John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 1, 2009
Well, I knew this day would come. I've been ignoring friend requests on Facebook for a month or so because, well, my longstanding friending policy has backfired, and I'm now at my "friend limit" of 5000 (well, 5003, to be exact). This limit has been much discussed, and I'm not sure I can add anything to what has become a timeworn dialog. It is what it is, and to be honest, I think 5000, upon reflection, is way too high a number.
Collaboration 2.0
SEPTEMBER 2, 2009
McKinsey, the venerable management consulting company, has produced their second piece of ‘Web 2.0 in business‘ research this year. This is arguably a sign of the rapid maturation of the 2.0 technology and associated (and I’d argue more important) change management sector: the pricey consulting company presumably smells money given their focus for their prospects [.
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Hunton Privacy
SEPTEMBER 25, 2009
On September 23, 2009, the Information Commissioner’s Office (the “ICO”), the UK’s data protection regulator, issued a press release announcing the approval of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation’s binding corporate rules (“BCR”) under the new mutual recognition procedure. Hyatt is the first UK applicant to receive approval under the mutual recognition procedure.
Scary Beasts Security
SEPTEMBER 22, 2009
Preface: unless otherwise noted, the bugs discussed here were found via fuzzing by Will Dormann of CERT -- and my involvement was to fix them. In other news, I recently moved to work on the Chromium project / Google Chrome, which I'm very excited about. It is in this new role that this piece of work was conducted, as part of HTML5 features. I recently fixed a lot of security bugs in ffmpeg, across a subset of the supported containers and codecs.
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.
Positively RIM
SEPTEMBER 10, 2009
Last week, an unexpected overlap “slapped me upside the face”: A prime challenge of corporate Records & Information Management matched current events, political opinion and social tumult. First the RIM part: The Records Director of a large financial services corporation called to ask for help implementing an enterprise RIM program. Apparently, the program is well written, comprehensive, and ready to deploy.
Information Management Today brings together the best content for information management professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 30, 2009
Thanks to the BingTweets program, I've been asked to opine on search and decision engines. I'm kind of proud of my third and final post , which riffs on the first two and goes a bit, well, meta. I'd love to know what you guys think of it. I'll repost the first half here, and link back to the whole post on the original site that commissioned the work.
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 30, 2009
Today was a good day. I got to meet with serious leaders of the Internet economy, think Big Thoughts, and push my understanding of the world a bit. In short, I spent the day with folks I'll be interviewing onstage at Web 2 next month, but also, with people who run companies that in one way or another are key partners and players in the ecosystem I love and in which my company (FM) works.
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 11, 2009
I had an extraordinary day yesterday, in terms of who I got to talk with. Not only did I meet with several of FM's partners - two Fortune 500 marketers, a major platform partner, and a major blogger - I also got to watch the launch of Ad Stamp and the complete schedule for the Web 2 Summit. But a highlight of the day had to be my chance to steal 30 or so minutes with the founder of DigitalGlobe , Dr.
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 28, 2009
Jeff Immelt is the CEO of GE, one of the largest enterprises in the history of the world. Let that sink in for a moment, it's not a trivial concept. One of the largest enterprises ever devised by mankind - General Electric. The Microsoft, nay, the Google of the 20th century, and not content with that success, Immelt and his team of hundreds of thousands of employees is bending toward the task of once again redefining the nearly 150-year-old company.
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John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 14, 2009
This graph is a rough estimate, does not include use of Twitter apps, mobile, etc. It's just traffic to Twitter.com. But it has proven a reliable trending mechanism for Twitter. And it shows a leveling off. Now, I am going to go out on a limb and say the growth is probably mostly in mobile and third party instances. But still.
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 22, 2009
Tim A. - who I will interview at Web 2 next month - says the future of AOL is in content. This is a drum he's been beating for some time, and I still find it intriguing that the man responsible for advertising at Google, a famously technology-driven company, is now a content nut. The Chair of the FCC has reawakened the net neutrality debate and Comcast and Larry Lessig have already weighed in.
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 23, 2009
Thanks to those of you who chimed in, via email, Twitter, Facebook, and comments, on our first interview at Web 2 next month with Brian Roberts. Next up on day one is Evan Williams , CEO of Twitter. I've had the pleasure before (at FM's CM Summit), and posted on it here. But much has changed in the past year. Twitter has become a mainstream brand, grown to tens of millions of active users, and raised a lot more money (and speculation continues that it has raised even more, at a billion dollar va
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 9, 2009
Nielsen's first half Y/Y comparison numbers came out for the ad industry yesterday , and as one might expect, they were not pretty. The Web did not escape unscathed. SAI has a nice chart , reproduced here.
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John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 8, 2009
I live in the Bay area, a place that has been, in the past 20 or so years, woefully underserved by what those in the quality news business call, well, quality news. I also am a graduate of a fine Bay area quality new journalism program, and I taught there as well. And before I started my career in technology journalism and entrepreneurial pursuits, my first ever idea was to create a "quality" newspaper for the Bay area.
