John Battelle's Search Blog January 2009

We Must Remove Pesky Humans From This Equation

This morning reports came streaming in that "Google was freaking out." From a Slashdot thread: "It looks like for the moment at least, all Google results are failing the malware checks and being listed with a warning 'This site may harm your computer,' including all pages from Google themselves….

This morning reports came streaming in that “Google was freaking out.” From a Slashdot thread:

“It looks like for the moment at least, all Google results are failing the malware checks and being listed with a warning ‘This site may harm your computer,’ including all pages from Google themselves. Users trying to visit pages at search results will only be able to proceed via manual manipulation of the search result link to remove the Google click-through (which is also broken). Until Google fixes this bug, it looks Google web search is useless.”

Other reports claimed that Gmail was also affected, from a mailing list I monitor:

Just fyi, the problem also affected any mail coming into Gmail, wrongly marking emails as spam and putting a big red warning flag on

them…..So check your spam folders.

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Don’t Spank the Cat (Spank the Cat, Baby)

So I write a longish post, thinking out loud, and tweet it. Then as an afterthought, I tweet that my cat was bad today, and I had to punish it. Do I spank the cat, I asked? Well, the response was pretty funny. Twitter is connected to my Facebook account, and most likley the longest comment thread ever on my “status” ensued. Within a minute, I had two status updates: One of my tweets is about the future of publishing, business, culture, the economy. Heavy shit. The other is about spanking a cat.

Which one do you think won in terms of comments and engagement? Yup. Lesson learned. When looking for traffic, spank your cat.

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(Credit, Oil, IT, and) Paper Ain’t Free, So Don’t Waste It.

(Second in an ongoing series, part one here) I've been thinking a lot about the world of "print" lately. I'm not alone. Everywhere I look, another story declares newspapers and magazines dead or dying. I disagree that the essence of what print has stood for will die (in short,…

(Second in an ongoing series, part one here)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the world of “print” lately. I’m not alone. Everywhere I look, another story declares newspapers and magazines dead or dying. I disagree that the essence of what print has stood for will die (in short, storytelling), but I do agree that the structures around that storytelling are ending a lifecycle. And that ain’t all that’s ending.

Besides coded communication (ie, words, grammar, language), print has been fueled on one big premise: Waste paper. Somewhere in the late 18th or 19th century paper became so cheap that entire economic systems could be built that presumed it was actually beneficial to use more of it than was needed. Paper was a revelation – there’s probably a great story to be written comparing the cultural and economic impact of paper to that of the web (it’s probably been written, and I missed it).

6 Comments

Comcast and Tivo: The Model Is In Ads as Service

Yesterday at the NAPTE show TiVo CEO issued a call to action to the television business: get a new business model, or suffer the same fate as the newspaper. I think he's right, and I've got some ideas about what that model should be. I'll be posting more on…

Yesterday at the NAPTE show TiVo CEO issued a call to action to the television business: get a new business model, or suffer the same fate as the newspaper.

I think he’s right, and I’ve got some ideas about what that model should be. I’ll be posting more on this, but the short overview is this: Television should respond to the exhaustive knowledge it has of our viewing habits, and create a model that trades value for engagement. I sketched this out a while back in my post “TV and Search Merge” but that was more than four years ago. A lot has changed, and I’ve learned a lot more about how marketing works. So look for another Friday sketch, tommorrow, outlining my more considered thoughts on the subject.

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Yahoo Beats Expectations

I wonder if Carol Bartz made this rabbit a condition of her joining – Yahoo beat estimates, despite showing a $300mm+ loss in the fourth quarter. Reports of her first earnings call were generally positive….

I wonder if Carol Bartz made this rabbit a condition of her joining – Yahoo beat estimates, despite showing a $300mm+ loss in the fourth quarter.

Reports of her first earnings call were generally positive.

3 Comments

Twitter and the Borg

I wonder what Kevin might say about this random tweet that came out of me: "Is Twitter the logical next step to a Borg hivemind? First books. Then blogs. Then Twitter. Then … Borg? " What I was on about was a habit I've notice I'm getting into -…

I wonder what Kevin might say about this random tweet that came out of me: “Is Twitter the logical next step to a Borg hivemind? First books. Then blogs. Then Twitter. Then … Borg? ”

What I was on about was a habit I’ve notice I’m getting into – I’ve timeshifted my reading into another (more accelrated) phase. I read Twitter a few times a day, blogs every other day, and print a few times a week. I used to read blogs all day, and magazines/print a every other day. I remember when I did this with blogs, everyone was saying to me “how on earth can you keep up?!” But it was not hard at all, it was valuable to me, it fed my work and my life.

What happens when Twitter shifts to real time? Could we handle it? Could it happen? A microconversation in our heads, on all the time? I’m not sure we could. It is, however, what the Borg is all about, no? The delta between individual and social closed to no more than a blink? Very sci fi. Hmmm.

20 Comments

Google’s Repricing of Options

Google yesterday announced it would offer a repricing program for its options holding employees, a move that acknowledges and addresses the reality that Google's stock has sunk, like most others, well below strike prices. Google plans to take a $460 million charge for the move. The WSJ picks up…

Google yesterday announced it would offer a repricing program for its options holding employees, a move that acknowledges and addresses the reality that Google’s stock has sunk, like most others, well below strike prices. Google plans to take a $460 million charge for the move.

The WSJ picks up on the news and offers a perspective (the post is behind a pay wall):

…options are also meant to align interests with shareholders — so if the price soars, both benefit. If the price drops, both suffer. If Google is going to reprice when things go wrong, it should also limit the upside to employees. It would be easier simply to pay bonuses instead, tied to corporate performance, with a portion in stock that vests over time to aid retention … when shareholders do add up the cost of options, the answer can be shocking. Albert Meyer, president of money manager Bastiat Capital, calculates that since 1995, Cisco Systems has spent $30 billion — or nearly half its free cash flow in that period — buying back stock issued as a result of employee options exercises.

10 Comments

The Easy Part

Ad Age does a good job reviewing and comparing Google and Microsoft's earnings. Google posted a 17% increase in revenue in the fourth quarter compared with the year-ago period and, in what appeared to be an attempt to temper expectations for a more difficult first quarter, called that the…

Ad Age does a good job reviewing and comparing Google and Microsoft’s earnings.

Google posted a 17% increase in revenue in the fourth quarter compared with the year-ago period and, in what appeared to be an attempt to temper expectations for a more difficult first quarter, called that the “easy part.”

1 Comment

Month: January 2009

We Must Remove Pesky Humans From This Equation

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Don’t Spank the Cat (Spank the Cat, Baby)

(Credit, Oil, IT, and) Paper Ain’t Free, So Don’t Waste It.

Comcast and Tivo: The Model Is In Ads as Service

Yahoo Beats Expectations

Twitter and the Borg

Google’s Repricing of Options

The Easy Part

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