John Battelle's Searchblog

JUNE 10, 2009

For the past few days I've been focused on a final draft of an essay, co-authored with Tim O'Reilly, focusing on the theme of this year's Web 2.0 Summit. It's rewarding work, reminiscent of the early days of Wired, when I'd regularly edit or write long form pieces focusing on big ideas and the future, but grounded in real world examples from today. But writing and editing this kind of stuff is also challenging work, and I often procrastinate, as I am right now, by writing a blog post or skimming

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Daradiction

DECEMBER 31, 2009

Folks over estimate what they can do in a year and under estimate what they can do in ten. No doubt you’d agree how quickly this past decade has flown by. My one regret is that I wasn’t nearly as intentional about the effects I wanted to create. I didn’t find my North Star (community empowerment) until quite recently. As I reflect upon the past decade and get clear about my vision for my life by 2020 there are a few stories that I would like to share with you: Petunia Pickle

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ChiefTech

JANUARY 12, 2009

Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design Register or Log In Search Stories Ideas Forums People Events Jobs About December Issue, 2008 Jens Jacobsen 32 Reputation points Jens likes writing for multimedia and loves tracking down usability issues. He founded the company “ Content Crew ” in 2006, and is its CEO since this time. This company specializes on the production of podcast, with the focus on audio.

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Collaboration 2.0

AUGUST 16, 2009

Here’s another YouTube video - ‘Social Media Revolution’ - conflating a lot of stats in order to make a case for ‘Social Media‘ being the ‘biggest shift since the industrial revolution‘ Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us started this style of delivery and really amplified the potency of the Web 2.0 movement in 1997.

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Hunton Privacy

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

CVS Pharmacy (“CVS”), reportedly the largest retail pharmacy chain, has agreed to pay the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) $2.25 million and submit a Corrective Action Plan (“CAP”) to HHS after an extensive nationwide investigation by the HHS Office of Civil Rights (“OCR”) and the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) which revealed that CVS employees disposed of protected health information (“PHI”) in violation of

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John Battelle's Searchblog

AUGUST 5, 2009

Early this year, well, January 1, to be exact, I made this prediction about our friends at Apple: Apple will see a significant reversal of recent fortunes. I sense this will happen for a number of reasons. but I think the main one will be brand related - a brand based on being cooler than the other guy simply does not scale past a certain point. I sense Apple has hit that point.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

AUGUST 12, 2009

A month ago I posted that Twitter was back to strong growth after a weak month of June. I just took at look at the numbers for August, which you can see in the screen shot here (I'm using Compete's data , but you can check out Quantcast , which is a "rough estimate" and has not posted any July data yet.). Twitter is still growing, according to this data, but not at the breakneck pace of the past.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MAY 15, 2009

Gian Fulgoni, Executive Chair of Comscore, has an interesting analysis of what's happening in paid search lately. It's germane to my earlier posts about paid search share sliding and Google's decision to allow trademark ad bidding. In his post, Gian notes that overall search queries are up dramatically (68% over two years) but: if one looks at the number of paid clicks, the growth rate is a lower 18%, which raises the question: why have paid clicks grown 3x slower than the total number of querie

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John Battelle's Searchblog

AUGUST 13, 2009

Matt Cutts points to a video interview (embedded above) on Google's Caffeine infrastructure update. "It's a pretty fundamentally big change" Matt says. What I'd like to know is why and in response to what changes on the web. Of course, the major changes in how the web works are clear: Real Time Search. In this post (and/or this one ) I said: In short, Google represents a remarkable achievement: the ability to query the static web.

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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

Collaboration 2.0

OCTOBER 22, 2009

Box.net, the little company that likes to tweak Goliath Microsoft’s nose with digs at Sharepoint - the billboard above is near Microsoft’s silicon valley digs - announced an alignment with Salesforce.com CRM earlier today. Nothing earth shattering here at first glance: it makes perfect sense for both sides and extends the simple to use but [.

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Collaboration 2.0

FEBRUARY 27, 2009

Kimberley Swann of Clacton on Sea in England was fired from her job at Ivell Marketing and Logistics Limited after she wrote that her job was dull on her Facebook profile. “all i do is shred holepunch n scan paper!!! omg!‘&# … “im so totally bord!!!&# 16-year-old Swann said she never mentioned by name the company [.

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Collaboration 2.0

AUGUST 11, 2009

An interesting US national poll from Common Sense Media asking ‘is social networking changing childhood?‘ opens up some wider issues. Common sense media suggest their poll… …illustrates a continuing disconnect between parents and kids when it comes to kids’ digital lives. In today’s society, there is more technology and less time for parents to supervise their kids’ actions and [.

