John Battelle's Searchblog

I noticed an interesting comment on my previous post on the launch of Google's AdPlanner, from Gian Fulgoni, Founder and Chairman of Comscore, a company that has gotten hammered in the aftermath of Google's launch. I asked if he'd elaborate, and here's the interview:

In your comment on the Searchblog post noting Google's Ad Planner, you noted discrepancies between publisher's server logs and Google's numbers. Can you say more? Why is this?

I suspect the main reason is that traffic numbers from server log data are inflated because of cookie deletion whereas panel metrics don't rely on cookies and so aren't affected by cookie deletion. As an example, Google Ad Planner shows mlb.com as having 9 million UVs in a month. comScore shows mlb.com as having 11.9 million UVs and mlb.com themselves have claimed they get 19 million UVs based on their server logs.
Separately, I've noted comments on the blogosphere from several site operators saying that their Google Analytic UVs are twice as high as their Google Trends UV numbers.

Are you concerned about Google's new product? What are you telling your apparently startled investors?

We think that Google's products and ours are designed for very different purposes. Theirs appear to represent a point solution aimed primarily at driving ad dollars to Google sites or sites in the Google Ad Network. In contrast, comScore's products are designed to be used for media planning and analysis on a Web wide basis. We believe that ad agencies, advertisers and publishers (especially any publisher that competes with Google) will continue to insist on the use of objective, third party sources of data such as comScore's. Nobody wants to see the fox guarding the chicken coop.

comScore offers a broad portfolio of solutions for media planning and analysis that include:
§ Home vs. work vs. university
§ Dictionary hierarchy of multiple levels: property, channel,
subchannel, etc.
§ Ad network view, custom views for companies that represent a
collection of sites.
§ Measurement of duration or time spent
§ Measurement of sessions
§ Measurement of day part
§ Segmentation by heavy, medium and light users
§ Segmentation by content consumption: finance, sports, health,
entertainment, etc.
§ Segmentation by Prism code, PersonicX code, customized customer
segments
§ Source / loss
§ URL level detail
§ Custom entities on the fly
§ Buying power index
§ Ad Impressions
§ Reach / Frequency
§ Advertising effectiveness, including branding, latency and offline
impacts
§ Video Metrix - reporting of online video consumption

Do you trust Google as an arbiter of where ad planners should put their money? If so, why? If not, why not?

My personal belief is that Google hasn't built these products with the objective of entering the market research industry and being an "independent arbiter" of where ad planners should put their money. Rather, they appear to have built tools that help facilitate the movement of display ad dollars to Google and its Ad Network. Nothing wrong with that if you're in the business of selling advertising. But, can you be that and be an arbiter at the same time? Perhaps Sarah Fay, CEO of Aegis North America, put it best when she said: "For an advertiser, the last thing you want to do is to have your adviser be the same person you are spending your money with."

I've enjoyed my professional relationship with Chris Sacca, who is leaving Google to pursue a career in investing. When I heard of his move, I pinged him in email, and the resulting dialog can be found below, verbatim, despite the fact that Google PR was cc'd on the thread. Thanks for your time, Chris, and good luck!

Why leave, and why why now?

A few reasons. First, I feel like the wireless team I built is in great shape and poised for some amazing achievements. I am proud of what the team accomplished this year and it makes me smile to see Verizon and AT&T fighting over which is more open than the other. Hard to say more about that without triggering the anti-collusion rules of the FCC around the 700MHz auction. That said, though I love Google and my colleagues here, I vested this Fall and it occurred to me how much I miss working in small, entrepreneurial environments.

It's refreshing to hear "I vested" as part of an answer – even with PR listening. It's such a powerful force. You also won a Founders Award while at Google. What for, and how much was it for?

I was part of a team negotiators that won one of the first Founders Awards at Google recognizing us for what the hundreds of millions of dollars of cost savings we had achieved in scaling Google's infrastructure. There are a lot of unsung heroes in that part of Google's business whose names are not well-known, but whose impact is humbling. I won't say exactly how big the award was, but I will say I am very grateful to the Larry and Sergey for their generosity. :)

I bet!
So as you leave Google, what do you think the best part of working there was? What is your greatest accomplishment? And, what frustrated you about the company?

I deeply admire how Eric, Larry, and Sergey are trying to build a 100-year company. Google encourages team leaders and entrepreneurs to take actions that traditional public companies, who are being managed quarter by quarter, would never be able to take. This allows Googlers to forget about short-term distractions and instead focus on accomplishing deep and fundamental changes to an industry or space. It's not fluff. I saw it every day and it was inspiring.

The wireless spectrum and openness stuff makes me smile. To see an informal, unchartered team come together over this past year and already catalyze some dramatic change in the US wireless ecosystem leaves me feeling good. Though I was hopeful about the impact we would have, I must admit that even I didn't expect Verizon and AT&T to be publicly feuding over claims they are the most open carrier. That said, I am most proud that it was entirely a team effort and there are some very strong Googlers who will carry the torch in my absence.

The one thing I began to miss at Google as it grows was the ability to be a generalist within the company. In a startup, it is easy and encouraged for folks to wear multiple hats. I used to buy data centers and fiber, manage an acquisition, work on Google Talk, pitch an access partner, receive a dignitary and give a speech about the future of media all in the same week. As a company gets bigger, inevitably, it begins to organize itself vertically and employees are pushed to specialize. As I focused my efforts almost exclusively around wireless, I began to miss the excitement and learning that comes with having touchpoints across the entire company on many different teams. One of the reasons I have enjoyed working with my portfolio companies like Photobucket, Twitter, and Auctomatic so much is that it reminds me of those early Google days.

So what are you interested in when it comes to investing? What
gets your attention?

I think there is still a lot of opportunity in consumer web. Despite the fascinating number of funded teams in the space, it seems that many entrepreneurs can't get outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber long enough to identify problems that millions of users need solved. For instance, I loved the Photobucket investment because there was so much attention on flickr, many investors were essentially ignoring Photobucket despite its traffic being 3-4x larger.

Beyond that, I think we are starting to see the U.S. mobile industry wake-up and go open. As much as the iPhone frustrates those of us who have been fighting for user choice and unfettered distribution when it comes to mobile apps, I do think we need to give Apple some credit for getting American consumers excited to use their devices to access the broader Internet. This hunger for more utility, combined with increasing openness creates so much opportunity for sharp teams to build apps that users want.

I am also very interested in wireless infrastructure and equipment having focused on this space for the last couple of years. I am seeing a lot of innovation by great teams and already have a couple of projects that seem promising.

What gets my attention is when I find small teams that work well together and are comprised predominately of engineers. A long time ago, I wrote a blog post about how to pitch an idea to Google. It all still applies when working with me as an investor: http://www.whatisleft.org/lookie_here/2005/09/want_to_do_busi.html

With Nokia shrugging at the Android threat, JImmy doing the same
about knol, FB (privately) scoffing at Open Social - do you think
Google's losing its magic touch?

I think two things are in play here: First, how would you expect Nokia, FB, and Jimmy to react? No way those folks would throw in the towel or even concede any threat. Instead, in the grand tradition of technology, they wear a strong face, inspire their teams, users, and investors, and get back to the lab to continue innovating. Soon it will be each of their turns to launch the feature or do the 'Google killer' deal and so the cycle repeats.

In parallel, it has always fascinated me to see the press impose upon Google the expectation that everything the company does will be a smashing success. This despite the stated fact the company prefers to launch new projects early and often and see what catches on. Will Android, OpenSocial and Knol all change the world? Who knows. (Actually, I am pretty sure Android will ... but I digress.) The important thing is that Google keep empowering entrepreneurs to take chances and try new and creative approaches to solving problems. Failure at many of those ventures is inevitable, but the successes will be worth it all.

Thanks Chris!

Last week saw the launch of Mahalo, the new human powered search index from Jason Calacanis (that's his dog, at left, one of his favorite online images). Jason has a flair for getting attention, and you all gave him some in the comments on my post noting the launch, all right. I emailed Jason for his response and we did the classic Searchblog back and forth. One thing I can say for Jason: He speaks his mind (see his comments on Squidoo, below). The interview:

What do you make of the response so far to Mahalo?

First off, I'm thrilled with the amount of attention and feedback the project has gotten. It's a very contrarian idea, so I think some folks are rightfully exited and/or skeptical. Launching at the D conference certainly contributed to the excitement.

Of course, we've heard and developed a strategy to resolve the issues that people first think of when you say "human search" months ago. As you can imagine, when we spoke to our investors they brought up the same issues: how does it scale, how do you deal with human bias, how do you keep the search results up to date, why would people switch from google, how many search results do you need to reach scale, how is it defensible, etc.

I'm also excited that the SEO community has predicted it will fail because, of course, they have the most to lose when it succeeds! (Jason has been notorious for dinging the SEO community).

Why is this better than, say, ChaCha? And how is it different from the many approaches of the past that have not worked?

For the top 10,000 searchers we will be better than ChaCha because we have full-time, well trained, Guides spending 10 hours building each search result. That's a lot of effort compared to the five or ten minute interaction with a live ChaCha Guide being paid, what, like $6 an hour (or $2 on a net-net basis from what I've been reading--ChaChat guides only get paid during ACTIVE searches from what I can see. So, if they get three five minute interactions per hour they make 1/4 of an hours pay for sitting in front of their computer for an hour--or like $1.50 or $2 I think).

