Even before I was a few pages into The Information, a deep, sometimes frustrating but nonetheless superb book by James Gleick, I knew I had to ask him to speak at Web 2 this year. Not only did The Information speak to the theme of the conference this year (the Data Frame), I also knew Gleick, one of science’s foremost historians and storytellers, would have a lot to say to our industry.

Now that I’ve finished the book (and by no means will it be the last time I read it) I can say I’m positively brimming with questions I’d like to ask the author. And perhaps most vexing is this: “What is Information, anyway?”

If you read The Information for the answer to this question, you may leave the work a bit perplexed. It may be in there, somewhere, but it’s not stated as such. And somehow, that’s OK, because you leave the book far more ready to think about the question than when you started. And to me, that’s the point.

When I was a kid, and fancied myself smarter than someone who might be in the room at the time, I’d ask them to explain to me where space ended. How far out? Often, and this was the trick, a youngster (we were six or seven, after all) would posit that there must be a wall at some point, an ending, a place where the universe no longer existed. “Oh yeah?!” I’d say, exultant that my trick had worked. “Then what’s on the other side?!”

I think the answer is information. Perhaps others would say God, but if that be true, then both are, and the truth is that both understanding God and understanding information are quests that are more about the narrative than the ending. At least, I think so.

Gleick’s book tells the story of how, over the past five thousand or so years, mankind has managed to create symbols which abstract meaning and intent into forms that are communicable beyond time and space. I too am fascinated with this (hence the focus and title of the new book I just announced – What We Hath Wrought .) While my book will attempt to be a narrative history of the next 30 or so years of information’s impact on our culture, Gleick’s is a history of the past 5,000 or more years – and it manages, for the most part, to stay focused just on the theory of information itself, rather than its political or social impacts. It’s ambitious, it’s heady, and at times, it’s nearly impossible to understand for a lay person such as myself.

Gleick traces the narrative of information from the first stirrings of alphabet-based communication to the explosion of academic excitement that accompanied the rise of “Information Science” and “Information Theory” in the mid to late 20th century. Nearly all the geek heros take a star turn in this work, from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage to Lord Kelvin, Claude Shannon, and Marshall McLuhan (Wired’s patron saint, in case you younger readers have forgotten…). Einstein, Borges, and scores of other folks who make you feel smart just for reading the book also make cameos.

The work really picks up speed as it describes the rise of early telecommunications, the role of information in mid century warfare, and the birth of both genetic sciences and the computing industry. In the end, Gleick seems to be arguing, it’s all bits – and I think most of us in this industry would agree. But I think Gleick’s definition of “bit” may differ from ours, and while it may be esoteric, it’s there I want to really focus when he visits Web 2 in October.

Reviews of The Information are mostly raves, and I have to add mine to the pile. But as with his earlier work (Chaos cemented my desire to be a technology journalist, for example, and may as well be viewed as a precursor to The Information), this most recent book is sometimes a rather dry tick tock of various academics’ journeys through difficult problems, often accompanied by descriptions of insights that, I must admit, escaped me the first two or three times I read them*. While I thought I knew it, I had to look up the definition of “logarithm” at least twice, and honestly, as its used in some passages, I had to just give up and hope I didn’t miss too much for my ignorance of Gleick’s nuanced use. (Given his larger point, that the core information is that which can be reduced to its essence, I think I got the point. I think).

I guess what I’m saying is that I had to work hard through parts of this book – for example, in understanding how randomness relates to the essence and amount of information in any given object. But I find the work worth it. I’m also still getting my head around the relationship of randomness to entropy (Maxwell’s Demons help…)

But isn’t that the point of a great book?In the end, I feel far more prepared to be a participant in what we’re making together in this industry, more rooted in the history that got us here, and more….yeah, I’ll say it, more reverent about the implications of our work moving forward. For that, I thank Gleick and The Information.

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Previous books I’ve reviewed as I prepare for What We Hath Wrought: In the Plex. Next up: Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (And How to Stop It), which I am finishing this week.

*This, for example, is a typical footnote: “The finite binary sequence S with the first proof that S cannot be described by a Turning machine with n states or less is a (log2 n+cp)-state description of S.” My blogging software doesn’t even have the right scientific notation capabilities to do that phrase justice, but I think you get the point I’m making….