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Collaboration 2.0

JANUARY 17, 2009

You may have seen the drama this week around a social media ad agency representative whose negative Twitter message about Memphis, Tennessee was read and responded to by one of his client FedEx’s employees. James Andrews, ‘@keyinfluencer‘ on Twitter, was flying into Fedex global headquarters in Memphis to present on digital media to the worldwide communications [.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

NOVEMBER 22, 2009

Back when I was reporting the book, I remember a meeting I had with Gary Flake , then the lead technologist at Overture, now a Fellow at Microsoft running Live Labs, responsible for stuff like Seadragon, Photosynth, and now, Pivot, an experimental approach to large datasets that attempts to rethink some fundamental approaches to what we understand search to be today.

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Collaboration 2.0

AUGUST 27, 2009

Three posts about ‘failure’ in the ‘Enterprise 2.0′ space in the last few days from Sameer Patel (’Five ways to avoid Enterprise 2.0 failure’ guest blogging on Michael Krigmans’ ‘IT Failure blog here on ZD Net), Dion Hinchcliffe (14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail) and now Dennis Howlett (Enterprise 2.0: what a crock).

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John Battelle's Searchblog

AUGUST 13, 2009

Google's new iGoogle upgrades smacks of Facebook. Read this: we're excited to introduce social gadgets for iGoogle. Social gadgets let you share, collaborate and play games with your friends on top of all the things you can already do on your homepage. The 19 social gadgets we're debuting today offer many new ways to make your homepage more useful and fun.

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Collaboration 2.0

JULY 14, 2009

Socialtext are making available an ‘unbundled’ appliance version of their microblogging product ‘Signals‘ at an attractive $US1 per user per month, plus $1,000 per month server subscription. With the rapid increase in business use of Twitter, the hugely successful but internet based free microblogging platform, there has come an attendant focus on security concerns in [.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

JANUARY 4, 2009

Related: 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. In each of the past five years I've written a predictions post - usually at year's end or by the first of January. This one is late, and I'll admit it's because I found it hard to write.

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Collaboration 2.0

AUGUST 19, 2009

I’ve got a first gen iPhone and live in San Francisco, the heart of Apple country. The voice communication part of it has been slowly getting worse and is now virtually unusable. A first gen iphone is of course ancient history to an Apple or Mobile Tech fanboy but the reality is many people are [.

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Collaboration 2.0

AUGUST 3, 2009

For those who think collaboration technology simply breaks down rigid command and control management hierarchies, consider the origins of the term: the military. The US military have had a significant online presence with various online forums for rank and file, commanders and other lines of business - all behind user name and password of course - [.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

MAY 13, 2009

The Google Twitter Facebook goat rodeo is getting more interesting. At its Searchology event this week, (TC/Post coverage ), Google unveiled a suite of new offerings that feel reactive to various competitors, including "Google Squared," a Google Labs response to Wolframs' new Alpha (more on that soon). Reuters bills it this way : Google also showed off a new feature, available immediately, that lets users view only the most timely search results, narrowing the results for a topic to the past 24

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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

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.

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Collaboration 2.0

APRIL 16, 2009

One of the highlights of last June’s Enterprise 2.0 conference was Don Burke and Sean Dennehy of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) describing how their ‘Intellipedia‘ wikis were transforming the agency into a more collaborative organization: that presentation is embedded above. Ten months later Time magazine picked up the story - ‘CIA discovers Web 2.0‘ [.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

AUGUST 18, 2009

Hey, I really like the soundtrack. And it's f*ing true as well. My beef with this is this simple statement, about 3:42 in. "Social Media isn't a fad, it's a fundamental shift in how we communicate.". True, to a point. What it really is, is the release of how we already communicate, but now at scale. It's not a shift in *how* we communicate, it's a step function in our *ability* to communicate.

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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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John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 4, 2009

The tweet is the query. From Ad Age , which penned a good piece on the promise of Twitter search: In the future, searches won't only query what's being said at the moment, but will go out to the Twitter audience in the form of a question, like a faster and less-filtered Yahoo Answers or Wiki Answers. Users would be able to tap the collective knowledge of the 6 million or so members of the Twitterverse.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

Danny Sullivan over at SEL has really teed off on Yahoo's search strategy , and any time he goes off, it's worth a read. From it: USER INTERFACE CHANGES WON’T LET YAHOO COMPETE IN SEARCH. Got it? Write it down, someone come check back on this in five years. If Yahoo’s moved up in search share thanks to outsourcing search and just toying with the user interface, I’ll eat those words somehow — covered even in Yahoo purple frosting.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

AUGUST 19, 2009

Regarding this story in the New York Times : With Bloggers in the Bleachers, Leagues See a Threat to Profits. (and related, my post on " Don't Be a Player Platform Hater "): I have such a rant in me on this topic but I simply cannot write it now, I'm way to Supposed to Be On Vacation. But suffice to say, you can do two things if you "own content" - like, say, football games (yep, that's content).

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