the majority.

Leaders missed many opportunities to add to the capabilities of America. In 2000, the U. S. had a positive trade balance of high-tech products. By 2007, our trade deficit of the same products reached $50 billion. We have already lost our leadership in many growth industries, and other new opportunities are at risk. Trust in business is badly shaken,and it is going to take awhile to get it back.

This is unacceptable. Our country was built on great undertakings that brought out the best in government and business alike. But that kind of vision, that kind of focus on essential national goals, has been missing.

This is not a man who pulls punches or, apparently, plays politics. GE has significant businesses in healthcare, energy, consumer electronics, finance, transportation, media (NBC Universal), and more. Immelt's presence at the premier Internet conference is a statement about how the Web and the World are merging. So what do you want to know from him?

Others we'll be interviewing on Day One (and I've asked for your help):

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

To come: Carol Bartz, Qi Lu, Aneesh Chopra, Sheryl Sandberg, Jon Miller, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Shantanu Narayen, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. Amazing lineup.

Twitter is a fad! Google isn't American! We're in charge! Thank God there's Tyler Bruhle!

Please.

A spate of Google books coming out, including one from Ken Auletta and one already out from Jeff Jarvis, and another from Richard Brandt. Ken's book has dangling, draw-you-in quote, as usual: Apparently Eric Schmidt told him that Google will be the world's first $100billion media company. MEDIA company, mind you. MEDIA.

Oh, never mind.

Thanks to those of you who chimed in, via email, Twitter, Facebook, and comments, on our first interview at Web 2 next month with Brian Roberts.   

Next up on day one is Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter. I've had the pleasure before (at FM's CM Summit), and posted on it here. But much has changed in the past year. Twitter has become a mainstream brand, grown to tens of millions of active users, and raised a lot more money (and speculation continues that it has raised even more, at a billion dollar valuation, no less).

And while questions remain about "how will Twitter make money," there's been no shortage of ideas - including from Twitter - addressing that particular concern over the past few months.

Not to mention, the past year has seen Facebook pretty much re-furbish its user interface to be more Twitter like, and Twitter has added or promised to add a slew of new features to make the service more robust.

But readers of this site don't need me prattling on about what the best questions are for Evan. You guys have them in your heads. Do me a favor and help me have a smart conversation with Evan next month! Thanks in advance....

Today comes news that Google is offering a universal commenting feature that allows anyone using Google's toolbar to leave a comment on any page they visit. Called Sidewiki, the service is intended to "increase engagement on the page" for publishers. But as much as I love the idea of SideWiki, I'm skeptical of it for one simple reason: Google isn't in the community business, and SideWiki, if it's going to work, needs to either A/be driven by communities or B/Needs to be embraced as a standard by publishers, who are the proxy for communities.  

Now, Google is an advertising services business, and one could argue that it's in the business of publishing as well (YouTube, Blogger, Knol). However, the company is not that great at leading community. I've covered this before (Google Maps and Wikipedia, the lack of Google News comments, the failure of Google Video vs. YouTube (and hence, YT takes off, gets bought by Google...), so I won't repeat myself. Suffice to say, I think SideWiki will suffer from the same fate as Google's previous efforts requiring community input: Google is not seen as a explicit community platform.

I sort of wish Yahoo would do stuff like this. This is the kind of product Yahoo could really win with.

SEL coverage here.

Tim A. - who I will interview at Web 2 next month - says the future of AOL is in content. This is a drum he's been beating for some time, and I still find it intriguing that the man responsible for advertising at Google, a famously technology-driven company, is now a content nut.

The Chair of the FCC has reawakened the net neutrality debate and Comcast and Larry Lessig have already weighed in. Guess who loves it, and who is not so thrilled? Larry came last year, Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, is coming to Web 2 this year.

WPP Chief Sorrell says he cannot keep pace with the decline in ad revenues. By keeping pace, he means firing enough staff.

MySpace, long quiet in this space, makes news with its plan to integrate Twitter. Jon Miller, to whom MySpace CEO Owen Van Atta reports, and Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, will both be at Web 2.

Comscore's monthly ratings are out and Bing continues a slow but steady gain in share, to the slight expense of Google and Yahoo. Bing has a massive marketing push on right now, but also, I think the service is starting to gain footholds with users who see it as a regular alternative to Google. I am also a fan of the recently unveiled visual search interface - I think it augurs some serious new - and useful - approaches to sifting through massive amounts of related data.

