John Battelle's Search Blog Thoughts on the intersection of tech, business, and society.

Bluesky, Twitter, and “The Open Network”

Emily Liu at Bluesky has a timely post that I’d like to respond to. (Back in the day, when blogging was a thing, we did a lot of this – someone would write a thoughtful piece, then many others would write responses. These organic, mostly high-quality “backlinks” formed the backbone of Google’s early web dominance, but I digress, somewhat, because it’s all related).

In any case, Liu’s piece, entitled “Benefits of an Open Network,” uses a series of simple metaphors to explain how Bluesky is different from other social networks. Most readers already know this, but just in case, here’s the core of it: Bluesky is an app built on an open protocol, which means Bluesky users can engage with any other app which conforms to that protocol. In other words, Bluesky lives in an open network, albeit a rather limited one at the moment. Here’s Liu:

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Apparently, Brand Safety Is Dead. That’s Good For News, No?

If you want to understand where the zeitgeist is headed in Silicon Valley, you have to study The Information, the clubby, well-sourced favorite read of Valley oligarchs. The publication made its reputation by commanding lofty subscription prices back when nearly all tech news was free; it now enjoys multiple revenue streams, including advertising, events, and a “pro” version for $750-$999 a year. I’ve been a subscriber (of the “regular” variety) for years, and I probably always will be.

That said, every so often The Information runs a story that is so clearly aligned with the interests of the plutocracy it begs to be called out. “Advertisers Retreat From Social Media Policing” is its latest entry in this category. The piece opens with a stupendous straw man: “For several years, a favorite tactic of progressives agitating against social media and conservative news outlets has been pressuring marketers to pull their ads.”

Don’t Repeal Section 230. Clarify It.

The 26 words that “changed the internet.” Image NYT.

(This is a column I wrote for Signal360, P&G’s companion publication for its Signal conference, which I co-produce. It’s always fraught to weigh in on this fundamental piece of Internet legislation, so I welcome your thoughts!)

It’s difficult to find anything Congress agrees on these days, but when it comes to the much-misunderstood policy known as “Section 230,” it’s unanimous: this piece of 20th-century legislation needs to be fixed. And while such a fix may be needed, it could have a significant impact on how every company goes to market.

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Technology, Humanity, and the Existential Test

I’m still digging through some of the pieces I posted at the now defunct NewCo Shift, and found this piece, adapted from a talk I gave at the Thrival Humans X Tech conference in Pittsburgh back in September of 2018. I was alarmed by trends that I saw intensifying – a push by the tech industry to deregulate their power, the growing influence of private company algorithms on public domains, the rise of autocratic politics and “technocapitalism.” Six years later, it feels like I could give this talk again today, nearly word for word – and it’d be even more relevant.

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Consume First, Deal with the Shit Later

https://dailymontanan.com/2021/06/12/big-bad-forest-clear-cutting-continues/

Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones) – 404 Media

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What’s SearchGPT Really About? Moving Past the Training Data Dilemma.

This morning we awoke to one story dominating the tech news landscape: OpenAI is “expanding into search,” launching SearchGPT, a prototype that appears to be a direct competitor to Google (and Bing and Perplexity, not that they really matter). But despite the voluminous coverage, my initial take is that once the hype cycle passes – I give it a day or two – OpenAI’s true goal will emerge: fixing the optics of its approach to training data.

The company doesn’t have the resources to take on Google on its core turf. So why announce SearchGPT now? This is speculation, but I’d wager it’s because the company is in a perilous place. It built its business – one that could lose up to $5 billion this year – by scarfing up the entire Internet, mostly without permission. It’s facing a serious backlash from both established publishers and governments. In response, it’s been busy cutting deals with as many partners as it can, and this search prototype feels driven by those optics.

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Introducing DOC

Late last year I wrote about my transition from being work-driven to being life-driven. It hit a chord – many of you are on similar journeys, particularly those of us who are looking toward, and past, middle age. Buried a couple of thousand words into that post, in the section about what I was up to after selling The Recount, was this line: “I’m helping to stand up a new kind of gathering at the intersection of science, medicine, and longevity.” My partners and I have spent the past six months developing that gathering, and I’m very proud to announce it’s got a name, a date, and most importantly, a program with a purpose.

My co-founders Dr. Jordan Shlain and Kevin Ryan and I have christened the community we’re forming DOC. Our inaugural gathering is October 24th – 26th at The Estate Yountville in Napa, California. DOC is invitation only and close to full, but if you’re interested in learning more, you can request an invite here.

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Ads, Ads Everywhere

The Times’s piece decries all the ads on TV. But is this a surprise?!

The advertising world is uncomplicated at its core, and utterly bewildering when seen from the outside. The easy bit stems from a simple axiom: Wherever you can find the attention of potential customers, you pay to get your message in front of them. That’s the essence of advertising: paying for attention. It gets complicated by the details – the medium, the message, the targeting, the tech – but wherever customers gather, advertising will follow. There’s simply too much money to be made for it to be otherwise.

So it was utterly unsurprising to learn, a few hours ago as I write this, that there will soon be ads on PayPal, driven by the data the company collects. PayPal recorded 6.5 billion payments in the first quarter of 2024 alone, according to the Journal. The company plans on creating what’s known as a “retail media network” allowing advertisers to leverage PayPal’s data to target users both on platform and off.

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