John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 11, 2010

This past week I spent a fair amount of time in New York, meeting with smart folks who collectively have been responsible for funding and/or starting companies as varied as DoubleClick, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Federated Media (my team), and scores of others. I also met with some very smart execs at American Express, a company that has a history of innovation, in particular as it relates to working with startups in the Internet space.

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Collaboration 2.0

DECEMBER 16, 2010

Whether you are job hunting or working, the challenges of personal control of your online personality at work, societally and socially have never been more complex. A hundred years ago we had virtually no data associated with us beyond possibly owning a passport, a few pieces of legal paperwork and maybe some national security files about us we [.

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Robert's Db2

DECEMBER 30, 2010

By now, you've probably seen and/or heard a good deal of information about DB2 10 for z/OS , which was announced and became generally available this past October. There is indeed a lot of big news associated with this latest release of IBM's mainframe relational database management system: reduced CPU costs, support for temporal data (tables with system and/or business time dimensions), a huge increase in the number of threads that can be concurrently active, a migration path to universal tables

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Hunton Privacy

DECEMBER 20, 2010

The Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams has issued the following statement about the U.S. Department of Commerce’s “Green Paper” released on December 16 : The Centre for Information Policy Leadership congratulates the Department of Commerce on the release of its Green Paper, entitled “Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework,” and commends the Department for the extensive outreach and research it conducted to inform

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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

CGI

DECEMBER 17, 2010

Why Understanding Culture Is So Important in Collaborative Innovation. ravi.kumarv@cgi.com. Fri, 12/17/2010 - 07:00. Innovation is an over-used, misunderstood concept, despite being talked about by most companies in most markets. Today, it has often come to mean creativity or invention and is often strongly associated with technological developments or research.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 2, 2010

Yesterday's post on Google having an algorithmic "opinion" about which reviews were negative or positive sparked a thoughtful response from Matt Cutts, Google's point person on search quality, and for me raised a larger question about Google's past, present, and future. In his initial comment (which is *his* opinion, not Google's, I am sure), Cutts remarked: ".the "opinion" in that sentence refers to the fact our web search results are protected speech in the First Amendment sense.

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Collaboration 2.0

DECEMBER 9, 2010

The Salesforce platform is starting to fill out into a stack that is a credible threat to other enterprise players well beyond their core sales roots. The Dreamforce event has been very accessible online - I spent a couple of hours at San Francisco’s Moscone Center earlier this week and have been keeping an eye [.

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Preservica

DECEMBER 3, 2010

At recent conferences there has been a lot of talk about whether formats really do become obsolete (see for example [link] and thus whether the research that has taken place to address such obsolescence is actually needed? In this posting, I'll address both these questions. Do formats become obsolete? To address the first question we first need to ask ourselves what does an "obsolete" format really mean?

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Hunton Privacy

DECEMBER 20, 2010

On December 18, 2010 , President Obama signed into law the “Red Flag Program Clarification Act of 2010” (S.3987), which amends the Fair Credit Reporting Act with respect to the applicability of identity theft guidelines to creditors. The law limits the scope of the Federal Trade Commission’s Identity Theft Red Flags Rule (“Red Flags Rule”), which requires “creditors” and “financial institutions” that have “covered accounts” to develop and implement written identity theft prevention programs to

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Risk

CGI

DECEMBER 2, 2010

Effective Ideas Don’t Need To Be Complicated. ravi.kumarv@cgi.com. Thu, 12/02/2010 - 07:00. Just reading an article in the Economist sent to me by a colleague at Logica about the use of text messaging in developing countries to verify the authenticity of medicine given to patients, which is helping combat the counterfeiters drugs trade. Often the simplest of ideas are the most effective because people just focus on the problem they are trying to solve, rather than start from a technology perspec

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Robert's Db2

DECEMBER 2, 2010

A DB2 DBA friend of mine recently told me of a problem he'd encountered in reorganizing a single partition of a partition-by-growth (PBG) tablespace: the online REORG job failed with an out-of-space condition pertaining to the partition's shadow data set. The topic of partition-level REORGs of PBG tablespaces is one that I find interesting; thus, this post, in which I'll explain why my friend hit that out-of-space situation and how he resolved it.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Wow, I've never seen this before. Check out Google's post , responding to the New York Times story about a bad actor who had figured out a way to make a living leveraging what he saw as holes in Google's approach to ranking. How Google ranks is the subject of increasing scrutiny, including and particularly in Europe. From Google's blog: Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looke

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Collaboration 2.0

DECEMBER 6, 2010

By 2014 internet traffic will triple in volume to 64 exabytes a month globally, according to Cisco’s (probably conservative) estimate, but your ability to filter the tsunamai of online information it is so easy for you to personally invoke is a much larger issue. My main email inbox is ground zero for the communications flowing in [.

