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Announcing Web 2 Summit 2011: The Data Frame

If you've been reading my musings these past few months, you may have noticed an increasing fascination with data. Who owns it (the creator, the service, both? Who has access to it – ISPs? Device makers? Marketers? The government? And how are we as an industry leveraging data to…

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If you’ve been reading my musings these past few months, you may have noticed an increasing fascination with data. Who owns it (the creator, the service, both? Who has access to it – ISPs? Device makers? Marketers? The government? And how are we as an industry leveraging data to create entirely new classes of services?

Well, expect a lot more musing here, because (finally!) we’re ready to announce the theme for the Web 2 Summit, 2011, and it’s this: The Data Frame. From my overview, just posted on the site:

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This Past Week’s Signals

Herewith and below: Friday Signal: What's Yer 20? Apple and Google Know! » Thursday Signal: War, Death, Skynet, Pot Weds. Signal: This Is Your Brain, On Facebook Tuesday Signal: We Were All Sophomores, Once And Again Monday Signal: What *Is* The Future of Media?…

FMsignal-sidebar.gifHerewith and below:

Friday Signal: What’s Yer 20? Apple and Google Know! »

Thursday Signal: War, Death, Skynet, Pot

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Plato On Facebook

One of my first "big books" out of college was James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science and it still resonates with me, though it's been so long I think I'm due for a re-read. In any case, the next book up in my ongoing self-education is Gleick's The…

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One of my first “big books” out of college was James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science and it still resonates with me, though it’s been so long I think I’m due for a re-read. In any case, the next book up in my ongoing self-education is Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. It’s long. It’s dense. It’s good, so far. In fact, there’s already a passage, a quote from Plato, that has struck me as germane to the ongoing threads I attempt to weave here on this site (even if all I’m really making is a lame friendship bracelet – pun intended, as you will see).

Early in the book, Gleick narrates the birth of the written word, which if you think about it (and he certainly has), is quite an extraordinary event. Turns out Plato, who was literate (and therefore quotable today), was not a fan of the written word. His mentor Socrates, Gleick reminds us, was illiterate. Well, OK, that’s not fair. Socrates wasn’t illiterate, he was, in Gleick’s words, a “nonwriter.” In any case, the passage that struck me is Plato speaking about the written word, quoted in “The Information”:

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Book Review: In The Plex

Last night I had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Levy, and old colleague from Wired, on the subject of his new book: In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. The venue was the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, and I think they'll have the audio…

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=johnbattelles-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1416596585&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Last night I had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Levy, and old colleague from Wired, on the subject of his new book: In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. The venue was the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, and I think they’ll have the audio link up soon.

Steven’s interview was a lot like his book – full of previously untold anecdotes and stories that rounded out pieces of Google’s history that many of us only dreamt of knowing about. When I was reporting my book,The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, I had limited access to folks at Google, and *really* limited access to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Levy had the opposite, spending more than two years inside the company and seeing any number of things that journalists would have killed to see in years past.

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Preliminary Agenda Is Live For CM Summit, Sign Up Now, It Always Sells Out…

Federated Media is proud to present the sixth annual Conversational Marketing Summit, June 6-7 at the fabulous Hudson Theater in the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Times Square. The preliminary agenda is now up, more is coming, but you can get a pretty good sense of the lineup – it's…

hudson theater_image.jpg Federated Media is proud to present the sixth annual Conversational Marketing Summit, June 6-7 at the fabulous Hudson Theater in the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Times Square. The preliminary agenda is now up, more is coming, but you can get a pretty good sense of the lineup – it’s amazing.
This year’s CM Summit will bridge the conversations of FM’s regional Signal conferences on one stage, bringing together the topics of content marketing, location services, mobile, data, and the real-time web onto one stage.

See our initial agenda, now live on the site.

The rise of digital platforms present massive opportunities, but one significant challenge: finding the signal in an increasingly noisy ecosystem of sites, apps, and services. Audiences fragmented between usage on Facebook and Twitter are constantly faced with new services like Groupon, Foursquare, Color, and SimpleGeo. How can we, as marketers, help our customers find the signal that’s right for them? CM Summit we will dive into a day and half of rapid-fire case studies, insightful one-on-one conversations, and dynamic High Order Bits that will help brands, agencies, and marketers better understand consumer trends, experiences and industry signals.  

Join the conversation! This event always sells out.
REGISTER TODAY and get your early-bird pricing, available only until this Friday, April 22. Special thanks to our event sponsors: RIM, AT&T, Google, cms2011-register-now.jpgQuantcast, Demand Media, Facebook, Outbrain, Pandora, R2integrated, Slideshare, Yahoo!, AOL, Mobile Roadie, Spiceworks, Ustream; and our partners: IAB, Mashable, SMAC, and paidContent.
We look forward to seeing you this June 6-7 in New York!
Please visit our site for hotel booking details, a full list of speakers, and more event details.

