Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

David Siegel on Web 3.0

There's some kind of blog karma in the world today.

In my MediaPost column today, I mentioned David Siegel's vision for the semantic web and Web 3.0. Today, he emailed me, "I update my blog once or twice a year, and today's the day. I'm launching my definition of Web 3.0."

Check out his full article at dsiegel.com.

Discovery: The Anti-Search

This column picks up from a post mentioned on this blog about two weeks back on how this is the Year of Discovery. The idea's fleshed out more in the MediaPost column below, which continues in the extended entry.

Discovery: The Anti-Search
By David Berkowitz

If some visions for the future of search are realized, then we'll be surfing a Web where search doesn't matter. The emphasis will instead shift to discovery.

Through discovery, when you read your favorite newspaper online, you're presented with a wealth of links from around the Web that should be of interest to you, including other articles, related books or products, or video clips, whether or not you'd expect them to be directly relevant. Amazon.com does this regularly, such as when it told me that customers who bought the Black & Decker 3.4 PS550B Handsaw also bought a 5-pound bag of Haribo Gummi Bears and the movie "Borat." It's through the power of discovery that a site like Home Depot could suggest, "After busting your butt with this handsaw, why don't you unwind with five pounds of Gummi Bears and a satire about a Kazakh journalist touring America?"

The better discovery gets, the less search should matter, at least in theory. Discovery is the lazy man's search, and I mean that in a positive way. If you can bring someone what they want "serendipitously" (really, it's done through sophisticated algorithms and targeting), then you save him the trouble of ever searching for it.

Here are four examples of how discovery plays a role online and who's making it happen:

Integrated Asset Digitization: The One Trend That Explains All Others

What's Integrated Asset Digitization, and why can it illuminate so much of what's going on with media and advertising right now?

I came to the topic in a roundabout way, at first contemplating how media buyers and planners will be affected by companies like Google trying to broker ads across all media from a single starting point. My gut tells me the media buying profession won't go away anytime soon, yet I kept turning back to Eric Schmidt's keynote at Web 2.0 and thinking about his case for technology to do a lot of multi-channel campaign optimization.

Ultimately, the column it spawned was far bigger than media buying, or Google, or any of us.

The column, originally published in MediaPost, starts below and continues in the extended entry.

The One Trend That Explains All Others
By David Berkowitz

What do all of Google’s acquisitions, the proliferation of social media, the long tail of search, and other search engine marketing developments have in common? They all connect to Integrated Asset Digitization, an emerging trend that encompasses several of the most significant issues marketers, publishers, agencies, and consumers will face for years to come.

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt hinted during his conversation with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo last week, Google aims to use its technology to optimize advertising across all media. Google’s Book Search, Docs & Spreadsheets, Picasa, Video/YouTube, and Base are just some of the services that empower consumers to either digitize assets or bring existing digital assets online. Media companies play a major role as well, digitizing TV, radio, out-of-home media, and print media -- both the content and the advertising. It’s the digitization coupled with Web-based access that makes integration possible.

In under 1,000 words it’s impossible to fully cover  just how Integrated Asset Digitization affects all of us, but here are five implications of the trend.

2007: Year of Discovery

Fine, I'm sold on it. I know I'm not the first to say it, but as someone who's been a huge cheerleader for the search space for years now, it feels a bit more like a confession.

A few cases in point:

1. The rumor mill says eBay acquires StumbleUpon. Read Pete Cashmore's 8 Reasons Why at Mashable. I still don't get why this site is so popular. TechCrunch cites comScore numbers that SU's up to 6 million pageviews a month.
2. Google's adding a discovery feature into its new toolbar to send you to recommended sites based on your search history.
3. Two words: Aggregate Knowledge. I met with them when I was out West and they're solving some very real issues with the web. Like, why do I still have such a hard time finding Mother's Day gifts no matter how hard I search? More on that another time. I'm looking forward to hearing what Paul Martino has to say at the Search Insider Summit next month.

More on the Year That Wasn't

The column this week reviewing search trends for the year could have gone on endlessly, and I had to keep cutting to get it down to a remotely readable length of under 1,000 words. Included below are some sections that were snipped from the final version. I've added a few headers and organized them in the rough order in which they would have beein included in the column to help make any sense of this.

Overall Impressions

Yahoo’s search term list seems the most honest, given its reflection of a celebrity-obsessed (and babe-obsessed) culture. Google’s is the most bizarre (Bebo tops MySpace), even more than the one from Lycos (#1 search term: poker), while MSN’s list included the most mentions of soccer players.

Another Take on Google Zeitgeist

Google Zeitgeist’s most prominent feature was labeled “top searches in 2006,” and it instantly raised eyebrows. Social network Bebo ranked as the number one term, followed by rival MySpace. I turned to Google Trends LINK, which expectedly showed searches for MySpace soaring way above Bebo searches.

I wrote Google, and a spokesperson promptly responded, “The reason for this is because the Google Zeitgeist is a regular look at an aggregation of the most popular and fastest-rising search queries as indicated by what people are typing in to their Google.com search box. Zeitgeist means ‘spirit of the times,’ and Google search queries, when seen in volume, tend to reflect what is collectively on our minds day in and day out. People use Google to search for what's new and interesting and top of mind.”