From the Thomas Weisel's analyst coverage, sent to me in mail:

Google maintains dominance within "core search" but Bing Nudges Up m/m at Yahoo's and Google's Expense: Core search excludes searches conducted on video, local and map portions of the companies' websites. Google's U.S. query share of core search queries was down 11bps m/m to 64.6% in August but increased nearly 1.3 percentage points from August 2008. Yahoo's share was flat m/m at 19.3% in August and decreased 39bps y/y. Microsoft's share increased 35bps m/m to 9.3% in August and up 89bps y/y. Ask.com's share were was flat m/m at 3.9% in August but decreased 45bps y/y. AOL's share decreased 14bps m/m to 3.0% in August and decreased 133bps y/y.

Our take: Google continues to dominate audience market rankings in the U.S. while Microsoft has shown some signs of stabilization and a modest uptick with the launch of Bing in June. Yahoo, while having shown signs of stability over the past 12-18 months, has recently started to lose market share again, declining from 21.0% in January to 19.3% in August. Taken together, Yahoo and Microsoft represent 29% of the core search market in the U.S., flat with the previous month. Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, was launched at the beginning of June alongside an $80-100mn advertising campaign. This is the third month of data reflecting Bing's impact. While the data indicates a very modest near-term bounce, we will be watching closely to see if any query pickup is sustainable.

We'll be opening this year's Web 2 Summit with an interview of Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast. I've asked Brian to come for the past three years, and he's always had a conflict. In those last few years Comcast has continued to grow, in particular when it comes to its footprint in the digital world.

Besides its role as a major cable television player, Comcast is one of the largest providers of broadband in the United States, and as such plays a major role in nearly every story now playing out across the Web ecosystem. Net neutrality? Check. Bandwidth caps? Check. Migration of television models to online? Check. Learning how to become a smart brand by joining the conversation online? Check.

More on Comcast and Brian:

Under his leadership, Comcast has grown into a Fortune 100 company with $34.3 billion in revenues, 24.2 million customers and 100,000 employees. Comcast’s content networks and investments include E! Entertainment Television, Style Network, Golf Channel, VERSUS, G4, PBS KIDS Sprout, TV One, and ten sports networks operated by Comcast Sports Group and Comcast Interactive Media, which develops and operates Comcast’s Internet businesses, including Comcast.net.

Comcast Interactive is an interesting play as well - a distinct entity with a number of newly purchased assets (Fandango, Plaxo, Daily Candy, etc) that may or may not find itself competing directly with Yahoo, MSN, and AOL someday, not to mention Google. It's clear to me that one of the next great battles online will be for the real estate currently known as your television (the other, of course, is your mobile device).  

I will be covering all of this and more with Brian, but as I do every year, I really seek your help with what to ask him on stage. So what do you want to hear from Brian Roberts?

Just noting this for the record. It's never good to be seen as too big, too greedy, and too overreaching.

Justice Department urges court to reject Google book deal

As I wrote those words - "Display Market" - I sure wish we could get our nomenclature right. Because that term means a lot of things to a lot of people.

In any case, Google today announces its Doubleclick Ad Exchange, which it promises will "simplify the process of buying and selling advertising," according to the Times coverage.

Google is leveraging it's competitive advantage: "the new system will automatically allow hundreds of thousands of advertisers and publishers who now use Google’s AdWords and AdSense systems to run their ads and ad space through the exchange."

Of course they are.

This pits Google directly against Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft in display, as each of these companies is playing here, though at various levels.

But let's be clear about what we're talking about - which is remnant display. This is not a premium publishing play. I'll have more on that, but the distinction is very important. VERY important.

Alex Salkever has written a post on Facebok's self service CPC platform, which has been getting a lot of traction lately and is largely responsible for the company's recent boasting about being cash flow positive. From it:

I chatted with nearly two dozen people who are buying ads on Facebook. Many of them are also purchasing ads on Google (GOOG) and other online venues. The overwhelming sentiment? Facebook ads are actually more effective and do a better job of getting them in front of their target audiences.

The piece is worth reading and really contemplating. How many of you use Facebook ads? Do they work better than AdWords?

