Category: Joints After Midnight & Rants

“Adverse Market Conditions”

Nanosys, the nanotech start up light on revenues but full of promises, canceled its IPO this week due to "adverse market conditions." I've seen this movie before, in 1996, and again in 2001. I've been wondering what's up with the IPO economy lately, a fragile place built on the tenuous…

concernedtraderNanosys, the nanotech start up light on revenues but full of promises, canceled its IPO this week due to “adverse market conditions.” I’ve seen this movie before, in 1996, and again in 2001. I’ve been wondering what’s up with the IPO economy lately, a fragile place built on the tenuous foundation of investor psychology. And my gut says it’s not a wonderful time to be going out. 2003 was a good year, overall, especially in the internet space. People started to believe again, interesting companies started making interesting products. And a slew of companies filed to go public, one right after the other.

For the most part, it’s still true that great companies are still making great stuff, especially in the internet space. But right now, things look pretty grim in the world, and I sense as a society we’re retreating once again into a somewhat grumpy, fearful place. As a result, IPOs leveraged over the future, like Nanosys, are being cancelled, IPOs that have narrow profit histories, like PlanetOut, are seeing their price range cut, and blockbusters, like Google, are being savaged by the pundits. Certainly it’s a good thing that there’s no appetite for hype in the world. But if I had my druthers, we’d still have a taste for hope.

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Gilgamesh, Search, and Immortality

Why Search? On a fine sunny morning, not long after the birth of my third child, I typed “immortality” into Google and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button. In an instant, Google takes me to the “Immortality Institute,” dedicated to “conquering the blight of involuntary death.” Not quite what I…

gilgameshtabWhy Search?

On a fine sunny morning, not long after the birth of my third child, I typed “immortality” into Google and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

In an instant, Google takes me to the “Immortality Institute,” dedicated to “conquering the blight of involuntary death.”

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Classic GoTo Page From Internet Archive

You gotta read this. 1998 "Who We Are" page for GoTo. Does it sound…familiar?…

gotoYou gotta read this. 1998 “Who We Are” page for GoTo. Does it sound…familiar?

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As We May Rant

Another rehash on "the future of search" – this one from Fast Company. OK, ready? It's…contextual, behavioral targeting, and local. Whoa. I have to keep in mind that the readers of larger magazines are not search enthusiasts, but still…the cliches ("Meet the future of advertising!"), the careworn anecdotes (they trotted…

Another rehash on “the future of search” – this one from Fast Company. OK, ready? It’s…contextual, behavioral targeting, and local. Whoa. I have to keep in mind that the readers of larger magazines are not search enthusiasts, but still…the cliches (“Meet the future of advertising!”), the careworn anecdotes (they trotted out the Adsense-displays-luggage-ads-next-to-suitcase-murder story, gleefuly planted by Overture last summer), the lack of analysis. Is this how you justify shipping atoms around the nation? At least my “intent over content” meme gets a boost, from Charlene Li, at Forrester. “You could never target intent before, in any medium,” says Li, capturing what’s exciting about the new method. “You just put your message out there around content that seemed likely to attract the right people and hoped it worked.”

Glad to see that idea spreading.

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Why The Archive Matters

Those of you who know me well are familiar with my fascination with all things archival, especially as it relates to the archaeology of the web. I am quite sure that in my golden years I will retire to a pith helmet and meerschaum pipe, evolving into a full time…

pipeThose of you who know me well are familiar with my fascination with all things archival, especially as it relates to the archaeology of the web. I am quite sure that in my golden years I will retire to a pith helmet and meerschaum pipe, evolving into a full time armchair anthropologist of the PastWeb. Interesting case in point comes to us from TechDirt, which reports on a LawMeme post about a run of the mill business lawsuit. The twist? The plaintiff “tried to amend its complaint to accuse on of the defendant’s lawyers of hacking Archive.org (Bewster’s Internet Archive).” Seems there was incriminating stuff on past versions of a site in question, stuff the plaintiffs did not want preserved through the eternity of time. The defendants, according to the suit, tried to “hack” archive.org to find the lost data. This I love – someone trying to plumb the Eternal to prove a point in the present. Priceless.

PS – Neat new interview with Brewster here. (Thanks Gary.)

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A Morning With Danny Hillis

Have had a very productive couple of days recently on the book, talking at length with various folks who in one way or another have very unique views on the search world. Before I get to Tim Koogle, who I spoke to this morning, or Shana Fisher and Geoff Yang…

hillisHave had a very productive couple of days recently on the book, talking at length with various folks who in one way or another have very unique views on the search world. Before I get to Tim Koogle, who I spoke to this morning, or Shana Fisher and Geoff Yang (yesterday afternoon), I wanted to talk about my visit with Danny Hillis.

On Tuesday I flew down to LA to visit with Danny, who founded Thinking Machines. After that he became an imagineer at Disney for five or so years (“The best ‘real job’ you can have,” he quipped). Danny has a million great ideas and is something of a polymath. He recently founded Applied Minds as a way to put that skill to work (he partnered with Bran Ferren, himself a scary smart polymath).

Danny has a lot of things to say about search, it’s an area he finds rich in implications, in particular as it relates to some of the long-term projects he’s involved in, such as the Clock of the Long Now. We spent some time riffing on the future of search, and its current limitations, but … I get ahead of myself. What I really thought was incredible was the playground Danny and Bran have created for themselves at Applied Minds.

