At the Blog Business Summit in October 2006, John Battelle pointed out that search is in the “command-line” phase of user interfaces. Search is in DOS mode still, and we have yet to reach Windows.

In an interview today on i-media connection he says that the biggest surprise to him in search is that we are still in the same place:

Joe Kutchera: What is the most significant change we’ve seen in search since you wrote “The Search”?

John Battelle: The complete failure of any other company to gain significant share against Google.

Not only has Google continued to dominate search, but search has not really changed much in terms of what it means.

Battelle thinks—and I agree—that Google’s dominance will continue until we reach a point where current search is supplanted with something drastically different in terms of how the user interacts with it:

The big change will be a redefinition of search to a new, more useful result. In other words, the shift from DOS to Windows — that kind of shift, metaphorically, applied to search.

Microsoft is looking the wrong way if they’re only trying to increase the quality of their search results. Google search results show 70% spam and people still use it more than any other engine. It’s not about what you find, it’s about how you find it.

For an industry that is often criticized on its monopolistic practices and habits of relying on cripplingly intense DRM, the Hollywood studios sure got Hulu right.

I’ve never bought the idea that consumers are “entitled” to free content. That’s crap - creative content costs money and takes time to create, and video especially can be an expensive and risky product to make.

The problem has always been a question of lock-in and user experience. So long as the cost of buying video (or music) is greater than the inconvenience of getting it illegally, people won’t be buying video.

And since people are already paying for their internet connection, you can scratch off trying to get people to subscribe to an extra fee for TV online. So the studios figured correctly that if you made free video widely available in a really great player with limited commercial interruption, people would flock to it.

I logged in to Hulu today to watch Dr. Horrible’s sing-along blog, and I realized that Hulu has taken a swing at one of the bigger problems with embedding and sharing video: sometimes you only want to share a segment.

When you click to embed a Hulu video, they let you crop the embed video to whatever segment you want. Think that one-liner was the most hilarious thing ever? No problem - share just those 10 seconds.

Brilliant. I see a bright future for Hulu.

The search for the holy grail of targeted advertising is still on. Veoh just recently announced that they’re going to start letting advertisers target video and display ads based on their users’ viewing habit.

Blogging and other web 2.0 and social media platforms are now maturing to the point where businesses are really starting to look for the business model. Nick O’Neill talks about how many blogs are turning to events or maybe even newsletters for revenue.

I think that moving to a place where consumers will pay for premium content is not unreasonable. Freemium should work as a content business model.

But I have maintained for a while that the best way to use blogging in a business atmosphere is as an architecture and a marketing tool, not a business in and of itself. If you were doing a direct mail campaign, you would not expect to make money from the mail. You expect to make money from the sales that it would generate.

Blogging is the same way. Most businesses should not expect to make money by selling ads or sponsorships or t-shirts on their blogs. They should use blog architecture to make their web sites dynamic and search-friendly. They should use the blog as a marketing tool to drive interest and sales in their primary product.

That is where I think businesses will get the most use out of blogging.

Although they do refer to it as a “blog” in the article, the Wall Street Journal headline In Big Sur, Web Site Run by Resident Is Key Data Source exemplifies the trend we predicted back in 2005 when we said that blogs will be the Web “sites” of the future.

“The Web site and blog are run by Lisa Goettel, a temporarily homeless Web designer whose move to a new Big Sur house about 150 miles south of San Francisco was derailed by the wildfire, which was 18% contained Tuesday. Ms. Goettel runs the site out of a coffee shop with free wireless Internet in Carmel-By-The-Sea, about 25 miles north of Big Sur. She depends on five residents and businesspeople who remain in Big Sur — defying mandatory evacuation orders — for on-scene reports.

The site has become a must-read for Big Sur residents, the media and even fire officials. It routinely scoops fire officials and newspapers. The site also provides displaced residents a space to find temporary employment or shelter. The blog has already received 73,000 hits since it went up on July 3.”