(image) Last night I got to throw a party, and from time to time, that’s a pretty fun thing to do. To help us think through the program and theme of the Web 2 Summit this Fall, we invited a small group of influential folks in the Bay area to a restaurant in San Francisco, fed them drinks and snacks, and invited their input. (Here are some pics if you want to see the crowd.)

Nothing beats face to face, semi-serendipitous conversation. You always learn something new, and the amount of knowledge that can be shared in even a few minutes of face time simply cannot be replicated with technology, social media, or even a long form post like this one. I always find myself reinvigorated after spending an evening in a room full of smart folks, and last night was certainly no exception. In fact, about halfway through, as I watched several of my close friends from my home turf of Marin mingling with the crowd, I realized something: The whole world is an Internet startup now.

Let me try to explain.

Back even five years ago, our industry was dominated by people who considered themselves a select breed of financier and entrepreneur – they were Internet startup folk. I considered myself one of them, of course, but I also kept a bit apart – it’s one reason I live up in Marin, and not down in the Silicon Valley. Why did I do that? I am not entirely sure, other than I wasn’t certain I wanted to be fully immersed in the neck-deep culture of the Valley, which can at times be a bit incestuous. I wanted to be part of the “rest of the world” even as I reveled in the extraordinary culture of Internet startup land.

Part of living up here in Marin is meeting and befriending smart folks who have pretty much nothing to do with my business. In the past ten years, I’ve become good friends with real estate developers, investment bankers (and not ones who take Internet companies public), musicians, artists, and doctors. When we first connected, I was always “the Internet guy” in the room. And that was that.

But as I scanned the room last night and watched those friends of mine, I realized that each of them was now involved in an Internet startup in some way or another. I then thought about the rest of my Marin pals, and realized that nearly every one of them is either running or considering running an Internet startup. Only thing is, to them it’s not about “starting an Internet company.” Instead, it’s about innovating in their chosen field. And to do so, they of course are leveraging the Internet as platform. The world is pivoting, and the axis is the industry we’ve built. This is what we meant when we chose “Web Meets World” for the theme of the 2008 Web 2 Summit, but it’s really happening now, at least in my world. I’m curious if it’s happening in yours.

A few examples – though I have to keep the details cloudy, as I can’t breach my friends’ confidence. One of my pals, let’s call him Jack, is a highly successful banker specializing in buying and selling other banks. But he’s an artist in his soul, and has a friend who is a talented photographer. Together they’ve cooked up a startlingly new approach to commercial consumer photography, including a retail concept and, of course, a fully integrated digital and social media component. Jack is now an Internet startup guy.

Another pal is a doctor. We’ll call him Dr. Smith. Smith is a true leader in his field, redefining standards of medical practice. He often gives speeches on what’s broken in the medical world, and holds salons where some of the most interesting minds in medicine hold forth on any number of mind bending topics. For the past year or so, Smith has been working on a major problem: How to get people to understand the basics of nutrition, and engage with their own diets in ways that might break the cycle of disease driven by poor eating habits. He’s got a genius answer to that question, and now, Smith is an Internet startup guy as well.

Dan, another anonymized pal of mine, made his name in real estate. Two years ago he effectively retired, having made enough money several times over to live a very good life and never have to work again. But Dan is a restless soul, and he’s also a bit haunted by the loss of his father to a poorly understood but quite well known neurological disease. He’s dedicated his life to supporting new approaches to research in the field, and the work he’s funded is tantalizingly close to a breakthrough. It’s an entirely new framework for understanding the illness, one that isn’t easy to grok if you’re a layman (as he was when he started). As I listened to him explain the work, I had a very strong sense of deja vu. Dan was an Internet startup guy now, pitching me his new approach to disrupting a sclerotic industry (in this case, the foundation-driven research institutes and their kissing cousins, the pharmaceutical companies.). It may work, it may not, but he’s going to go for it. To raise funds for his new approach, Dan is talking to angels and VCs, and developing a new model for profiting from drug compounds that may come out of the research he’s funded. In short, Dan’s appropriated the Internet’s core funding process to try to solve for one of the most obstinate problems in health.

