Susan Mernit's Blog: Navigating the Info Jungle

Yes.
Why?
Google is both one of the largest sites on the web, generating humongous page views each day, a good percentage of which are monetized with profitable paid listings. It is also the fastest-growing ad network, agressively doing deals with both large portals and with targeted niche sites, such as iVillage.

Back in the day, DoubleClick did a good business serving ads for clients via DART, and also running demographically and thematically targeted networks on which they served clients' ads.

Both companies found ways to encircle the market and make money from related--but diverse--revenue streams.

DoubleClick foundered on the Abacus deal, which raised privacy concerns(that would be an understatement), and on the declining--okay, plummeting, online ad market.

As the money keeps pouring it, is is going to be interesting to see whether the Google engineers, including the founders, lose their focus on search as the dollars gets bigger. Some say it is already happening. I think not.

But where there is smoke, there will eventually be fire. Keeping a big, profitable company aligned with the mission can be tough, especially when some of the earliest employees start to focus on enjoying their wealth and move their eyes off the product and customer experience. Google's biggest challenges will be to continue to provide unique, valueable services core to their mission at the same time as they grow in value and make the business pay out.
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iVillage has done a contextual advertising deal with Google that could make them millions in new paid search listings appearing as contextual results on content pages.
Under the terms of the deal, Google will provide Web search and paid search listings from its network of 100,000 advertisers. In addition, iVillage signed on for AdSense, joining top sites like Weather.com and Switchboard, to display relevant text listings on certain content pages.
This is a real set back for Spinks, for whom iVillage was one of their bigger clients.
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Naked walker: Did you hear the one about the 44 year old truck driver walking naked through Britain to remind people of the beauty of the human body? Turns our he really wanted to set the record for hiking naked, so he lief about his motives. Go figure.
Naked paintball: A hoax to sell the (staged) videos. Is anyone over 12 years old surprised?
Naked TV star: Sheryl Lee Ralph, star of Moesha, tells The Jamacian Gleaner, "My favourite garment... is my birthday suit. I feel so comfortable in it. I like being naked. At home I just walk around naked you know, I just bare it all."
Not naked: Cameron Diaz' nude pix will stay hidden after a judge ruled the photog has no rights to distribute the 10 year old pix.
Not the Naked Chef, either: Jamie Olivers' new book was not the 2 MGB file distibuted on the web this past Friday.
Naked risk: There's a dearth of stories about the burgeoning traffic in women in Eastern Europe. The problem, journalists are afraid of ending up naked and dead.
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Spencer is outside of Salt Lake City today, heading to Reno tomorrow and to San Jose on Monday. He drove through the Grand Canyon, and passed Bryce as he went into Utah from Arizona. "It's beyond beautiful," he said on the phone tonight, about the drive north from New Mexico . "I feel like I just can't take take pictures as beautiful as what I am seeing."

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JD Lasica's done his usual insightful and provocative job in creating a detailed package on participatory journalism and the mind shifts and technologies helping to evolve this new form.
Check out JD's work here and here .
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What would you think if you read that Netscape, the division of AOL that laid off all its engineers and took its name off the buildings in Mountain View, had just partnered with an online learning company to create a premium education center on the Internet?
In AOL-think, this makes perfect sense: the Netscape portal is still in the top 50 sites in terms of traffic overall, and then opportunity to convert .05% of the user base to paid, premium online education services probably looked pretty good in the original focus groups and tests. So what if you've dumped the browser? What does that have to do with making money from premium services, something the Web Properties group, which includes Netscape and CompuServe, desperately needs to do.
A friend asked me today if I thought AOL would sell Netscape and I said I could see them licensing the name, especially abroad, more than selling it. On othe other hand, if they could sell the portal site to make a buck, they would. So, does the left hand know what the right hand is doing? Probably not, but it doesn't matter that much for now.


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John Scalzi reports that he is to be AOL Journal's new Blogging Guy.
Says John., "... My job will be to show AOL members how blogging and journaling is done, both by example (i.e., by blogging and opining myself) and by acting as a sort of tutor/instigator/spotlight operator for AOL Journals. I'll also be doing time as a general cheerleader for the concept of writing online in all its forms...I'll also be doing the time-honored stomp through the AOL Journals and the rest of the blog world to find other worthy linkables. And on top of all that I'll be doing some other stuff too, which I won't talk about now but which will hopefully be neat"

John has worked for AOL in the past, so the Dulles powers-that-be can be sure he's not going to put up Photoshop pix that show him nude from the waist down in preview form, or insult Dick Parsons when the stock dips, or say anything political of any sort about the California elections.