This opens the door to a range of questions. Why call the list “top searches in 2006” if they only reflect the “spirit” of 2006? How can Bebo be top of mind if it’s really far below the top of minds for most searchers? How is Metacafé CHECK STYLE top of mind over YouTube,  which doesn’t make the list?

I can’t help but think, when reading Google’s list, that 2006 was the lamest year ever.

Other Changes in the Year of Inaction

Publisher Judith Regan who was fired over a book that wasn’t released. Donald Rumsfeld left his post too, in a year where he did nothing, and the Democrats gained control of the legislature largely for doing nothing incredibly wrong.

More on Yahoo's Top 10

The celebrities in spots 1, 5, and 10 on the overall list (Britney, Paris, Lindsay) all were photographed baring their genitals in public; that may not be what got them on the list, but it didn’t hurt. Yahoo’s list may not be perfect. If Yahoo was presenting an unfiltered list, terms like Google and Yahoo and at least a couple sexual queries would have likely bumped Linsday off the charts. Yet for what it is, it’s refreshingly real.

The News That Matters

As I wrote this column on a plane to Las Vegas sitting next to Cara and I asked her what were the biggest news stories of the year, she rattled off an eclectic list spanning TomKat to Darfur, and then she sweetly added, “We moved in together.” That won’t show up in any top ten list, but it will be the story that will affect us more than any supposed chart-topper. Only later in the hotel room at 4:30am Eastern Standard Time did I realize how right she was.

2006: A Year about Nothing?

I just wrote my next column, which looks at the top searched terms of 2006, and the news terms grabbed me; it felt like nothing happened. I'll post the full column Tuesday when it's released, but in the meantime, I'll share some excerpts, since I wrote over 2,000 words for what's supposed to be a 750-word piece (if not shorter).

One part, that veered from the general theme of the column, discussed Lycos ranking "poker" as the top term of the year.

Poker? 2006 was also the year of Pokemon. Lycos also came out with a list of top fads for the year, which included several of its top 10 search terms (Poker, MySpace, and video game RuneScape), but Pokemon, the top fad of, oh, 1999, can’t return to the fad pool. Another question for Lycos: if consumer interest in MySpace, iPods, and YouTube is still growing, how can you declare them fads before seeing how they turn out next year? Lycos also picked the Atkins Diet as a top fad – a good thing, since you might not have known the fad really ended a year or two ago.

Lastly, while we’re calling spades spades here, Lycos also included poker, blackjack, and baccarat, along with Pokemon, iPod, and Harry Potter, among its top 10 most searched toys this holiday season. If it’s defining toys that loosely, I’m amazed MySpace and golf (another top search term of the year) weren’t somehow included.

Now Joining the Blogosphere: Ahmadinejad

These seems too bizarre to be true, and yet...

Iran's president, Mahmood Ahmadinejad, appears to be blogging: يادداشت هاي شخصي احمدي نژاد (check the mini distorted version of the US flag on the upper right for Engilsh).

Thanks Google Blogoscoped for the link.

For more on Ahmadinejad's outreach to Western media, you can catch several clips from his "60 Minutes" interview with Mike Wallace at CBS News Video (I missed the airing, but it seems like most of the interview is online). It's chilling. Wallace calls out Iran's president for dodging questions but also has to give a little slack just to keep the interview on track. Half the Q&A seems to be a meta-interview, one where the two are jovially bantering about their interviewing tactics.

During the interview itself, Ahmadinejad is quick-witted, well studied, and frighteningly endearing. He isn't, however, always logical. For instance, he criticizes the US for continuing to keep its military in Iraq when Iraq now has its own government, yet also tacitly defends Iranian suicide bombers permeating the border, which is of course undermining the fragile Iraq government and thus requires the US keep its Armed Forces there longer.

As for the Holocaust denials and moving Israel to Germany, it's all too much to blog about at the moment.

USPS Saved by the Internet

I love  stories where the killer turns out to be the cure. E-mail once made some question the viability of the US Postal Service, but package delivery, at least somewhat credited to e-commerce, is help making up for the shortfall. Great story: Postal Service Finds a Friend in the Internet - New York Times.

This is a similar type of story to one I wrote about in MediaPost in June, where search engines, which were cited by some very smart people as bringing about the downfall of newspapers, may be newspapers' best lifeline.

Google Trends China: Ethan Hawke Goes Uncensored

Courtesy of Google Blogoscoped, Google Trends is now available in Chinese. I can't read Chinese, nor can I write it with my US keyboard, but it's still possible to have fun with it. For instance, take one of the trends of the Chinese Google Trends homepage and then add your own. Apparently, Mao is far more popular than Ethan Hawke, and whatever the other two trends are. Click the image at right to see it.

Update: According to Google Translate, 机票 is "ticket" and 火车票 is "train tickets." It was more interesting when I didn't know what all this meant.

Hezbollah vs Kate Hudson

Some of the most fun I have writing columns is from the distractions. On today's radar: who's more popular in terms of search volume, Hezbollah or Kate Hudson? Click the chart to see.

What surprised me here is that there hasn't been a massive spike in Hezbollah searches. Okay, maybe I shouldn't be. But when CNN and Fox News are running round-the-clock coverage with features such as "Anderson Cooper Refs a Hezbollah vs Haifa kickball match" and "Fox News Live for World War Five," you'd think there'd be something visible in search trends.

Nope. Even a has-been daughter of a has-been actress who has been in a total of one watchable movie trounces the terrorist group in search volume. I love America.