Category: Site Related

The Searchblog Social Front Page

I’m a fan of Paul Berry & Co’s new curation platform RebelMouse (I’m also a small investor). Many content companies have adopted the service as their “social front page,” including TIME, TechCrunch, the USA Network and many more. Now thanks to the folks at RebelMouse (and my wizards at Blend), Searchblog has a similar page. You can see it here, I’ve also added it to the navigation bar at the top.

RebelMouse organizes the things you tweet, post to Facebook, etc. into a clear, coherent presentation, and give each person the tools to arrange them however they want. It’s pretty cool. Check it out!

3 Comments on The Searchblog Social Front Page

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

Predictions From Last Year: How I Did (2012 Edition)

Every year around this time I do two things: First I look back at my predictions from a year ago and grade myself, then I get around to making a new set of predictions. These are often my most popular posts of the year, proving the old magazine saw that the world loves a list. So who am I to buck the trend? Let’s get cracking on seeing how my crystal ball turned out, shall we?

As you can see from my 2012 predictions roundup, I took something of a new approach to the prognostication game last year. Instead of one lengthy post with all my predictions, I actually broke them into a series of posts, seven in all. I went into detail on why I thought each forecast would prove correct (save the last one, which was a series of “shoot from the hip” predictions.)

I’ll be as brief as I can with this review – this marks the ninth time I’ve done it. Overall, I’ve had a pretty good run of it. I hope 2013 keeps pace.

Read More
7 Comments on Predictions From Last Year: How I Did (2012 Edition)

Writing Every So Often: The Personal Essay Makes A Comeback

Browsing Hacker News, which I’ll admit I don’t read very closely (because, well, I’m not a hacker), I saw an interesting headline: I quit Twitter for a month and it changed my thinking about mostly everything. Well, that’s going to get my attention.

I clicked through and noted the author’s name: Adam Brault. I don’t know Adam Brault (at least, not well enough to recall reading him before), but with a headline like that, I sure wanted to read the piece. It’s quite a thoughtful rumination on his snap decision to stop using Twitter for the month of November.

Some of what Brault said didn’t resonate with me, not because I disagreed, but because it’s clear he uses Twitter in a very different manner than do I. He follows people closely and feels a connection to them that I rather envy. I follow more than 1200 people, and I’ve become a bit inured to the resulting torrent.

Read More
23 Comments on Writing Every So Often: The Personal Essay Makes A Comeback

Time To Begin, Again

Family, colleagues, and friends knew this day was coming, I knew it was coming, but here it is: I’ve rented a new place to write, a small, remote house directly on the beach, about 12 miles as the crow flies from my home in Marin county. It’s not a direct 12 miles – that crow would have to fly up about 2500 feet so as to clear the peak of Mt. Tamalpais. And that mountainous impediment is intentional – it takes close to the same time to ride a mountain bike from my home to this office as it does to drive one of several winding routes between here and there. I’m hoping that will spur me to take my commute by bicycle. I won’t be here every day, but I certainly hope to spend a fair bit of time here over the coming months.

I’ve added this new address to my long list of offices for one reason: To complete the book I’ve been talking about for nearly half a decade. That book began as an idea I called “The Conversation Economy,” but grew in both scope and ambition to encompass a much larger idea: an archaeology of the future, as seen through the digital artifacts of the present. Along the way, it’s changed a lot – 18 months ago, its title was “What We Hath Wrought.” Now, I’m thinking it’ll be called “If/Then.” I may yet call it “If/Then…Else” – or, as I wander through this journey, it might end up as something entirely different.

At this moment, I’m not certain. And that’s a bit scary.

Read More
18 Comments on Time To Begin, Again

Help Me Stop HubAdverts Dot Com!

I’ve been working with my site design partner Blend to try to track down a spammer who has taken my entire site and repurposed it as their own, replete with tons of ads and a clear intent to draft off Searchblog’s quality content (if I do say so myself) and, most likely, its pagerank as well.

