John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 21, 2010

Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we've come to call the web? I believe the answer is yes. I'm fascinated with how our society's new norms and mores are developing - as well as the architectural patterns which emerge as we build what, at first blush, feels like a rather chaotic jumble of companies, platforms, services, devices and behaviors.

Marketing 111

Marketing IT Content services Personal data 111

Collaboration 2.0

OCTOBER 25, 2010

The United States Department of State (often referred to as the State Department), is responsible for the international relations of the United States and equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries. The Department was created in 1789 and was the first executive department established. Currently lead by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the department is [.

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Robert's Db2

OCTOBER 29, 2010

I only got to a couple of sessions on this, the last day of IBM's 2010 Information on Demand conference (held in Las Vegas), but they were good ones. Below are some of the highlights of each. Back to the future: early experiences with temporal data processing in DB2 10 for z/OS. In this session, Shawn Gravelle, IT architect at State Farm (a large insurance company), talked about State Farm's work in testing the new temporal data support delivered by DB2 10.

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Analytics Libraries Insurance Archiving 48

Hunton Privacy

OCTOBER 29, 2010

On October 27, 2010, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (the “CFTC”) issued two notices of proposed rulemaking (“NPRMs”), citing Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (“GLBA”) privacy rules, and marketing and data disposal rules of the Fair Credit Report Act (“FCRA”). The proposed rules come in the wake of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which places two new categories of covered entities ( i.e. , “swap dealers” and “major swap participants”) under the CFTC’s jurisdict

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Speaker: Aarushi Kansal, AI Leader & Author and Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO at Aggregage

Software leaders who are building applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often find it a challenge to achieve reliability. It’s no surprise given the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. To effectively create reliable LLM-based (often with RAG) applications, extensive testing and evaluation processes are crucial. This often ends up involving meticulous adjustments to prompts.

IT

Preservica

OCTOBER 22, 2010

Bill Steel, Jon Tilbury and I have just returned from a very useful informational tour of US State Archives and leading US academic institutions. The purpose of the trip was to gain a better understand of the position of the State Archives with regards to long term digital preservation. We had some very engaging conversations in California, Minnesota, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia and also with the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

Archiving 40

Archiving Digital preservation Libraries Risk 40

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 12, 2010

Today I was in a meeting with a number of consultants to a very large technology company. Their job: market research, essentially. They called to ask me my thoughts on the media and technology world, in particular as it might play out in the next five or so years. They were responsible for helping the Fortune 50 company navigate an increasingly complicated world.

Marketing 111

Marketing IT 111

Collaboration 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2010

If you follow the soccer world you’ll probably be aware of the high noon around the storied Liverpool Football Club, seventh in the The Deloitte Football Money League (a ranking of football clubs by revenue) whose current owners, messrs Hicks & Gillett, are currently two of the most hated people in England. Hicks and Gillett purchased [.

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Robert's Db2

OCTOBER 17, 2010

I've written a number of entries, here and in my old Catterall Consulting blog , on various topics related to DB2 buffer pools (I posted the most recent of these just a few weeks ago). Often, when I write about DB2 buffer pools (or talk about them in presentations or when working with DB2 users), I have sizing in mind -- this because 1) undersized buffer pools are the DB2 performance inhibitor that I most frequently encounter, and 2) many DB2 people haven't yet thought about leveraging 64-bit ad

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Hunton Privacy

OCTOBER 28, 2010

David Vladeck, Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection of the Federal Trade Commission, today provided a high-level outline of the Commission’s forthcoming report on the future of privacy. Speaking at the 32nd International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Jerusalem, Vladeck said the report reflected two broad conclusions.

Privacy 40

Privacy Education Data collection Risk 40

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Risk

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 29, 2010

( image ) Recently I was watching television with my wife, a baseball game if memory serves, when an advertisement caught my eye. It was for a regional restaurant chain (not a national one like Jack in the Box). The ad was pretty standard fare - a call to action (go now!) and a clear value proposition: the amazing amount of tasty-looking food you could have for a bargain price.

Marketing 98

Marketing Privacy IT Access 98

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 20, 2010

Today Apple announced a move that, on first blush, seems to push the Mac, its seminal and defining product, into the iWorld. You know, the world of Apple-controlled, closed, manicured gardens a la iPhone, iPod, iPad, and iTunes. There's going to be an "app store" for Macs, and the iPad OS is going to be integrated in the next release of the Mac. If anything, ever , will make me leave Mac for good (and the companies I've started have purchased literally thousands of them), it will be the integrat

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IT 95

Collaboration 2.0

OCTOBER 3, 2010

When you work in a large company, there’s often an awareness that your email is accessible to your employer so that communication method tends to be used very conservatively for business communication. This is based on past experiences, and now that email is a pretty mature medium these days most of literate society understands the [.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 13, 2010

As you know, part of visualizing the them for this year's Web 2 Summit included a map I dreamt up with a crew of possibly inebriated fellow travelers. I've been really pleased with the response to the maps' first iteration - we're closing in on nearly 100K unique visitors who have spent nearly six minutes each playing with the maps various features, which include two levels of detail, threaded location-specific commenting, and a cool visualization of key Internet players' moves into competitive

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IT 92

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Security

Collaboration 2.0

OCTOBER 28, 2010

My new MacBook Air has arrived, shipped from Shanghai on October 23rd after I ordered it post ‘Apple Special Event‘ and arriving in San Francisco on the 27th. First impressions: as light as an empty ringbinder and impressively fast. You can see the 11 second boot time in the short video above, where it sits next [.