SAI points to an interesting piece by Chris Dixon, founder of Hunch, in which he argues that Twitter will inevitably be competing with its core developers (complements to Twitter) at some point. This is always true for development ecosystems, however, and I don't think, in fact, it will be as bad as Chris claims. His argument:

At some point, significant (non-VC) money will enter the Twitter ecosystem. I have no idea whether this is will be by charging consumers, charging businesses users, search advertising, sponsored tweets, licensing the twitter data feed, data from URL shorteners, or something else. But history suggests that where there is so much user engagement, dollars follow.

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose Twitter’s eventual dominant business model is putting ads by search results. Who gets the revenue when a user is searching on a 3rd party Twitter client? Even if Twitter gets a portion of revenue from ads on 3rd party apps, there will always be an incentive for them to create their own client app, or to “commodotize” the client app by, say, promoting an open source version.

But it doesn't have to be so. Witness AdSense. Google doesn't own the Internet, but it has the largest ad network out there, AdSense. Sure, it's not nearly as profitable as AdWords on Google.com (100% owned and operated, way higher margin), but it's a big, big business, and it feeds a ton of data and goodness back to the mother ship, as well as supplies serious oxygen to an ecosystem that makes Google way more important as a business overall.

Hence my argument, made many times over, that Twitter will and must create TweetSense. As I've written before, it's not just search on Twitter, it's all Tweets that are the searches, and TweetWords will key off those Tweets. TweetSense will be TweetWords distributed to third parties. Those third parties would love to have TweetSense to run on their apps, I am certain of it.

It doesn't have to be a zero sum game.

Unemployment is up and continuing to rise, the recession, while possibly, maybe, sort of technically over, does not feel over at all, and while Murdoch says "things are better" in the advertising economy, "better" means "no longer totally crap."

So why on earth would I write a headline like the one adorning this post?

Because despite all that bad news, there's a fair amount of good news in the web space. A number of healthy private companies are doing quite well, and seem poised to become serious IPO candidates. Among them:

Facebook. The company said it's now cash flow positive and has been profitable for several quarters. This is the final step toward a public bow, one that could possibly stimulate a wee bit of Googly optimism, just as Google did during the mini-boom of 2004-07.

Demand. According to all accounts, this company has been profitable for several years, is growing nicely, and has revenues well over nine figures. Its search/content/social media mashup model is unique and growing.

Linked In. With a new CEO (Jeff Weiner) who would not have joined had there not been a promise of a large exit, multiple revenue sources, and a strong community, Linked In is another late stage company in the Big IPO queue.

Three companies does not a trend make, but I am sure there are others, and there are even more companies that are one to two years out (like Twitter, for example). It doesn't take that much to get a trend going in these markets. Unlike the bubble of ten years ago (wow, has it been that long), these companies all have profits, histories, and strong operating plans. And the markets have been on a tear, there is plenty of money on the sidelines, and folks are looking for a place to take a little risk after a year of hiding in treasuries and triple A-rated muni bonds.

In short, I think the IPO market is back on the table, and I would not be surprised to see it start to take off in the next several quarters.

Who did I miss, and what companies do you think might be ready to go soon?

Danny Sullivan over at SEL has really teed off on Yahoo's search strategy, and any time he goes off, it's worth a read.

From it:

USER INTERFACE CHANGES WON’T LET YAHOO COMPETE IN SEARCH

Got it? Write it down, someone come check back on this in five years. If Yahoo’s moved up in search share thanks to outsourcing search and just toying with the user interface, I’ll eat those words somehow — covered even in Yahoo purple frosting.

No one has succeeded as a general search engine just by making user interface changes. No one, in the past nearly 15 years of us having search engines. That’s like 150 “real” years. (For more, see A Search Eulogy For Yahoo and Why Search Sucks & You Won’t Fix It The Way You Think)

The interview ticked me off in other ways. Bartz downplayed search as something people spend only 3% of their time on. Hey, I don’t spend all my time shopping. But who do you think makes more money off of me, places I shop at or television stations that deliver me entertainment?

This is very interesting. We're interviewing Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at Web 2 next month, man will we have things to talk about now. Why would Adobe want to get into the web analytics business (in short, supporting ecommerce and marketing)? Well, it makes sense given nearly all ads are in Adobe Flash now. Hmmmm...what do you think? From the Merc piece:

"Adobe customers are looking to us for solutions to deliver engaging experiences and more effectively monetize their content and applications online," Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said in a statement announcing the deal. "This is a game changer for both Adobe and our customers. We will enable advertisers, media companies and e-tailers to realize the full value of their digital assets."