I could go on. There’s the award winning filmmaker and his musician/producer partner who are creating mind-blowing next generation online games. The agency creative who’s won every traditional advertising prize on the planet, and is now obsessed with digital. And on and on and on….

I guess my point is this: The Internet no longer belongs to the young tech genius with a great idea and the means to execute it online. Innovation on the Internet now belongs to the world, and that is perhaps the most exciting thing about this space. It’s attracting not just the “next Mark Zuckerberg,” but also thousands of super smart innovators from every field imaginable, each of whom brings extraordinary insights and drive to play. And that’s another reason I love this industry, because, in the end, it’s not a singular business. It now encapsulates the human narrative, writ very large.

What a great story. Does it resonate with you? Do you have examples like mine? I’d love to hear them.

This past week I attended the Cannes Lions, one of the advertising industry’s most prestigious and well attended events.

The premise of the event is to celebrate excellence in advertising, marketing and communications, but given it attracts more than 10,000 folks in a business which celebrates Don Draper as an icon, I think it’s fair to say that the Lions are as much about drinking and networking as they are about awards. According to hotel staff, the attendees of the Lions drink three times more than those wimps from Hollywood who come for the Film Festival earlier in the summer. (And, for whatever reason, the drink of choice is Rose. If I never see another pink glass of wine, I’ll be the better for it…)

This was my first Lions, though I’ve been asked to come for the past two. I thought I was being invited because of my role in the marketing world, but after four days in Cannes, I’ve come to realize that it might have just as much to do with my role in the Internet world. Because if there was one clear and consistent theme to this year’s Cannes Lions, it was this: the baton has been passed, and the show this year was pretty much driven by major digital brands.

Every major party, save one or two, was thrown by technology companies. And yes, the parties matter, a lot, in the culture of the Cannes Lions. Media companies set up elaborate stages, bars, and dance floors along the Croisette (the main beach promenade of Cannes). On any given day (and sometimes every single day) you’d see Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Vevo, Facebook and Google tents and/or parties. Even smaller and newer companies, like Twitter, Demand and Say Media were there in various configurations.

The event program also reflected a distinctly digital slant. The content ranged from inspiring to insipid, but it was dominated by discussion of our industry. My session, underwritten by Adobe, focused on digital content and its role in marketing, for example. Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington pitched their AOL turnaround story, Yahoo brought in Robert Redford, and just about every agency and major brand took a session, which they often focused in some way on digital (social, word of mouth, network exchange buying, etc).

Sure, there was a lot of content focused on creative work, which is the core of the Lions, but then again, most of the people I spoke to wanted, in the main, to talk about what creative really meant in a digital world.

Since this was my first time, I asked a number of folks who’d been coming for years what had changed. All of them mentioned how remarkable it was that the Lions, in just a year or two, had come to be dominated by digital companies and brands. And while a few hardy old school media companies made a showing (USA Today’s party on Thursday night is supposed to be a hot ticket, and Time Inc took a session in the program), the television industry, who one would think would take the prime real estate at the Lions, was pretty much absent.

Perhaps that’s because they don’t want to spend the money anymore (not that the TV industry is hurting), or perhaps they got out marketed by digital companies looking to outflank them. I’m not sure. But it’s worth noting nonetheless.

Over at the Federated Media site, I’ve posted an appreciation of the company I started in a garage six years ago this week. FM came about because of my work on my first book – it was through the study of search’s impact on media and markets that I came up with the idea in the first place. Which means, in a pretty direct way, it was attributable in part to the musings here on Searchblog, and to your responses to those musings. 

FM is great success by any metric now, so I wanted to briefly say thank you to all of you who still read me here, and know that I will be writing a lot more in the next year or so, thanks to a new book project soon to be announced. 

From my post on FM’s six year anniversary:

FM was the first company that I built from scratch – no initial corporate parent (as I had with The Industry Standard), no initial set of partners (as I had with Wired or Web 2), just an idea and equal measures of optimism and trepidation…..