That being said, I'm a fan of ChaCha for long tail searches. I like the concept of real-time searching and I think we're going to add that feature to Mahalo.com at some point later this year. I've read many folks beating up ChaCha, but I think that ChaCha can make live search work in the way that Yahoo made Answers work after Google gave up on Answers.
Also, I think ChaCha would be a nice plugin to Mahalo, so perhaps there is a partnership opportunity for the two companies (although I haven't reached out to them yet).

In terms of past approaches, I think Scott's original vision for About.com/Mining Company *did* work, and the DMOZ absolutely worked--for a time. Both of those projects, however, suffered from neglect and a lack of resources. About.com has really switched from being a "guide to the web" to a destination. If you compare our Poker result with their result you will see they are trying to answer the questions and we're trying to help you find the people who can answer the question. Both are valuable, but my feeling is that the world doesn't need Mahalo to answer questions for them--especially not with the Wikipedia doing such a phenomenal job answering questions. The most we're doing are the "fast facts" in the top right hand page of SeRPs. Those are like the top five facts to quickly confirm we got what you're looking for, and maybe fill in some knowledge gaps users might have--not comprehensive in any way.

What the world needs now curation--not more experts.

Also, the world has changed in a number of ways since we last tried this type of project:

a) Software and bandwidth are essentially free--taking out 50% of the cost of running a web-based business. This trend is call Web 2.0... it's gonna be big I think. ;-)
b) Google Adsense exists as a massive, scalable, and wildly efficient monitization engine. We're not going to sell ads directly... we're gonna leverage the services out there based on which ones perform best on a PER-SERP basis.
c) There are many more users online doing many more searches today
d) There is a lot more noise and "bad actors" polutting the web today (Blackhat SEOs, spammers, affiliate traps, splogs, etc), and as a result folks are frustrated with search.

Speaking of curation, what do you make of Squidoo?

I just did a search for Paris Hotels on Mahalo and Squidoo, the result are obvious: Squidoo is a disaster and Mahalo is helpful. If you give folks the tools to make anything they will, and if you get some page rank the SEOs will come in and destroy your service. That's what's happened to Squidoo in the past year--it's a dark, dirty, SEO back-alley now and I think folks are afraid to just say that. Do ten searches and look at the results--it's garbage. There might be one good lens every once and while, but as a service it's just horrible.

Seth had a good idea with Squidoo I think--empowering people. However, the execution was way too open and you can see what happens when you let anyone do anything without a mandate (think Wikipedia if it WASN'T an encyclopedia project and it didn't have an active group of admins).

Squidoo is actually dangerous to use and it fails the number one test of Internet usability and trust: would you send your mother there.

That being said it has to be making a fortune for Squidoo and their 'lens masters" because you can't tells what's an advertisement and what's not. With Google's new "let us know about deceptive advertising" program it's only a matter of time before Squidoo winds up in the penalty box in my mind.

Seth should pull the plug on it.

... other than that I have not thoughts on Squidoo. :-)

You've said you can go four years without revenue. But your last business made a pretty good living on AdSense. Do you plan to do that again? Also, what about lead gen or similar deals? How do you plan to make money?

We are testing adsense already (see corvette page). My position, and the investors/board position, is that we should spend year one figuring out how to make *perfect* search results (a lofty goal), while figuring out how to scale our process.
As we all know search advertising is the most desired advertising on the planet because users are saying what they are interested in *right now*. It is the most effective advertising on the planet for this reason. If we build a great product it will scale, and if you have scale--as I learned at AOL--you can't help but make money. Advertisers love scale--thats what federated media is hitting the ball out of the park--ya got scale you win!

Thanks, Jason!

Update: Jason just launched his Greenhouse effort to get the public involved in helping create search results...

When news of Google's acquisition of Feedburner broke last week, those of us who have known Dick Costolo for a while were all smiles - Dick is a great guy, and we all love his service, which has a very publisher friendly approach and provides real benefit to us all. I shot a congratulatory email to Dick and asked him a few questions over the course of the week. Here's the exchange:

Why did you sell to Google?

We help publishers manage distributed media by providing a suite of services for analytics, distribution/promotion, and monetization. On the media call yesterday, I said that we thought there was tremendous overlap between our competencies and the depth and breadth of Google's offerings. Susan Wojcicki commented on this point during the call and used the term complementary instead of overlap, and I think that's a much better word choice for a few reasons. We both offer detailed publisher analytics, but Google is extremely strong on site and marketing analytics while we are light on site analytics but very deep on feed and distribution analytics. Further, while our customer base is a critical mass of publishers (over 400k) that grows at an amazing rate, we have select advertiser relationships. It goes without saying that Google's depth and breadth of advertiser relationships well complement the critical mass of publishers we serve. I could go on with a number of other examples like this. So, I like the term complementary as a defining theme for the reasoning behind this relationship.

Why now?

Timing about anything like this is always a hard question to answer, mostly because it's not necessarily up to one party to decide on timing. Both parties have to agree it makes sense. That's obvious I suppose, but it can make a unilateral answer to a timing question sound a bit (or a lot) disingenuous. Acknowledging that, I'd say there are two components to the timing question and both harken back to my answer above. I say 'harken back' as if I wrote the paragraph above in 1972. Anyway, I mentioned speed of innovation. We now have well over 400k publishers leveraging one or more of our services (do you like how I've pointed out that number twice? This is what we call 'on message'). The type and variety of publisher working with FeedBurner has grown in interesting ways in the last couple years, and it has become more and more evident that in order to provide timely services to as many of our publishers as quickly as possible, FeedBurner must scale in multiple directions simultaneously. Google's track record for scaling services and innovating on them quickly for a global customer base adds to the logic behind our decision. To elaborate on one element of this point, I have talked before about our desire to provide publishers with a 360 degree view of audience and reach analytics. This is an immensely difficult challenge - one need only note the continued inability of competent third party organizations to agree on classic page view or visitor metrics for many sites - and it has simply become more obvious to us that this is an important challenge and that fully meeting this challenge requires further innovation in a number of areas. Could it be pursued by a private company continuing to operate independently? Of course, but you always want to focus on making sure your customers are successful and part of that is understanding when there is a shorter path from here to there! The folks that we've talked to at Google and the work that we've all recently seen come out of Google Analytics convincingly point toward a shared vision. Apologies for switching between first person, third person, and second person all in one paragraph; I think that's the grammar police at the door now.

What changes might we expect in the FB service?

Our immediate focus is integration along several service lines. Certainly, the FeedBurner services that people love will be integrated and enhanced with complementary Google services. While there is tremendous excitement about the kinds of next generation feed services we can deliver, we want to make sure we pay initial attention to speedy integration.

What will you do now that you could not do before?

The short answer is "more, faster". We need to innovate along multiple axes simultaneously in order to meet the needs of such a diverse publisher base (analytics, distribution promotion, rich media syndication, etc), so we are now in a position where we can tackle more of these challenges more quickly instead of having to pick a linear innovation path that values some publishers over others. So, I don't think we had anything we couldn't do before, but now we can do more of the things we need to do more quickly.

Is everyone staying in Chicago? Will you join Google's offices there?

Everyone is staying where they are based, yes (we have a few people based outside of Chicago), and we will indeed join Google's offices in Chicago, although it is still unclear whether my request for a luxuriously appointed desk in the Queen Anne style is being taken as seriously as it should be.

What does this mean for Feedburner's ad sales? Will it be taken over by Adsense, or will you continue to sell it independently?

We're definitely looking forward to leveraging Google's existing sales efforts. Selling it independently wouldn't provide the scale we'd like to offer to publishers as quickly as we'd like to provide it.

Everyone wonders, no one asks, so I will: What's it like to know you've made this kind of money?

As you well know, starting a company is hugely stressful, regardless of what you're trying to build, and my cofounders and I have been doing this since 1995 or so. Especially as you get married and have kids, there's just an always-on anxiousness in your mind about financial health, maybe sometimes more at the forefront of your thoughts and other times in the back of your mind, but always there, in much the same way you feel a constant anxiety about coursework when you're in college (at least I felt that way!). So, to continue that analogy, it feels like the sense of relief you have after finishing a final exam; you have this stress that was present on some level for an extended period of time that falls away. That's the best way I can describe it - you can see why I'm not a motivational speaker.

What do you want to be doing in five years?

I'm sure this will reflect poorly on my approach to personal growth, but I've never given thought to what I want to or should be doing a year or two down the road. I don't know why, I've just never approached things that way. I generally think in very immediate terms like "is this fun" or "it's time to stop doing this and try doing that", but i've never thought to myself "by the end of next year, I should be doing X", so I can't for the life of me take an honest crack at what I'd want to be doing in five years. Right now I want to keep doing what I'm doing, but five years from now? It's a mystery.

Thanks Dick, and congrats to you and the whole team!

If you've been reading a while, you've seen my coverage of Udi's career, from A9 to Google (and before, though I did not cover his work at Yahoo or prior to that...).

I pinged him a while back and he got back to me after the universal search announcement had passed (he had a lot to do with it...).

Here's our brief interview:

How did Google make the decision to do universal search? What got you comfortable with the approach? It reminded me of the things we spoke of when you were at A9...

The project started way before I arrived at Google. What you see today is just the beginning, and it's a culmination of many different pieces that came together recently. What got us comfortable are three things: First, the design of the infrastructure is solid. It's scalable, measurable, and efficient. Second, we solved some interesting ranking problems, which allows us to mix results from many sources in the right way. Third, and most important, we put together a wonderful team that got it done. David Bailey and Dan Belov (from Engineering) and Johanna Wright (from Product Management) ( see http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/behind-scenes-with-universal-search.html ) lead the core team, but this was an effort of many teams over a period of time. Again, this is just the first step.

