“John Battelle”:http://www.battellemedia.com/ is a noted “author”:http://www.battellemedia.com/archives/001194.php, “event organizer”:http://www.web2con.com/, “columnist”:http://www.battellemedia.com/archives/cat_columns.php, and “entrepreneur”:http://www.fmpub.net. In his spare time he acts as “Ruben Kincaid”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/22/battelle_looks_back_.html to the “Partridge Family of the Internet”:http://www.boingboing.net/ (“Xeni”:http://xeni.net/ even says they’ve got the web equivalent of “bubblegum cards”:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/11/john_battelle_interv.html).
Interestingly, John’s brevity leaves us with a 305 word interview that is 57% questions and 43% answers – a ratio only slightly better than if I’d asked “boxers or briefs” and he’d answered “briefs”.
*One Degree: Your “endemic advertising post”:http://battellemedia.com/archives/000678.php was a big part of the inspiration for One Degree. Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by endemic advertising and why you think it is a natural match for blogs?*
Publications are conversations between three parties – authors, audience, and advertiser. I believe that advertising works best when the advertiser is also a conversant – someone who naturally belongs in the conversation. My term for that kind of an advertiser is “endemic.” You see a lot of them on boingboing.net, for example.
*One Degree: I’ve been assuming that your new venture FM Publishing would be modelled around endemic advertising. Is this the case?*
Category: Search Marketing
Google’s on a roll. Again.
Today they opened up “Google Earth”:http://earth.google.com/ as a free download. The screenshot above is from their “Google Earth download page”:http://desktop.google.com/download/earth/index.html and to me represents a really great focus on the non-technical user. (Click on the image to see it full size) Note how they simplified the tech requirements and put it in a context most users can understand – what kind of computer they have and how old it is. It’s worth looking at the whole page to see how they’ve set up _three_ download buttons that do exactly the same thing. The first is “I’m good. Download GoogleEarth.exe”, the second (after more traditional system requirements) says “I’m pretty sure I’m good. Download GoogleEarth.exe”. And finally, after getting to possible conflicts with video cards says “”I’m feeling lucky. Download googleearth.exe”. Very nice.
As far as I’m concerned, you can’t call yourself an Internet marketer unless you’ve spent at least 15 minutes contemplating the output of a “search voyeur” tool like Dogpile.com’s SearchSpy.
While there are dozens of more statistically accurate tools out there, such as Wordtracker, that count and rank the millions of searches conducted on the Internet every day, there is no better (or more eye-opening) way to get a sense of how Joe or Jane Public actually conducts searches than a search voyeur tool.