John Battelle's Searchblog

From Biz' post on Twitter's shift:

Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore—starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?"

Well, regardless of spin, this is a major shift, to my mind. Semantics matter, *a lot*, when your entire business is, well, semantics. Language is how we encode that which is essential to who we are. And there is a world of difference between "What are YOU doing" (emphasis mine) and "What's happening".

For starters, it's a rather subtle leapfrog of Facebook, which has recently mimicked Twitter with its status updates. Facebook is stuck (but there are upsides to this stuck-ness) in a personal framework. Twitter, by moving past the YOU, is declaring Facebook's imitation moot.

Will that stick? We'll see. But I love to see the evolution of the space. It's such good narrative...

You imagine something out loud in a book, and then it starts to happen....

I am sure many of you have heard of RedLaser, but I hadn't until today. I love it!

Here's the text from my blog post, written in 2004 (pre iPhone, so I used a Treo...) which I rewrote into the book:

What to do? Not to worry, you’ve got Google Mobile Shop installed on your phone. You whip out your Treo 950, the one with the infrared UPC reader installed, and you wand it over that bottle of 2001 Clos Du Val now lovingly cradled in your arms. In less than a second a set of options is presented on the phone’s screen ....

Here's the video on the app:

Today I had quite an experience with United Airlines. It has very little to do with much of anything I usually write about here, save one key element: I have posited that to succeed in what I've been calling the Conversation Economy, companies must learn to have conversations with their customers at scale. (And to do so, they will need to leverage open platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc. and, of course, change the way they instrument their business. But more on that later).

Well, here's a tale of one company failing miserably at doing just that, even while, in the end, due to my own insistence (and most likely, the rising level of anger in my voice), it kind of, sort of, managed to not totally fail.

But first, the backstory.

I am a United flyer, in the main. I'm not saying I'm a proud, loyal, or passionate United flyer, but a United flyer I am. I like their "PS" service between NY and SF, and I fly that route a lot - to the point of knowing the flight attendants and picking exactly which seats I settle into each trip. I tend to fly United where ever else I go (and anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I go to a lot of places). I've been an Executive Premier there for a long, long time (though I think it dropped at some point during the bad years of 2001-02) - which means I fly a ton with United. At some point or other this year, in fact, a gate agent at United let me know that I'm a million mile flyer - however, most of their agents on the phone have no idea what I'm talking about when I recite this nugget back to them.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying, I know the airline really, really well. And when I fly, even with my family, I tend to fly with United, even though I've had my share of travel and customer service disasters (and you all know, regardless of what airline you fly, what I mean by that).

But does the airline know me? No. Not at all. And today was a remarkable example of that in action.

So today my wife and I decide that we're going to fly to Arizona for Thanksgiving - all five of us. Her family is there, and we've decided to join them. Since this is not a work trip, I use Expedia to check flights between the Bay area and Tucson - I've been there many times in the past, and I know direct flights are very hard to come by. Turns out, there is a direct flight, and it's on United, and - double luck! - it's just at the times (departure and return) that I want to fly. Economy seats are priced, roundtrip, on Expedia at about $440 each. Pricey, but it's not like I have a lot of choice. It's a week away, and there are no other direct flights. And yeah, it's true, I'm willing to pay the extra hundred bucks to not have to connect through Vegas, LA, or Phoenix when traveling with three kids. Anyway.

Experience told me that the kind of reservation I wanted to make would require human interaction - five seats, three kids, possible upgrades, etc. - so armed with the flight numbers and times, I called United directly.

Now, it's Sunday afternoon around 1 pm. After running a gauntlet of voice recognition driven commands, and finally asking, five times in a row, for an "Agent! Agent! AGENT! .... yes....AGENT!" I get...an agent.

Now United, like many large companies who must handle a large volume of customer service, has a preponderance of customer service agents based in India. They are almost universally pleasant, professional, and courteous, but, I have found, they are also not very good at coloring outside the lines. So when I call in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, with three kids in the background, asking whether there's a good business fare for my wife and I, and whether we might get an upgrade from economy, and oh by the way is there any chance the flight leaving at 7 pm is relatively empty, and if so, might we get seats in economy near the front, etc. - well, it's been my experience that nine times out of ten, the call will devolve to the point where neither I nor the still-professional but clearly flummoxed customer service agent are having any fun. At all.