I'm very interested in the next steps. Without telling us too much (if you would like to, why, please do), what are the interesting problems in search right now that you feel well positioned to address?

As search gets better, user expectations rise even higher, and we need to improve at a faster rate. Most of our work still focuses on the fundamentals -- making results more relevant, more comprehensive, for more users, in more languages. Much of this work involves pure algorithms, deep understanding of search and of the web, and just plain hard work. Just the way we like it. It is not sexy to the outside world and it doesn't make headlines, but it has the highest impact. Most of the advances in pure ranking that we're making aren't obvious to users -- they just find what they're looking for more often and they take it for granted. Just the way it should be.

In addition to the fundamentals, we are involved in dozens of efforts in new areas. I wish I could brag about all the cool stuff we're doing, but I won't until it's done.

Your colleague Adam Bosworth and I had a long chat recently about his work on Health. It strikes me one of the more interesting areas of search might be in domain specific search, like health. You can do things with structured results and deep knowledge of a person's information needs in that kind of environment. Would you agree that this is an area where devoting significant resources makes sense?

Of course. What's more important than health?

As you know, we improved the search results for health-related queries with Google Co-op, which launched last year. If you search, for example, for diabetes, we'll offer refinements at the top of the page (treatment, symptoms, tests, risk factors, for patients, for health professionals, etc.). We are working with the major health organizations and we put special emphasis on ranking of health-related queries. A lot more work on health is being done by Adam and his team.

Given the approach of universal search, how does domain specific fit in? I mean, given that Google is bringing all search results to one place ( google.com) how does domain specific stuff like Health fit into the Google master plan?

The universal search vision is about including results of all types in the best possible way on one page -- the main search results page. It does not mean that we will not invest in improving search for particular types of data, in fact it's the opposite. By building the infrastructure for universal search and by giving every type of result the prominence it deserves we make it easier for the search group and other groups within Google to highlight the best results. We are also working on giving users specialized access to different types of data. The ranking and presentation of local information are different from that of, say, video or news. We now give users the option to play a video directly from the search results page and see a map directly on the search results page. Once you follow the link into our maps area, for example, we provide a very rich experience (with maps, satellite images, and now street view images, all integrated). One of the most important goals of the universal search project is to build new ways to handle specific data types, like maps, images, scholarly articles, or health.

Do you see Google creating stand alone destination sites around search separate from google.com?

My job is to improve search on Google.com.

Well defelected, Mr. Manber. Thanks!

Michael Wesch, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. If you've been reading Searchblog, then you know him as the guy behind this amazing video.

After I saw the film, I had to talk to the man who made it. Michael is a very thoughtful fellow, as one might expect, but he comes to "Web 2.0" from an entirely different perspective than your typical Valley entrepreneur (yet he seems to know more than most of us!). For more, read on....and keep in mind the Michael has agreed to answer your questions in the comments field, should any come up!

You did your fieldwork in a Melanesia, and teach at Kansas State. How did you end up making such a compelling video, one that resonates so deeply with folks like, well, those who read Searchblog?

For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization.

My friends in Papua New Guinea are experts in relationships and grasp the ways that we are all connected in much more profound ways than we do. They go so far as to suggest that their own health is dependent on strong relations with others. When they get sick they carefully examine their relations with others and try to heal those relations in order to heal their bodies.
In contrast, we tend to emphasize our independence and individuality, failing to realize just how interconnected we are with each other and the rest of the world, and disregarding the health of our relationships with others. This became clear to me when I saw a small boy in a Papua New Guinea village wearing a torn and tattered University of Nebraska sweatshirt, the only item of clothing he owned. The grim reality for me at that moment was that the same village was producing coffee which eventually found its way onto shelves in my hometown in Nebraska, and this boy may never be able to afford to drink the coffee produced in his own village.

So if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind. I’m not being overly utopian and naively saying that the Web will make this happen. In fact, if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.

So that’s some of the more personal and philosophical background behind this video. I wanted to show people how digital technology has evolved and give them a sense of where it might be going and to give some momentum to the all-important conversation about the consequences of that on our global society. I did not know it would reach so many people, but I had hoped that for those it did reach it would spark some reflection on the power of the technology they were using. Because without proper understanding and reflection, “the machine” is using us – all of us – even those that don’t have access to the machine at all.

Your video was quite sophisticated about how the web works, and the production quality was quite high as well. Where did you pick up those skills?

I made my first website in 1998 using notepad and HTML while I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. It was slow- going but I saw a tremendous potential for transforming the way we present our research. Since then I have had a passion for exploring the latest technologies and how they an be used to communicate ideas in more effective ways. I like to learn these technologies on my own through trial and error, because sometimes the errors turn out to be new uses for the tool that I might not have discovered through formal training. I’m always looking for ways to use tools in ways other than for what they were intended. The great thing about our current era is that the tools are not only easier to use (as evidenced by an anthropology professor being able to learn them in his spare time), they are also more flexible than ever, allowing for some creative uses that seem to re-invent the tools all over again.

What tools do you use out there on the web that you find useful? Are you a devotee of any of the "Web 2" tools?

One can think of the Web as a place where multiple overlapping global conversations are taking place simultaneously. To keep up with these conversations I have established my online home at Netvibes, which allows me to integrate almost all of the tools I use and organize them into different “tabs” in a way that fits with my online life. I have a tab for blogs and comments which allows me to track multiple online conversations, along with a blog search module that updates whenever somebody posts something related to the topics I am currently interested in.

To keep up with parts of the global conversation that might not have a simple RSS feed, I use feeds from social bookmarking services like Diigo and Del.icio.us. As a visual anthropologist I also need to monitor parts of the conversation taking place in photos and videos. Sites like Flickr that allow photo tagging make it easy to monitor the photos, and with new video services like Viddler, Mojiti, and Bubbleply that allow users to tag, comment, and create their own content within and on top of existing videos, it will soon be possible to be alerted the moment somebody uses a tag to describe any particular piece of an online video. On the other end of the media spectrum, it is now easier than ever to keep track of traditional paper-based journals as well, as many are now providing RSS feeds and putting the articles online. This has created tremendous potential for Cite-U-Like, a social bookmarking service for academic journals, which I use to alert me whenever somebody uses a certain tag, or when somebody with similar interests as me tags anything.

The best tools are those that are flexible enough to be used beyond that for which they were intended. The more a web service can build this kind of flexibility in, the better, as it can tap into the collective intelligence of those using the service to extend its possibilities. Netvibes has this built right in by allowing users to create their own modules. With the help of an “API maker” like Dapper, we can create almost anything we need and integrate it into Netvibes, further extending our ability to keep track of those parts of the global conversation that interests us the most.

As a university professor I have also found Facebook to be useful. I was inspired to use Facebook for teaching by something I saw while visiting George Mason University. Like many universities, they were concerned that the library stacks were rarely being accessed by students. Instead of trying to bring students to the stacks, they brought the stacks to the students, placing a small library right in the middle of the food court where students hang out. We can do the same with popular social networking tools like Facebook. Facebook is not only great for expressing your identity, sharing with friends, and planning parties, it also has all the tools necessary to create an online learning community. Students are already frequently visiting Facebook, so we can bring our class discussions to them in a place where they have already invested significant effort in building up their identity, rather than asking them to login to Blackboard or some other course management system where they feel “faceless” and out of place.

Would you be open to answering any other questions readers might have in the comments section of my site?

Sure, sounds fun.

Joe Kraus, a co-founder of Excite (image credit), recently sold his latest company, JotSpot, to Google. I’ve known Joe for quite some time, and thought a quick email interview might be in order given his long history in search and Internet media. (Joe introduced JotSpot at the Web2.0 conference two years ago.)

Did Google buy JotSpot, or your team? If the former, what is the plan for the company? If the latter, what's the plan for the team?

Simply put, I think Google bought both the technology and the team. In *most* acquisitions, you are acquiring both and ascribing value to both.

Google has invested substantially in collaboration (Groups, Docs&Spreadsheets, Google Apps for your Domain) and JotSpot is a part of that trend. In my opinion the first wave of productivity apps (seen in the 80s) was about making an individual more productive. Word, Excel, Powerpoint were all about making me, as a worker at my desk, able to create more work per unit of time. But, I think we've eeked out the last bit of individual productivity gain at this stage. I mean, does the new ribbon on MS Word make me more productive as an individual? Probably not. It's a great interface, but it's unlikely that there is a massive gain in personal productivity.

This next wave that we're in is about productivity gains achieved NOT by making the individual more productive, but by making groups more productive. The massive penetration of email means that we're in touch with one another like never before and dependent on teams like never before. That means that there is a huge opportunity for productivity gains through more effective collaboration. That's what Google is trying to do in their efforts and that's the theme in which the JotSpot acquisition fits.

I can't talk specifically about product plans, but I hope that the above gives you a general sense of direction.

It does, thanks.
Now, personally, isn't it kind of a mixed emotion joining Google? I recall a conversation earlier - 2004 or so - in which you expressed some reservations at the giddy growth and presumptive optimism of the place. I think like many of us you felt perhaps Google was due a needed, well, life lesson, one that you learned at Excite, and I learned at The Standard. What say you now to such sentiments?

Well, I have to say that I think "the rumors are true". Google has collected the smartest group of people I've ever encountered under one roof.