…When Twitter took off in 2008, FM was there, creating the first brand integration, with our partner Microsoft. And when the world’s largest publishing platform, WordPress – long a friend to the company – was ready to explore monetization, FM again was the partner of choice…

Over the past three decades, I’ve been at the center of a few amazing companies – two of which have passed 500 employees in girth. Wired, which still lives on, was the first. The Industry Standard, which lives on in a few markets outside the US, was the other. But FM is my proudest and most cherished accomplishment – with just 175 or so extraordinary employees, we’ve managed to deliver more than $100 million back to the creators of the Independent web over the past six years. That means that thousands of independent voices have rung out true, in part because FM and its partnesr were there to help them pay the bills.

I can’t really put in words how proud that makes me feel.

As I wrote last month, I’m working with a team of folks to redesign the Web 2 Points of Control map along the lines of this year’s theme: “The Data Frame.” In the past few weeks I’ve been talking to scores of interesting people, including CEOs of data-driven start ups (TrialPay and Corda, for example), academics in the public dataspace, policy folks, and VCs. Along the way I’ve solidified my thinking about how best to visualize the “data layer” we’ll be adding to the map, and I wanted to bounce it off all of you. So here, in my best narrative voice, is what I’m thinking.

First, of course, some data.

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On the left hand side are eight major players in the Internet Economy, along with two categories of players who are critical, but who I’ve lumped together – payment players such as Visa, Amex, and Mastercard, and carriers or ISP players such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.

I’ve given each company my own “finger in the air” score for seven major data categories, which are shown across the top (I don’t claim these are correct, rather, clay on the wheel for an ongoing dialog). The first six scores are in essence percentages, answering the question “What percentage of this company’s holdings are in this type of data.” The seventh, which I’ve called Wildcard data, is a 1-10 ranking of the potency of that company’s “wildcard” data that it’s not currently leveraging, but might in the future. I’ll get to more detail on each data category later.

Toward the far right, I’ve noted each company’s overall global uniques (from Doubleclick, for now, save the carriers and payment guys – I’ve proxied their size with the reach of Google). There is also an “engagement” score (again, more on that soon). The final score is a very rough tabulation computing engagement over uniques against the sum of the data scores. There are pivots to be built from this data around each of the scores for various types of data, but I’ll leave that for later. This is meant to be a relatively simple introduction to my rough thinking about the data layer. Hopefully, it’ll spark some input from you.

Now, before you rip it apart, which I fully invite (especially those of you who are data quants, because I am clearly not, and I am likely mixing some apples and watermelons here), allow me to continue to narrate what I’m trying to visualize here.

As you know, the map is a metaphor, showing key territories as “points of control.” The companies I’ve highlighted in the chart all have “home territories” where they dominate a sector – Google in search, Facebook in social, Amazon and eBay in commerce, etc. What I plan to do is create a layer based on the data in the chart that, when activated, shows those companies’ relative size and strength.

But how?

Well, the best idea we’ve come up with so far is to show each as a small city of sorts, where the relative height of the buildings is determined by a corresponding data point. So Twitter, for example, will have a tall building in the middle of its city, representing “Interest data.” Google’s tallest building will be search. Facebook’s, social, and so on. And of course the cities can’t be all on the same scale, hence our use of total global uniques, and total engagement. Yahoo may be nearly as big as Facebook, but it doesn’t have nearly the engagement per user. So its city will be smaller, relatively, than Facebook’s.

What is interesting about this approach is that each company’s “cityscape” emerges as distinct. Microsoft’s is wide but not tall – they have a lot of data in a number of areas. It will probably end up looking like a suburban office park – funnily enough, that’s what Microsoft really looks like, for the most part. Amazon and eBay will have high towers of payment data, with a smattering of shorter buildings. And so on. I don’t have a good visualization of this yet, but the designers at Blend, who I’m working with, have sketched out a very rough early version just so you can get the idea. The structures will be more whimsical, and of course be keyed with color. But I think you get the idea.

I’m even thinking of adding other features, like “openness” – ie can you access, gain copies of, share, and mash up the data controlled by each company? If so, the city won’t be walled. Apple, on the other hand, may well end up a walled city, with a moat, on top of a hill.