The site is “hubadverts.com” and no, I’m not going to link to it. Each of my posts is ripped off as a URL including that domain – if you click on the domain, you get a scammy feeling ecommerce site. But at “hubadverts.com/on-data/” for example, you will see a recent post of mine, scraped in its entirety.

The funny thing about this site it that it scrapes my full text RSS feed, then rebuilds my site. Then it has spammy sites trackback to the rebuilt site, and leave comments there. Oddly, those trackbacks and comments are emailed to me as if I was the WordPress administrator of the site. Of course, the last thing I am going to do is try to log into the back end of the site, because that would give the spammers access to the backend login information of my own site. It’s phishing and blackhat SEO all rolled into one!

Read More
29 Comments on Help Me Stop HubAdverts Dot Com!

OpenCoSF Storified

Yesterday I participated in OpenCoSF. After weeks of preparation, we really had no idea how it was going to turn out, but to judge from the Twitter buzz, it seems folks had a really good time, and the vibe of open collaboration, rapid iteration, and “run with it” mentality really took over. Thanks to everyone involved. Below is my “Storified” version of the day:

http://storify.com/johnbattelle/highlights-first-ever-opencosf.js[View the story “Highlights: First Ever OpenCoSF” on Storify]

Leave a comment on OpenCoSF Storified

OpenCoSF – A New Kind of Event

I’m very excited to announce that registration is now open for OpenCoSF, a new kind of event that I’m helping to bring into the world.

Registration is free and open to anyone who’s interested in innovation in the Bay area. You can sign up here. Already about 1,000 people have expressed interest in coming, and I think we’ve got room for another 500 or so, if my math is correct.

So what is OpenCo? Well, it’s one the “seeds” that’s been germinating since I wrote the It’s Hard to Lay Fallow post back in the early summer. A few months before that, I took a mountain bike ride with one of my pals in the business, Magna Global managing partner Brian Monahan. Brian is on the board of sfBIG, a large Bay area marketing and Internet organization. At a recent meeting, the board was tossing around ideas for how to shine a brighter light on the unique culture of  innovation here in San Francisco and beyond. The idea of an event came up, and knowing my experience with the Web 2 Summit (now on hiatus)  and Federated’s Signal series, Brian asked my advice.

Read More
3 Comments on OpenCoSF – A New Kind of Event

Signal:Chicago Is Back, And It’s All About The Data…

I’ve written up an overview of the lineup at FMP’s second annual Signal:Chicago conference over on the FMP site. Highly recommended, it’s a very good event.

Speakers include Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon, Scott Howe, CEO of Acxiom, Laura Desmond, CEO of Starcom Mediavest Group, and Carolyn Everson,  VP of Global Advertising for Facebook.

If you’re anywhere near Chicago in September, or even if you’re not, this is one that’ll be worth attending. We’re exploring the role of data in marketing, as well as  my favorite topics of mobile, real time, local, and social, of course. Check it out.

1 Comment on Signal:Chicago Is Back, And It’s All About The Data…

How Not To Post A Comment

Recently my site has been hit with a ton of “manual spam” – folks who are paid to post short comments in the hope they’ll appear and drive pagerank back to various sites (or perhaps just increase their or their clients’ visibility.) It’s not hard to kill these comments, though it’s a bit of an irritant when they pile up. I don’t really mind, because their full-blown amateur-hour earnestness is pretty entertaining. Besides leaving chuckleworthy comments like “Facebook now 100 billion company there big really now”, the spammers also leave behind their user handles, which are simply priceless. Enjoy:

2 Comments on How Not To Post A Comment

It’s Hard to Lay Fallow

I’ll admit it, I’m one of those people who has a Google News alert set for my own name. Back in the day, it meant a lot more than it does now – the search results used to pick up blog mentions as well as “regular” news mentions, and before FacebookLand took over our world (and eschewed Google’s), a news alert was a pretty reliable way to find out what folks might be saying about you or your writing on any given day.

Like most folks who maintain a reasonably public conversation, I now watch Twitter’s @replies far more than I do Google news alerts. Of course, Twitter doesn’t catch everything, so I never unsubscribed from my Google News alert.

Read More
4 Comments on It’s Hard to Lay Fallow