Which is exactly what happened. However, this call took a turn for the worse not based on a lack of communication, but on the real time usury of United's pricing system. Herewith an edited transcript of my conversation with the agent:

ME: So how much would it be if my wife and I flew in Business, and my kids flew in Economy?

AGENT: There is no Business class on this plane.

ME: OK, so that means there are two classes of service?

AGENT: Yes.

ME: OK, great, so let me ask it another way...how much would it be if my wife flew in the more expensive class, and my kids flew in economy? I just want to know in case it's a good deal. Otherwise, maybe I'll try to get upgraded....

AGENT: So you want two First Class tickets?

ME: Erhm...well, no, I want to know how much a First Class ticket would cost?

AGENT: OK hold on....(45 second delay)...OK, that would be $1633.20.

ME: EACH?!

AGENT: Yes.

ME: But it's a 90 minute flight!

AGENT: Yes.

ME: (Recalling the Expedia fares of around $440). And how much are the economy seats?

AGENT: For three?

ME: Erhm....well, I just want to know how much an Economy class fare is.

AGENT: Let me check. (90 seconds go by.....) OK. Economy class fare for three would come out to $447 for each, round trip.

ME: (Relieved) That's great. Let's just do five Economy fares then. No way am I going to pay nearly four times the Economy rate to sit in First!

AGENT: Erhm....(30 second delay)....well sir, just a minute.

ME: Is there a problem?

AGENT: Well, no. Can I put you on hold?

ME: (Fearing the Interminable Purgatory Of Hold) NO! Please don't put me on hold. What's the problem?

AGENT: Well, it's just that the system is now giving me a new price for each Economy fare roundtrip.

ME: (Fearing the system). Why?

AGENT: Well, before, I asked for just three seats. Now you want five.

ME: ....and?...

AGENT: And well, there are only six left on that flight.

ME: So....what is the system saying to you now?

AGENT: Sir, the price is now $2011.

ME: Holy sh*t.

AGENT: Sir....

ME: Really?

AGENT: Yes, so can I put you on hold and see what is going on?

ME: Yes, please do. Please.

For the next five or so minutes, I am put on hold, which for no additional fee includes a very peppy rendition of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, a tune I never, ever thought I'd dislike. But over the years, United has put that faith to the test.

About a minute in, I start to twitch. I'm not one to hold well, and my wife is now hovering over my computer, asking what is going on. So I fire up Twitter and post this plea:

Of course, nothing happens immediately (and as of this post, still nothing...8 hours later). So back in the moment, I have a revelation - I think I have a special phone number for Super Premium United Customers, one that I got at about the same time I was told about the Million Mile thingy.

I look it up in my contacts and yes, there it is. So I call it on my cel, even as I'm on hold with United.

Same voice recognition tree. Same result - I'm screaming "AGENT" about 30 seconds or so in.

And after some reconciliation between me and the computer, an agent does indeed come on. A very nice Indian gentleman who asks how he might help me.

ME: Er, hello. Forgive me if my voice sound strained but so far I've had a rather rough time of it with United's pricing system. I have a complicated fare I'm hoping you might help me with. (Secretly, I'm hoping I can find a backdoor into United pricing heaven, of course...)

AGENT: How can I help you?

ME: Well, I'd like it if you can price for me five economy seats on (this) flight on (that date)?

AGENT: Certainly.

ME: (A bit sheepishly) Uhm, and...can I ask you something?

AGENT: Certainly sir.

ME: Is this the super special line?

AGENT: Sir?

ME: Well, it's just that I called a number that I thought was for premium customers, but the voice mail tree was the same and you didn't seem to know who I was....

AGENT: I am a reservation agent.

ME: Oh yes, I know. I was just wondering if you...

AGENT: How can I help you?

ME: OK. Well, tell you what. Can I give you my mileage number? Would that help?

AGENT: Certainly sir.

ME: (Gives number).

AGENT: Thank you. Now, how can I help you.

ME: Well, again, I'd like it if you can price for me five economy seats on (this) flight on (that date)? It's just that I tried this already, and I got a really, really high price on the seats, higher even than the price for First Class, and the agent told me it was because there were only six seats left, and I wanted more than three, and...anyway, I don't think it's fair to pay that much for seats that were quoted to me at $447 during the same phone call, is it?