This graph is a rough estimate, does not include use of Twitter apps, mobile, etc. It's just traffic to Twitter.com. But it has proven a reliable trending mechanism for Twitter. And it shows a leveling off. Now, I am going to go out on a limb and say the growth is probably mostly in mobile and third party instances. But still...

Way to go dudes at Omgili!

By now you probably know about the “Search Options” feature Google introduced in May. One of its features is to limit the search results by time frame. By default the available time frames are: Any time, Past year, Past week, Recent results and Past 24 hours. Past 24 hours is nice but still far away from Real-time. What Google isn’t telling you is that you can search in the past minute and even in the past second. The trick is to change a parameter in the URL that will narrow down the time frames. ....Notice the URL parameter qdr:d. I assume qdr stands for Query Date Range (sounds about right). All you have to do to search for the query in the past minute is to change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s.

Past Minute:

http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qd

Good to see this happening:

Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate Your Data!

In short, Google is taking its commitment to allow data exporting seriously. This is a very, very good thing.

Bing is announcing new visual search features today. The post outlining it all is not yet up, but here are details and links from an email sent to me earlier:

Link to the blog post, not yet up, but soon they promise.

Link to the announcement on TC50 stage.

Text from the email, edited for clarity:

On Monday, Microsoft will launch a new beta feature in Bing, it's new decision engine, called Visual Search that is a new, easy way to search by clicking instead of typing. Visual Search helps you search information visually, and helps you refine a query when a picture makes it easier to sift through all the online information. Look for that movie you wanted to see, find the best new purse, or figure out which digital camera is right for you using an engaging visual experience without having to sort through page after page of links. People can try the beta of Visual Search by going to Bing.com/visualsearch.

· Visual Search categories that will be available on Monday are outlined below. This list will continue to grow and expand.

· Structured Content and images for Visual Search are provided by a number of sources, including MSN.

· The seamless transitions between selections are achieved through the integration of Silverlight technology

Visual Search Galleries:

Entertainment

100 heroes and villains, Billboard's past albums, Billboard's past songs, Film legends, Greatest movies, Movies in theaters

Popular books, Popular celebrities, Popular DVDs, Popular TV shows, Pulitzer winning fiction, Top albums, Top songs

Famous People

FBI's most wanted, Popular celebrities, US politicians, US presidents, US vice presidents, World leaders

Reference

Dog breeds, Periodic table, Travel destinations, US politicians, US presidents, US states, US vice presidents, World leaders, Yoga poses

Shopping

Cell phones, Digital cameras, Handbags, HDTVs, New cars, Popular books, Popular DVDs, Portable GPS, Pulitzer winning fiction, Top albums, Top iPhone apps

Sports

MLB players, MLB teams, NASCAR drivers, NBA players, NBA teams, NFL players, NFL teams, NHL players, NHL teams, UFC fighters

Update: I played with the Dog Breeds visual search, and found it pretty cool. It's not as deep as I would like - the promise is that you don't have to go out onto the web, and I found myself back into the "back and forth" button mode too soon, but the visual search is really cool to start with.

I had an extraordinary day yesterday, in terms of who I got to talk with. Not only did I meet with several of FM's partners - two Fortune 500 marketers, a major platform partner, and a major blogger - I also got to watch the launch of Ad Stamp and the complete schedule for the Web 2 Summit. But a highlight of the day had to be my chance to steal 30 or so minutes with the founder of DigitalGlobe, Dr. Walter Scott.  

Now why was I talking to Dr. Scott? Well, he's presenting at the Web 2 Summit this year, and I get to work with him on how Digital Globe fits into our theme of WebSquared.

In Dr. Scott's case, this task pretty much a layup.

Now, Web 2 is known for in depth interviews with titans of business like GE CEO Jeff Immelt, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, or former HP CEO and pending Senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina - all of them are coming this year. And it's known for having the stalwarts of the Internet industry represented as well - leaders from Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL, Newscorp, and Microsoft will also be there.

But Web 2 is also known, I hope, for the High Order Bit - the short, mind blowing presentation of a new idea or new data that makes you step back and just say Wow.

To me, that's what happened when I really grokked DigitalGlobe, a company with a billion dollar market cap that successfully went public in the midst of the worst recession since 1931.

What the company does is pretty simple, actually. It sends super expensive satellites into space, and takes high resolution, geographic-data tagged pictures of every square foot of the earth. It then makes these images available to anyone willing to pay* (and sometimes to those who can't but really need the data, as it did with the recent LA fires).

