John Battelle's Search Blog Thoughts on the intersection of tech, business, and society.

The Power of Being There

It’s been building for weeks – Friday marks the first day of the fifth annual Outside Lands festival here in San Francisco. Despite the demands of work and family, I try to get to as many festivals as I can – so far, I’ve managed to see Bonnaroo a few times, Coachella once (I’ll be back!), Austin City Limits, and a few others. Outside Lands is local to San Francisco and therefore much easier to attend – this will be my third. Compared to your average festival goer (who tends to be single and about half my age) I’m a punter, but I’ll take it.

Why do I go? In two words, serendipity and joy. When you gather with tens of thousands of like minded, smiling people, unexpected connections are made, and bouts of pure happiness break out all over the place. Who wouldn’t want to soak in some of that?

2 Comments

Wine and Song

A good couple of weeks in wine, and a first ever for the garage band my buds and I have formed – we played our first gig in front of actual human beings, at a party last night. We even have a name: After.

To the photos.

First, the wine. I like to post interesting bottles here so I can pin them on Pinterest (the only active board I have is called The Wine of My Life). In no particular order…

2 Comments

Who’s On First? (A Modest Proposal To Solve The Problem with First- and Third-Party Marketing)

Early last month I wrote a piece entitled Do Not Track Is An Opportunity, Not a Threat. In it I covered Microsoft’s controversial decision to incorporate a presumptive “opt out of tracking” flag in the next release of its browser, which many in the ad industry see as a major blow to the future of our business.

In the piece, I argued that Microsoft’s move may well force independent publishers (you know, like Searchblog, as well as larger sites like CNN or the New York Times) to engage in a years-overdue dialog with their readers about the value exchange between publisher, reader, and marketer. I laid out a scenario and proposed some language to kick that dialog off, but I gave short shrift to a problematic and critical framing concept. In this post, I hope to lay that concept out and offer, by way of example, a way forward. (Caveat: I am not an expert in policy or tech. I’ll probably get some things wrong, and hope readers will correct me if and when I do.)

The “concept” has to do with the idea of a first-party relationship – a difficult to define phrase that, for purposes of this post, means the direct relationship a publisher or a service has with its consumer. This matters, a lot, because in the FTC’s recently released privacy framework, “first-party marketing” has been excluded from proposed future regulation around digital privacy and the use of data. However, “third-party” marketing, the framework suggests, will be subject to regulation that could require “consumer choice.”

6 Comments

If Google Were Really Evil…

My morning routine was interrupted today in a big way – because Twitter was down. I hadn’t realized how much I depend on the service for any number of things, from tossing out the headline or two that I find interesting as I read my feeds, to checking the status of the conversation around stuff I’ve written the day before, to logging into other services I use through my Twitter account. In short, this morning when Twitter went down, much of my Internet experience did as well.

Huh. Anyway, I wanted to see if this was a local thing, or if a lot of folks were experiencing it, so I went to Google+ and asked. Within a minute, I had ten responses, nine people said Twitter was down for them as well. In five minutes, it was 21 of 22. That’s a lot of engagement.

So I got to thinking….if Google was really evil, it’d do something like this when Twitter goes down:

13 Comments

My, How the CMO Has Changed

GM FB response — A posting (and responses) on GM’s Facebook Wall, July 2012

When you visit Joel Ewanick, CMO of GM, in his offices in Detroit, the first thing you notice is that unlike most C-suite executives, he’s not on the 39th floor of GM’s Renaissance Center headquarters (the highest floor). Instead, you exit the elevators on the 24th floor, less than two thirds up the building.

The second thing that strikes you is the floor itself – it’s bright with natural light, sports an open plan bustling with energy, and features a central video wall sporting constantly updated feeds reflecting consumer sentiment about GM and its brands – Facebook wall postings, Tweets, news stories, and the like.

19 Comments

What We Lose When We Glorify “Cashless”

Look, I’m not exactly a huge fan of grimy greenbacks, but I do feel a need to point out something that most coverage of current Valley darling Square seems to miss: The “Death of Cash” also means the “death of anonymous transactions” – and no matter your view of the role of government and corporations in our life, the very idea that we might lose the ability to transact without the creation of a record merits serious discussion. Unfortunately, this otherwise worthy cover story in Fortune about Square utterly ignores the issue.

And that’s too bad. A recent book called “The End of Money” does get into some of these issues – it’s on my list to read – but in general, I’ve noticed a lack of attention to the anonymity issue in coverage of hot payment startups. In fact, in interviews I’ve read, the author of “The End of Money” makes the point that cash is pretty much a blight on our society – in that it’s the currency of criminals and a millstone around the necks of the poor.

Call it a hunch, but I sense that many of us are not entirely comfortable with a world in which every single thing we buy creates a cloud of data. I’d like to have an option to not have a record of how much I tipped, or what I bought at 1:08 am at a corner market in New York City. Despite protections of law, technology, and custom, that data will remain forever, and sometimes, we simply don’t want it to.

27 Comments

On Mayer, Yahoo!, and The (Other) Customer

marissa at web 2 — Mayer at the Web 2 Summit, San Francisco

(image James Duncan Davidson)

I try to let big news percolate for a few days before weighing in, and it seems even more appropriate to follow that playbook when it came to the scrum around Marissa Mayer joining Yahoo.

20 Comments

A Rare Treat: Midweek 20+ Miler

Today I got to steal a ride under the guise of bonding with a senior exec at Federated Media, Walter Knapp, an avid rider/racer who spends much of his time with our Lijit business in Boulder, Colorado. Of course, he’s younger than I, and lives at a higher altitude, which is why he went easy on me as I took him through one of my favorite rides – from my home in Ross out past Fairfax and up into Tamarancho, a unique single track haven built by bikers in cooperation with local Boy Scout troops. Then we headed up to Pine Mountain to take in some views – here’s Walter enjoying the Bay Area’s answer to Colorado high:

That’s on Pine Mtn. Trail, with Mt. Tamalpais in the background, and the East Bay over his right shoulder. One of my favorite “happy spots” within striking distance of my house. According to my AllSports GPS app, we rode 22.1 miles, climbed about 4500 feet, and were at it 2.5 hours. Talking business the entire time, of course. (Actually, that’s pretty much true). Here’s some context as to where we were in the world:

Wines to Remember, July 2012

It’s been a good couple of weeks for good wine, so here’s the roundup thus far – mostly wines we’ve had while on the road in Colorado and New York.

The Cain Cuvee, Napa, is a blend that works with just about anything.

Share this:

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: