Author: John Battelle

EBay: Google’s Not A Threat; Overture’s Tops, Jupiter Says

The eBay-and-Google-are-competitors meme continues unabated, and Meg Whitman responded at a recent analyst day, "We're good for Google, and Google is good for our sellers." Ebay spends buckets on Google's AdWords program, and it also spends buckets over at Overture, which recently got some good news from Jupiter, which published…

The eBay-and-Google-are-competitors meme continues unabated, and Meg Whitman responded at a recent analyst day, “We’re good for Google, and Google is good for our sellers.” Ebay spends buckets on Google’s AdWords program, and it also spends buckets over at Overture, which recently got some good news from Jupiter, which published a study claiming Overture’s paid listings service outperformed Google’s.

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The Economist Weighs In

Ho hum. Not as sharp as usual, but a few good points in this Economist piece on the Google IPO. Chief among them is a claim that Google's contextual advertising margins are weak, according to Findwhat's CEO (wishful thinking, perhaps?), and a furtherance of the building meme that Google…

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Ho hum. Not as sharp as usual, but a few good points in this Economist piece on the Google IPO. Chief among them is a claim that Google’s contextual advertising margins are weak, according to Findwhat’s CEO (wishful thinking, perhaps?), and a furtherance of the building meme that Google is, in fact, an online advertising agency driven by a great search engine.

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Declan on Govt. Information Practices

Worthy of a read, and related to my earlier post about architecture and politics, Declan at CNET outlines current administration tactics w/r/t information sharing that taken together certainly seem to form a pattern. We should all be thankful for projects like Brewster's Internet Archive and The Memory Hole. UPDATE: Larry…

Worthy of a read, and related to my earlier post about architecture and politics,
Declan at CNET outlines current administration tactics w/r/t information sharing that taken together certainly seem to form a pattern. We should all be thankful for projects like Brewster’s Internet Archive and The Memory Hole.

UPDATE: Larry Lessig points out that in fact the White House has deliberately changed the press release, and the Internet Archive proves it. No record made of this by the administration. Thank God for the IA.

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“Get Where You Want In Two Clicks”

Dipsie, a new search engine coming Summer 2004, was recently written up in Businessweek (two paragraphs, with no mention of who was behind it). I could not find the site using a Google search (or Alta Vista or Teoma, so hold the conspiracy theories), but found it by simply typing…

lockupDipsie, a new search engine coming Summer 2004, was recently written up in Businessweek (two paragraphs, with no mention of who was behind it). I could not find the site using a Google search (or Alta Vista or Teoma, so hold the conspiracy theories), but found it by simply typing in “dipsie.com.” Gee…that seems odd, or they are so new that they’ve not been crawled, or…they have banned spiders from their site.

The site is very light on details, though it does say they are privately funded, in Chicago, and they are hiring. In the Businessweek piece (I’d link to it but their online site is deeply f*cked up) they also claim they will index 10 billion web pages (Google et al do about 3 billion) and will have semantic ranking (language based) that will be better than Google (the motto is “Get Where You Want In Two Clicks”.) If that’s right, expect them to be bought soon. If they *really do* have great tech, tech that can scale and withstand serious slashdotting, they’ll lash themselves to the mast, ignore the siren call of easy money from Google, MSFT, or Yahoo, and launch. Their price will go up with every new user they pull in. As Eric at Google often points out, the competition is one click away. And as great as Google is, fact is, no one ever gets past what Tim Bray calls the “Google Event Horizon” – result # 1001. In fact, few get past result #10 in any search engine, and therein lies an opportunity.

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The future of video advertising

In my recent B 2.0 column, I give MSFT credit for pushing a new form of video advertising into the mainstream, and claim that this TV-type advertising will support free video consumption on the web. Neat then to see that Yahoo will expand its free video again, and has killed…

In my recent B 2.0 column, I give MSFT credit for pushing a new form of video advertising into the mainstream, and claim that this TV-type advertising will support free video consumption on the web. Neat then to see that Yahoo will expand its free video again, and has killed its video subscription service.

Microsoft and Google?

I've written about this before, in Business 2.0, pointing out that MSFT and Google – in some ways – share similar cultures. But I really doubt this will happen, regardless of the rumours spurred by reports in the NYT. Of course MSFT wishes it had Google, and of course…

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I’ve written about this before, in Business 2.0, pointing out that MSFT and Google – in some ways – share similar cultures. But I really doubt this will happen, regardless of the rumours spurred by reports in the NYT. Of course MSFT wishes it had Google, and of course Google respects MSFT. But I just don’t see them doing it. If they do, well, it’d be the biggest thing to hit the internet since AOLTW. Enough said.

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O’Reilly on Tech/Media Future

"We're all Linux users," he points out at the OSCOM conference this week. Huh? Well, we all use Google, a Linux application running over the net. His point is important: traditional notions of the application and operating system, once held fast to our individual computers, are in flux, and now…

“We’re all Linux users,” he points out at the OSCOM conference this week. Huh? Well, we all use Google, a Linux application running over the net. His point is important: traditional notions of the application and operating system, once held fast to our individual computers, are in flux, and now the best applications run across the network (ie, iTunes, iPhoto, Google). I’d add that most of the best network applications are media applications, interestingly. Here’s more on the idea from Wired News.

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Standing By Their Numbers…

Neilsen rechecked their figures, and stands by them, this WSJ Page One piece reports (sub req'd). The upshot: Young men are abandoning network TV….

Neilsen rechecked their figures, and stands by them, this WSJ Page One piece reports (sub req’d). The upshot: Young men are abandoning network TV.

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