Year Zero: This Is What the Beach Was Made For

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=johnbattelles-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0345534417&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

It’s summertime, and if you’re not already lying on a beach somewhere, I’ve got a good reason for you to go: My friend Rob Reid’s new novel is out today, and it’s absolutely tailor made for beach reading. It’s called Year Zero, and it’s a hilarious send up of the music industry, mixed, naturally, with a ripping yarn about aliens, romance, and intergalatic politics.

Rob let me read an early-ish draft of the book, and I loved it. It’s his first novel, years in the making, and it’s a masterstroke.

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Halfway Through The Year: How’re The Predictions Doing?

It’s time to review how my Predictions 2012 are faring, now that half the year has slipped by (that was fast, no?).

One thing that stands out is the timing wrt Twitter – my first two predictions were about the company, and now that I think about it, given the news just this week (and the attendant debate), I should have realized how the two could be in direct conflict with each other. It all makes for some interesting chin stroking, which I’m busy doing while on vacation – fishing the Rio Blanco up above Meeker in Colorado. Yes, you may now give me shit for writing that.

But to the review: I’ll take them one at a time:

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Google’s “Mute” Button: Why Didn’t I Think Of That? Oh, Wait…

One of my pet peeves about our industry is how slowly we change – I understand it takes a long time to gather consensus (it took three years to get AdChoices rolled out, for example) – but man, why don’t the big players, like Google, innovate a bit more when it comes to display advertising?

Well, yesterday Google did just that, announcing a “mute this ad” feature that it will roll out across its network over the next few months. The feature does what you might expect it to do – it stops a particular ad from “following” you around the web. It will look like this:

 

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How Not To Post A Comment

Recently my site has been hit with a ton of “manual spam” – folks who are paid to post short comments in the hope they’ll appear and drive pagerank back to various sites (or perhaps just increase their or their clients’ visibility.) It’s not hard to kill these comments, though it’s a bit of an irritant when they pile up. I don’t really mind, because their full-blown amateur-hour earnestness is pretty entertaining. Besides leaving chuckleworthy comments like “Facebook now 100 billion company there big really now”, the spammers also leave behind their user handles, which are simply priceless. Enjoy:

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It’s Hard to Lay Fallow

I’ll admit it, I’m one of those people who has a Google News alert set for my own name. Back in the day, it meant a lot more than it does now – the search results used to pick up blog mentions as well as “regular” news mentions, and before FacebookLand took over our world (and eschewed Google’s), a news alert was a pretty reliable way to find out what folks might be saying about you or your writing on any given day.

Like most folks who maintain a reasonably public conversation, I now watch Twitter’s @replies far more than I do Google news alerts. Of course, Twitter doesn’t catch everything, so I never unsubscribed from my Google News alert.

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Ross to Bolinas via McCurdy

Saturday presented an opportunity – two beach parties on the other side of where we live, the first out in Bolinas, a small, quirky beach town that values its isolation from the rest of Marin, and the second at Muir Beach, some ten miles by road south of Bolinas.

The opportunity was this: I got to ride to Bolinas, and take in some new trails I’ve always wanted to ride.

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When You’re Stuck, Go Out And Talk To People

Yay! It's a nameless hotel ballroom! But the people who fill it are what matter...

I had one of those kind of days yesterday that reaffirm my belief in our industry, in its people, and in the work I do.

It’s not easy to sit here and write, much less write a book, and I’ll admit lately my faith (and my productivity) has flagged – there’s so much work left to do, so little time in which to do it, and so many other things – Federated Media, conferences, board positions, family, new business ideas – competing for my attention.

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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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Good Ride, Good Wine: The Debut of “Four Letter Words”

Many of you have asked me to not mix business with the rest of my life, and thanks to my pals at Blend Interactive, it’s finally happened. I have a new section of my site, which I’m calling “Four Letter Words” – mostly photo posts about life, wine, and bike(s). Consider this the first post, in which I’ll catch you up on some good drinks and rides over the past few weeks. Searchblog RSS subscribers who take the main feed will NOT see these posts, but you can sign up to get them either as a separate stream, or with all other posts, on my feeds page.

First up, let’s get a bit of wine entered into my personal Database of Intentions (and I’ll pin these to my board as well). We had this nifty Chappellet 2002 Cab last month, and I’d encourage anyone within reach of a bottle to open it, immediately.

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Google’s Transparency Report: A Good And Troubling Thing

A couple of days ago Google released its latest “Transparency Report,” part of the company’s ongoing commitment to disclose requests by individuals, corporations, and governments to change what users see in search results and other Google properties such as YouTube.

The press coverage of Google’s report was copious – far more than the prior two years, and for good reason. This week’s disclosure included Google’s bi-annual report of government takedown requests (corporate and individual requests are updated in near real time). The news was not comforting.

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