Those images are, of course, digital. And they comprise, to echo my writing about search, nothing less than a database of surface reality, albeit from the point of view of outer space. This reality is objective, factual, and indifferent to politics. It can inform a mind bending number of new use cases. If you think about this database from the point of view of an Internet entrepreneur, well, It could become, to wax into a bit of hyperbole, fuel for a whole new ecosystem of value.

Allow me the use of a metaphor, one with which you are all quite familiar.

So think of search. What is search? Well, search is a database of everything that is worth knowing about on the web. It's made by a crawler that pings web real estate and creates an index/database of what it finds. It's served up as an application through a user interface that takes your queries and matches them to the best results in that database.

Simple, but that simplicity largely fueled Web 2 as we know it.

Now consider a new dataset for search, the dataset owned by DigitalGlobe. The "crawlers" are DigitalGlobe's satellites. The "real estate" being pinged is every square foot of the earth. As with the web, some parts of the world are worth pinging more often than other parts. ("We don't hit Greenland very often," Dr. Scott told me. But during the Olympics, the company took a picture of Beijing *once every 8 seconds.* Imagine if this technology was around during Tiananmen). The data that satellite crawler captures is stored in a vast index/database. And that index is served up as a product through a UI, though in DigitalGlobe's case, the UI is not yet scaled to a mass consumer use like Google.

Wait, check that, it is, in a way. DigitalGlobe provides the imagery you see in Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. And while that information is really cool, and provides the foundation for a huge number of interesting applications (and controversy), things get really interesting when you bring two key pillars of search into the equation: Freshness and comprehensiveness.

Freshness is what is sounds like - how often does the crawler check back to the source and see what might have changed? And Comprehensiveness is equally self-describing - but in the case of satellite imagery, it's not so much how *much* of the earth you have in your database (that would be the whole darn thing), but rather, how high the resolution of that data can be.

The data fueling Google and Microsoft's web applications is good, but it's not very fresh, and it's resolution is limited. But that doesn't mean DigitalGlobe doesn't have far fresher data and way better resolution. It does. It just doesn't sell it to Google. (And as I think about the company, I can't help but think Google or Microsoft must be sharpening their pencils, sketching out scenarios for how they might acquire DigitalGlobe. But I get ahead of myself).

Imagine a time when DigitalGlobe's crawlers scale across every square inch of the (interesting bits of the) earth at second-by-second freshness - the way Google's crawlers do for the Web. And imagine a time when the data from this crawl becomes available to all of us, in near real time. Is it possible? Of course it is. You need more satellites, more CPUs, more storage, and some pretty amazing UI and use cases.

Far as I can tell, we have those components already made, just like Google's infrastructure was not so much about its component parts as it was about how they were put to work in the service of a culture changing service.

Is your mind blown yet? Mine is, but then again, that happens a bit more frequently than your average bear, I'll admit.

Back here on earth, I asked Dr. Scott two questions that bear repeating. First, who are DigitalGlobe's largest customers (and how did they use the data)? Far and away, he said, the company's largest customer is the US Government. Why? Well, they buy high resolution data of, say, a particular Afghan village, datestamp yesterday. Then they give that data to soldiers on the ground, who go into that village and ask folks questions like "What were those heavy loads being moved around in the town square by these five men at around noon yesterday?"

Why, might you ask, why doesn't the US use its super secret spy satellites to give ground troops this data? Well, because the information on those spy satellites is classified. It's super secret. But DigitalGlobe's information is commercial, and unclassified. In essence, the US Government uses DigitalGlobe for the same reason it uses FedEx to move military supplies around the world: it's just faster, better, cheaper, and easier.

OK, so there's the answer for why the US Government is such a big customer (and it's not just military, of course. There's NASA, there's NIH, there's Agriculture, you get the picture, no pun intended). What was my second question?

Well, my second question was informed by the concept of search and my rhapsody around the implications of the world as a database. Might DigitalGlobe consider offering a fresh, high-resolution database of its imagery to developers world wide - replete with business rules for commercialization? Imagine the use cases - for the images are not simply images, they are laden with latent meta-data - interpretive data on everything from how crops are growing to how traffic is moving to how governments are treating their citizens.....might DigitalGlobe consider doing such a thing?

"That would be cool," was Dr. Scott's only answer (he is an officer of a public company, after all.)

It sure would be. That would be so WebSquared.