Collaboration 2.0
SEPTEMBER 27, 2009
Anyone with a computer and access to stock photos can put together a slide presentation and upload it to sites such as slideshare, and sometimes it seems like everyone and his brother is doing just that on social media, enterprise 2.0 and other 2.0-ish subjects. The sheer volume of instructionally toned sets of slides, earnestly explaining [.
Collaboration 2.0
SEPTEMBER 6, 2009
Distance learning - providing access to learning when the source of information and the learners are separated by time and/or distance - has been around since the dawn of postal delivery services. In the current economic climate further education seems likely to take a pounding given the huge personal expense and often substantial debt involved, so [.
Collaboration 2.0
SEPTEMBER 14, 2009
Entertainment personality Kayne West’s outburst over the weekend at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony has implications for the enterprise business world. Jive Software, whose ‘SBS’ (Social Business Software) ‘frees people to engage in open, natural business conversations and workflows that typically are trapped inside of emails, phone calls or meetings’, to quote their line, is [.
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John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 29, 2009
What more can be said about Carol Bartz ? Her appearance at the helm of Yahoo has certainly energized the company and given both its supporters and detractors plenty to talk about. But beyond the colorful language and straight shooting demeanor lies one of the most challenging turnarounds in Internet history (at least from this observer's point of view).
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009
Unemployment is up and continuing to rise, the recession, while possibly, maybe, sort of technically over, does not feel over at all, and while Murdoch says " things are better " in the advertising economy, "better" means "no longer totally crap.". So why on earth would I write a headline like the one adorning this post? Because despite all that bad news, there's a fair amount of good news in the web space.
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 14, 2009
Bing is announcing new visual search features today. The post outlining it all is not yet up, but here are details and links from an email sent to me earlier: Link to the blog post, not yet up, but soon they promise. Link to the announcement on TC50 stage. Text from the email, edited for clarity: On Monday, Microsoft will launch a new beta feature in Bing, it's new decision engine, called Visual Search that is a new, easy way to search by clicking instead of typing.
Collaboration 2.0
SEPTEMBER 10, 2009
Successfactors (SFSF) the Strategic Human Capital Management/people performance software as a service company I last wrote about in June, today expanded their scope to embrace ‘Business Execution Software’, which is now the strap line under their company logo. As Larry Dignan covered here on ZD Net prior to the analyst briefing today The people performance market—SuccessFactors’ current [.
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.
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 25, 2009
A spate of Google books coming out, including one from Ken Auletta and one already out from Jeff Jarvis, and another from Richard Brandt. Ken's book has dangling, draw-you-in quote, as usual: Apparently Eric Schmidt told him that Google will be the world's first $100billion media company. MEDIA company, mind you. MEDIA. Oh, never mind.
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 23, 2009
Today comes news that Google is offering a universal commenting feature that allows anyone using Google's toolbar to leave a comment on any page they visit. Called Sidewiki , the service is intended to "increase engagement on the page" for publishers. But as much as I love the idea of SideWiki, I'm skeptical of it for one simple reason: Google isn't in the community business, and SideWiki, if it's going to work, needs to either A/be driven by communities or B/Needs to be embraced as a standard b
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 21, 2009
We'll be opening this year's Web 2 Summit with an interview of Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast. I've asked Brian to come for the past three years, and he's always had a conflict. In those last few years Comcast has continued to grow, in particular when it comes to its footprint in the digital world. Besides its role as a major cable television player, Comcast is one of the largest providers of broadband in the United States, and as such plays a major role in nearly every story now playing out acro
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 18, 2009
Alex Salkever has written a post on Facebok's self service CPC platform , which has been getting a lot of traction lately and is largely responsible for the company's recent boasting about being cash flow positive. From it: I chatted with nearly two dozen people who are buying ads on Facebook. Many of them are also purchasing ads on Google (GOOG) and other online venues.
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John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 15, 2009
This is very interesting. We're interviewing Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at Web 2 next month , man will we have things to talk about now. Why would Adobe want to get into the web analytics business (in short, supporting ecommerce and marketing)? Well, it makes sense given nearly all ads are in Adobe Flash now. Hmmmm.what do you think? From the Merc piece: "Adobe customers are looking to us for solutions to deliver engaging experiences and more effectively monetize their content and applications o
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 14, 2009
Way to go dudes at Omgili! By now you probably know about the “Search Options” feature Google introduced in May. One of its features is to limit the search results by time frame. By default the available time frames are: Any time, Past year, Past week, Recent results and Past 24 hours. Past 24 hours is nice but still far away from Real-time. What Google isn’t telling you is that you can search in the past minute and even in the past second.
John Battelle's Searchblog
SEPTEMBER 10, 2009
Today my company Federated Media announced a new ad format for a group of our publishing partners. We call this beta program "Ad Stamp", and those of you who've been watching the space closely, and reading my thoughts on marketing here, won't be too surprised by what you see. However, with Ad Stamp there is more than meets the eye, and I wanted to think out loud a bit about why I believe this format works, and how it might reflect some of the trends I've been watching and commenting upon in this
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