And it’s no surprise that the blog is driven by WordPress, our favorite blogging engine for this type of site. We’re converting more and more traditional client “sites” to WordPress these days…

A recent Forrester report shows B2B blog adoption dropping off sharply from 2006 to 2007, and it predicts a continued drop in 2008.

Why? MediaPost shares:

“The gap between blog hype and reality widened in 2007,” said Laura Ramos, Forrester analyst and chief author of the report. “After counting 36 companies that started promoting corporate blogs on their Web sites in 2006, the number of B2B firms starting up blogs dropped sharply to 19 in 2007.”

One of the big problems with blogging is that it’s too easy. Twenty seconds on WordPress.com and you can start posting to the world at large without having to talk to a single person in the IT department.

But there’s a big difference between simply blogging and blogging well, and that’s why businesses aren’t necessarily seeing the kinds of results that blogging hype has promised them.

To be fair, hype is hype, and there was a lot of it in 2006 (although the trend still points upward). I can understand why some companies who haven’t seen ridiculous upswings could think they’ve been had.

There really is value to be gained form blogging, but it’s all about the kinds of conversations you start and the relationships you build, not it how well you can, in the approximate words of Eminem, “get up on the mic and spit it.”

For ages and ages “publishing” has meant going to a whole lot of expense to get something distributed to a large number of people.

If you look at things on a large enough scale, it goes like this:

First, if you wanted to share information with someone, you had to see them and talk to them.

Then, you could write it down and give it to them. They could write it again or simply pass the original document on.

Then someone figured out how to make identical copies of an original item without actually re-making the original.

Then we separated information from its physical form, and freed it from the laws of physics entirely. Suddenly getting information from point A to a place where every other person in the world can see it is easier than cooking dinner.

Often, this is called blogging. If you’re a company and you’re blogging, are you in the publishing business? Are you competing with your local newspapers and TV stations to get your customers valuable information in your space?

If you’re not, you’d better think about starting. Publishing is so cheap, there’s no reason not to be doing it.

It’s a really good idea for large companies to take advantage of social media technologies to remove some of the management overhead that just comes naturally with directing a large group the old fashioned way.

One of the most well known tools is a blog. Giving employees a blog they can use internally (or externally) is a good way to get your company out there.

But as we move forward, it’s more and more likely that you’re going to be hiring people who already have their own blog, either on their own hosting or with Wordpress.com or Typepad or one of a hundred other freely available services.

And you can’t make internal communities and blogging mandatory. Groudswell has a good explanation of why it’s a bad idea (with case studies to back it up!).

So the problem going forward is going to be: how do you integrate employees’ personal blogs into an internal network?

I think it would be interesting to see a plug-in for engines like WordPress that would let users specify, for example, a particular category of post to be fed only to a secure intranet area. This way an employee could keep their personal blog, but be able to participate in an internal blogging structure as well.

Blogging is just the tip of the social media iceberg, of course. Who wants to set up a brand new profile when they move to a new company?

I’m interested to see how businesses approach this problem.

I know I’ve said it before, but if you’re running your web site and you’re not paying attention to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, you’re ignoring a very good resource.

Just yesterday, Sven Naumann (who is on the search quality team) wrote a post dealing with concerns webmasters have about scraper sites that pull exact post content and republish it as their own.

So what does Google do? They use a couple of methods, which they don’t identify, to determine which bit of duplicate content is the original piece, and then point to those.

For people who see scraping sites placing higher in search results than their own, original content, they offer this advice:

Some webmasters have asked what could cause scraped content to rank higher than the original source. That should be a rare case, but if you do find yourself in this situation:

• Check if your content is still accessible to our crawlers. You might unintentionally have blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file.
• You can look in your Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
• Check if your site is in line with our webmaster guidelines.

Largely, the answer seems to be “don’t worry, we’ve got a handle on it.” But if you want more details on how to minimize duplicate content within your own domain, you can go check out the post.

