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

AUGUST 19, 2010

Facebook, the current common denominator social graph provider, have rolled out another component which they have turned on by default between you and your friends within the USA (and who knows who else behind the scenes). Your friends can now ‘check you in‘ to a geographical location at a specific time (much as they can tag [.

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Daradiction

AUGUST 24, 2010

My TEDxSB talk on Inspired Environments. After watching this video I got inspired to get a tan, hit the gym, and cut down my sugar intake by 80%. What a positive difference this has made in my energy levels and well being. Click here to view the embedded video.

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Preservica

JUNE 1, 2010

I'm really looking forward to presenting at the Association of Canadian Archivists Pre conference next week. The theme is Digital Preservation in the Canadian Landscape, and I'm going to be speaking about international collaboratives including Planets and KEEP. They have a packed agenda with some very interesting topics and an opportunity for an open discussion on what the audience has learned during the event, and how people think organizations in Canada might progress.

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Digital preservation 52

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

Shoreline Records Management

JUNE 9, 2010

The amount of Paper in the average office continues to grow by 20% to 30% each year, and Offsite Document Storage is often required for companies that have either outgrown their existing space, or have too many files to efficiently manage in their current configuration. No matter what type of company you have it is increasingly important to adequately plan for the proper storage, retrieval and purging of documents.

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Records Management Paper Access IT 29

John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 19, 2010

The media really, really, really loves to write about Apple and the iPhone these days. It reminds me of Google in 2004, when the media fell in love with the concept of search. Besides the antennae story, which I find hopelessly over reported, the latest iPhone rhapsody has been how many iPhone 4s Apple has sold - apparently, 3 million as of last Friday.

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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.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

APRIL 17, 2010

Dear Apple: We miss you. Once upon a time, back before you got real popular , you used to take part in the public square. You may have been less forthcoming than most, but at least your employees would speak at industry events, have unscripted conversations with journalists, and engage in the world a bit here and there. But over the past few years, things seem to have changed.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

SEPTEMBER 30, 2010

( image ) Today I landed from a trip to the world of the non-tech obsessed (PA and OH) to find my newsfeed was full of speculation that Google MUST buy Twitter , or be damned to obscurity in a race its already losing to Facebook. Not so fast. Here's my simple reasoning for why Google won't buy Twitter: Twitter won't sell. Those who decide whether Twitter goes to Google pretty much come down to a handful of folks: Founders Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone, with COO Dick Costolo and Twitt

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Risk

John Battelle's Searchblog

JUNE 9, 2010

I' ve written extensively about iAds here and here , and one question I raised has to do with Apple's policies with regard to third party data and ad networks, in particular AdMob. As All Things Digital notes today , Apple this week "clarified" its policy with regard to third party networks, and it's hard to read it as anything other than a direct declaration of war with Google.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 8, 2010

I'm sure you've noticed, but there's a major battle underway for the hearts and minds of what we, in this industry, broadly call "developers." Often the term is used quite strictly, to mean actual coders who build actual software-driven applications, services, or websites. Other times the term is more loosely applied, meaning "companies that build stuff" or "partners of platform X or service Y.".

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John Battelle's Searchblog

NOVEMBER 30, 2010

One of the many reasons I find Twitter fascinating is that the company seems endlessly at an inflection point. Eighteen months ago I was tracking its inflection point in usage (holy shit, look how it's growing! Then, holy shit, has it stopped ?!), then its inflection in business model (hey, it doesn't have one ! Wait, yes it does, but can it scale ?!

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John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 10, 2010

( image ) I just reviewed this presentation from Paul Adams , research lead for social at Google (embedded below). He works on Buzz and YouTube, and presumably, whatever is next from Google, including the rumored "Google Me.". His presentation is good, and worthy of your time if you are interested in the impact of social media on culture and business.