Now, a bit more detail on the data categories. You all gave me a lot of really good input on my earlier post, where I posited these original categories. But I’ve kept them the same, save the addition of the wildcard data. Why? Because I think each can be interpreted as larger buckets containing a lot of other data. I’ll go through each briefly in turn:

Purchase Data: This is information about who buys what, in essence. But it’s also who *almost* buys what (abandoned carts), *when* they buy, in what context, and so on.

Search Data: The original database of intentions – query data, path from query data, “intent” data, and tons more search signals.

Social Data: Social graph, but also identity data. Not to mention how people interact inside their graphs, etc.

Interest Data: This is data that describes what is generally called “the interest graph” – declarations of what people are interested in. It’s related to content, but it’s not just content consumption. It includes active production of interest datapoints – like tweets, status updates, checkins, etc.

Location Data: This is data about where people are, to be sure, but also data about how often we are there, and other correlated data – ie what apps we use in location context, who else is there and when, etc.

Content Data: Content is still a king in our world, and knowing patterns of content consumption is a powerful signal. This is data about who reads/watches/consumes what, when, and in what patterns.

Wildcard Data: This is data that is uncategorized, but could have huge implications. For example, Microsoft knows how people interact with their applications and OS. Microsoft and Google have a ton of language data (phonemes, etc.). Carriers see just about everything that passes across their servers, though their ability to use it might be regulated. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have tons of email interaction data. And so on….

Now, of course all these data categories get more powerful as they are leveraged one against the other, and of course, I’ve left tons of really big data players off the map entirely (Tons of small startups like Tynt, Quora, or Sharethis have massive amounts of data, as do very large companies like Nielsen, Quantcast, etc.). But you have to make choices to make something like this work.

So, that’s where we are with the Web 2 Summit map data layer. Naturally, once the data layer is live, it will be driven by a database, so we can tweak the size and scope of the cities and buildings based on the collective intelligence of the map users’ feedback. What do you think? What’s your input? We’ll be building this over the next two months, and I’d love your feedback before we get too far down the line. Thanks!

When Facebook announced it had convinced Carolyn Everson to leave Microsoft to head sales at the pre-IPO social networking giant, a few eyebrows lifted: Everson had only been at Microsoft for nine months, and was recruited there by CEO Steve Ballmer after he watched her work to integrate an important deal between Microsoft and MTV, where she previously worked.

While Microsoft could not have been pleased it lost a key sales executive, at least Everson was going to a friend of sorts: Microsoft owns a chunk of Facebook stock, and has been busy leveraging Facebook data into its upstart search engine Bing.

Everson and I spoke last month as a prelude to our onstage conversation next week at the CM Summit. She repeated one of her early statements about Facebook’s advertising potential – “We’re one percent done” – and we spoke abut Facebook’s “branded stories” product, which lets companies put social activity related to the brand directly into Facebook advertisements (I ribbed her about how FM has been doing something similar for years, but of course, FM has about 10% of Facebook’s scale).

There are no shortage of questions to get into with Everson, including Facebook’s rumored push into content – something CEO Mark Zuckerberg implied was inevitable in recent public speeches. And then there’s the always rumored “Facesense” – a Facebook-data driven ad network for third party publishers that would take on Google’s display business. And of course, the recent launch of Facebook Deals, a Groupon competitor that is super focused on the local advertising marketplace.

And then there’s the question of privacy. While Zuckerberg has a clear philosophy on the question, and most likely it’s shared by a large percentage of his customers, advertisers are usually far more sensitive to how they use data, and, oddly enough, at far larger risk of regulatory backlash. And of course privacy laws are not only in flux (there are half a dozen or so proposed pieces of legislation in the US alone), but they vary greatly from country to country.

Lastly, there’s the rumored 2012 IPO, and with it the pressures of making quarterly numbers. As global sales chief, that responsibility falls to Everson.

In short, there are plenty of things to discuss, and that’s why I’ve asked Everson to be our last speaker at CM Summit, so if we go a bit long, we’re not bumping anyone else off the stage. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to ask her.