In terms of emotion, you know, it's an understandable question, but honestly, there's no mixed emotion -- I'm honestly just excited to be here. I think that comes from two things -- more than the former founder of Excite, I was most recently fully occupied as the CEO of JotSpot. I had 28 employees that were working very hard, who had given up other very good opportunities and and for whom I wanted a great outcome. There's no better outcome than to be at Google (it's a wonderful nerd paradise -- a place that nerds like me can thrive in) and there is great satisfaction in that. Second, I left excite 6 years ago, and at a personal level, my life has gotten a lot more rich and fullfilled from a variety of sources -- marriage, kid, non-profit work (as well as my for-profit work). So, it's not that I don't love my work and feel very passionately about it -- it's just that I'm not defined by it the way I was when I was in my 20s.

What can you do at Google that you can't do outside of Google? And a follow up, what can't you do at Google that you "gave up" to be there?

What can I do at Google that I can't do outside of this place? I think there is a lot here, but the short answer is the pretty obvious one. Google operates at a scale that startups don't approach. And, while that provides its own challenges (making sure your stuff can handle high numbers of users), it provides a ton of opportunities to get your ideas exposed to a large number of people and get a large amount of feedback. Also, if you are pursuing very forward-looking ideas then a larger company like Google provides staying power in the market. There's that old adage in startups "being early is the same as being wrong". In a startup, if you're too early for the market, it feels like there is no market at all. It's hard in a startup to really tell the difference between early and wrong and in most cases it leads to startup death. Google is a place where there is strong interest in the long term and that is a very unique thing.

Thanks Joe!!

Dave founded Tacoda, a behavioral ad network, six years ago now, and recently inked a deal to add Comscore demographic information to Tacoda's network. Tacoda is an FM partner, so read with that caveat, but I found our email back and forth interesting, and hope you do too.

Like Tacoda recently did, Google incorporated Comscore some time ago. Why is yours better?

Because TACODA is capturing and can target ads against anonymous browsing behaviors from more than 15 Billion page views per day on 4500 of the top news, entertainment and information sites on the web, from NYTimes.com to MSNBC.com to Orbitz WSJ.com to FM Publishing. This gives TACODA the broadest, deepest and most diverse database of user content browsing anywhere - more than Google or Yahoo! - though they certainly have a lot more search data.

By matching this browsing data to anonymous ComScore data, we now know not only what content they surf, but marketer sites they are visiting online and what e-commerce categories they are buying online. Since we can associate this with time, we can see users much higher up the purchase funnel than search marketing. We can see the users when they are still in the brand consideration phase. By the time that users get to Google, like yellow pages offline, they generally already know what they are going to buy, it's just a matter of price and vendor.

Will there be any change in how you charge for this?

We sell on a CPM basis only, since our efforts are focused on brand and branded response advertisers – folks that care who sees their ads and where they see them – rather than direct response. We see video as a big part of this future, whether it is on the computer, of IP-driven television or on mobile devices. Nothing beats sight, sound and motion for delivering brand advertising.

Given that you sell on CPM, but are a network, don't advertisers still want to buy site by site? Will you ever get into that business, or do you think all the behavioral and demographic data obviates site-specific selling?

I expect advertisers to buy both behavioral networks and site-by-site in their media mix. They buy individual sites for the strong, integrated branding opportunities, but they have to live with limited inventory and premium prices. Buying behavioral is a nice complement to that. With TACODA’s behavioral network, they get the audiences that they want on clean, well-lit sites. They get a lot of scale. They get lower prices. However, it will never replace site=specific selling. When someone wants a Wall Street Journal reader or a Boing Boing reader, the only place that they can be certain to reach them, and the only way to fully-leverage the sponsorship value of a great publisher brand, is to buy it site-specific.

As a behavioral network, I do not expect TACODA to get into the site-by-site selling business. It is much better served by direct or specialized sales forces working on behalf of the sites. We are focused on selling people, not pages. When advertisers want to talk to certain types of people, TACODA will be there. When they want to their messages on certain kinds of pages, that will be for other sales organizations.

So how is business at Tacoda? Can you give us a sense of your scale in terms of revenue and margins?

TACODA is doing great. As a private company, we don’t release specific numbers on our revenue or margins, but I can tell you that our last quarter’s revenue was up several hundred percent year over year, our margins are strong and growing, and our team has grown from 25 or so a year ago to more than 90 today, thanks in large part to the work of Curt Viebranz our CEO, who was our COO for the past two years and was the former CEO of HBO International and Time Inc. New Media. Over the past year, our publisher network has grown by 10X as have the number of marketers and agencies that advertise on our network. 2007 is starting out very well and we expect the strong growth to continue.

Can you be more specific on the size of the publisher network?

TACODA’s network today has more than 4500 branded content publishers – folks NYTImes.com, Dow Jones/WSJ.com, Orbitz, Cars.com, NBC, Tribune, BusinessWeek.com, Technorati and FM Publishing. These sites deliver 15-20 Billion page views per month to an unduplicated US audience of more than 140 million unique visitors and deliver real-time anonymous content browsing behaviors to TACODA’s servers with virtually every page and person that they serve. Since TACODA’s market focus is brand advertising, not performance and direct response, its advertiser customer base is quite different than other online ad networks. Among its top advertisers in Q4 were Coke, Snapple, American Express, FAO Schwartz

In your estimation, what are the hurdles/gates in the online advertising business right now?

Advertisers need more scale and less friction and there is a looming shortage of quality inventory at cost-effective prices. If General Motors wanted to appreciably increase their online ad spend this year, they would have a tough time doing it economically and efficiently. All of the substantial auto content sites are largely sold out for 2007. Search usage is growing, but not nearly at the rate that online ad spend is increasing, and the rates for the best search terms are already pretty high. The vast majority of web pages viewed every month – probably 80% of them – can’t currently support premium advertising. They either lack an intuitive and valuable commercial context – they have news, social, email, photo and video sharing content, not technology, travel, cars or health – or they have unsuitable content. Unfortunately, these non-premium content pages are growing much faster than the premium pages. The majority of ad view growth on the web in 2006 was in social and photo and video sharing. Finally, while the “sight, sound and motion” of video advertising on the web certainly offers an attractive vision for the future, it is going to take years for it to truly come to fruition.

Any other thoughts for 2007?

I think that the big online ad stories in 2007 will be brand dollars, targeting and scale. This should play very well for all networks, but particularly those that they serve the needs of brand advertisers – who care about who sees their ads and where they see them. I think that we are going to see a lot of attention, and a lot of money, flow to sites further down the food chain than those few that have dominated this sector historically. The really big guys will do fine, but the mid-size and smaller folks will do even better.

Thanks, Dave!

As I posted yesterday, Peter Horan (image credit) is heading to IAC to run a suite of its media and advertising businesses, including Citysearch, Ask.com, and IAC's other media assets. I emailed him three questions, here are his answers.

So, what drew you to this job?

The door was opened by a personal relationship. Jason Rapp lead the team at The New York Times that acquired About.com in 2005. During that process and the integration, we came to know, like and respect each other. Jason joined IAC in the fall as SVP of M&A and suggested that I talk to them about this job.

As those conversations progressed, I was very impressed with IAC and realized that this job would let me focus on several things that I am passionate about: the evolving relationship between search and content; developing mobile solutions; and local web products that work. We have the resources, the team, and the brands to really advance the state of the art in all of these areas. There's also a proven sales team to help with the monetization.
It's a unique opportunity.

Did you have a vision for what IAC needs, or is it more that you're there to manage what already exists?

I am fortunate to be going into a situation where I can focus on growth and adding strategic value. There's nothing to fix. Under strong leaders, the individual businesses have been doing well. The goal now is to bring together IAC's amazing array of resources in new ways that benefit the consumer (and drive IAC's share). Mobile and local solutions will be high up on the priority list. I will also be working to find ways to use search to help power other IAC business units.

Early this year, we will also be evaluating our options for monetization and distribution. I expect that to be a vigorous process. The initial overtures have been very interesting.

Hmmm. Can you unpack "evaluating our options for monetization and distribution" a bit more?

IAC's Google contract comes up for renewal at the end of the year. The company has already started to explore options.
It will be one of my top priorities to make sure that we get the best deal for the company.
Economics will be a big part of that but so will distribution and other factors. Because this will be one of the most valuable parterships in play this year, we expect this to be a very vigorous process.

OK, let's start from scratch. What is AskCity?


OK. Here we go: AskCity is a new local search application from Ask.com. You can find it in one of two ways: through the AskCity link on our homepage, our automatically, at the top of our standard results page, in response to your local queries.

AskCity is the fifth major search vertical we've launched this year, following Image, Maps, Blog/Feed, and Mobile search, and we're really proud of it. It stands out from the crowd because it seamlessly integrates four types of local search - business/service, events, movies, and maps - with the best local content on the Web, along with ergonomic design and features, to form an "all-in-one" resource. AskCity users won't have to bounce around to multiple sites in order to find, and take action with local information. In short, we get you from Point A to Point B faster.

Local has been around for ages. Why now?

Very simple. Local accounts for 10% of all Ask.com searches, and yet it is the vertical on our site, and in the overall search category, with the lowest user satisfaction. Our research showed that people felt that recent local products launched by our competitors focused too heavily on maps, or on "cool" fly-through graphics, and not enough on helping them dig deep into local content, or into helping them accomplish tasks. AskCity fixes that and then some.

Upgrading our local capabilities will hopefully serve our users needs better, increasing their likelihood to adopt Ask as their primary search engine in a very competitive environment.

I really like user reviews/testimonials. Will AskCity have this feature?

We found in our research that one of the biggest causes of dissatisfaction with local search is an over-promotion of and over-reliance on the map, and limiting information to mere links. It reminds me of the over-reliance on comparison shopping in product search, as opposed to product research, which is 80% of online shopping. 
 