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Russell Beattie has a post today about KQED and heading back to San Fran. One of the joys of being back in northern California--especially considering that the distances I am driving daily have doubled--is the profusion of great radio stations.
My personal favorites--and I am still discovering what's on the dial--
KCSM--Jazz. Not as great as WBGO in Newark, NJ, but still smooth.
KQUED--How could you not like one of the greatest public radio stations?
KKUP--Sunnyvale community radio, electic as they get. Love the Hawaiian show on Friday mornings. Have to see if it is still on the air.
KPFA--I love KPFA, makes me feel like old hippies still have a little passion left. One of my favorite things is driving along listening to KPFA grumbling about their knee-jerk leftist politics.
KFOG and ALICE: Guilty pleasures.
I also like the Stanford radio station at 90.5, which plays lots of drum and bass, house, jungle, etc. and 91.5, which plays a lot of jazz and blues. The quantity of blues played here is about 300% higher than in NY; which is to see perhaps 20% of what I spin past is blues, compared to one big fat zero in New York.
The one show I really miss listening to in the car is Victor Hernandez' The Rhythm Review, the best Saturday morning show on the planet.
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I signed up for Google News alerts the day they launched, selecting two terms for them to track for me, the first incredible obscure (my name, Mernit), and the second, fairly ubiquitious (AOL). It's been a few days and here's my impression of the service--it ain't the world-beater Google news is, in facrs it's kinda a yawn.
What's the diff? The alerts systems sent me the same eight or so stories listed as most relevant on the news pages today, so it is accurate, but it seems far more limited that actually using the news service.
I think the problem is not with the technology, but with me, the user--the email string of alerts is literally just that, and nothing else. When I read news at news.google.com, I am always opening new screens to conduct new searches on related terms I find; the alerts don't support that--they're more of a notification system useful for big events, such as AOL getting sold to Verizon or something.
One way to address this issue would be through a form of proximity mapping that would give you shorter summaries of related topics, or that would use collaborative filtering based on your behavior to become smart about what related stories and links to send you.
Another--and this is the OBVIOUS one--would be to make all Google news stories RSS-enabled, like Feedster does with its searches, so users can digest keyword search string results and take it from there--it's the same technology they're using now, but delivered in an entirely different way.

So,Google, you listening? How about :
A) Making your news available as RSS feeds with great coding, so they work with most newsreaders
B) Team up with some of the newsreader companies to create a server-side newsreader right on Google (I know the newsreader folks will hate this idea, but it IS inevitable, so live with it...)
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"When you first met him, he said I want to know all about you. You don't believe him, you've heard that before. You remember the familiar, distracted gaze. He listens, but his eyes flicker over your face, your lips, your throat, as if your voice were merely an accompaniment, your body the main event.
Isn't your desire for him enough--what else would he really need to know? That's you're divorced, that you will never pierce your ears, that you like it from behind? Or that you prefer to wear black, to make love to certain songs, to take naps on dark days? But what about this: what if you told him about your father, about the things you've stolen, about what it takes sometimes to get you through the night? Would he want to listen to your fears, to hear of the images you can't forget--the blind man you drove by one night, the way he just stood there in the rain, your frightened brother reaching for your hand, you mother's face collapsed in grief as another man left?
You remember men who loved you more the less you revealed. As you pulled from them, they reached for you. You let them love your body, opened it to them as if that was the only gift you could give, that and the memory of when you were gone. What you have brought them to, such a painful hope of nothing."
--from San Francisco,The Territory of Men

Joelle Fraser's memoir of growing up the sweet, self-sufficient child of ramshackle hippie parents turns into a must-read memoir as she pushes aside the granny prints to reveal how she's grown up to be just like them: a women as obsessed with being desired in 'the territory of men' as her mother was, and as full of dreams and good intentions she's unable to commit to as her handsome, alcoholic father.