###

*From the company's own product descriptions:

DigitalGlobe’s CitySphereTM product features 60 cm or better orthorectified color imagery for 300 pre-selected cities worldwide. These GIS ready cities are available as off the shelf products and ready for immediate delivery.

With over 37 million km2 of 3 inch to 2 foot resolution color imagery of select American and international markets, DigitalGlobe’s Orthorectified Aerial Imagery is part of our complete offering of the most current high resolution aerial and satellite imagery and the largest library of earth imagery available anywhere. In addition to the largest library of aerial imagery anywhere, we maintain a complete, highly accurate USA basemap at 1 meter resolution or better, with major cities at 6 in to 2 ft resolution.

Today my company Federated Media announced a new ad format for a group of our publishing partners. We call this beta program "Ad Stamp", and those of you who've been watching the space closely, and reading my thoughts on marketing here, won't be too surprised by what you see.

However, with Ad Stamp there is more than meets the eye, and I wanted to think out loud a bit about why I believe this format works, and how it might reflect some of the trends I've been watching and commenting upon in this space for years.

First and foremost, what is most striking about Ad Stamp is how much space is dedicated to the marketer's message (see image at left - the temporary and one time pushdown at the top is pushed back up in this mock up). Ad Stamp coordinates three large units across roughly 50% of the total space available on a site - an "ad edit ratio" not unlike most premium magazines. An initial visceral response might be "That's too much!", but I don't think that's how audiences are going to react.

Why? Because in the main, I think the rise of ad networks and the relegation of marketing impressions to increasingly competing "third rails" on the sides and tops of sites has created a "Nascar effect" where more than five - if not 15 - messages blink numbly and disparately at their subjects. This is not a quality environment for readers or brand marketers, and it's a premium publisher's job to create a quality environment for both. (For a longer treatise on this see my post "The Rise of Independent Media Brands Online").

It's our belief that delivering 100% of the real estate reserved for marketers to *one marketer at a time* could be part of a strong solution to this concern. Ad Stamp, while still an early test program (and one we hope to roll out to all our sites) does just that. The authors of sites involved in our initial test - sites like Serious Eats, Mashable, Apartment Therapy, Business Insider, Dooce, and Boing Boing - all responded positively to early mockups of Ad Stamp, and all for the same simple reason: It makes the site look better.

Looking good is just one part of the thinking behind Ad Stamp. Other premium publishers are doing similar, larger executions (see the OPA news for more), but FM takes a decidedly social twist, as you might expect. To that end, an equally, if not more significant part of Ad Stamp is a new unit we call "the Conversationalist."

The Conversationalist unit (an early execution is shown below) takes some of the best work FM has done over the years (content-driven, conversational ad units), and brings it full circle into the realm of high quality brand marketing. The thesis is this: When a reader comes to the page, he or she initially sees the uncluttered, focused brand message via the coordinated pushdown and tower on the side. (Both of these units are now quite standard across the premium publishing web, but are not often coordinated from a creative and messaging standpoint.) Given that FM sites are A/ a branded environment; B/ a conversational media environment; and C/ that brands are conversations; the next step is pretty logical for an enlightened marketer: Provide the reader with a space where he or she can converse with the brand.

That's where the Conversationalist comes in. Developed in part through work FM did with American Express, Microsoft, and many others, the unit can pull in and curate nearly any conversation deemed relevant by the marketer. Nearly every brand on the web now has Twitter, Facebook, and blog presences, for example. Some have an extremely sophisticated approach to social media (witness American Express Open's Open Forum or Asus and Intel's WePC, for example). In short, brands are becoming social media publishers, and they have a lot to say, and they are increasingly ready to begin a dialog with their customers. The Conversationalist is where they can do just that.

Consider the scenario of a movie campaign, for example, or a mobile phone launch. Both types of campaigns are driven by awareness - the marketer wants to announce the presence of something new and timely. Ad Stamp provides a large canvas for just that. But both campaigns also create a ton of conversation across the Web. The Conversationalist provides a place to curate and add to that dialog - via Twitter and Facebook feeds, blog search, and more.

We've noticed that ads which offer up a chance to join a dialog or engage with contextually relevant content perform one to four times better than ads without these features. It's my belief that combining a clean, clutter free environment with the opportunity to converse is a strong alternative to the Nascar-network blight that seems to be creeping into high quality conversational sites.  

