John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 20, 2009

The Neiman Journalism Lab has gotten its hands on a forum with the Publisher of the NYT and the-then Editor of Digital for Time Inc., in which they struggle with the question of how the Interwebs were going to impact their print biz. It's fascinating reading. From the overview, written by Zachary Seward: But the transcript is also notable for how little distance some of these debates have traveled in the intervening years.

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ChiefTech

MARCH 20, 2009

Like anyone who works in the enterprise social computing space, Thomas Vander Wal's post about SharePoint was essential reading. He concludes: " What is clear out of all of this is SharePoint has value, but it is not a viable platform to be considered for when thinking of enterprise 2.0. SharePoint only is viable as a cog of a much larger implementation with higher costs.

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Collaboration 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

I had the pleasure of attending the GTD summit last week: the inaugural conference arranged by The David Allen Company around the GTD methodology outlined in Allen’s book ‘Getting Things Done: The art of stress free productivity‘. GTD has gone on to sell over 2 million copies since it was published in 2001 and is available [.

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Hunton Privacy

MARCH 27, 2009

On March 20, 2009, the Federal Trade Commission published a Red Flags Rule compliance guide for businesses, entitled “Fighting Fraud with the Red Flags Rule.” The guide offers an overview of the Rule and practical steps businesses need to take to comply. In addition, the guide addresses the issue that has raised the most concern among businesses — the Rule’s scope.

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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.

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Scary Beasts Security

MARCH 26, 2009

Now that new packages are out for lcms and OpenJDK, I'll publish my LittleCMS exploit. It's harmless in that if it actually works on your machine, all it does it put your CPU into a spin -- watch out for 100% CPU usage. It's also relatively harmless in that it doesn't work on many systems out of the box. I targeted my 32-bit Ubuntu 8.10 laptop which happens to have an executable heap, executable stack, no stack cookies but does have ASLR.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 9, 2009

I will never forget that quote , from Alta Vista founder Louis Monier, as he bemoaned the devolution of his creation into Yet Another Portal. He was devoted to the idea that Alta Vista would do one thing - search - and do it well. But Alta Vista was instead turned into a bawdy image of Yahoo, AOL, Lycos, Excite, and all the other portals of the late 90s.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 3, 2009

I'm Thinking Out Loud about Blogger and Google and.Twitter. yeah, I'm writing about Twitter a lot, but hell, it's the most interesting thing in search in a while, and things keep popping up that spark my mind. This post from Google , for example. It's titled "Blogger connects to Google Friend Connect", which isn't exactly a barn burner of a headline.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 21, 2009

It's Twitter's third birthday, and there's been lots of chatter about Twitter's growth lately, so I thought I'd try to find some context. Google (officially) launched in Sept 1998. Three years later it had nearly 18mm US uniques (comscore). Facebook launched in mid 2004. Three years later it had nearly 27mm US unique users (comscore). Twitter launched in March 2006.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 7, 2009

Search, and Google in particular, was the first true language of the Web. But I've often called it a toddler's language - intentional, but not fully voiced. This past few weeks folks are noticing an important trend - the share of traffic referred to their sites is shifting. Facebook (and for some, like this site, Twitter) is becoming a primary source of traffic.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 13, 2009

This I find quite worthy of comment. More after breakfast. AOL is getting new leadership again, just two years after the outgoing executives were chosen to turn around the struggling dial-up and content company. Google Senior Vice President Tim Armstrong will take over as chairman and chief executive, replacing Randy Falco, said Time Warner, AOL's parent company.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 5, 2009

An AP story today about changes coming to the Facebook service is quite interesting: Facebook: Taking a cue from Twitter in sharing? The popular online hangout Facebook is revamping its home page and plans other changes so its millions of users can more easily choose the types of information they see. Perhaps taking a cue from Twitter, the rising service for letting people express themselves in 140 characters or less and keep up with what celebrities have to say, Facebook said Wednesday it will

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 25, 2009

I have been thinking about this a lot. How we are finally taking technology and making it serve our evolution, the two major breakthroughs of being human - our fingers - finely tuned gesticulation as a reflection of our minds - and our voices - again, finally tuned expression of our minds. Pattie is on to something here. This post is really a bookmark of sorts, for more thinking that I've been doing about how this relates to search, real time search, and interface.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 24, 2009

Our annual event in New York, The Conversational Marketing Summit , has just announced its initial lineup. It's going to be very, very good. I host this event each year in New York and this year we are focusing on answering a simple question: What Works? Speakers include: Fred Wilson , who I can't wait to talk to about his investments in Twitter, Comscore, Tacoda, Boxee, Clickable, Etsy, Tumblr, and tons of other really intersting CM companies.