As a reminder, we’ll hear from more than 30 presenters at CM Summit, 11 of which will be one-one interviews. Those include:

Visa CMO Antonio Lucio: Our Business Is Digital, Period

The in.imit.able will.i.am: Embracing Brand As An Artist

Google’s Neal Mohan: A $200 Billion Opportunity

Reimagining Yahoo!: Chief Product Officer Blake Irving

Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain Declares Interdependence: The Internet Is Changing How We Think

The Colorful Bill Nguyen: The Market Will Come

The Swan Song of Mich Matthews, Outgoing Chief of Marketing at Microsoft

Taking Twitter to the Next Level: President of Global Revenue Adam Bain

On the Future of Media: Starcom MediaVest Group CEO Laura Desmond

I’ll be adding my final post on Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt in the next 24 hours, as we are speaking later today.

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The CM Summit is less than one week away, and nearly 500 folks have registered – it’s just about sold out….so register today before we do.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Blackberry, AT&T, Google, Quantcast, Demand Media, Facebook, Outbrain, Pandora, Pixazza, R2integrated, Slideshare, Yahoo!, AOL, American Express OPEN, Balloon, BriefLogic, Evidon, Marketing Evolution/Telmar, Mobile Roadie, Spiceworks, and Ustream. And a shout out to our partners at IAB, Mashable, paidContent, ReadWriteWeb, SMAC, and TechZulu.

Next week will mark the third time in one year that I’ve interviewed Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am on stage, and each time it’s gotten better. If you’re coming to CM Summit, you’re in for a treat. Will is in New York for a benefit concert in Central Park, and he’s stopping by to chat with us along the way.

I’ve found will.i.am to be a rare bird – a massively successful commercial artist who embraces brands and marketing as part of his work, instead of a distraction from his work. He reminds me of another William – William Gibson, an author who natively embraces marketing as part of a narrative, finding signal in the work of branding, rather than noise. And no one can argue with Will’s street cred, his philanthropic work is a model for all celebrities. Not to mention, the dude is director of innovation at Intel. Intel!

If you want a preview of what we’ll be talking about, check the interview we did back in February at Signal LA. Expect more of the same, with a few twists, when we meet in New York next week.

As a reminder, we’ll hear from more than 30 presenters at CM Summit, 11 of which will be one-one interviews. Those include:

Google’s Neal Mohan: A $200 Billion Opportunity

Reimagining Yahoo!: Chief Product Officer Blake Irving

Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain Declares Interdependence: The Internet Is Changing How We Think

The Colorful Bill Nguyen: The Market Will Come

The Swan Song of Mich Matthews, Outgoing Chief of Marketing at Microsoft

Taking Twitter to the Next Level: President of Global Revenue Adam Bain

On the Future of Media: Starcom MediaVest Group CEO Laura Desmond

I’ll be adding posts on the remaining folks – Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Visa CMO Antonio Lucio, and Facebook’s Carolyn Everson, shortly.

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The CM Summit is less than one week away, and nearly 450 folks have registered, we can only take 500….so register today before we sell out.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Blackberry, AT&T, Google, Quantcast, Demand Media, Facebook, Outbrain, Pandora, Pixazza, R2integrated, Slideshare, Yahoo!, AOL, American Express OPEN, Balloon, BriefLogic, Evidon, Marketing Evolution/Telmar, Mobile Roadie, Spiceworks, and Ustream. And a shout out to our partners at IAB, Mashable, paidContent, ReadWriteWeb, SMAC, and TechZulu.

Yahoo! It’s our industry’s favorite puzzle. On the one hand, it’s one of the largest sites on the web, on the same size and scale as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. On the other hand, it’s not growing very quickly, revenues are flat, and investors have been calling for CEO Carol Bartz’s head with increasing regularity. The company has failed to find a “hit” that redefines its value proposition in a world driven by hits like Twitter, Foursquare, and Flipboard. What’s a nearly two-decade old industry legend to do?

Well, bring in fresh blood, for one. The company recently hired Ross Levinsohn, formerly of Fox, to lead North America. Prior to that, it hired Blake Irving, formerly of Microsoft, to lead product. I’ve spent time with both in the past month, and one thing is for sure: They’re singing from the same song sheet. Both men are energized by the chance to leverage the Yahoo platform, and both are realistic as well – it won’t be easy, and it won’t come fast.