What I think Google really needs to solve though, is the arrival of “old” content for the first time online. How do you figure out who the real owner of that content is?

Fred Wilson is absolutely right about web discussions: Information can be sucked out, but it needs to be pumped back in as well.

If I write a great blog post, and it gets sucked in to Facebook as a note, and the conversation happens there, inside Facebook - it doesn’t automatically get attached to my site. The problem stems from the fact that all these different web services get value from having the conversation happen on their servers.

Facebook gets value from having a complete social environment going on inside their walled garden, so they’re not dependent on search.

Disqus gets value because all the comments left in their system are regarded by Google as their original content.

FriendFeed gets value from having conversations happen ON friendfeed, which keeps people on their service.

Business bloggers get value from having comments on their site because Google sees it as original content and because smart commenters frequently add to the knowledge available in the post.

Google is the largest roadblock in this process. As long as it provides an incentive to web sites and services who collect comments and discussion on their server (first), then it’s only smart business to keep things segmented.

Over on the interactive marketing blog, you can find background information on the blog reader survey that Forrester gathered about four of their blogs: Web Strategist, the Interactive Marketing blog, Groundswell, and Being Peter Kim.

I thought some of the most interesting results are shown on slides 11 and 14. They tell you 1) how people are reading these blogs (overwhelmingly RSS) and 2) that these blogs are clear sources of authority in their space.

Here’s the slideshare of the results:

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I’ve been asked to talk about blogging and how it relates to business at the Rainier Club in Seattle on May 12, if you’re a member and plan on attending. Let me know what questions you have ahead of time and I’ll tailor my presentation. Steve [at] blogbusinesssumit [dot] com

Hey PR people! Want to get bloggers to write about you or your products? Please, please, for all concerned — tear up your Technorati Top 100 list and start over. For most companies, 99 percent of overtures made to the “A” list bloggers will at best be ignored, and at worst could result in negative coverage.

We believe the best bet is to find approachable bloggers with the right topical alignment. The nice thing is that if you are topically aligned to a significant degree, even a relatively popular blogger can find your message of interest.

The key thing is to create a win-win scenario where the blogger being approached is actually glad to hear from you, and you know that if they write about you, someone will actually read it. We think a good way to do this is to find bloggers who are writing about things your customers are interested in, and have aligned posts that are prominent in search.

The main thing to recognize is that significant and growing numbers of shoppers begin their buying process in a search engine. Anyone with a retail site can attest to the fact that their server logs show the bulk of their traffic is coming from search. Blog posts are featured prominently in results your customers are finding, and these are the bloggers to engage. Robert Scoble wrote recently that despite Twitter and Facebook it’s still “a Google world” and we couldn’t agree more.

Here’s an example of how search term analysis can provide a numerical index of alignment with a company.

Let’s look at two bloggers that are not on the Technorati 100 and how they align with two very different companies.

Let’s start with Jeremiah Owyang. He wrote a bit about influence today. Buzzlogic, a company perhaps using the old-world(?) “inbound-links-as-power” metaphor was profiled.

Jeremiah places highly (in the top 20) in Google for 7,900 unique search terms. The top 10 individual words used are: media, marketing, web, social, myspace, strategy, community, facebook, companies, and corporate.

Thomas Hawk places highly with 8,200 terms, the top ten being: camera, media, digital, windows, player, mce, store, center, connection, photo, and slr.

Do these blogs overlap at all? A little. They share 8 popular search terms between them:

That’s an alignment of about .1 percent.

Let’s look at a couple vendors who are buying Adwords search terms.

Awareness Networks provides social networks to the enterprise. They’ve purchased 1,270 search terms. How many align with Thomas Hawk’s organic keywords? Zero. How many align with Jeremiah? 64. That’s an alignment of 5.04% Here those terms are:

Digital SLR Guide teaches consumers how to buy and use digital SLR cameras. They’ve bought 708 search terms. How many align with Jeremiah? Zero. How many align with Thomas Hawk? 50. That’s an alignment of 7.06%. Here are the overlapping terms:

Our sense is that the terms we see here are compelling, and that alignment numbers (purchased terms/blogger organic terms) indicates both strength of “influence” (highly ranked organic terms) and topicality (shared terms).

