Category: Book Related

At MediaPost, Gord Hotchkiss, a search consultant, wrote the kind of review every author wants to get. What might that be, you ask? A rave? Well, sure. A review that understands the core intent of your work? Most certainly. But what really got me was the comparison to a high school sweetheart turned pinup girl:

Reading it was a unique experience for me. It was addictive, like literary crack. I devoured it in huge gulps. I can’t recall the last time I read a book in such a short time. Look, They’re Writing About Us!…”The Search” is unlike any previous volume written on search. There have been several “how-to” books that have explored the mechanics of search, both from a user’s and marketer’s perspective. But Battelle for the first time explores search as a business and social phenomenon. Not only that, he muses that it might be THE social phenomenon, with world-shattering implications. For anyone who has grown up in search, it’s like seeing your high school sweetheart become a world-famous centerfold. “See, I told you she was hot. No one believed me!”

Last minute note – in other words, I forgot to mention – but I am doing what may be my last official book tour reading tonight on my home turf of Marin, at the Corte Madera Book Passages. 7 pm, here’s a link to it on Yahoo Maps.

Though this marks the last official book reading, what I have come to realize is that the tour really never ends. Loads of folks have come calling asking me to come and speak, and I am trying to do as much as I can. And I still get to go to London next month for the FT book award. Cool!

OK, this is entirely self referential, but I just love seeing the cover of my book in Portuguese. Here’s the Brazilian version of The Search – a Busca. I must say, the Brazilian press has been a joy to work with.

I’ll be heading up to Seattle Monday bright and early, to speak at both Microsoft and Amazon. I return Tuesday afternoon. We don’t have a bookstore signing set up there, but maybe we can meet up in the bar at the W if you’d like. Just let me know….

This is my second to last book tour event. I go to Vegas for a talk Weds, back Thursday. Then, a few talks here and there through November and December, but nothing really requiring major new trips. I am really, really tired, and very, very happy with how the book did. Onwards….

Update: So it looks like if any Seattle Searchbloggers want to meet up, let’s do it at around 7 pm, lobby bar of the W in downtown Seattle. I’ll be the one with a bourbon and a menu…

Quite a few readers have emailed me asking why the heck Amazon is suggesting a book on beer might be what they want next. I think it may be that the Author, Steve Hindy, has written about technology in the past, and folks who bought those books also bought The Search.

But this next book he’s written is pretty far off the mark: “Steve Hindy’s Beer School : Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery.”

I take no credit for this. I drink far more wine than beer as of late….

Read More

I’ll be signing and reading at Barnes & Noble today in San Jose. Details:

Monday, October 3

7:30PM

Barnes & Noble

3600 Stevens Creeks Blvd.

San Jose, CA 95117

408-984-3495

If you are around, come on by!

Read More

Scoble wants more from my book, so he writes it up, and the comments are flowing in. Cool!

On the subject of why he thinks engines are doing a poor job, (using a hotel search as an example), he asks:

So, what COULD search engines do? Well, first, give me some choices at the top of the page. Why couldn’t search engines ask you these questions:

Read More

Yesterday I once again drove down to Google, but this time it wasn’t to do a set of interviews for the book, it was to read from the book to perhaps the most demanding audience I’ve ever encountered – a room full of Googlers, nearly 200 in all.

I was a bit nervous. While I think the book is fair, and clearly acknowledges the importance and power of Google, it also has more than its fair share of reporting on the negative aspects of the company’s astonishing rise – from privacy concerns to allegations of arrogance and self dealing. Would I be booed off the campus?

It didn’t help my anxiety to see a gaggle of folks in the audience who also were in the book or helped me in one way or another – from Louis Monier and Peter Norvig to Raymond Nasr, Steve Langdon, and Eric Case.

Read More

I sense you might be getting sick of me tooting this particular horn, but I can’t help myself, The Search made it to the Wall St. Journal’s weekly list of Business Bestsellers (reg required) today, at #12. That’s pretty good for only being out ten days, I’m told. And now I can brag about being a bestselling author. Like I am right now.

Again, I think all this happened because of Searchblog readers. I really enjoyed meeting some of you in New York, I have a few more events coming up, and will make sure to keep my book page updated. Thanks.

As you all know, I promised to use this forum as a platform for anyone who took issues with the book to provide me feedback and corrections, if I got anything wrong. I was recently contacted by a communications consultant for Frank Quattrone, one of the most formidable investment bankers of the dot com era. I made a passing reference to Frank in my book, and he clearly disagreed with my observations. Bob Chlopak, Communications Consultant to Frank Quattrone, drafted a statement, which I post in full below. I’m happy to do the same for any source or character in the work who feels similarly.

”The Search” mischaracterizes Frank Quattrone’s case. The book makes reference to the right to privacy for personal email and says:

“While the more sophisticated e-mail user among us has grown to understand the folly of this assumption in a corporate environment, the idea that e-mail is an ephemeral medium is still widely held. In 2003, Frank Quattrone, one of the technology sector’s most powerful bankers and hardly a computing rube, was brought down by such a presumption when incriminating e-mails were used as evidence against him in a widely publicized trial.”

Read More