With a blunt, compassionate precision reminiscent of Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story, Fraser takes the scalpel of memory to her 35 years and produces a critically acclaimed, must-read memoir. This is her first book--I can't wait to see what she writes next--and damn, I wish I could write as honestly and yet delicately as she does.
In a sense, what makes this book special is that the author doesn't write about herself as if she is special--she just tells her story, and that of her family, in a dramatic, yet subtle way that draws you in and keeps you reading. I know these people, you think five pages in, but then the story keeps shimmering and shifting, and she's got you, and you just don't want to stop.
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285 posts on Feedster today for BloggerCon--apparently, the invites went out. I hope this is a really good conference and not completely a group grope of friends patting each other on the back about their pioneering good taste and discernment.
Of course, with the less than shy personalities of some of the folk, it could lean toward a flame war with real-time back-channels and track back attached--hey, that's a joke!
I am sure everyone will comport themselves in a manner appropriate to the event--ideally, that means down to earth, relaxed, and about to do a few magic tricks to break the ice.
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So this note is all about me. I promise to not do a lot of these all happy entries. In fact, I promise to keep myself to no more than one a month. So, here it is:

We've moved (back) to San Jose, California, to an area called Naglee Park that is a historic area developed starting in 1902, 20 years after his death, on the former estate of Brig. General Henry Morris Naglee, a Civil War veteran and California pioneer. (Interestingly enough, the General's two daughters were the prime developers). Turns out this was the last big plot of land near the center of the city, so plots went fast--to university professors, but also to doctors, lawyers, and "fruit men"--business people who wanted to be near downtown (sounds like today, huh?) and be near their orchards.

The houses are California craftsmen bungalows, Victorian gingerbread two stories, and half stone/half timber Robinson Jeffers wild houses that defy description. Many have abundant gardens, with brilliant red poppies, orange marigolds, blue flax, pink clematis and jacaranda, and large cypress and eucalyptus trees.

There street has many small children on it; including Marigold, a little blonde two-year old who pedals her pink trike furiously up and down the block as her 45 year olf blonde-going to grey grandma stands watch, and Prima, all of four, whose daily dress is pink tights, black leotard and a sparkly purple necklace. Each house has a (barking) dog, often of the Retriever/Laborador/Boxer persuasion, and most of them also have station wagons or SUVs parked out front next to the husband's really good car: an Infiniti, Saab convertible, or BMW, the California state car.

When I tell people I just moved back from New York, they inevitably smile widely and say,"That's great! Well, welcome back!" in this friendly way that only Californians have (and maybe only in this over-grown cow town I've chosen to move back to). The garbage-man half-hugged me today when I handed over my flattened cardboard boxes from the move (of course, I'd just slipped him $10, so that may have had something to do with it.). "You know there's a good concert at lunch today in the park downtown," he said, "And it's free--you should go enjoy it!"

Gush, gush, gush...it's not that it's so perfect here, it is just so different that NYC..and probably fairly different than San Francisco. (End of perfunctory apology)

Postscript: Spencer's cross-country road trip started last Friday am and he's now West of Albequerque heading for Reno. After almost a week on the road, he's become a pro, as has the dog, who sits in the backseat, but who likes to lay his head on the gear shift between the two front seats so as to get maximum benefit from the (turned on high) air-conditioning, their only barrier against the steady 100-degree heat outside.

PPS: Just do you don't think I am all Pollyanna, I do have something to complain about--while this neighborhood is amazingly pretty and historic, it seems bereft of services--you can't get Pizza delivered, there are no decent supermarkets within 2 miles, and the one Whole Foods is the one I used to go to down in Campbell, about 8 miles away. You have to drive across the downtown to get to my old neighborhood, the Rose Garden, and the highways that encircle the area, 101 and 280, don't really offer any shortcuts through the core of the town. That is going to get old fast; I drove a good 20 miles today doing nothing but meaningless errands.