We’re now starting to use search term analysis in an organized way to both measure influence and to do the needed “matchmaking” between clients and bloggers. Eager to hear what readers think.

It’s abundantly clear by now that the internet is a double-edged sword for business ventures: On on the one hand, the rapid dissemination of information and content can lead to mass market exposure with the lowest cost-benefit ratio in the history of mankind.

On the other hand, this very same process can often take a gigantic chunk of the “benefit” by effectively killing a business’s ability to monetize that same content.

I saw today on Chris Pirillo’s blog that Cory is releasing a new audiobook completely DRM free AND with a generous license to re-hash the content (up to 30 minutes can be redistributed wherever). This is from the e-mail Cory sent to Pirillo:

The audio book comes with the author’s sampling license: once you own it, you’re free to take up to 30 minutes’ worth of material from it and remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it’s clear that this is a remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that you’re allowed to do.

Anybody who embraces DRM-free internet distribution with a paid product is undoubtedly forfeiting a good chunk of potential revenue.

In the future I think that the “widgetization” of content will allow businesses to monetize their content via ads regardless of where it goes. But for now, when is the right time to let your product go? Should you risk the lost revenue for the possible gain in exposure?

I’d be really interested to see some data on this. Finding and downloading content of all kinds—music, movies, audiobooks, etc—is so easy already that the amount of revenue captured by DRM has got be relatively minor. For the most part, people who will steal the book will steal the book regardless of whether it is a DRM release.

Given that assumption, I’d say it’s almost always the right decision to release content without DRM. Enabling open sharing will help drive the technology to monetize it using some new model. What do you think?

I had a chance to interview Web marketing guru Andy Beal recently about Trackur, his new blog/press monitoring service. Since we had recently unveiled our own sentiment tracking system, I was intrigued by what appears to be a complimentary offering.

I tried to get Andy to reveal a little of what goes on behind the technological curtain, but understandably he was a bit reserved about detailing trade secrets.

Note the final paragraph. This is where Andy really aligned with our thinking regarding sentiment tracking. As Alan Wilensky says, sentiment is the weakest of CGM metrics.

I’d be eager to hear from any clients how the service is helping them in their brand monitoring efforts. The current buzz has been quite positive.

Here is the interview in it’s entirety:

Steve Broback: Many companies have “rolled their own” monitoring systems by aggregating custom search feeds from multiple sources. Other than the time it takes to create these searches, the challenge is that duplicate content, old content, and spam (splogs!) need to continually be weeded out. Is Trackur intended to be the alternative to this largely manual process?

Andy Beal: Absolutely! We built Trackur because creating custom search feeds was too time consuming and we couldn’t get the filtering and reporting options we needed. With Trackur, you enter your keyword one time and then let Trackur automatically monitor the different types of social media for you. You can filter out unwanted items, sort the results, email to co-workers and subscribe via RSS or email updates. You can’t do any of that when you manually monitor your reputation.

Steve Broback: Are we correct in assuming that Trackur taps into multiple existing search engines and then de-dupes and de-spams the results?

Andy Beal: Trackur does a great job of filtering out the noise and focusing on the signal–the content that matters most to your reputation. It doesn’t remove all duplication and actually, you probably don’t want to remove it all. A post might show up in Technorati one week, then again on Digg.com the next–if you removed the duplicates, you’d miss this reoccurrence.

Steve Broback: What search engines are you leveraging?

Andy Beal: Trackur pulls from a wide selection of content. It’s not really a search engine, more of a reputation aggregator. We don’t provide a complete list of sources, but we do include some unique content such as Flickr, YouTube, and Digg.