The subject of a recent NYT profile, Irving will be joining me onstage next week at the CM Summit, and I’ll be asking him about all of this and more. In particular, I’ll be asking about one of his central initiatives: Livestand.

Blake will be showing Livestand, due later this year, at the Summit, and we’ll be discussing its potential. The new service, which is focused on a tablet media experience, is aimed directly at several weaknesses and opportunities in Yahoo’s portfolio.

First and foremost, Yahoo is a top publisher on the web, but until recently its publishing platform was inconsistent from region to region and segment to segment. In addition, Yahoo has massive amounts of content engagement data (what many call an “interest graph”), and hundreds of scientists and engineers analyzing that data. These folks are creating systems that inform which content to show Yahoo users at a particular moment in time (think of it as similar to what advertisers are trying to do with data-driven ad systems). Irving had a lot of clean up to do before he could roll out something as ambitious as Livestand on top of all that tech, but he claims he’s close.

Second, Livestand is a mobile play, in particular, a tablet app that creates a personalized media experience based on a user’s implicit and explicit content preferences. Yahoo is the ultimate PC-web company, and Livestand is its first major attempt at moving into the mobile world. Third, Livestand is a platform for other publishers outside of Yahoo, publishers looking to hook into Yahoo’s massive audience and technology assets. Yahoo has always held the promise of becoming a true platform for smaller publishers, but Livestand marks a commitment to that space. In short, Yahoo wants to make Livestand a channel for all publishers who want a “tablet edition” of their wares to be available to the public.

So with Livestand, Irving is attempting to leverage Yahoo’s technological publishing platform to create a service that gives Yahoo a foothold in a key new market (tablet) with a key new media experience (the Livestand app) leveraging key new partners (the creation of an outside publishing ecosystem).

Ambitious? Yes. But it’s about time Yahoo started innovating again, no?

Oh, and by the way, Livestand is just one of the many issues and products upon which Irving must focus. He’s got to integrate social into Yahoo, which means Facebook, in the main (Yahoo has deeply partnered with the leading social service). He’s got to continue to innovate in search user interface and experience, even as he leverages Yahoo’s decision to partner with Microsoft on core technology. And he’s got to keep up morale, which has been battered by constant bad news over the past few years.

Somehow, the man keeps a smile on his face. So what does he know that we don’t? I intend to find out. What would you like to hear from Irving onstage next week?

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The CM Summit is less than one week away, and nearly 450 folks have registered, we can only take 500….so register today before we sell out.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Blackberry, AT&T, Google, Quantcast, Demand Media, Facebook, Outbrain, Pandora, Pixazza, R2integrated, Slideshare, Yahoo!, AOL, American Express OPEN, Balloon, BriefLogic, Evidon, Marketing Evolution/Telmar, Mobile Roadie, Spiceworks, and Ustream. And a shout out to our partners at IAB, Mashable, paidContent, ReadWriteWeb, SMAC, and TechZulu.

One of the curveball sessions I’m most looking forward to at next week’s CM Summit is with filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, whose recent documentary features “Connected” was selected for inclusion at Sundance (and many other prestigious festivals.) Today I jumped on the phone with Shlain, who has been a fellow traveler since the days when I started The Industry Standard and she founded The Webbys. We’ve both moved on from those heady days, but find our work is once again interconnecting – “Connected” is an essentially optimistic but cautious story of Tiffany’s own life, work, and passions, in particular as it relates to her relationship with her father, a renown physician and author who spent much of his life searching for patterns in human behavior which transcended traditional boundaries of academic pursuit.

In short, the film is a call for all of us to move past our current frame of thinking, and to leverage the moment we are in to embrace a new philosophy – that of interdependence. The axis of this movement is the Internet, Shlain argues, and we have it within our grasp to leverage digital networks to solve the extraordinary problems we’ve collectively created through, well, collective creation.

Shlain was in a good mood as we began our conversation – she had recently learned her film had been picked up for national theatrical distribution in the Fall. That’s a big deal for a committed independent filmmaker, to be certain, but it’s also something of a quandry – theatrical distribution is “how films are normally done” and Shlain has plenty of unique ideas about how to get her work out into the world.