For now, Ad Stamp is limited to about 20 sites in the FM family, in two distinct categories - tech/biz (around 11 million uniques) and Home (about 10 million). Should this new format prove successful, we'll roll it across all of FM, and it's my hope the rest of the industry will adopt similar formats. We're all in this together.

In summary, Ad Stamp is a response to what I wrote in a previous post about all of this more than a year ago:

Brands are, in essence, defined by the conversations your consumers have about your products or services (and yes, I am indebted to Cluetrain and Ogilvy and any number of other great thinkers, even Hopkins, who might justifiably be the bridge between direct response and brand advertising).

Brand advertising in traditional media has been about getting in between the ears of a target consumer in some way and "building brand equity" through media executions. In essence, brand advertising has been, up till now, an attempt to influence the conversation that potential consumers will have after experiencing the advertising.

With conversational media and marketing, that concept is time shifting. Now brand advertising can *join* and even *initiate and convene* those brand conversations. And that requires a different skill set, one media folks are just starting to explore. To date, we've just begun to figure out how to execute marketing in this new form of media in ways that work for all parties concerned - the content producer, the marketer, and the consumer. But that doesn't mean we won't. It just means we have very interesting work ahead of us.

I am thrilled that by working with the amazing folks at FM and our extremely thoughtful publisher and marketing partners, we're taking what has been a lot of theory on this site (OK, call it bloviating if you wish) and turning it into very real advances that are becoming reality in the field. I feel very, very fortunate. And as always, let me know what you think, as your input over the years is what has always led my thinking.

From Neiman:

Google is developing a micropayment platform that will be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,” according to a document the company submitted to the Newspaper Association of America. The system, an extension of Google Checkout, would be a new and unexpected option for the news industry as it considers how to charge for content online.

The revelation comes in an eight-page response to the NAA’s request for paid-content proposals, which it extended to several major technology companies and startups.

And from Google:

For us, search has always been our focus. And, starting today, you'll notice on our homepage and on our search results pages, our search box is growing in size. Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we're excited about it — because it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use.

Well, if I were Facebook or eBay/Paypal, I'd be concerned about any payment system from Google, no matter how early stage. And the larger search bar, well, just seems to make sense. Search queries are getting longer, for one, and we're all getting older, for another - the text is now bigger as well. (OK, maybe it's just me getting older...)

Nielsen's first half Y/Y comparison numbers came out for the ad industry yesterday, and as one might expect, they were not pretty. The Web did not escape unscathed. SAI has a nice chart, reproduced here.

Update: Comscore Chair Gian Fulgoni notes that this data does not include display ads with search, CPC or CPA model...

I live in the Bay area, a place that has been, in the past 20 or so years, woefully underserved by what those in the quality news business call, well, quality news. I also am a graduate of a fine Bay area quality new journalism program, and I taught there as well. And before I started my career in technology journalism and entrepreneurial pursuits, my first ever idea was to create a "quality" newspaper for the Bay area. (That's the late great New West magazine at left, started by legendary editor Clay Felker. If he couldn't make it happen, not sure anyone can.)

So imagine my merriment when I read this piece in the NYT entitled The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times Plan San Francisco Editions.

Oh joy! Finally, a place for quality local news! Right?

Not so fast.

The lede of the piece:

Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are planning to introduce San Francisco Bay Area editions, hoping to win new readers and advertisers there by offering more local news, in what could be the first glimpse at a new strategy by national newspapers to capitalize on the contraction of regional papers.

Now, I'm pleased as punch that the two majors want to give me and my neighbors a quality alternative to the failed local papers, but unless the pay attention to some pretty specific realities about this place, I don't imagine it's going to pan out for them in terms of ROI for effort expended. So here are a few thoughts, should either or both decide to focus on our odd little patch of Northern California paradise.

First off, no one in Concord cares a whit about news in San Francisco, unless the Bay Bridge is broken. This is a principle of hyperlocalism, and it's very, very distinct here in the Bay area. For decades editors have been trying to crack the code of what makes the Bay area hang together as a region, and they've all failed. Marin folks simply don't care about what's up in Palo Alto, and those who live in Noe Valley barely care about those who live five miles across town in the burgeoning SOMA neighborhood. If you want to have a local edition of a national newspaper here, you're going to have to figure out a way to cover stories all these folks care about. I'm not sure it's possible....unless....

...unless you focus on the local Bay area stories that we all care about: the ones that have national scope, and cover them with the same rigor and depth that you would any major national story. Now you'd be cooking with gas.

