Blogs, search, and the changing media landscape

John Battelle (Federated Media)


" Turn off your fucking cell phones."

Why am I standing in front of you?
I went to Berkeley.
Wired magazine - worked. No idea why.
Hotwired - a portal. Larger than Yahoo for a week in 1994. Started the 468 banner. Sorry about that. "How are we going to pay the Hotwired writers?" "Well, Prodigy seems to sell ads on the banner at the bottom." "Let's detach it from the bottom and put it at the top!"
Industry Standard magazine, and thestandard.com. At leak, half million visitors a month. We spent only $16 million. Sold 7500 ad pages. Fourth quarter of 2000, everything blew up. Out of a job. What do you do?
Go back to Berkeley. As a professor this time. Among other things, teaching blogging as journalism.
Remember Suck? Netizen? Justin Hall?
Started searchblog in 2003. Became fascinated by search while at Hotwired.
Book: The Search. Blogged to write the book - people could come and give me feedback.
Within 6 months, 40-50,000 visitors a month. Why?
Then Boing Boing's Mark F. said, we have huge bandwidth costs - just from huge number of readers. Hmm...huge media shift. Time to get out of academia.
Founded Federated Media.

Three-hump tech curve.
Digitize back-office 1970-1980
Digitize front-office 1980-2000
Digitize customers (2.0) 2000->

This was part of the Industry Standard business plan, but I didn't know what the interface would be - Google.
Search as interface: DOS = dir
Then Windows, Mac experience
Google is like DOS: you have a command line, you get a list in return. Difference: the command is spoken language.

What might be next? Hard to know. Search is an interface - like a steering wheel? How we navigate through space in a car, where it's second nature?

One scenario: "New bottles, old wine"
The wine aisle is a testament to hierarchy. Most expensive is at the top.
Imagine a product code on the bottle - scan it with your phone, a search comes back from Google or Yahoo Mobile, checks against a database, average price in your neighborhood: $45. At the store you're at: $85. Up the street: $60. Read reviews, reserve a bottle, have a bottle delivered.

Covered the battle between Netscape and Microsoft.
OMG, Microsoft is going to own the window! That means they'll dominate the Internet!
But it turns out that the window doesn't matter - it's what's in the window.

Advent of Web 2.0.

Tim O'Reilly: "architecture of parrticipation" aka "user-generated content".

Lightweight business models. Craiglist just topped 20 employees.

SEARCH RULES. Search drives Web 2.0 businesses.

Very important phenomena - never have we created an artifact in which every single thing you do with the artifact is kept throughout eternity.

Who owns search history? Can I get a copy and give it to my son so he knows what I searched for on the day he was born?

Database of intentions.

Piper Jaffray's chart - cost of customer acquisition. Search is way down low.

Content after search: audience delcares intent, then content finds audience. "I searched on my interests and found you, but you don't have the content I want. What's wrong with you?"

Marketing becomes a dialogue.

Traditional media: you get attention by controlling distribution.
Now, attention is controlled by the consumer.
Content is now king. The landing page is the queen. When they land on your site, you need to understand why they're there.
Don't write things in Flash. If you do, know how to hack Flash so people can link to it!

Your product being criticized is a huge opportunity. Scoble is the king of that - responding to criticism in an intelligent way.

Case study: Lenovo
Sold ThinkPad to Lenovo. Oh my God, the quality will deteriorate.
Federated: Invite leading bloggers to tell you what they want from a new laptop, then build it.
Agency: Yay!
Lenovo: Uh...right.
Compromise: ppeople got to vote on whether it should be titanium or black. It took 17 steps to vote, yet they got 200,000 votes.

Case study: Microsoft
Microsoft ran dinosaur print ad.
Federated: This is awful.
Microsoft: You got something better?
Federated: How about author-driven copy?


Case study: Symantec
Bought media just to drive people to their security blog
Blog admitted that there was no virus threat to Macs
Digg!


Case study: Cisco
Wanted to drive discussion of "the Human Network"
Knew that people would roll their eyes if Cisco just hammered their definition of it
Worked with Federated Media authors to define the human network
Bump in the road: Cisco wanted to put the final definition on Wikipedia. Um...
Federated: Let's ask the authors what they think.
Result, posted on Wikia, the commercial version of Wikipedia, which makes total sense. This conversation

Case study: Dice
IT job board. IT people aren't happy. Let's get them to rant about how much their jobs suck!
Live scrolling text of submitted rants.


Federated Media
Author-driven
Commonly held values
Closing in on 100 sites

Advertisers come to FM and say "I wish you had a (blank) federation."

FM sells ads against content, not intent. Seems to contradict previous comments, but our ads understand the intent of the readers of that site.