In response to this, with AskCity, we went deep on information, incorporating over 25 companies from across the Web directly into the product. We not only feature full editorial profiles of each business, but we include 10 years worth of reviews, both from IAC companies like Citysearch and ServiceMagic, as well as non-IAC companies like Yelp, Tribune, OpenTable, RottenTomatoes, TripAdvisor, InsiderPages, JudysBook, Fandango and others. 
 
An important differentiator with AskCity is the fact that we return these reviews right within the results, just beneath the full profile of the business, service, locale, movie, etc. We even have reviews of the movie theaters themselves.
 
Speaking of which, its important to note that AskCity is much more than just an online version of the yellow pages. Yes, you can use it to find businesses. But there are four types of search in the product - business/service, events, movies, and maps/directions. And we plan to add more next year.

But can **I** post a review?

Are you some kind of review monger?

No, but I do like to hear what folks have to say...

You don't write reviews directly on OUR site, but that's not our job. Instead, when you post it on Citysearch, Yelp, InsiderPages, etc., we will crawl them and post the top ones in AskCity. We also tell you how many reviews exist on each one of those sites for that particular business, and link to them. We also have 10 years worth of editorial reviews from Citysearch, which adds a different flavor.

We’re not currently a place where you can write them yourselves. But we are crawling those other sites constantly, so as soon as you write it there, they’ll be searchable on Ask. And the bottom line for this version of AskCity is that we’ve gone further than any other site to incorporate review content directly into our results.

How long did it take to pull this together, and is this the start of Ask.com becoming the "connective tissue" of IAC?

We worked on AskCity for the better part of the year, really turning up the heat over the summer, after our initial relaunch. With Local being such an important part of search, and something we weren’t doing very well, it was an obvious place to make an effort to do something really good and really original.

I look at the connective tissue thing a bit differently, in that to date I think people have assumed that meant we’d stick a bunch of links for IAC companies all over our homepage. But that’s not what people want from search, and going back to Pathfinder I don’t think that’s a model that’s worked well. Even today, we’re being used more and more for what you might deem “portal” content, because people find it easier to use a search box than navigate a page with dozens of services on it and going through a separate experience. If they can get it, people want one, cohesive experience. So instead of looking at Ask as the glue, I look at us as a chef that is remixing IAC into our own recipe, to create new, valuable products that didn’t exist before. AskCity is a great example, but IAC has leading brands in many other categories, so you’ll see us create new recipes for things like shopping, real estate, travel, etc. We develop things with a “quality over quantity” mentality, however, so it may take a little while to get there.

I know you've answered similar questions (see Om), but how does this change the positioning of Citysearch, which was a local search destination?

It doesn’t change anything. We’re the doorway, they’re the destination, and we both have well over 20 million users per month, respectively. With AskCity, we’re incorporating more of their content directly into our results than other search engines do, and that helps people make more informed decisions more quickly. This will raise the water level for both Ask and CS at the end of the day, and that’s why the Ask and Citysearch teams worked so well together on this one.

How important a launch is this for Ask.com - what are your expectations?

Very important from the perspective of doing a lights-out job on 10% of our searches, where we formerly had a pretty high failure rate. Any time you can do that, you build your foundation for growth. That’s been a key to our success all year against a very strong headwind, with a company that has few, if any, structural advantages over our competition. Image Search has been the fastest growing part of our site on the back of critical praise and industry-leading relevance. Even our Mobile search, launched last month, has been growing like gangbusters – well beyond my expectations – with almost no real press coverage. With Local, I expect even more. The product deserves it, because it delivers.

Matt is the man who the SEO/SEM world looks to for answers around most things Google related. Over the past month Melanie and I have been having a wide-ranging email exchange with him on spam, the role of humans at Google, and other things. Here's the result:

Let's say you decide to leave Google and are asked to write an exact job description for a replacement to do exactly what you do now. What does it say? (We told Matt to be honest, or his options will not vest!)

My official job is to direct the webspam team at Google. Webspam is essentially when someone tries to trick a search engine into ranking higher than they should. A few people will try almost anything, up to and including the mythical GooglePray meta tag, to rank higher. Our team attempts to help high-quality sites while preventing deceptive techniques from working.

As a result of working on webspam, I started talking to a lot of webmasters on forums, blogs, and at conferences. So I've backed into handling a fair chunk of webmaster communication for Google. Last year I started my own blog so that I could answer common questions, or to debunk stuff that isn't true (e.g., inserting a GooglePray meta tag doesn't make a whit of difference). These days when I see unusual posts in the blogosphere, I'll try to get a bug report to the right person, or to clarify if someone is confused.

As you pointed out, you've become the human voice between Google and webmasters/SEOs. We've heard Google needs to manually remove spam sometimes. And even the algorithm-based feed for Google News requires an editorial gatekeeper for selecting sites. Do you think there is a growing role for human presence in Google's online technologies?

Bear in mind that this is just my personal opinion, but I think that Google should be open to almost any signal that improves search quality. Let's hop up to the 50,000 foot view. When savvy people think about Google, they think about algorithms, and algorithms are an important part of Google. But algorithms aren't magic; they don't leap fully-formed from computers like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus. Algorithms are written by people. People have to decide the starting points and inputs to algorithms. And quite often, those inputs are based on human contributions in some way.


The simplest example is that hyperlinks on the web are created by people. A passable rule of thumb is that for every page on the web, there are 10 hyperlinks, and all those billions of links are part of the material that modern search engines use to measure reputation. As you mention, Google News ranks based on which stories human editors around the web choose to highlight. Most of the successful web companies benefit from human input, from eBay's trust ratings to Amazon's product reviews and usage data. Or take Netflix's star ratings. This past week I watched Brick and Boondock Saints, and I'm pretty sure that L4yer cake and Hotel Rwanda are going to be good, because all those DVDs have 4+ stars. Those star ratings are done by people, and they converge to pretty trustworthy values after only a few votes.

So I think too many people get hung up on "Google having algorithms." They miss the larger picture, which (to me) is to pursue approaches that are scalable and robust, even if that implies a human side. There's nothing inherently wrong with using contributions from people--you just have to bear in mind the limitations of that data. For example, the three companies I mentioned above have to consider the malicious effect that money can have in their human systems. Netflix doesn't have to worry much (who wants to spam a DVD rating?), while eBay probably spends a lot more time thinking about how to make their trust ratings accurate and fair.

Google recently added user-tagging to photos. it's an interesting way to sort search, adding a personal and human dimension yet opening up a can of worms for syntax and keyword variation. Is this social training of human-input going to be applied to other dimensions of search at Google? Requiring labels to gain a critical mass before they become official is clever step, but of course its not immune to automated spamming. From your perspective on quality control, is this going to open up doors for more abuse of Google as a platform?

I personally would love to see more human input into search at Google. But the flip side is that someone has to pay attention to potential abuse by bad actors. Maybe it's cynical of me, but any time people are involved, I tend to think about how someone could abuse the system. We've seen the whole tagging idea in Web 1.0 when they were called meta tags, and some people abused them so badly with deceptive words that to this day, most search engine give little or no scoring weight to keywords in meta tags.

Google took a cautious approach on this image tagging: the large pool of participants and their random pairing makes it harder to conspire, and two people have to agree on a tag. Users doing really weird things would look unusual, and image tagging is easy for people but much harder for a bot. As tagging goes, it's on the safer end of the spectrum.

I think Google should be open to improving search quality in any way it can, but it should also be mindful of potential abuse with any change.

W3C Schools is listing its supporters' websites on Page Rank 9 and PR7 pages in exchange for donations, $1000 a pop in cash or trade (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/sup). Speculation on this is buzzing because though W3C is a well respected educational resource many SEO blackhats endorse similar tactics. Does Google consider link selling a type of webspam against Google's TOS? And if so, should we expect to see some kind of a censure on W3C? Or how does it differ from what Google considers webspam?

I've said this before in a few places, but I'm happy to clarify. Google does consider it a violation of our quality guidelines to sell links that affect search engines. If someone wanted to sell links purely for visitors, there are a myriad number of ways to do it that don't affect search engines. You could have paid links do an internal redirect, and then block that redirecting page in robots.txt. You could add the rel="nofollow" attribute to a link, which tells search engines that you can't or don't want to vouch for the destination of a link. The W3C decided to add a "INDEX, NOFOLLOW" meta tag to their sponsor page, which has the benefits that the sponsor page can show up in search engines and that users receive nice static links that they can click on, but search engines are not affected by the outlinks on that page. All of these approaches are perfectly fine ways to sell links, and are within our quality guidelines.

Did the W3C decide to add the metatag on their own, or was that the result of talks between you and the W3C?

We were happy to talk to people at the W3C to answer questions and to give background info, but I believe they made the decision to add the metatag themselves.

Thanks for the considered responses, Matt!

A while back I posted a note asking you all who you'd like to see interviewed here on Searchblog. The top vote getter was Bill Gross, of Goto/Overture, Picasa, Knowledge Adventure, and Snap fame. (He also starred in Chapter 5 of my book). Bill was gracious enough to agree to an email interview, and even more gracious to agree to answer some of your questions in the comments section, when time permits.