Those stories are, in no particular order:

- Technology and the Internet. No national paper comes close to owning this story (the way The Industry Standard did in the late 90s, or a handful of blog sites do now). There is a serious opening here for determined, high quality journalism. The WSJ already has All Things D, and the Times has a strong passel of reporters already here on the ground.

- Biotech/Health. I break it out because it's a massive story, and totally undercovered. The impact of genetic research and massive drug companies' agendas on policy, for example. The Bay area is one of several key centers of R&D and business in this area.

- The sustainability story. Again, the Bay area leads here, it's not just for hippies or rich liberals anymore.

- Real estate. Everyone cares about the value of their home, and this area is a major story in that regard - some of the highest foreclosure rates as well as the highest home prices within miles of each other. And commercial real estate is huge here as well.

- Asia. Making this very large story approachable to a local audience is key. The Bay area is deeply connected to Asian culture and business but I've not seen great reporting that makes that connection meaningful on a regular basis.

- Food and wine. Sorry, New York, but all the good stuff gets made here. (OK, that was hyperbole but no one can argue with Napa, Sonoma, and other amazing terroirs, and the restaurant culture alone is a major story).

- Sports. We all love our teams - The Giants, the 49ers, the colleges (Cal, Stanford in the main), and the Sharks. This is one thing our local paper does reasonably well.

If the WSJ and/or the NYT can create a "local" edition that *owns* these stories and tells them in a way that makes them meaningful to Bay area residents in a way that transcends traditional local blandishments, I can see a pretty strong audience developing for the product.

But then I look at the other side of the equation: The business proposition. Let's say the two papers create a strong local edition along the lines of what I've outlined above. Folks like me would be thrilled (I'd probably reconsider my decision some years ago to stop subscribing to both papers, though I'd want them online). Would that be enough? Probably not. You need regional advertising to truly make money in the news biz. So will strong local editions mean national papers sell more local advertising? To me, that's a very open question.

The advertisers that once filled the pages of the local papers here - car dealerships, department stores, Frye's electronics, Shaneco jewlers and the like, seem to have found new channels of communication for their customers. Most of those channels are online. I wonder, what will these national/regional plays do online? How will they go to market online? It's an interesting question, and one that will have to be resolved before these editions truly find their footing.

My second post (of two) is up over at the BingTweets site, part of an FM partnership with Microsoft. In it I describe my frustration with search as it relates to helping me make a complicated decision: How to possibly buy a classic car. From it:

So first, how would I like to decide about my quest to buy a classic car? Well, ideally, I’d have a search application that could automate and process the tedious back and forth required to truly understand what the market looks like. After all, if I’m looking for classic Camaro or Porsche convertibles from the mid to late 1960s, there are only so many of them for sale, and they can be categorized by any number of important variables - price, model, region, color, features, etc. And while a number of sites do a fair job with a portion of the market, I don’t trust any of them to give me a general overview of what’s really out there. That’s where an intelligent search agent can really help.

But the next step is the harder one. I am not “smart” about how to buy a classic car. I don’t know enough to buy one with confidence. I don’t know what to ask about. I don’t know if it’s good or bad that an engine, electrical system, or transmission is original or rebuilt. I don’t know how one model does versus another in resale value, or insurance cost or…well, you get the picture. There’s a lot to consider, and I don’t know how to value everything. The world of classic cars is complex, like most major decisions. In short, there’s no easy way to decide in this case (unless, of course, I could just buy the most expensive one. That usually guarantees you’ve gotten what the market thinks you paid for it. Not an option for most of us).

So what do I need? I need help from a human being - someone I trust who has command of the classic car domain *and* has my best interests at heart. But given that I don’t have a spare Uncle who happens to be a classic car nut, what am I to do?

Yesterday I got a chance to debrief with two leaders of Yahoo's search team (yes, I know how that sounds given the Bing deal, but bear with me here). Late last week Yahoo announced its intentions with regard to continuing its innovation in search, and I had noted the irony of such an announcement.

I think most of the industry has written off Yahoo as a search player, and for some good reason. It's true the company has abandoned two key pieces of the search puzzle - indexing and search monetization. But it's also true, as I noted in my coverage of the deal, that Yahoo is retaining its right to control the user interface to search, and it's clear that's what the company is now focusing on.

What I find fascinating about this is how clearly it positions Yahoo to compete, directly, with its partner Microsoft and Bing. More on this later today.