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Security

John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 18, 2009

The Times runs a piece today citing a media analyst at Sanford Bernstein claiming: monetizing Twitter “would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful.” People who sign up for free services tend to resent a company for trying to wring revenue from the business later. Subscription fees are out of the question, they said, and advertising-based revenues don’t seem to have yielded enough cash flow to make a Web 2.0 property viable.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 16, 2009

I just logged into Facebook for the first time since The Change. And I have to say, it's totally a Twitter experience. Except.that's not why I am going to Facebook. I find myself wanting all the simplicity and tools of Twitter, and they are not there. (Except I like the threaded conversations, which are nice, however, I wonder if and how folks know you've "replied?").

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 5, 2009

As I think through the major themes of the book I hope to write over the next year, the word "horizontal" keeps coming up, over and over and over. It comes up in nearly every conversation I have with marketers. More often than not, when you get to the heart of an innovative marketing program, you find a block that can be summed up thusly: "That's not what we do.".

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ChiefTech

MARCH 2, 2009

I know you all know this , but for the record here is the official press release about my new role at Headshift : HEADSHIFT APPOINTS JAMES DELLOW AND RAMPS UP ENTERPRISE 2.0 CAPABILITIES News Summary 3 March 2009 Headshift, a leading enterprise social computing consultancy has expanded its local team with the addition of Senior Business & Technical Consultant James Dellow.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 27, 2009

Fridays have become days where I catch up on all that I've missed during a hectic week of travel and focused meetings with the team at FM and tons of really interesting partners. The past week has been particularly rich in travel and meetings, which means I've not noted nearly all the things I'd like to here. So in no particular order, here are a few thoughts about things I've seen lately.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 25, 2009

Thanks to the hard working folks at Six Apart and Ivan at FM, Searchblog now lets you comment using your Facebook login. This makes it a lot easier to leave comments if you're already on Facebook. Now, if I can only get the Facebook comments on my tweets of these posts to populate on this blog (hint hint, Facebook), the loop will be complete!

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 23, 2009

This morning marks the launch of ExecTweets , a platform my company has built working with Microsoft, its sponsor, and Twitter. I'm proud of the work here, it reflects a lot of thinking about how to use conversations like Twitter to fuel what I hope is a value-added experience. In this case, we're filtering for business-realated content from senior execs in various industries, like retail, healthcare, government, and more, and we've created a platform for community conversation, voting, input, a

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 12, 2009

I could not make the event, but FM had two participants. Chas summed it up this way: "the format is like a reality TV show: A contest among groups of digital marketing experts, Apprentice-style, in an effort to tap social media tools to sell Tide t-shirts for charity.". It was a fun night, from what I've heard, and $100,000 was raised for charity, which is really cool.

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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

MARCH 11, 2009

Just off the phone with the folks behind Aardvark , a (relatively) new service that will most likely be the talk of SXSW this week. I'll have a longer riff on the company shortly, but suffice to say, I find it fascinating. The service rides between your social network(s), search, and the web, cleverly leveraging each to provide a platform for asking and answering the kinds of questions for which traditional search usually fails: the kinds of questions you ask a friend (or a friend of a friend, t

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 5, 2009

Missed writing this up earlier this week, I'll point to it now: A greasemonkey script authored by Moveable Type consultant Mark Carey puts real time Twitter search results up at the top of Google. Neat.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 3, 2009

I missed this last week, from Yahoo's Search blog : Starting today, Facebook enhanced results will automatically appear in search results. This means users can add a friend, poke, send a message, and view a person’s friends from the deep links on the search results page. Facebook shared the structured data for this SearchMonkey app by adding semantic markup to their public profile pages.

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Collaboration 2.0

MARCH 13, 2009

Twittering from the jury he was serving on as it was awarding a massive settlement against a building materials company by Jonathon Powell of Fayetteville Arkansas has resulted in defense motions for a mistrial. Powell “was predisposed toward giving a verdict that would impress his audience.&# by using his mobile phone to give a running commentary [.

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Collaboration 2.0

MARCH 29, 2009

“Competition has its place in the marketplace or against last year’s performance — perhaps even against another office or individual where there is no particular interdependence, no need to cooperate. But cooperation in the workplace is as important to free enterprise as competition in the marketplace. The spirit of win-win cannot survive [.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 1, 2009

Love this: [link]. The home page is literally a Twitter search for "skittles". That's a brand embracing the conversation. Well done. (Thanks Matt J).

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 31, 2009

I'm traveling this week, and most likely quiet on the site, though one never knows. follow me on Twitter if you want the blow by blow, I'm in NY for an Amex small business event.I'll post more on Twitter once I have details.

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