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Security

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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John Battelle's Searchblog

JUNE 1, 2010

and I mean that. Watching Jobs work his way through nearly 90 minutes of interview and audience questions , I really felt, for the first time, a sense of how strongly the guy feels for his work and his products. Then again, I found myself angry, several times. Angry when he championed the press as crucial to democracy, and implied the iPad would save our country from "descending into a nation of bloggers" (my view: we started as a nation of bloggers - pamphleteers like Thomas Paine).

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John Battelle's Searchblog

NOVEMBER 19, 2010

This third conversation with Mark Zuckerberg was, to my mind, the best so far, and YouTube seems to agree, as it's got more plays than nearly any other save Eric Schmidt (who was featured by YouTube on the homepage). See if you agree.

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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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IT

John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 5, 2010

Way back in November of 2003, when I was a much younger man and the world had yet to fall head over heels in love with Google, I wrote a post called The Database of Intentions. It was an attempt to explain a one-off reference in an earlier post - but not much earlier, as the "DBoI" post, as I call it, was just the sixty-third post of my then-early blogging career.

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Search queries Marketing Archiving IT 102

John Battelle's Searchblog

JULY 14, 2010

I've written before about my relationship with Foursquare , and I'm sure I will again. I've tweeted my complaint that the "friend" mechanism is poorly instrumented (in various ways), and I should note that this is certainly not just a Foursquare problem (more on "Friendstrimentation" shortly). But today I wanted to build on my earlier post, " My Location Is a Box of Cereal ," and Think Out Loud a bit about what I'd really like to do on Foursquare: I'd like to check into a state of mind.

Search queries 101

Search queries Marketing IT 101

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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John Battelle's Searchblog

MAY 13, 2010

I had a good call today with Dennis Woodside, who runs North American Sales for Google, and Susan Wojcicki, who runs products. Both are long timers at Google, Susan is pretty much a llfer - she joined in 1999. Both are joining me on stage at the CM Summit next month , a first for Google to have ad products and sales represented in one onstage interview.

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IT Sales Access 100

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 7, 2010

There are many, many signals in the Database of Intentions, as my readers have pointed out, but the one I feel compelled to add to the chart I created Friday is the Commerce signal. This signal emerged before search, really, and has remained a constant, though honestly it has yet to become a signal that others can truly leverage into an open ecosystem (unlike the signal of search, or status update, or the social graph).

IT 100

IT 100

John Battelle's Searchblog

MARCH 5, 2010

Way back in November of 2003, when I was a much younger man and the world had yet to fall head over heels in love with Google, I wrote a post called The Database of Intentions. It was an attempt to explain a one-off reference in an earlier post - but not much earlier, as the "DBoI" post, as I call it, was just the sixty-third post of my then-early blogging career.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

AUGUST 26, 2010

I was struck by this headline from TechCrunch: Has Google Purged Places Of Yelp? All Signs Point To Yes. The story is rather pedestrian - yet another dispute between a content and community service with the all powerful Google. Sure, it's Yelp, but at the end of the day, it's another company who has run afoul of the distribution giant, and is a bit confused by how things seem to be playing out.

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IT 98

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.

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Analytics

John Battelle's Searchblog

JUNE 8, 2010

The most tweeted Slideshare of the show so far is Mary's presentation. Here it is for your reading pleasure! Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research View more presentations from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

APRIL 28, 2010

This is very interesting news, but not unexpected if you've been paying attention. Note in the past I've predicted that Apple will not do web search, but will do "app search," because app search is essentially broken, if you can even call it search to begin with. It's more like directory navigation at this point. Today Apple announced acquisition of Siri , a personal assistant app that includes voice recognition and search capabilities.

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John Battelle's Searchblog

SEPTEMBER 1, 2010

as far as I can tell, they in fact don't ever meet. You can't leverage your networks on Facebook and Twitter in Ping. It's another closed Apple system, another Apple universe in a gilded gift box. It's not that Apple hates the web, it's just that Apple is better than the web. Apple doesn't need it. It seems Apple has it all figured out. I am sure Ping will get traction because it'll be fun, and if it truly helps folks discover more music, so much the better for all (especially iTunes sales).

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