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The Next 100 Years: A Review

For my next book (no really, I'm starting to work on it in my copious spare time), I've begun to read in earnest. I've got a rather long list, and I'm not sure I'll get to them all, but for those that I do read, I plan to do…

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For my next book (no really, I’m starting to work on it in my copious spare time), I’ve begun to read in earnest. I’ve got a rather long list, and I’m not sure I’ll get to them all, but for those that I do read, I plan to do a quick review here, if for no other reason than to prove I read the damn thing, and had an opinion.

Because the next book is a report from the future, I figured I may as well start with the NYT bestseller The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman, a fellow who apparently is the leader of a consulting company his publisher calls “the shadow CIA”. (And yes, that link is an Amazon affiliate link. I’m trying to make a few bucks to pay for the sorry state of publishing overall. Someday I’ll write a post about the process of selling my next book, but that day is not today).

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The Past Week’s Signals

Herewith, for all you RSS readers of Searchblog, is that other thing I do every day of the work week, Signal. If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the FM home page (upper right box). Monday Signal: What *Is*…

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Herewith, for all you RSS readers of Searchblog, is that other thing I do every day of the work week, Signal. If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the FM home page (upper right box).

Monday Signal: What *Is* The Future of Media? (Today’s Signal)

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A Funny Coincidence, or a Glimpse of the Future?

I took a ride today, and it was gorgeous as usual. That's not my story, but it's certainly a part of it. As I rode I used the AllSports GPS app on my iphone to track my progress (guys, if you're reading, your upload is busted). I knew I'd be…

I took a ride today, and it was gorgeous as usual. That’s not my story, but it’s certainly a part of it.

As I rode I used the AllSports GPS app on my iphone to track my progress (guys, if you’re reading, your upload is busted).

I knew I’d be able to see the whole ride on Google Maps later, which is cool. It also tracks stuff like distance, vertical, speed, etc. Tons of fun.

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Join Us For the Sixth Annual CM Summit in New York During Internet Week

We're very excited to announce the theme and initial speaker lineup for our 6th annual Conversational Marketing Summit. The Summit will take place June 6-7th in New York City, at the Hudson Theater and Millennium Broadway Hotel. Our theme is Finding the Signal. Speakers at our annual anchor event…


We’re very excited to announce the theme and initial speaker lineup for our 6th annual Conversational Marketing Summit. The Summit will take place June 6-7th in New York City, at the Hudson Theater and Millennium Broadway Hotel.
Our theme is Finding the Signal. Speakers at our annual anchor event include Laura Desmond, CEO of Starcom MediaVest, Tim Westergren, Founder of Pandora, David Karp, Founder of Tumblr, Antonio Lucio, CMO of Visa, and Judy McGrath, Chair and CEO of MTV Networks. And that’s just for starters…see the full (and growing) list here.
We’ve taken our theme in the spirit of our regional Signal event series. Each Signal focuses on a key new area of digital marketing: Location, Real Time, Content, and Social. Finding the signal in an increasingly noisy eco-system of sites, mobile apps and services is increasingly difficult. At the CM Summit, we’ll cut through the clutter and offer up the very best and brightest for two robust days of case studies, insightful one-on-one conversations and compelling introductions of new products, start-ups and services.
Please join leading agencies, marketers, platforms and entrepreneurs in our industry’s most rigorous and thought-provoking annual gathering, the Conversational Marketing Summit.
Early-bird registration is open until April 22. Don’t wait, this event always sells out.
I look forward to seeing you in New York in June.
A very special thanks to our sponsor partners who make all this rich conversation and exploration possible: RIM, Google, Quantcast, Demand Media, Pandora, R2integrated, Slideshare,Yahoo, AOL, Mobile Roadie, Spiceworks and Ustream.

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Go Forth And Invest

This headline caught my eye this morning: US VCs Raised $7.7 Billion In Q1, Highest Influx In A Decade. Of course, if you've been following the news in our industry, you know there's a raging debate on over whether we are in "another bubble." This news will of course…

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This headline caught my eye this morning: US VCs Raised $7.7 Billion In Q1, Highest Influx In A Decade. Of course, if you‘ve been following the news in our industry, you know there’s a raging debate on over whether we are in “another bubble.” This news will of course be interpreted as evidence that, in fact, we are back to bubbly levels…after all, one decade ago was when we had our last big hurrah, right? When VCs gave mostly incompetent founders way too much money, and the whole thing came crashing down around us.

Well, yes….and ten years ago, there was no way our industry, social culture, or technological infrastructure was ready for the big ideas VCs wanted to fund.

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