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Idea Dumb, Guys

In an earlier post I referred to this piece (on a keynote at a B2B trade show) and ranted a bit about trade magazines, the internet, and the like, but it seems the Ad Age story missed what I think is the key piece of blinkered thinking that came…

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In an earlier post I referred to this piece (on a keynote at a B2B trade show) and ranted a bit about trade magazines, the internet, and the like, but it seems the Ad Age story missed what I think is the key piece of blinkered thinking that came from the speech. Rafat points it out:

Trade Companies To Block Google and Other Search Engines?: It is an idea floated by International Data Group CEO Pat Kenealy, no less. He gave a speech recently at American Business Media conference, and also talked about Google’s effect on trade media companies and magazine industry…
In the latest issue of Media Business magazine (it is available as a PDF and rather cumbersome to download, as the whole magazine in split into two PDFs…the Google story is broken in the middle), a story discusses the Google conundrum for magazine publishers…and quotes Kenealy on his speech at the ABM conference: “Kenealy has floated the idea that American Business Media member companies should agree to block Google and other search engines from crawling their sites. Together, these business media companies could develop their own search algorithm, or they might cut a more favorable revenue-sharing deal with an existing search engine, he said.”

Rearrange the deck chairs, boys! Let’s all get a good view of our asses as we sink to the bottom….Sure, you can put your site behind registration, I mean, many do, though they’re learning that even pages behind registration should be visibile in some way to engines. But block search engines? How about next you go off the power grid and start churning butter by hand? And whoa boy, do I want to see the search algorithms these guys might come up with.

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Toward the Endemic: What’s missing in PPC/Behavioral/Contextual Ad Nets

During the AdTech panel yesterday I started ranting about what I think is missing from all this contextual, behavioral, paid search, and network-based advertising – you know, all the stuff that's setting records and revolutionizing marketing. All the stuff I've been hyping for the past two, no wait, ten years…

asseenontvDuring the AdTech panel yesterday I started ranting about what I think is missing from all this contextual, behavioral, paid search, and network-based advertising – you know, all the stuff that’s setting records and revolutionizing marketing. All the stuff I’ve been hyping for the past two, no wait, ten years now. And I think I’ve come up with a clear way of saying it: what’s missing is the advertiser’s endemic relationship with the community a publisher serves.

I’m almost certainly restating what others have already pointed out, but then again, I’ve not seen it put this way yet. So think about a “traditional” publishing environment. You’ve got three parties in an ongoing, intentional conversation: The reader/viewer (we’ll say audience for lack of a better word), the editor/programmer/author/creator (we’ll say publisher for lack of a better word), and the advertiser. In a traditional publication, these three parties interact in various ways through the medium of the publication. Most importantly, the advertiser has voted with their dollars for that particular publisher, hopefully because the advertiser had take the time to understand that publication’s audience, and hence wants to be in conversation with that audience.

What’s inherent in this interaction is the intention of all parties to be in relationship with each other. This creates and fosters a sense of community – the best publications always have what are called “endemic” advertisers – those that “belong” to the publication’s community, that “fit” with the publication’s voice and point of view. I’ve found that in the magazines and sites I’ve helped create, my readers enjoyed the ads nearly as much as the editorial, because the ads served them, seemed to understand who they were in relation to the community the publication created.

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Shocker: Google Has an Ethics Committee

The Register breaks this "news" – groups of folks get together at Google to determine what to do when difficult issues like the Jew Watch controversy break. Well of course they do. At least the company has an ethics committee in the first place. It's true, they have not been…

The Register breaks this “news” – groups of folks get together at Google to determine what to do when difficult issues like the Jew Watch controversy break. Well of course they do. At least the company has an ethics committee in the first place. It’s true, they have not been forthcoming on this subject, but as the reality of being public company sets in, they’ve get better at it. It’s an engineering-driven culture in the process of realizing that it’s playing on a major media stage. DNA changes slowly, and not without pain.

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Terms of Service and the Clickstream: A Survey

As I muddle my way through yet another iteration of my outline, and think about the issues raised in my recent ephemeral/eternal post, it seems apparent to me that as a culture we are nowhere near consensus on what rights, if any, a person has with regard to the data…

TOSAs I muddle my way through yet another iteration of my outline, and think about the issues raised in my recent ephemeral/eternal post, it seems apparent to me that as a culture we are nowhere near consensus on what rights, if any, a person has with regard to the data we create and/or provide to third party applications like A9, Gmail, Plaxo, and the like. Clearly we are touchy about all of this, as the reaction to Gmail proves. In the process of my research, I started reading the terms of service and privacy policies for various services, and found them inconsistent, often vague, and in general difficult to understand.

Now, I know there is a vocal contingent of folks who believe that we should simply assume we have no privacy online, and assume the quid pro quo for any service that we use is loss of control over the metadata/personal information we create along the way. I certainly understand this line of thinking, but…it strikes me as a cop out. In the end, I’d warrant that business models are going to evolve to the point where services will spring up that offers consumers access to their own clickstreams in new and powerful ways, and I’m going to predict that we will want that access as a right. I’d prefer we not have early lockdown on this issue, if we can at all avoid it.

The nice thing about doing a book is that people help you. I have had and continue to have help from a lot of smart folks, and one of them is Abigail Phillips, a lawyer who has worked with the CDT and the Berkman Center. Abigail is helping me pull together a little research project that will compare the policies of several well known platform players as they relate to what I’m calling “clickstream/stored information” – the data exhaust we all create when we interact with web-based services.

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