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IT 90

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 7, 2010

( image ) I'm fascinated by the tracks we leave online, and their implications both in real time (better search results, real time advertising ecosystems, new forms of social behavior etc) and in the long view. Those of you who read my book may recall my epilog, where I opined on the concept of immortality through the Database of Intentions. This study ( via CNet ) is fascinating - it shows that nearly every kid in the US has an online record by age two, thanks to parents posting pictures.

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IT 88

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 21, 2010

( photo ) As I do each year, I'll be thinking out loud here about some of the key interviews I'll be doing on stage at Web 2 next month. Opening the conference is Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Given our theme of "Points of Control," I can't think of a better way to start - of all the major players in our industry, Google stands alone in both its ambition as well as its power.

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Marketing Cloud Privacy IT 87

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 26, 2010

Who exactly is Yuri Milner ? I've heard this question asked quite a bit over the past year, as the Russian financier and entrepreneur has amassed significant holdings in key US Internet players - from Groupon to Zynga to Facebook (where he now owns around 10% of outstanding shares). His company, DST, has more than a billion invested in these social media players.

Marketing 82

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John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 24, 2010

Gwyneth Jones , the Daring Librarian on Flickr, recently posted a terrific visual aid for using Twitter. Humor, color, something other than a long list – Brava. This is too good not to share (and she had put it as Creative Commons for sharing. Excellent. Building awareness of, skills for using and discernment of how and when to use digital tools has become a pervasive part of my work.

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IT 82

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 28, 2010

Continuing my tour of selected speakers at Web 2 this year, I alight upon RIM's Jim Balsillie , the man responsible for guiding the Blackberry brand through the Skylla of Apple and Kharybdis of Android - or is that the other way 'round? In any case, RIM has long been the king of enterprise smart phones, but that grip is arguably slipping. However, a suite of new products and an invigorated approach to developers is showing promise.

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IT 82

Collaboration 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2010

Whether a business is a sports club or a company like Harley Davidson motorcycles, having people who live what you stand for is a hugely desirable asset, but which is much more fragile than many people realize.

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Collaboration 2.0

OCTOBER 19, 2010

I got my paper copy of (US) Foreign Policy magazine in the mail yesterday and was startled by Philip Longman’s cover story ‘Old World‘, which details how global population is rapidly getting older… …It’s true that the world’s population overall will increase by roughly one-third over the next 40 years, from 6.9 to 9.1 [.

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Paper IT 77

Speaker: Nicholas Zeisler, CX Strategist & Fractional CXO

The first step in a successful Customer Experience endeavor (or for that matter, any business proposition) is to find out what’s wrong. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it! 💡 That’s where the Voice of the Customer (VoC) comes in. Today, far too many brands do VoC simply because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do; that’s what all their competitors do.

Customer Experience

Collaboration 2.0

OCTOBER 12, 2010

Morten Hansen asks ‘Who Should be Your Chief Collaboration Officer?’ in his blog on the Harvard Business Review (a website which has become a sort of business Oprah self help style site recently). I like Hansen’s sober and sensible book ‘Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results‘, one of the few [.

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Collaboration 2.0

OCTOBER 20, 2010

Here’s a very revealing clip of Cisco CEO John Chambers at the Gartner Symposium being interviewed by Gartner analysts Mark Raskino and Ken Dulaney in front of 7,000 CIOs and IT directors. Understandably, given the audience, the focus is on IT budget spend, but note how Chambers answers the IT product question “what is the [.

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IT 75

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 22, 2010

I'm particularly pleased to welcome Baidu CEO Robin Li to the Web 2 stage this year. Li is a familiar Valley startup success story - he left a promising career at search pioneer Infoseek to found a startup that has rocketed to multi-billion dollar valuations and global business fame. The big difference? Li did it in China. A one year chart of Baidu's stock , shown at left, certainly tells a story of success.

Marketing 69

Marketing Education Government IT 69

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 22, 2010

( image ) Continuing my journey through the highlights of our forthcoming Web 2 Summit (here's my initial take on Eric Schmidt ), today I ask for your help in interviewing Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. I am particularly pleased Bartz is coming, first because she's very good in conversation (and yes, often salty), and second because she fell ill the day I was to talk with her last year on stage, and we all missed the chance to hear her then.

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Analytics

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 28, 2010

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has come to Web 2 as many times as Mark Zuckerberg, and like the Facebook CEO, he's had one heckuva year. From the fallout with Apple over Flash to the rumors of a Microsoft takeover (which he's denied ), Narayen has had more than his share of challenges this past 12 months. So it should be interesting to hear what he has to say in two weeks time.

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Cloud Marketing Privacy IT 65

John Battelle's Searchblog

OCTOBER 27, 2010

Readers of Searchblog already know that Web 2 is coming in less than three weeks, what with all my missives here about Schmidt, Zuckerberg, Bartz, and others. But what I haven't told you about is the "Web2 Debrief" that my company, Federated Media, is doing after the conference. The Debrief is an evening event directly after the last day of the show, featuring Tim O'Reilly and myself in conversation about the previous three days.

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Marketing IT 63

Hunton Privacy

OCTOBER 25, 2010

On October 11, 2010, the French Data Protection Authority (the “CNIL”) released guidance (the “Guidance”) on data protection issues related to the outsourcing of data processing activities to non-EU countries ( Les questions posées pour la protection des données personnelles par l’externalisation hors de l’Union européenne des traitements informatiques ).

Personal data 40

Personal data Security 40