AGENT: I don't know, sir.

ME: But really, I mean, well, it's usury, isn't it? It's not fair?! When I asked for just three seats, I got a quote of $447 each!

AGENT: Sir, it's just how the system works.

ME: But ... (resisting the urge to scream "DON'T YOU KNOW I'M A GOOD CUSTOMER WHO SHOULDN'T BE TREATED THIS WAY?!!")

At this point, the other agent came back on my other line. I told the agent on my cel phone that I'd call back and returned to my original call.

(ORIGINAL) AGENT: Sir?

ME: Yes, I'm here.

AGENT: Sir, I've checked the system, and that's the price.

ME: So you are telling me the "system" is now saying that instead of paying two times $1633 for First and three times $447 for Economy, if I want to pay for only Economy seats, I have to pay five times $2011?

AGENT: I am afraid so sir.

ME: That's more than $10,000 to fly my family 90 minutes!

AGENT: (silence)

ME: OK. Look, I understand this is not your fault. Can I speak to a supervisor?

AGENT: Certainly. Can I put you on hold?

Look, it's late, and I have a long day tomorrow, so I won't bother you with the resultant blow by blow. Suffice to say, after about another thirty minutes on the phone, I managed to get five economy class seats on the flight, at an average of about $550 each. It took a lot of wheedling, patience, arguing, anger and resolution, not to mention delivery of information I had already delivered more than once. The fellow, who was a supervisor, even tossed out the $25 per ticket "ticketing fee" that he was supposed to tack on (not that I knew about that till he told me he was waiving it, sensing he'd lose me entirely if he forced another $125 in fees on me. He was right, and I do appreciate the gesture).

So in the end, we're on the damn flight.

I got off and I told my wife, in so many words, that we're going to see f*cking Grandpa for f*cking Thanksgiving in f*cking Tucson after all.

So thanks United, for making it that much more special! As you might imagine, I can't wait for Virgin, Southwest, or Jet Blue to start direct service between SF and Tucson. Because when they do, I won't think twice about switching.

Until then, however, you've got my business. But if I were in your shoes, I'd be very, very nervous about the future of yours.

The interview with Qi Lu and Microsoft's Bing - Twitter deal announced at Web 2 last week. I'm working on a wrap post coming soon.

Big week last week for Twitter, two deals with two search powerhouses, new revenue, and new traffic will flow due to both. I asked about the pending search deals deep into the interview but Evan plays coy, the announcements come the following day.

Sergey made a surprise visit to Web 2 last week, just as he did six years ago for the first one.

Tim Armstrong didn't need the job, but he decided to accept Time Warner's offer to become the CEO of AOL anyway. Why?

That's the first question I have for Tim when he joins us at Web 2 next week. What do you want me to ask him?

As you most likely know, Tim came to AOL from Google, where he ran North American ad sales for years. Clearly, Tim relishes a challenge, and sees an opportunity. And, while Tim probably is too politic to discuss it, AOL will be spun out soon, and either go public or become an independent entity (unwinding the most disastrous new/old media merger in recent history).

So...what do you want to know from Tim? I've got my own list - which I've discussed with Tim already - but you all will have even better ideas, as usual...

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

Shantanu Narayen

Carly Fiorina

Jon Miller

Sheryl Sandberg

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Tim Berners Lee, and more. An amazing lineup and less than one week away!

Also, remember to tweet your questions for any of the folks above with the #w2s hashtag for a chance to win a free Web 2 Summit pass - we'll be picking three at random to win...

I met with Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, ten days ago - one week before the annual Adobe developer's conference. He told me there'd be a lot of news about Adobe coming, and the company certainly delivered - in particular around mobile and Flash platform development.

But while the list of product and platform releases is impressive, it was Adobe's earlier announcement of its acquisition of Omniture that got folks buzzing. From my point of view, this is one more step in Adobe becoming a central platform company in the Internet ecosystem.

