Category: Site Related

Four Letter Words

If you’ve been following this site for a while, you’ll remember my experiment earlier this year with posting pictures of wine, bike rides, and other “life” things. Many of you liked those posts, others, not so much. (Here’s one example.) My reason for posting these photos was pretty simple – I prefer to have my content emanate from my own site, rather than be bound to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or some other third-party walled garden. If I could figure out a way to post stuff to my own site, then I’d share it out to those services, but keep the content firmly planted in what I call “The Independent Web.”

But I knew not all of you wanted to hear about my rides or consumption of wine, so I created feeds that filtered out the non-work related stuff. Alas, that wasn’t enough. I heard from a lot of you that you didn’t like my site clogged up with the pictures, and I don’t blame you. Having a website should mean having flexibility, so I’ve created a section of the site, which I’m calling “Four Letter Words,” for posting personal stuff. You can find it here.

The main RSS feed for Searchblog will include only posts that are *not* tagged with “Four Letter Words,” and the main site will only display my typical industry-related stuff. But if you want to check out the other side of my life – one of my favorite four letter words, along with life, wife, kids, bike, and wine –  check it out. And thanks for coming. Means the world to me.

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New Feeds For Searchblog

Pardon the site-specific interruption, but as part of my ongoing quest to keep my content here on my own site, I’ve begun posting pictures of stuff here that I’d otherwise put on Instagram, Twitter or other services. Given that many of you read Searchblog for my trenchant commentary as opposed to my preferences in pinots, I promised you that I’d create new RSS feeds. Well, here they are!

You’ve got a lot of choices – Everything (all photos and posts), Everything But Photos, Headlines Only, and Photos Only.

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Curtain Raiser: The CM Summit in NYC Next Week

The Soho Skylight, awaiting its incarnation as site for the 7th annual CM Summit.

As New York City gears up for its annual Internet Week, the team at FMP has been diligently working away on creating another stellar program for our 7th annual CM Summit, held this coming Monday and Tuesday in SoHo.

Last year we eliminated panels from our program, the move was met with great success – attendees love our fast-paced approach, which features short, high-value presentations from leaders in digital marketing and technology platforms, interspersed with conversations with CMOs from Fortune 500 brands and entrepreneurs driving change in digital.

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Championships, Milestones, and Alzheimers

As readers are realizing, I’m posting photos here first, then using this as the basis for exports to other services like Twitter or Pinterest. It will be a few days before I have a “non photos” RSS feed for you to follow, forgive the interruption with non-work related stuff. But, it was a big weekend.

It started with my daughter winning the county championships in the 1oom dash for the third year in a row. Wow!

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Get Ready for Some Pictures, Folks

A wine we enjoyed last weekend.

I’ve become increasingly troubled by the “data traps” springing up all over AppWorld and the Internet, and while I’ve been pretty vocal about their downsides, I also use them quite a bit – especially for photos. That, I hope, is about to end.

However, I’m afraid it means you, dear reader, are going to be seeing a few more pictures of Mount Tamalpais and my favorite wines here on Searchblog.

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On The Future of The Web 2 Summit

By around this time of year, most of you are used to hearing about this year’s Web 2 Summit theme, its initial lineup of speakers, and any other related goings on, like our annual VIP dinners or perhaps some crazy map I’ve dreamt up. It’s become a familiar ritual in early spring, and many of you have been asking what’s up with this year’s event, in particular given the success of both last year’s theme (The Data Frame) and its amazing lineup of speakers and attendees.

Truth is, we’re not going to do the Web 2 Summit this year, and I’m writing this post to explain why. For the most part, it has to do with my book, the subject of which was outlined in my previous post. As the person who focuses on the core product – the programming on the stage – I just could not pull off both writing a book and creating a pitch-perfect onstage program. It takes months and months of hard work to execute a conference like Web 2 (and not just by me). My partners at O’Reilly and UBM TechWeb are full to the brink with other conferences, and after months of discussions about how we might route around this problem, we all agreed there really wasn’t a way to do it. It’s not fun being the guy who stops the party, but in this case, I have to step up and take responsibility.

That’s not to say we won’t be back – we’re keeping our options open there. For now, the Web 2 Summit is on hiatus. Each of the partners will continue to produce conferences (I am doing five for FM this year alone, and have ideas about others in the works). We’re just letting the Web 2 Summit lay fallow for a year.

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The Conversational Marketing Summit, Seventh Edition: A Searchblog (Deep) Discount

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

Each year at Internet Week in New York, I curate a conference on media and marketing called the CM Summit (video from last year above). Past speakers have included Dick Costolo, CEO Twitter, Sheryl Sandberg, COO Facebook, John Hayes, CMO American Express, Laura Desmond CEO Starcom Mediavest Group, will.i.am, and many, many more. We’re on the seventh edition of the CM Summit, and it’s only getting better. (By comparison, I’ve done eight Web 2 Summits – so this is the second longest running conference I’ve ever curated).

Speakers at this year’s event, slated for May 14-15, include the legendary Valley investor Ron Conway, the always fascinating founder of Huffington Post Arianna Huffington, and chiefs of marketing for Coca Cola, Nokia, Mastercard, and many, many others. We’ve got startup founders who are changing the game in media, agency chiefs who oversee hundreds of millions in spending, and publishers who are redefining our understanding of content. (And a few surprises yet to come…). For more, head over to the ever-evolving speaker page here.

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If-Then and Antiquities of the Future

Over the past few months I’ve been developing a framework for the book I’ve been working on, and while I’ve been pretty quiet about the work, it’s time to lay it out and get some responses from you, the folks I most trust with keeping me on track.

I’ll admit the idea of putting all this out here makes me nervous – I’ve only discussed this with a few dozen folks, and now I’m going public with what I’ll admit is an unbaked cake. Anyone can criticize it now, (or, I suppose, steal it), but then again, I did the very same thing with the core idea in my last book (The Database of Intentions, back in 2003), and that worked out just fine.

So here we go. The original promise of my next book is pretty simple: I’m trying to paint a picture of the kind of digital world we’ll likely live in one generation from now, based on a survey of where we are presently as a digital society. In a way, it’s a continuation and expansion of The Search – the database of intentions has expanded from search to nearly every corner of our world – we now live our lives leveraged over digital platforms and data. So what might that look like thirty years hence?

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The Yin and Yang of Audience

(image) The Signal San Francisco conference is less than a week away, so I thought I’d take the time to explain my reasoning for the theme, and offer a curtain raiser of sorts on the day-long program. (PS, I have ten, and only ten, half price tickets available. Hit this link, and use the code “luckyday.”)

The theme, a portion of which is the title of this post, is “The Yin and Yang of Audience, Platforms and the Independent Web.” I do get a few eyes a-rollin’ when I frame conference themes, but hey, I can only do what I know how to do. I actually think pretty hard about this stuff, and like to take the time to outline the ideas behind the program.

So here goes. As readers know, I’ve been thinking out loud a lot about the future of the Internet, and whether the rise of “walled gardens” like Facebook and Apple’s iOS (what I call AppWorld) are ultimately the future the web. My short answer is yes….and. By that I mean that the Internet, which began as an open, gatekeeper-free platform where anyone could hang a shingle, will ultimately interconnect with these walled gardens – there’s just too much value in what I call the “ecosystem approach” for the opposite to occur. I framed two major forces driving the Internet today: The independent web (sites unaffiliated with major platforms like Google or Facebook), and the dependent web (major platforms which create a valuable “logged in” experience that changes “depending” on who you are.).

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