Steve Broback: Have you created your own crawler of any kind, or is it exclusively tapping into existing indexing services?

Andy Beal: We didn’t set out to make Trackur a web crawler. It’s a reputation monitoring and aggregation tool. It’s power comes from bringing a wide range of web content together in a central database, then giving you powerful tools to manage the data.

Steve Broback: Google has been working this problem for years without much luck — how good is Trackur at removing splogs from results?

Andy Beal: Removing splogs from search engine results is extremely tough, so we’ll leave that to Google’s immense resources. Instead, Trackur focuses on providing clients with the tools they need to pinpoint conversations which include their reputation. If a Trackur client finds a splog showing up, they can add a filter to remove it from any future results.

Steve Broback: How do you avoid filtering out relevant content?

Andy Beal: We advise Trackur users to start off with the broadest of searches. For example, if you are Apple, start by monitoring “Apple” and see what’s tracked. If you find too many irrelevant results–or simply want to be more refined with your monitoring–you can add filters to focus on a particular word (such as “iPhone”) or remove the unnecessary results.

Steve Broback: How do you insure that old posts don’t re-emerge in search results?

Andy Beal: Actually, we don’t believe it’s a smart practice to say, “never show me this result again” when it comes to reputation monitoring. If a blog post attacks your reputation, you need to know if it keeps resurfacing–that would suggest that the post is being revisited or discussed by others.

Steve Broback: Have you applied for any patents specific to Trackur?

Andy Beal: Not at this time. There are processes we could patent, but we’re not finished enhancing Trackur’s technology, so we’ll probably wait until we’ve added new features, before applying for a patent.

Steve Broback: Shane Atchison says sentiment is the “next great analytics frontier”, and we’ve been focused on that metric of late. Are there any plans to integrate sentiment tagging into Trackur results?

Andy Beal: Sentiment analysis is definitely something we exploring with Trackur. The biggest problem is that it’s virtually impossible to accurately ascertain the sentiment of web content using an algorithm. Apart from the need for human interpretation as to what is positive or negative, technology gets confused by statements such as “Apple Mac’s are wicked bad!”

I wrote a post a year ago about how the fear of blogging had been replaced by the fear of not blogging. Boy, was I wrong about this being the case on a national level. A few months later I discovered that (at least for businesses in and around Chicago…) most of the dozens of directors of marketing I spoke to were still terrified or completely apathetic about the idea of blogging. Almost zero had any interest in our conference we built significantly for them. We had to cancel an event that in San Francisco drew 300 rabid attendees.

I’ve noticed that there’s barely a startup in Silicon Valley that doesn’t have a company blog. I dare you — find me a company that’s announced a round of funding that doesn’t have a blog. Okay, maybe a few don’t, but for every one that’s not blogging there are at least ten that are.

Now I read in the Wall Street Journal about how in the heartland of America, Miller Brewing Co. has created a very successful blog whose intent is primarily to needle their rival Anheuser-Busch:

The corporate marketing battlefield has long been strewn with pithy digs in ads and selective news leaks about others’ business woes. But it’s unusual for a company to go to the trouble of creating its own media arm to grind out news on the competition. While the site lets Miller tweak its famously tight-lipped rival, it also gives the company a platform to take a first crack at spinning industry news.

“They are trying to aggressively go around the gatekeepers” in newsrooms and the trade press, says Stephen Quigley, an associate professor of public relations at Boston University. “It’s something you couldn’t do five years ago,” before the proliferation of blogs.

The article doesn’t say if Anheuser-Busch is responding with their own blog, but the implication is that they’re largely in denial:

Anheuser declined to answer specific questions about Brew Blog or make an executive available for an interview. It wouldn’t say whether it considers the site a concern. “Our focus is on our consumers and delivering great brands,” Dave Peacock, Anheuser’s vice president of marketing, said in a statement.