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Heading into day six in Silicon Valley. Had my first Palo Alto start-up meeting today, stopping outside of Il Fornaio to meet a friend who's been working on a very cool project.
No, I'm not going to tell you what it is, but you'll be really interested when they pull the covers off, I promise. We talked about buzz and burn-out; his contention was that buzz--for a new venture--was often an express train to burn-out. "Will Friendster really benefit from all the buzz it's getting, or will it burn out from the pressure of meeting raised expectations?" was high question, and it's a good one for everything that ends up wielding the double-edged sword of hype. I remember, back in the day, when Rupert Murdoch hired 500 people--yes, 500--to sit in an immaculate spanking new multimedia office suite high above the clouds in midtown Manhattan and when they came to recruit me I demurred, convinced anything that would rise that fast could head down just as quickly. And sure enough, six months to the day later, most of those folks did not have jobs, and I was working away at the less jazzy company I'd gone to, which would later win all sorts of prizes (and which had Jeff Jarvis as a stealth weapon.
Moral of this story: None.
Useful wisdom: Make sure your fast track doesn't lead to flame out
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Career Builder, the job search network developed by a series of newspapers, is finally getting serious about winning online. After many years of newspaper sites fearing that Yahoo, Digital Cities and other portal businesses are going to nibble away at their job listings margins and torpedo their business, CareerBuilder has stepped to the plate and committed up to $265MM in spending for their distribution partnerships with AOL and MSN.
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Guterman's back: The always-fluent Jimmy Guterman has posted after a long hiatus and getting settled in a new job: ...But the most successful business blogs will be those that revolve around personalities of individuals or small groups, not entire companies. The blogs of UserLand's Dave Winer and John Robb, for example, succeeded in part because that small company is so closely associated with those two people. There wasn't much difference between a personal weblog and a business weblog for these guys, because the two were so intertwined. Most "business blogs" you see are from people whose business is also their hobby and passion."
Jon Dube: 60 ways to improve your newspaper site (just in case you are in charge of one and haven't seen this):
Offer readers access to real estate ads a day or two earlier online (or send via e-mail) and charge extra for this access or limit to print subscribers

Offer an online coupon section
Create timely special packages from archived content and sell them to sponsors
Set up online town hall meetings (i.e. chats) with local political candidates
Create a downloadable MP3 section and let local bands upload their tunes for readers to download
Create multimedia obituaries online and charge extra for them. Then
Create multimedia wedding announcements online and charge extra for them
Use the Weblog format to cover a breaking news event
Do at least one thing on this list.




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Spencer snapped this:

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My husband, Spencer, is driving our dog, Winston, across the country, New York to San Jose, with a detour to Birmingham, Alabama to visit the relatives of our good friend, Rev. Claude Jeter, the 89-year old lead singer of the Swan Silvertones.
The guys left Thursday, drove the Blue Ridge to Birmingham, and then hit a snag when the dog got heat stroke and spent two days in the animal hospital. Winston's stay gave Spencer a chance to prowl Birmingham and surrounding towns.
The pictures below are from Birmingham, and from the Clarksdale, Mississippi area.


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Fiction soothes the savage beast living out of a suitcase until the movers come:
Crake and Oryx by Margaret Atwood: The 28 Days Later of the literary fiction world. A wow!
White Apples by Jon Carroll: Is charm and whimsy enough to keep me reading? Judging by how ambivalent I feel about almost every book I've read by Jon Carroll(not the SF columnist, the other one), the answer is yes, but then I complain about it. I read The Marriage of Sticks about a year ago, and loved it, and keep reading Jon Carroll books in the hope I will find another as good. I am still looking.
Medicine Men by Alice Adams: I was going to take out a serious book by Peter Ackroyd, but this was right next to it, so I decided to read the fluff first. It was and is fluff...not her best, either.
A Shooting Star by Wallace Stegner: Stegner is my current favorite author and I have still not read all his books. This one has bits of glorious writing, especially about a very Filoli-like estate and its old lady owner, but it's a bit heavy-handed and clunky over all.
Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights by Daniel Pinkwater. Short pieces by the witty author and columnist. I took this book out of the library because now that I am in California, I want to read about Hoboken, New Jersey. Go figure. I alson enjoyed reading about Pinkwater's fatness and the crows on his property. Go figure.
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AOL did a $115 million dollar deal with CareerBuilder,a job web site developed by a group of line newsaper compaies. Apparently, Monster.com's stock fell 14% on the news, but I wonder if they had actually wanted and intended to renew, especially at comparable terms to the first deal in 1999?
In other words, was Monster a satisfied partner? And would they have renewed?
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Brad wants new blogging software. He says " Now, there's nothing wrong with the crop of blog software out there, but it all pretty much works the same. I'm not even sure what I want different... I just want something different. What I want, really, is something so radically different that it's hard to even call it "blog software"."