As those of who who've read The Search know, I'm a fan of Bill and his work. From Chapter 5:

By his own account, Gross has been starting companies since he was
thirteen. His problem was never ideas. No, he, in fact, has way too
many of those. His problem was scale—how could he possibly start
companies as quickly as he could dream them up?
Gross started in a linear fashion, building companies one at a
time. He’d grow them till he got bored or distracted (or both); then
he’d sell them. He funded his first year of college by selling solar en-
ergy conversion kits through ads in the back of Popular Mechanics.
While still an undergraduate (at the California Institute of Technol-
ogy in Pasadena), Gross hacked up a new high-fidelity speaker de-
sign and launched GNP, Inc., to sell his creations (GNP stood for
Gross National Products—an indication of Gross’s sense of humor
as well as an underdeveloped sense of modesty).
But Gross had reason to boast: GNP, Inc., grew to claim number
seventy-five on Inc. magazine’s 1985 list of the 500 Fastest-Growing
Companies. When he graduated, he sold the speaker business to his
college partners and started a software company that presaged much
of the rest of his life’s work. The company, GNP Development, al-
lowed computer users to type natural language commands that the
computer would translate into the arcane code needed to execute spe-
cific tasks. In other words, Gross’s company created a program that
in essence let you “talk” to the computer in plain English, as opposed
to computer code. Gross’s program was a small step toward Silver-
stein’s Star Trekinterface (as discussed in Chapter 1)—the holy grail
of nearly everyone in search today.

Searchblog: You've had tremendous success over your career, and in particular with search (Magellan, Goto/Overture, Picasa, etc.). But the world has woken up to search - and Google seems to gain market share monthly. Yet you are trying to once again take on the world with Snap. What makes you feel like there's still an opportunity there?

Grosss: I've always thought that search is extremely important, but my interest in it has always been very personal in that I've always been trying to make things that "I" would really want. With Magellan, I wanted to be able to view my files faster than DOS allowed back then. With Goto, I wanted a way to remove the spam at that time from the Top 10 listings at the search results I was seeing. The pay model seemed like the best way to do it, and although ridiculed at first, really took off. And then again with Picasa, we really wanted a way to browse and organize our photos better than the PC-based tools allowed at that time.

Snap is very similar, in that a team of us at Idealab just brainstormed about what things we would like to have that would make search more productive for us. It might not be for everybody, but we feel there is a lot of room for innovation in particular areas, and we're extremely excited to pursue that. I absolutely agree with you that the world has woken up to search, but that is far from saying that every idea in search has been done, and thus it is very exciting to us.

What do you make of Google? When folks ask you for your unvarnished opinion of the company, what do you say? What is its biggest weakness? Strength?

I think Google is an amazing company. They have a money machine, and they continue to introduce a broad array of new advertising offerings. I think they are turning out to be one of the best competitors in the history of business -- and they have shown that with their ability to go up against MSFT and stay ahead. That's a very impressive feat.

I think their biggest strengths in order, are their profit margins, their brand, their core relevance algorithm, their number of advertiser relationships, and their many smart mathematicians and developers. I think their only weakness, and it's small, is the increasing challenge they will have to keep up their rate of innovation now that they are becoming such a large company.

I have to ask, given that you starred in a chapter in my book, what you thought of that chapter, and if perhaps you disagree with my characterization of you as a bit wistful that perhaps GoTo could have become Google, so to speak?

I don't recall how it came across in your book, but I am certainly not wistful. I think Goto "did" become Google <smile> as I think 99% of Google's revenues come from pay per click. Seriously, Google did an amazing job of building upon Goto's early success.
Seriously also, we're honored to have played a part in causing such a fundamental and profitable shift in the internet advertising space over the last 10 years.

Do you have any ideas about what search might look like in five or ten years? Do you think pure search sites will continue to prosper? How might they be different from today?

I do think pure search sites will continue to prosper, but I also think that there will be many new kinds of specialized search that continue to surprise us. I just made up a little table of the searches I do per day over the last 20 years, looking at some key milestones, like when I started using email heavily, and then when Netscape took off, and then when the first search engine companies went public, and then again when new tools came out, like X1 for searching email, iTunes for searching music, my TomTom for searching for locations.

Overall, I find myself increasing my searching from a few searches per day at the beginning of the 90's to probably 40-50 searches per day now, but that includes my daily email and file searches with X1, searches with Snap and Google, patent searches, music searches, and so on.

So I think that search in the future is going to continue this march, impacting our lives with, say 25% compound annual growth in our usage. And I think search will continue to find a greater and greater place in our daily lives, where it's just embedded in nearly everything we do, to find information, entertainment, friends, places, and 10 more things that are as hard to imagine now as it would have been 10 years ago that I would type 3 characters, then see some album art, and then click play.

Would you be open to answering a couple of questions from the Searchblog readers when we post this?

Yes, I'd be happy to answer some questions as long as it's not overwhelming in time.

Fortune recently ran an interview with Google's Vint Cerf (I think it's in the current issue, it's not up on the site yet). That was unfortunate for Business 2.0, the magazine where I do interviews, because I had recently completed an interview with him as well. Given that B2 is monthly and Fortune comes out every two weeks, Fortune scooped B2, and now the magazine doesn't want to run my interview.

Well, that's great for us. Because B2 said I can run it here, a full month ahead of when it would get through B2's production process, and at greater length.

Vint, who is Chief Internet Evangelist for Google and is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the Internet, does not mince words in this interview. He's clearly got a point of view, and he is not afraid to explain it. Of note - Cerf understands the Bellhead point of view personally, he spent a fair amount of time at MCI before joining Google....

Here's Part 1, more coming as I edit it...

----------------------

Searchblog: I’ve got a bunch of stuff to ask you. I don't know if you saw - I posted on my site requesting questions for you...You do read Searchblog, right?!

CERF: Well I actually would like to, finding a few hours between midnight and 3 in the morning.

Searchblog: I knew it … Let’s get to the hot issue right now: Can you define the issue of net neutrality and why is so much at stake right now?

CERF: Okay, so let me try and we’ll see whether it seems to make sense to you. This whole issue arose when (AT&T CEO) Ed Whitacre made some charges in the press that Internet service providers or information service-providers or application service-providers were getting a free ride on his broadband network and he thought that was wrong. And he said that he was going to fix that problem - he was going to make damn sure that companies like Google paid him to get access.

Searchblog: This sounds a little bit like “I’m not making enough money in my core business and I’m a little jealous of Google’s business model.”

CERF: I would have to concur that it sure sounds like that.

Searchblog: Now the response of course is – “Well wait a minute, I’m paying 30 bucks a month for DSL or cable, and I’m sure Google pays its bandwidth bill on time every month. Isn’t this really about the idea of a tiered network?”

CERF: Well, the term “tiered network” turns out to be ambiguous, so let’s hang onto that for just one second. Let me come back to what we believe has been sold to the subscriber and then what we believe is inconsistently being said by the broadband provider. Now I don’t mean to suggest every broadband provider is necessarily behaving this way. Some of them are sitting back, maybe privately hoping that the claim that’s being made (by folks like Whitacre) will somehow be feasible or be achieved and then they’ll jump on the bandwagon.

Here’s what (folks like Whitacre) are saying: “Well, we built this network and we can do anything we want with it. And by the way, the FCC has now essentially released us of any common carrier obligations we ever had, thank you very much, and so we can do whatever we want to and why don’t you just buzz off.”

That sort of grates a little bit. Gee, excuse me, but we don’t get a free ride at all. We spend an awful lot of money being connected to the public Internet backbone, in addition to which we pay a lot of money for our own Internet backbone that links all of our computer centers together at substantial capacity, which is necessary to do what we do.

Moreover, the subscriber has been told (by the telcos and cable ISPs) that if you pay for broadband service, you’ll get access to everywhere on the Internet. But then they’re saying, in the same breath or same paragraph anyway, “Well actually, it’s not quite like that because the places you’ll be able to get to in this broadband mode are only the ones that we’ve done business deals with. So well we’re going to shut out Google unless they pay or, you know, shut out eBay, or Amazon.”

And so this means that the subscriber’s choice has suddenly been circumscribed by what business model the people at these broadband service-providers have been able to invent. My view of their invention is that the business model seems very 20th century and very backwards looking.

Searchblog: In what way?

CERF: They seem to be very focused on video as a service. Lots of people associate broadband and video as being somehow linked at the hip. What they do not understand, apparently, is that people are not necessarily eager to watch video in a streaming mode, limiting themselves to whatever is being transmitted at the moment. And if you’re paying any attention at all to Tivo and iPod and other fairly modern communication services, you’ll find people downloading things and then listening to or watching them later. And if you are no longer watching the video as its being delivered to your hard drive, then you no longer need for it to be delivered in realtime in a viewable form. The broadband providers seem to be reinventing the cable and satellite television service model for the Internet. What mystifies me about this is that they are therefore going after an already hotly completing-for market with a finite revenue stream. So the best they can do is a share of that market. Their entry is not going to increase the market, in my view.

Searchblog: Right.

CERF: They’d be renting or leasing or otherwise paying for content from all the same sources. And all it does is add a competitor who delivers nothing new. For the life of me I do not understand why one would base a business on this 20th century model, when you could be thinking the way the people in the U.K., in New Zealand, in The Netherlands and places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore are thinking. What they’re saying is let’s open this broadband pipe up. Let’s make sure that access to it is open in the sense that there isn’t any constraint as to where the subscribers to these services can go on the Internet. Let’s allow innovative new services to enter into the system without constraining them to pay tolls in order to deliver an innovative new service. Let’s look at Yahoo! and Amazon and eBay and Google. Here are four companies that did not need to get permission from the Internet service-provider or to pay a special tariff to the Internet service-provider in order to offer the service.

Part 2 Coming ....

My interview with AOL's Jonathan Miller is up now on CNN/B2.0.