We’ll be talking about some of those ideas, which range from using Facebook to drive local screenings, to a mobile app specifically for the film, to continuing the film as a conversation across the web through the creation of three-minute “follow-up” films, the first of which will be crowdsourced through YouTube.

As I asked earlier about Bill Nguyen, why have Shlain at a digital marketing conference? Well, “Connected” is certainly about the impact of the Internet on our lives. But also because, as Tiffany says in her film, “emotional connection drives everything we do.” Marketers need to be reminded of this from time to time, in particular in the context of the constant, real time connections for which all brands are now the stewards. It struck me as somehow appropriate to have an artist grace our stage, and I’m thrilled Tiffany has agreed to join us.

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The CM Summit is just one week away….so register today before we sell out.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Blackberry, AT&T, Google, Quantcast, Demand Media, Facebook, Outbrain, Pandora, Pixazza, R2integrated, Slideshare, Yahoo!, AOL, American Express OPEN, Balloon, BriefLogic, Evidon, Marketing Evolution/Telmar, Mobile Roadie, Spiceworks, and Ustream. And a shout out to our partners at IAB, Mashable, paidContent, ReadWriteWeb, SMAC, and TechZulu.

Twitter. It’s our favorite conundrum here in Internet Media Land, isn’t it? On the one hand it’s changing the world and growing like crazy, with more than 200 million users who generate 155 million tweets a day. The services handles tens of billions of search queries a month, putting it on scale with some of the most elite platforms in the world. However, only a fraction of its users are also active creators of content; most are readers and followers – and that’s where Twitter can be confusing*. If Twitter is to truly scale, it needs to become a more compelling media experience. Further, Twitter’s initial foray into advertising products, its “Promoted Suite” of services, are garnering some mixed reviews, mainly for a lack of scale, though the company tells me it engages with 600+ advertisers who have run 6,000+ campaigns to date.

The company is openly self critical of its shortcomings, and knows it has work to do to make its service less opaque and more valuable to both marketers and users (not to mention developers, who have been scratching their collective heads of late, wondering how best to create value in the Twitter ecosystem). In March the company welcomed co-founder Jack Dorsey back into an active product role, and just this week it acquired TweetDeck, a respected third-party developer which had created a custom interface for advanced Twitter consumers.

And perhaps no question has dogged the company more than this one: When and how can Twitter make money? The issue is further freighted by staggering valuations in the private secondary market, which have wrapped a multi-billion dollar valuation albatross around Twitter’s still slender neck. The successful IPO of industry bretheren LinkedIn and Yandex, and the expected success of Pandora only heighten expectations for the young company.

Perhaps, given all this, Twitter doesn’t need to be profitable to have a successful initial public offering, but it certainly has to show numbers that prove the company is on its way. The man responsible for that job, Adam Bain, will be sitting down with me on day one of the sixth annual CM Summit in two short weeks.

Early revenue estimates are encouraging – eMarketer estimates $45 million in 2010, and more than triple that this year. But it’s expensive to maintain the infrastructure – and staff – needed to keep Twitter running. At least Bain has experience in both. He came to Twitter from Fox Interactive, where, among many other things, he helped lead the acquisition of MySpace and build out a scaled revenue platform across all of Fox’s online properties.

So it’s fair to say we’ll be having a robust conversation at the Summit. I’ll be asking about all this and more, and I’d love your input as well. If you have a question you’d like me to ask Adam, leave a comment here or join the conversation on the #CMSummit hashtag. See you in New York!

Oh, and PS – Register today before we sell out. It’s getting close!

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*I’ll be writing a longer post on this soon, for one take, check VentureBeat.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Blackberry, AT&T, Google, Quantcast, Demand Media, Facebook, Outbrain, Pandora, Pixazza, R2integrated, Slideshare, Yahoo!, AOL, American Express OPEN, Balloon, BriefLogic, Evidon, Marketing Evolution/Telmar, Mobile Roadie, Spiceworks, and Ustream. And a shout out to our partners at IAB, Mashable, paidContent, ReadWriteWeb, SMAC, and TechZulu.