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Security

Preservica

DECEMBER 9, 2010

Some people may have seen that David Rosenthal from Stanford has posted on his blog ( [link] ) commenting on my previous post here. He makes a number of interesting points that I thought I should follow up on. Digital Preservation Architectures. First of all he states that his main argument is not that formats don't become obsolete but "basing the entire architecture of digital preservation systems on preparing for an event, format obsolescence, which is unlikely to happen to the vast majority o

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Hunton Privacy

DECEMBER 17, 2010

As previously reported , on December 16, 2010, the U.S. Department of Commerce released its Green Paper “aimed at promoting consumer privacy online while ensuring the Internet remains a platform that spurs innovation, job creation, and economic growth.”. During a press teleconference earlier that morning announcing the release of the Green Paper, Secretary Gary Locke commented on the Green Paper’s recommendation of adopting a baseline commercial data privacy framework, or a “privacy bill of righ

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John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 27, 2010

Related: Predictions 2010. 2009 Predictions. 2009 How I Did. 2008 Predictions. 2008 How I Did. 2007 Predictions. 2007 How I Did 2006 Predictions 2006 How I Did 2005 Predictions 2005 How I Did 2004 Predictions. 2004 How I Did. Well, it's that time of year again, time to see how well, or poorly, I did predicting events in the past year. This is my "keep myself honest" post, next week, I hope, I'll post my predictions for 2011.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 3, 2010

Yesterday I posted what was pretty much an offhand question - Is RSS Dead ? I had been working on the FM Signal , a roundup of the day's news I post over at the FM Blog. A big part of editing that daily roundup is spent staring into my RSS reader, which culls about 100 or so feeds for me. I realized I've been staring into an RSS reader for the better part of a decade now, and I recalled the various posts I'd recently seen (yes, via my RSS reader) about the death of RSS.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 8, 2010

I'm pleased to formally announce Federated Media's upcoming Signal Series - three full-day conferences in three great cities. Born from FM's annual Conversational Marketing Summit and my daily Signal newsletter , the Signal conference series focuses on one key topic in one city at a time. These three events will culminate in our annual CM Summit in New York next June during Internet Week.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 22, 2010

This has become something of a tradition at Searchblog (well, OK, it's the second time in three years), in which I review the year in posts and note those of which I am particularly proud. For me it's a way to remember what I've been on about, and catalog some of my sketches for further work (perhaps as a book, ahem ). So in chronological order, here are the posts I liked from these past 12 months, with some commentary as well: January.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 23, 2010

I'm pleased to announce that the preliminary agenda for our first ever Signal conference, Signal LA, is live and online. Signal is FM's conference series highlighting one major trend in digital media and marketing, in one city, on one day. First up is Los Angeles, Feb 8th, with a focus on Content Marketing. Check out the amazing lineup : Register today , I expect this to sell out.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 2, 2010

Almost immediately after the Web 2.0 Summit last month, Tim O'Reilly and I sat down at an FM event and debriefed each other on what we learned. Here's the video.

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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

John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 16, 2010

Remember back in the halcyon days of the web, when bloggers shared a sense of community with each other, linking back and forth to each other as a matter of social grace and conversation, as opposed to calculated consideration? Well, if not, that's how it was back in 2003 or so, when I started blogging. Now, that signal (who linked to you recently) is gone, and honestly, not just for blogging.

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IT 71

John Battelle's Searchblog

DECEMBER 7, 2010

It's been a while since I've updated you on my Signal newsletter, which I do each day. Here's the last week or so of them. If you want to read it in RSS, here's the feed: [link]. Tues. Signal: Does Your Media Have an Address? Monday Signal: Clearly, It’s Not About The Money. Friday Signal: Nazis From Space! Thurs. Signal: Go On, Opt Out. Just Don’t Come Cryin’ To Me ….

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Hunton Privacy

DECEMBER 17, 2010

On November 25, 2010, the German data protection authorities responsible for the private sector (also known as the “Düsseldorfer Kreis”) issued a resolution on the minimum requirements for the qualifications and independence of company data protection officers (“DPOs”). This initiative follows inspections carried out within companies that revealed a generally insufficient level of expertise among DPOs given data processing complexities and the requirements set by the Federal Data Protection Act

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Hunton Privacy

DECEMBER 17, 2010

On December 14, 2010, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled in United States v. Warshak that a “subscriber enjoys a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of emails” stored, sent or received through a commercial internet service provider (“ISP”). According to the court, the government must have a search warrant before it can compel a commercial ISP to turn over the contents of a subscriber’s emails.

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Hunton Privacy

DECEMBER 16, 2010

On December 16, 2010, the U.S. Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force issued its “Green Paper” on privacy, entitled “ Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework.” The Green Paper outlines Commerce’s privacy recommendations and proposed initiatives, which contemplate the establishment of enforceable codes of conduct, collaboration among privacy stakeholders, and the creation of a Privacy Policy Office in the Department of Commerce.

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Hunton Privacy

DECEMBER 16, 2010

Adam Kardash from Heenan Blaikie LLP in Canada reports that Bill C-28, the Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam bill, received Royal Assent on December 15, 2010. The centerpiece of the Act are prohibitions aimed at preventing spam, but the law also includes regulations to combat phishing and protect users from online malware. Specifically, among other things, the legislation would prohibit: sending commercial electronic messages (including emails and text messages) without consent (subject to c

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Hunton Privacy

DECEMBER 10, 2010

On December 10, 2010, Senior Advisor to U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), Daniel Sepulveda, briefed the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams LLP (the “Centre”) members on Senator Kerry’s forthcoming privacy legislation. The bill, which will be introduced next Congress, aims to establish a regulatory framework for the comprehensive protection of individuals’ personal data that authorizes rulemakings by the Federal Trade Commission.

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