Hey big companies: If this whole “transparency” thing is still terrifying to you, wait until competitor blogs are launching assaults on you and you have no defense. Hey wait, maybe your competitors will let you comment on theirs!

Buzz Bruggeman sent me this info a few days ago. Collective Intellect has closed another round of financing this time worth $6.6M. Their total take so far is $11.2M. The bulk of the services they provide are social media tracking and sentiment analysis.

An interesting note from this article is that it appears their initial foray into sentiment analysis was to provide investor-related analysis services to Wall Street. That idea seems to have been eclipsed by the idea of doing brand monitoring.

Despite the fact that this arena is viewed as a highly attractive one to investors, we have purposely eschewed the notion of pursuing VC funding for Sentimine. It seems to us that the pressure to monetize quickly/prematurely and the risk of commoditization of sentiment puts those with a high level of capitalization in a less competitive position.

I often joke that we need to do a press release touting how we’ve secured $147.50 in our third round of financing for our service.

Monitoring blogger sentiment is critical to journalists according to a report cited by JakeMcKee today. Seems like Sentimine, our new platform for aggregating and tracking blogger sentiment may have a role beyond brand monitoring. It might also serve as a useful tool to serve journalistic endeavors.

I’ve been reading Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smarter Business Decisions by Shane Atchison and Jason Burby. Shane (co-founder of ZAAZ) wrote a post for ClickZ back in March of 2007 claiming that sentiment is the “next great analytics frontier.” Seems to me that if companies and now journalists are tracking blogger sentiment, we may be onto something…

I know a lot of people who are reluctant to start blogging because they feel like they’ll have a hard time coming up with stuff to blog about. And they’re right that coming up with the right stuff to blog about is one of the more daunting tasks you face if you’re aiming to blog regularly.

The first great solution, which I recommend, you can find at Copyblogger here.

Fortunately, there’s a loophole for this problem. You can write about the same stuff more than once.

It turns out that repetition is a great tool for teaching and persuasion. If you’re trying to get an idea through people’s heads, it’s actually a good strategy to approach the issue for four hundred different angles. I can’t count the number of times that we’ve blogged about how a blog should be your business homepage.

The point is this: repetition is a teaching strategy. As long as you’re not simply re-posting something you wrote before, re-hashing the same subject is fair game.

I know that blogging can often take more time than you expect. I sat down to write this post half an hour ago, and I’m just now starting to type. Who knows what time it will be when I’m actually done writing it.

Unfortunately, successful blogging often requires a commitment to consistency that can seem daunting. Fear not - there are strategies for rolling activities that you do on a daily basis into good, useful blog posts with a minimum of effort.

Del.icio.us

If you use del.cio.us to tag interesting posts or pages on the ‘net, you can also use it to automatically generate a digest post at the end of each day.

You can find instructions on how to set up your blog by plugging your username into the following URL:

https://secure.del.icio.us/settings/USERNAME/blogging/posting

As long as you bookmark at least one item with del.icio.us each day, you’re guaranteed to have a post on your blog. Even better, if you’re bookmarking interesting things (and why wouldn’t you be?), you’ll be giving your readers a great set of recommendations.

Twitter

If you’re not on Twitter, you should be. It’s the new Facebook.

Twitter’s API is awesome, flexible, and completely malleable. It also gave birth to Twitter Tools, which is an awesome plugin for anyone using WordPress (and why wouldn’t you be?) that lets you import a digest of the day’s tweets.

So unless you go a day without tweeting OR tagging anything in del.icio.us, that makes two posts a day without even opening your posting window.

A side effect of having a plethora of cool web services built by VC-backed entrepreneurs is that they all need to find an exit.

In recent times, that’s meant that companies get acquired as opposed to IPOs.

Check out Fred Wilson’s blog post today on finding new exit strategies.

I think it’s a good point that these services tend to languish under the ownership of large companies. It would be cool to find a new way to maintain high levels of innovation and still give investors and entrepreneurs the incentives to keep building them.