Excerpts:

..it's true that too much of our innovation was locked behind the subscriber wall. It was less than a year ago that AOL moved out onto the Web, launching AOL.com, which is such a good broadband portal that our friends at Yahoo (Charts) have redesigned their homepage to look a whole lot like it.

...AIM turns out to be more extensible than I think anybody would have imagined. As it turns out, it can be used for real-time voice communication, not just text. Adding in video chat and other things is another opportunity.

....All the players are trying to do the same fundamental things: e-mail, search, and now social networking. MySpace is the newest entrant - the new kid on that block, if it turns out they have real staying power.

The new entrant before them was Google. Everyone else in the rest of the group -Yahoo, Microsoft, and so on - is more than 10 years old, which I think is important to consider. Achieving one of those primary positions is genuinely difficult; it doesn't happen every day.

I'm less concerned about them and more concerned about the startups and other companies that might be gaining on us. If a hundred companies achieve the kind of scale we have, then the pie gets much more fragmented. As it is, there's plenty to go around between Yahoo and us and the others. ...

...Are we ready for a partial spinoff that would give us a stock currency of our own? We're still not quite there. This year we are very much in a process of transitioning the business. And there are very positive signs.

....What's your takeaway from the Google deal?

Well, I think the process reminded people that AOL has real value on the Web, and it was nice to be wanted. I think that was healthy for our company. We had to decide whether to extend a great partnership with Google or start competing with it. At the end of the day, it was too much of a jolt to leave Google.

And at crunch time, Google indicated a willingness to do some things with us that hadn't been on the table before, like letting us sell search ads directly to our advertisers and making a $1 billion investment in us. On the other side, with Microsoft, it was difficult to figure out how to run the proposed business.

I'm still not used to the idea that my stuff at Business 2.0 is not behind a paywall. But it ain't. Here's my interview with Ray Ozzie. From it:

When the deal went down, people wondered, Was it Groove that was getting acquired, or was it Ray Ozzie?

The answer's "Yes."

At such a big company, there's so much to tackle. What did you do first?

The first few months I spent doing what anyone who sells a company should do - make sure the acquiring party doesn't screw up the acquisition. Fortunately the culture that we had built at Groove matched the Microsoft Office development culture, and Groove will be part of Office moving forward. After a few months, I started spending a lot more time in Redmond. Before doing anything, I just wanted to get to know people and understand the map of projects. It's very broad. Every organization is the product of its leaders and its culture and the negative and positive things that have happened to it over time. So I tried to just learn from people there.

The Microsoft culture is famous for its bureaucracy. People joke about how hard it is to get battleship Microsoft to tack. Did you find that to be true?

It's true in different ways in different parts of the company. The Windows organization has completely different processes than the Office side, which is completely different than MSN. The MSN culture is younger they're used to more rapid turnaround in getting their products out. Both the Windows and Office sides ship a product with a mentality of 10-year support. The MSN side puts code into an Internet ecosystem where people don't expect 10-year support. Users expect to be on the latest version all the time.

What's different at Microsoft?.....

This is from my Biz 2 column, which just posted on CNNMoney.

From it:

So you've left Yahoo, with thousands of employees, to run a company with--how many people?

"There's five of us."

In the Valley, some entrepreneurs like to build things and run them. Others like to build them and hand them off once they get to a certain size. Where do you fit?

"I found that my sweet spot is in taking something at the prototype stage, where there's proof of concept but there isn't market validation yet. It can then be handed to somebody whose business is to take it to the mass market. It takes a different skill set to just start from scratch and say, 'I'm just going to sit there for a year and work on this thing, and maybe it'll work and maybe it won't.' That's more of an inventor."

You may recall my interview with Gary Flake, which ran earlier this month. I titled that "A Frank Interview With..." and mentioned that it would be one of a series, and just to show I'm not slacking off, here's the second edition.

This time our victim is Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Ask.com. I've known Jim for quite a while, and always appreciated his passion for defending, well, the underdog. Read on to see what I mean.....

Google recently acknowledged that it finds the approach Ask has taken with Zoom at least worthy of a hire. What do you make of that?

I think it makes sense. We've had a lot of success with our product. As you've seen with the tools we've built over the past couple of years, we're still focused on core search and things that help people get what they need faster. Relevant results are like the Model T: a way to get you from point A to point B. But you can do so much more for people. Just as cars evolved beyond a box on wheels, search is evolving beyond "10 blue links." A relevant link was a novel concept back in 2002, but when people are exposed to tools like Zoom, or Smart Answers, they start to expect more.

It's also not just what you have under the hood, but how the product is designed. As you can see, we place our Zoom related suggestions on the right-hand side of the page, where others have ads, because we've found this to be a natural place for people to look to iterate their searches. Iteration is a common user behavior in search, because of the natural tendency of searchers is to start with one term and then whittle their way, gathering clues, to the right keywords. Zoom related search helps them do this instinctively, without learning how to use it. It's in the right place and the right time. It is fundamental to people's search needs, not just an interesting bell or whistle.

When I posted on these topics, a number of folks chimed in saying that Ask isn't nearly as relevant for things like last names or the name of their business. What is your response to them?

When it comes to algorithmic search, we're far better than we've ever been, but we're not as good as we want to be. We're in the middle of some important infrastructure upgrades, so between now and the end of '06, you'll see us steadily strengthen our relevance even further. One place we lag in particular is freshness. That will change. Content management and quality control are things we haven't put as much manpower on yet. That is coming. Mostly our focus has been on algorithms and heuristics, and we believe we have some of the best in the industry. You pointed out some of the benefits of our differentiated ExpertRank (formerly Teoma) ranking methodology, which certainly has a different take on things at times. (For example, try the queries "dc colleges" and "bay area airports".)

With the "Scoble" example, we somehow missed ranking his new page, so the top result wasn't right (Google made the same mistake). On the other hand, for the query "Robert Scoble", we have a Smart Answer at the top of the page with his photo. You pointed out that for "Battelle" we did a better job for the algo results, but we also found you in the Zoom related searches under "John Battelle", and had a Smart Answer for you too. Again, going beyond "10 blue links" is something we are leading the way on. Relevant links are very important, clearly, but we can do more to get you better information, faster.

So, let's talk about "getting beyond the blue links." That's code for "beyond Google," which has been a very important partner for Ask, in terms of business model. Where do things stand on going your own way past your Google AdWords deal? And do you think Ask can ever break out of its role as a small player compared to the giants like Yahoo and Google in terms of search traffic?

Our relationship with Google has never been better. I like so many of those guys on a personal level, and we make a lot of money for each other on a professional level. Our interest in building our own ad system is straightforward. In some cases, we make more money if we sell the ads ourselves. In some cases, advertisers want a direct relationship with us. Over time, our own network will strengthen, but that will take time. It's going very, very well so far. Google gets this and is supportive of our efforts because it makes us a stronger partner for them overall, and helps grow the category overall.

We absolutely compete with Google for users, as we do MSN and Yahoo. In the past we have called this "co-opetiton." I think it's easier to conceptualize this using an analogy. Imagine we're the Fox Network and Google is CBS. Fox tries to create great shows that compete for viewers with CBS, but Fox lets CBS sell its ads for them. If Fox wants to sell some of its own ads, either to try to make more money or because some advertisers want that option, Fox does it themselves. Either way, it's good for CBS because they know network TV traffic isn't a zero-sum game, and Fox isn't going away anytime soon.

In terms of our size, we may be small relative to Google, but I think this needs to be put into perspective in a couple of ways. First, as a business, remember that a 1 point gain in market share for Ask (from 6% to 7% share) is a 15% increase in share of queries. The way our business works, that's also likely a 15% increase in share of revenue. So just one point of share has an incredible impact on our business growth, and I think people forget that because they're comparing us to Google, rather than to our own growth curve. As I said, it's not a zero-sum game.

When it comes to users and traffic, at 6% we may be small relative to GYM, but we're still a top player in the #1 activity online outside of email. We're anything but small. Collectively we operate the 6th largest (just passed Amazon last month) Web property in the world. It's just that you're looking at us relative to the GYM behemoths, who admittedly are a level above us.

To that end, I would love for people to appreciate what we're trying to do in competing against them. We're the underdog here, kind of like Firefox. Google does a good job of presenting themselves as the underdog, and MSN is helping them with the way they act publicly. But to me they are both giants. So back to your original statement, yes, we feel passionately that there is more to search [than] the Google paradigm. Nothing against them, but we are doing some things better, and those who experience it are coming back more often. That is why we've grown market share, and hopefully we can accelerate the curve.

One of the most important page-turners for Yahoo and now Google, as well as Microsoft, is mail. Is Ask Mail on the horizon? And what do you make of all the new features at Google - Fusion, Calendar, Finance, etc.?

We prioritize by impact to searchers. Verticals like Finance make sense, because people are searching for that information on Ask already. (Our Finance Smart Answer was launched 3 years ago. To date we haven't launched a full Finance "channel", but at some point that could make sense.) This is true of almost all informational categories on the Web. Search is the doorway.

Email would be a tangent for us, currently. Ask has been growing through increases in frequency of use, by improving core search and developing unique search tools. Things like the launch of our new Image search in January, which many insiders have called the best in the industry, and our new Maps, which has received great buzz for its feature set, really drive query volume for us. As we move forward, we'll add products that are "first cousins" of search, that help you organize and/or do things with the stuff you've searched for. I don't want to give too much away here. But I can assure you that everything will make sense as an extension of our core reason for being: search.