I don't want new blogging software, but I want new tools:
--Server side newsreaders that can also be downloaded to my desktop so I can see the same blogs on different machines;
--Ability to do custom syndications of my blog without having to be a geek ( ai am so not...)
--FOAF easy to install and turn on
--Blogrolling as dynamic and intuitive tool
--Integrated toolsuite--not piece meal--recommendations and rankings of other blogs, notify when updated, send update via email.
--Want to add comments and send RSS or other feed format items to a friend

I realize all these things are possible..but most of them are also a pain. Can't someone make them work better and integrate them together? It won't devalue blogging if the tool challenges get a little easier for users.
(See Phil Wolff, aklog apart)
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...getting it up.

Are you really surprised? Other risk factors " for erection difficulties included smoking, drinking alcohol, and watching television.
Source: Annals of Internal Medicine August 5, 2003, via Reuters Health

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Wise words from Winer:
"...Bloggers who never flame anyone and don't have blogrolls (or don't make a big deal about them) may take a long time to become "important" -- but if they stand out because of the quality of their ideas, and the ideas they inspire, they can attain a kind of longevity that has value, like the giants whose shoulders Sir Isaac Newton stood on."

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At How to Save the World, Dave Pollard writes about his behavior as a blogger and charts his activities:


Dave writes: ...Why can't we enhance blog software so it allows a discussion, at the author's discretion, to migrate simply to other, more powerful conversational tools without losing the connection to the initial blog post that provoked it? I could (as lots of bloggers do) add applets and links for chat, IM, voice-over-IP, a webcam, desktop videoconferencing, my forums and groups, and my Ryze and LinkedIn pages."

I spend about an hour a day blogging; I could easily spend two, but I don't usually have the time. The areas where I spend less time that Dave are reading others blogs in my newsreader(that's been every other day, lately), checking Feedster and Technorati, and promotion. One of the things I find most thrilling about blogging is the extended group conversation going on--I write, others write, we read one another, new people read the blogs, and so on. And then my real world friends--most of them not bloggers--sometimes read my blog as well, and....so on, I have written about this before.
(Via Steven Delaney's Blogging Alone)
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Gawker's launched a personals section. Powered by Spring Street Networks, which is Nerve.com, Gawker's personals join their text links and ad blocks as yet another effort to make money through advertising and services.

On one level this is amusing (always a euphemism for annoys the hell out of me): The good-natured but always snooty Gawker has done a deal with the same provider fueling New York Magazine personals, which shows they are completely willing to bend their editorial voice and position for dollars (this, of course, is to be expected of any business and not unique). All those Williamsburg hipsters they so gleefully skewer are just the younger incarnation of the Upper East Side lizards anyway, so why shouldn't they date from the same pool? And be too stupid to notice that's what their favorite web site is helping them accomplish?

One another level, perhaps its an indicator of a new way smaller web sites and larger blogs are going to try to make money--You create a web site or blog with a strong core user base, first add text and paid search ads to the pages with Google, Sprinks, or WebRelevance, then layer on a personals service a la Gawker.

Advance Internet, Cox Newspapers, New Times, and Real Cities have already teamed up with Spring Street Networks to provide personals services on their local sites; so have a number of local and national magazine and media sites, including JANE, Esquire, New York Observer, Time Out New York, The Advocate, and The Onion. Now Gawker joins Nerve in offering this service. Are they the first blog to do so? Seems like it.

So now, I am wondering, does this mean we are going to start to see a slew of affinity personals listings on popular blogs?
The Political Pundit Hookup line for Instapundit and Buzzmachine?
The 'I'm quirky, just date me' service for BoingBoing, Gothamist, Anil Dash, and SmartMobs?
"Geeks need to get laid too" on Chris Pirillo and Doc Searl's blogs?

Certainly, many of the new "identity networks' like Tribe have to be looking at the success of Friendster and thinking about how to get a piece of that pie. And partnering and syndicating services is the smart way to go in terms of adding revenue producing bits.

And yet at the same time, as a reader, I feel annoyed that Gawker turned this feature on....unlike asking people to pay for the site, offering a premium service, or even adding more text ads, it feels contrary to their editorial voice -- and that makes me feel, somehow, like I am being played.


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