With 800mm installs of Flash, the acquisition of Omniture, and a multi-device strategy, Adobe aims to become the industry standard in how marketers and media companies deliver experiences to audiences and customers. And while many still view the company as the provider of end user tools like Photoshop, the reality is that Adobe is in fact Microsoft's most significant web platform competitor, which in turn makes it a significant competitor to Google in some areas (though the companies collaborate on key initiatives, like the Open Screen Project, for example, which is clearly as anti-Microsoft as they come). The difference, Narayen told me, is that Adobe does not have (nor does it plan to have) a media business, so it doesn't compete with its partners.

I'm looking forward to our conversation, and I'd love your input on what you'd like to hear from Narayen.

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

Carly Fiornia

Jon Miller

Sheryl Sandberg

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. An amazing lineup and less than ten days away!

Also, remember to tweet your questions for any of the folks above with the #w2s hashtag for a chance to win a free Web 2 Summit pass - we'll be picking three at random to win...

During the late 1990s and through 2005, Carly Fiorina was one of the most powerful women in technology. As CEO of HP, she developed a reputation as a respected and effective manager, doubling HP's revenue, buying Compaq in the process, and debuting as Fortune magazine's first ever "Most Powerful Woman in Business".  

Fiorina is not without her detractors in the Valley (her departure was a story in itself), but she's an indisputable powerhouse, and she seems ready and poised for her next act. According to most reports, that act will be as a Republican challenger to longtime incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer. During the 2008 election, Fiorina acted as a economic advisor to John McCain, addressing the Republican National Convention, a move often seen as a precursor to public life.

Fiorina will join us on our first night at dinner to have a wide ranging discussion about the state of technology, policy, and politics. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, and could use your help to identify the best things to discuss with her. What do you want to hear from Carly Fiorina?

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

Jon Miller

Sheryl Sandberg

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Shantanu Narayen, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. Again, an amazing lineup.

If you want to come, I can still get you a Searchblog discount (for a few more days). Just ping me here.

Jon Miller has graced the Web 2 stage several times, most memorably when he was CEO of AOL, and both Google and Microsoft were competing for his company's search deal (Google won, that deal is close to expiration, and now-CEO Tim Armstrong, who helped Google win the deal back then, will be discussing, at the Summit, who he might next partner with - Microsoft or Google - but I digress...for now).

Now Miller runs digital for none other than Rupert Murdoch. I've enjoyed my relationship with Jon over the years, he's a straight shooter. He's inherited a number of seemingly intractable problems - the digital model for news, for one, MySpace, for another. But when I spent an hour with him in New York a couple of weeks ago, he was unperturbed. He's seen too much.

Since Jon agreed to submit to yet another Battelle-style interrogation, his newest report Owen Van Atta has also joined the lineup (it's so recent that we don't have him up yet on the speaker page). No matter, I'll ask both Owen and Jon what the plan is for MySpace.

But let's not forget that Newscorp is a lot bigger than MySpace. If you want to know how much bigger, pay attention to the Audience Network, a little known entity that just happens to be #2 in ad network reach after Google. Who owns it? Well, Miller and Murdoch.

This one is going to get interesting. Trust me.

So help me out, what do you want to hear from Jon Miller?

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

Sheryl Sandberg

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Shantanu Narayen, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. Again, an amazing lineup.

If you want to come, I can still get you a Searchblog discount (for a few more days). Just ping me here.

As I mentioned a couple of days back, one of the folks I get to interview on stage later this month is Sheryl Sandberg, who I met with earlier this week (this post was one result of that meeting). Sheryl is Mark Zuckerberg's key partner in building out Facebook, and while she won't take credit publicly, I'd wager that Facebook's recent declarations of profitability and top line revenue growth have a lot to do with her leadership and focus on Facebook's online advertising platform, which is clearly starting to scale.

Recall that Sandberg came from Google, where she ran ad platforms, and she made the choice to move to Facebook for a reason. What did she see? Well, my own thoughts run to the trends I've been pointing out for the past year or so - the model of attention distribution is shifting in the web economy, and Facebook, along with Twitter and other social sites, are increasingly taking share from Google. Follow the referrals, so to speak. Search is still king, but it's no longer a dictatorship.

So what do you want to hear from Sandberg?