Thanks, Jim. Will you be open to answering Searchbloggers' questions in the comments once I post this?

Of course!

Today marks the first of what I hope will become a regular series of Q&A interviews on Searchblog. The format is simple - I send an opening question to the luminary in question via email, they respond, and we go from there. First up is Gary Flake, a veteran of Overture, Yahoo and now Microsoft's vaunted research labs (he's founder and director of the new "Live Labs.") Gary and I have known each other since I first began work on the book, and he's always had a refreshingly frank outlook. I expected that to be tempered by a year at the world's largest (and oft-criticized) software company, but I was wrong. If anything, Gary has become more outspoken. I've bolded the really juicy bits, but see for yourself....

You've been at Microsoft for nearly a year now. Are you satisfied with the pace of development on the core search product?

Broadly speaking, yes, but there is always room for improvement. We've been laying a foundation for the past year, trying to solve the hardest problems first. Frankly, we've left some low-lying fruit hanging on the vine, so to speak. On the good side, we have a rock-solid 64-bit backend architecture (probably the only one in the industry) that can scale almost indefinitely on multiple dimensions. Our relevance framework, built with machine learning technology from Microsoft Research, is now picking up steam and is getting close to parity with the competition. We even have some real product differentiation that we've just launched with virtual earth maps, search macros, and the image search experience. But to be honest, we pretty much blew it with the GUI for the past year. Why? There's no good reason, really. The truth is we've had so much going on over the past year that it was simply more fun to focus on the core issues first, which is a mistake typical of engineers. I think the whole industry has been in a bit of a rut with respect to the user experience, and we are more guilty than most, but the good news is that there is a lot of room for improvement and we are now in pretty good shape to experiment more.

Say more about 64 bit architecture. Why is it different? What does it allow you to do with search you can't with 32 bits? How easy or hard might it be for Google and others to migrate to a similar architecture? And can you tell us a bit more about Microsoft Research? Lastly, if you could - can you give me a specific example about what you did not like about your old UI?

"64 bits" refers to the native address space of the CPUs that we use in our architecture. Having the entire architecture be 64 bit carries several implications that are quite subtle and mostly of interest only to engineers, but I'll take a shot at highlighting some of the important differences.

First, all search architectures tier their data stores so that the data can reside on relatively slow disks or fast RAM. For performance purposes, you want the most frequently accessed data to be on the fastest store (RAM). A 64 bit system can have vastly more RAM than a 32 bit system, which means that we can have a higher ratio of RAM to disk space (per CPU), versus others in the industry. Second, we've only scratched the surface on the possibilities for using advanced hyperlink analysis for web relevance. There are a class of algorithms (like Pagerank) that work well in either 32 or 64 bit systems (technically, because the algorithms can be realized via a linear sweep of hyperlinks). However, there is an even richer class of algorithms that can only be efficiently built on a 64 bit system because you essentially have to have a significant part of the web stored close to a single CPU. So, 64 bit systems pave the way for entirely new forms of relevance that look at how pages relate to one another. Finally, with the bigger address space, we may also see 64 bit systems critical to realizing more sophisticated relevance algorithms that analyze a result set in the aggregate as a final step. In this scenario, you may have a huge amount of data in memory, which 64 bit systems can do just fine. So, in short, it's a real big deal and it will be more important as the entire industry matures.

Google and others can certainly start to migrate towards 64 bit. In fact, everyone will have to at some point. However, there is a huge cost to make the jump, in terms of hardware, porting existing code, but especially in revamping algorithms to make the most use of the new resources. We took our medicine early because we could (we didn't have a legacy system as baggage). This is an example of us taking a longer-term view, in the sense that we increased our startup costs, but are now have a more strategic technology platform.

Microsoft Research is possibly the greatest computer science research institute in the world. MSR was also one of the key reasons why I came to MS. MS basically offered me the role of figuring out how to make MSN and MSR even more tightly connected, and the idea of being able to fully leverage MSR towards web search gave me goose bumps. Internally, we talk about what we are working on as being historic, in the sense that we are defining a computer science research agenda that could possibly influence an entire generation of computer scientists. Without MSR as part of our story, we wouldn't stand a chance at such lofty goals.

What didn't I like about our old UI? Where do I begin? There is so much to choose from ... The fonts inconsistantly rendored and were too big. The damn search box was too small. It made no sense to have redundant buttons, links, and menus -- yet we had some of each. Even the size of the page (in terms of raw HTML and CSS) was entirely too large. Our margins weren't even consistant from browser to browser. So, to be blunt, it sucked.
But I need to also be clear on a couple of related points: none of us had any illusion that this was a pretty UI. We, including the folks who coded it up, hated it. Our team is small and growing and has always had more engineering talent than anything else. And like I said, there were just so many other problems that were more interesting to solve first. So, in the end, we are guilty of indulging our engineering passions first, which is a very human mistake to have made. This situation is also evidence that the executive team has a lot of trust in us. Of course they disliked the UI as much as us, but in the end they let the team decide the priorities - which was the right call for a variety of reasons.

Now, thankfully, we are in a much better place with the UI. In particular, we just launched a new search experience on live.com. And while it is not perfect, I think it shows more UI experimentation than just about anywhere. In the end that is the important thing: not that we nail the UI or any piece on our first try -- but that we have a platform, framework, and philosophy that are all in support of trying new things so that we can progressively improve and learn.

Your take is quite refreshing, to be honest, it doesn't sound like Microsoft. Do you sense the culture there is shifting? Or are you ever frustrated?

"Yes" on both counts, but as an answer to your second question, this says more about me than it does about Microsoft (I have a grumpy old man in me yearning to be free). I don't think MS is particularly clear in how it communicates things to the outside world. I also think that MS often makes mistakes by trying -- wait for it -- too hard. Specifically, instead of doing one thing and nailing it, we'll sometimes do six slightly duplicative things in parallel -- each being slightly below critical mass -- which can create confusion inside and outside of MS until we've had time to sort things out better. So, yes, I get frustrated at times. So it goes. For me, frustration is a biological signal that means I should try harder, which is a good and helpful thing.

I think your first question, about our company culture, is very important, so please forgive the length of this next part.

Let's talk about people as a preface to culture, because I want to get the "evil" thing out of the way. I know the reputation that MS has with some communities. I was hacking Linux in the early nineties, I have a four digit Slashdot userid, and I've personally written over 100,000 lines of open source code. I say all of this to qualify my opinion. Being new to MS, the biggest surprise for me was the people. I knew they were smart. I knew they were driven. I knew they were competitive. But I had no idea they would also collectively tend towards kindness, openness, self-criticism, passion, righteousness, and even uncertainty. These are great people -- from the executive team down to the rank and file -- these are simply wonderful people in every way.

As for culture, I think a change has been underway within MS, but it's not the one that you may be thinking of. This isn't a change about core values, which have been pretty steady as far as I can tell. I think the change is actually a reaffirmation -- an increase in confidence so to speak -- of old core values. Let me explain. 

People from Redmond often speak of a "platform" while in the valley they speak of an "ecosystem". Here's the surprise: both groups are talking about the same thing. To MS, Windows is a platform because it fosters a virtuous cycle in two parts: developers come to the platform because it has the most users; users come to the platform because it has the most software.

In the valley, everyone talks about Web 2.0ish things that all come down to creating something of an ecosystem where people and companies of all sizes can be both producers and consumers. In both cases, we see something of an indirect network effect, where the aggregate value -- the whole -- is greater than the sum of the parts.

Here's what's new: many folks within MS are now realizing that a lot of the stuff that's real about Web 2.0 -- not the fluffy buzzwords but the fundamental and important parts -- have actually been part of MS's core vision and mission for *decades*. Do you believe in the importance of ecosystems? Windows is the biggest one ever, that generates vastly more wealth for third parties than for MS. Do you value the long tail? MS has done more for bringing computing to the masses (both people and small businesses) than any other company. Is the democratization of tools important to you? Desktop publishing and simplified development flourish because of tools like Office and Visual Basic. What about network effects? We've created several that have reaped incalculable value to society.

Okay, now I know I am sounding like a corporate drone and I am well aware that for every example above, there are plenty of people in the valley that will bitch about my characterization. When you assume evil, then an ecosystem looks less than well-intentioned. When you assume goodness, then an ecosystem looks like benevolence. The truth is more complex and vastly more interesting.

So look at the facts: MS was pushing Web 2.0 values over a decade ago. It's the realization that this is the case that's new for MS. Our vision for where we've been, what we know how to do, and where we want to go is now much more crisp and consistent than it has ever been before. We know that helping people to be more successful -- seeking win-win dynamics -- is a major part of what we do. It's not new, but clearly connecting the dots between our past and our future is very new and, frankly, downright exciting.

I'm sure all of you have questions for Gary as well. Post them in comments, and maybe we can lure him into the comments thread!

Way back in 2002, Josh Quittner, who is a pal and also the Editor of Business 2.0, took a risk on a down-and-out dot-com publishing exec and contracted me to write a column for his magazine, the only one left after the Standard and its ilk bit the dust. But when I got the Time Inc. contract (B2's owners,) I was bereft. I had an issue with the fact that what I wrote would be behind AOL/TW's paywall. So I requested, nice as pie, that I be able to post my columns here, on this site. Josh agreed, and the rest is history.

Well, all that's moot now. CNNMoney is picking up my column, and all of B2 for that matter, and it's all free.

Here's everything I ever wrote for Josh!

Enjoy, I sure as heck will!

Of course I'm the last to link to it, but here's my interview with Eric Schmidt, up on B 2.0 (and not pay walled).