It's Unnerving

Tactic or honest response? Sergey on Microsoft:

"The Internet has evolved from open standards, having a diversity of companies," Brin told The Associated Press after the event. "And when you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that's unnerving."

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:41 AM
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Comscore Search for Jan...

...can be found here. Not a good month for Yahoo, though it's hard to say what drove their drop - it was not the core Yahoo sites, it was "all other."

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:42 PM
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OpenRoadTV

Fun to do this quick piece with the Open Road TV folks....

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:32 PM
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Starting Up? Hit the LaunchPad!

The SF Web 2 Expo is coming up in April, and the LaunchPad is once again happening. If you're part of an interesting startup, you should consider applying for the LaunchPad. This year they are doing it as we did it at the Summit last year - VCs are judging the whole shebang. Check it out here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:29 PM
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You're In the Media Biz Now

I've been thinking about media for a long time now, and if asked to give advice to folks who are *not* in the media business, I often offer this chestnut: You're in the media business too, whether you like it or not. As part of a long term sponsorship, American Express asked me to opine over on their site, you can find my first post here. An excerpt:

Today, I’ll assert, no matter what business you think you’re in – be it making widgets or providing a service, you’re now in the media business, plain and simple. Those that recognize this shift will succeed, those that ignore it will atrophy and eventually become irrelevant.

Now, what do I mean by the media business? Well, let’s start where all good businesses start: with the customer. Your customer’s media habits have changed dramatically in the past ten years. More likely than not, your customers spend nearly 15 hours a week online – it’s where they play, communicate, interact with services, and shop and research major purchases. In short, your customer has developed a major new media habit. The question is: Has your business?

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:25 AM
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AdSense For Video Launches

More here. I plan to write more on this later.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:46 AM
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A Lot of Folks Are Leaving Google...

So it's about time to create an alumni relations program! (Thanks David)

Update: oops, this is a university program, not a Google alumni program...

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:00 PM
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On Advertising

I gave an interview to Yahoo Finance in November last year. Here's the result....three months later!

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:46 PM
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Yahoo Search Improves...

According to this study. (via Yahoo's Search Blog)

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:48 AM
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Meanwhile, Hadoop News

Yahoo is on the ropes, but this project has been showing promise for a long time. Check out the news today:

Yahoo! recently launched what we believe is the worlds largest Apache Hadoop production application. The Yahoo! Search Webmap is a Hadoop application that runs on a more than 10,000 core Linux cluster and produces data that is now used in every Yahoo! Web search query.

The Webmap build starts with every Web page crawled by Yahoo! and produces a database of all known Web pages and sites on the internet and a vast array of data about every page and site. This derived data feeds the Machine Learned Ranking algorithms at the heart of Yahoo! Search.

Some Webmap size data:

* Number of links between pages in the index: roughly 1 trillion links
* Size of output: over 300 TB, compressed!
* Number of cores used to run a single Map-Reduce job: over 10,000
* Raw disk used in the production cluster: over 5 Petabytes

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:41 PM
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Get Yer Head Right

(Note: This is the first of a number of posts I'll be doing using mobile technology thanks to a sponsorship from Microsoft and FM. More here).

Sometimes you just need to go to a show (click on the pic for a larger image I shot while there). I certainly did after the past two months of four hour meetings, travel, and general madness. A good friend introduced me to Umphrey's McGee, a killer jam band out of Chicago. This was my third or fourth time seeing them, and they always just kill it, wherever they play. If you want a real treat, subscribe to their podcast here. What does this have to do with Searchblog? Well, as I've written before, I find the music industry very predictive of the media markets in general. Umphrey's is the kind of band that heralds a new approach to media, entertainment, and distribution. The band has a strong following in its native Chicago, but it has found another strong following online. The music doesn't lend itself to traditional packaged goods approaches to marketing, but that doesn't matter - online distribution and word of mouth has helped the band play to packed halls all over the country. I saw them at the fabled Fillmore, twice in fact, and they did the place proud. The third show is tonight, go see them if you can...

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:49 PM
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Surprise, Surprise: Phones and Search

How do you use your phone? Do you search a lot on Google? Yeah, me too. Apparently, this surprised Google. I don't think it should have...or honestly, surprised anyone who makes business decisions there...(thanks JG)

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:28 AM
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Google Video Ads In Search

A long time coming. Long time. I remember writing about this here, so long ago, I can't recall when.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:00 PM
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Waiting For the (other) Other Shoe At Microsoft

Another reorg at Microsoft. But where is the chief of aQuantive? The other shoe will drop soon. Meanwhile, as predicted, Steve did not get the big job. So he's leaving.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:59 PM
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Oh, Thank God. Baseball Is Coming.

Today, pitchers and catchers report to spring training. In three weeks, I take my son for our annual weekend in Scottsdale.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:56 PM
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Want Some Insight Into Google's Thinking On Yahoo?

Then read this.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:43 PM
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Oh, Good Lord

Today has been filled with news about who got laid off at Yahoo. But this news, that the fellow who was responsible for helping Yahoo run innovative new ventures inside the company, is leaving for Google, well...man. Ouch.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:21 PM
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In biological natural selection, the prime architect is death

Need I say more about this post from Kevin? No, it's not about biology, but man, I love it when Kevin pens stuff like the headline above. From it:

And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it's worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:19 PM
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Google's Share Drops? Inescapable

Much talk about this news, which is debatable, I suppose, if you're Google - it's one research company (IDC), claiming that Google's overall share of the online advertising market has slipped.

But I see this as inescapable. The brand advertisers are marching onto the internet, because that's where the audience is. And when you look at where the audience spends most of its time, it's not at Google. It's at highly engaging sites, applications, and services. This is one reason Google is so busy throwing new application pasta at the walls.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:11 PM
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Slow...

I'm tied up in meetings as I was last week, and posting will be slow. I hope to chime in here and again, but...

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:06 PM
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