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

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

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

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

In the personality-driven world that is our industry, Qi Lu stands out for his relative lack of public profile. Widely respected as a technological leader while heading up search at Yahoo, Qi burst onto the industry scene when he defected to Microsoft last year and took the role of President of the Online Service division. In short, Qi is the man in charge of Microsoft's online strategy.

Our interview later this month will mark Qi's debut on the Web 2 stage. From all accounts, Qi is a very different character from his boss Steve Ballmer (who was a highlight of Web 2 two years ago). I'm looking forward to our interaction. Clearly we have a lot to discuss - the shifting sands of alliances (Facebook, Yahoo, Myspace, etc.), the rise (and fall?) of Bing, the Yahoo search deal, the future of MSN with regard to content, the role of ad exchanges and platforms (the Aquantive deal), and much more.

But I digress. What do *you* want to hear from Qi this year?

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

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, a few more zingers from his speech:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Comcast and Brian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It sure would be. That would be so WebSquared.

###

*From the company's own product descriptions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I may have been "on vacation" over much of the past month, but as usual, I was working, and part of my work was framing out and filling in the program for the sixth annual Web 2 Summit. Tim O'Reilly and I had a very hard job trying to top last year's program, given it featured Lance Armstrong, Al Gore, Edgar Bronfman, John Doerr, Jerry Yang, and so many more.  

But I think we've managed to top it. Pasted below is a note we sent out recently with an overview of the program. But even since then, we've had a couple of pretty major new additions, both from the world of government and policy:

- Aneesh Chopra -  America's first ever appointed CTO will join us this year, in conversation with Tim O'Reilly (for Tim's take and a video of Chopra, click here). A charasmatic figure and proven leader, Chopra is charged with developing national strategies for technology investments - overseeing the U.S. Government's $150 billion R&D budget.

- Austan Goolsbee - Chief U.S. Economist, member of the Council of Economic Advisers, serving the executive office as staff director on the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB) - an outfit established within the Department of Treasury charged with analyzing and understanding the state of our financial markets, banking and commerce systems in order to inform decision making around economic policy. Between the CEA and PERAB, Austan is working to fix America's economic standing both domestically and internationally. No small feat. (See his interview with Jon Stewart here).

More on the rest of the program:

Day one covers broad ground — opening with an in-depth conversation with Brian Roberts, Chairman and CEO of Comcast — and moving into a series of powerful High Order Bits and discussions around government policy and healthcare. Then Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of GE, will share his thoughts before our dinner Q&A session with maverick Mark Cuban, hosted by ModernMom CEO and Dancing with the Stars champion Brooke Burke (Mark had his own stint on Dancing With the Stars, as you may recall...).

After kicking off with morning workshops, day two features insightful one-on-one conversations with Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!, and Qi Lu, President at Microsoft, who's leading the recently announced partnership between the two companies. Later in the day, media gurus will discuss the future of their industry, including Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of the New York Times, CEO Dan Rosensweig of RedOctane, and CEO Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media.

Mid-day we'll check in with Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, then launch our new High Order Ignite program — a session of dynamic, rapid-fire presentations that highlight ground-breaking and viable technologies that may well change the world. After a focused session on sensor and augmented reality applications, we'll wrap up the day with Twitter CEO Evan Williams.

Last, but definitely not least, our third day will include conversations with the CEOs of Intel, Adobe, AOL, and Jon Miller, head of digital for Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. We're also bringing back our famed Teen Panel, where we'll hear from the generation that will most shape the future success or failure of our industry's efforts. And in a manner more fitting than we could have planned, we'll close our conference with the man who started it all — Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

And those are just the highlights. Let's not forget the slew of new speakers we've added including:

Erin McKean, CEO of Wordnik. (An API for language? Why not?!)

Sundar Pichai, VP at Google. (Responsible for Chrome OS, Google's pointed response to Windows.)

Steve Schneider, Program Director at WestEd. (Walking the talk, Steve has plans to launch the first-ever standard for technology literacy across the U.S. by 2012.)

Cynthia Warner, President of Sapphire Energy. (If Sapphire's biofuel plans scale, we have reason for hope in the world of energy.)

If you'd like to come to the Web 2.0 Summit, let us know by requesting an invite. I have discounts for Searchblog and Twitter readers (ping me here or jbat at battellemedia dot com), and I really look forward to seeing you October 20-22 at the Westin San Francisco!