The River

I had a lot of fun this week reporting a story about PremierGuide’s new functionality. Though the new features were interesting, what was much more fascinating to me was the trend toward integrating social networks and local search platforms.

I spent a lot of time talking about this with PremierGuide President and CEO Malcolm Lewis and the Kelsey Group’s Greg Sterling. Lewis talked about his wife’s interest — when making purchasing decisions — in obtaining the opinions of her Palo Alto/Menlo Park Mother’s Group. (Why am I completely unsurprised this group has a Web presence?) He outlined a scenario in which his wife could filter local search results based upon the recommendations of other mothers in the group. This idea makes complete sense and absolutely serves an important consumer need. (Note: the PremierGuide demo site is at loqal.com)

Sterling pointed out other sort of under-the-radar companies based upon this concept, like Judy’s Book (which he said was founded by the same person who started Abuzz, which was later sold to the NY Times) and InsiderPages.com, an idealab company. There’s also local-i, which we wrote about in ClickZ News a while back. (Former Jupiter Research analyst Matthew Berk is involved in this one. Thanks, Niki, for the tip.)

Needless to say, achieving a critical mass of regular users and reviewers is critical to the value proposition. Yahoo! is working on this. Note today’s blog entry about Yahoo! Local, which exhorts users to submit reviews:

We think merchant and user communities can be very helpful in providing fresh, accurate content.

Not only have we gotten a ton of restaurant reviews ? people are submitting reviews on just about anyplace or anyone. I?ve seen reviews for dentists, auto repair shops, even the local dry cleaner. We?ve received thousands of reviews already, and in general, they?ve been very informative.

Yahoo! obviously has a good chance — because of its sheer volume of traffic — of getting these user reviews rolling along. Super local players, like local newspapers or yellow pages players (PremierGuide’s target audience) have a good chance here, too, as users are accustomed to going there for information about local merchants. Craigslist, needless to say, has a very loyal audience and a lot of user trust. How will this all play out? Don’t know… just watching and waiting and continuing the conversation.

Funny take on Gizmodo about the NYTimes Circuits story on the iPod’s shuffle feature (like no other electronic gadget ever had “shuffle” before… duh). The (whacked-out) premise of the article (free reg. required) is that people’s iPods, when on shuffle, betray their “preferences” for certain types of music. One interviewee notes that his iPod “drifts” toward a tune by a certain American Idol.

“It really likes Ruben Studdard,” the winner of “American Idol’s” second season, Mr. Angus said. This, despite the fact that he only has one song of Mr. Studdard’s - the soulful ballad “Sorry 2004″ - stored on his 20-gigabyte player. “There’s nothing worse than when you are having an intense workout and Ruben comes on,” he said, “but it seems to always happen to me.”

Here I was thinking these problems were solved by those fancy-schmancy iPod features called “playlists.” I guess I’m not really “listening” to my iPod’s secret inner desires.

UPDATE: Ok, to be fair to NYT, I should add (now that I’ve actually read page 2) that the author mentions playlists in the piece, but says most people interviewed for the story had never heard of them. The story also mentions the fact that it’s algorithms that mimic “randomness.”

Gary sends an e-mail on the algorithm favoritism issue:

You know, I had a multi-disc player that also had a tape deck. You could load in 6 CDs, put in an audio tape, hit shuffle and record and it would create a random mix tape. I used to notice that all my tapes would seem to favor one CD more than any other.

I always thought this had to do with the fact that computers can’t really pick random numbers. Although its a function of every computer language, the mechanics are really to take some known number…like seconds since 1936, or number of mouse-clicks in the last 72 hours…and put that into some complicated algorithm to generate a new number. So, if the algorithm wasn’t that great, you would always get ‘random’ numbers that were pretty similar. I figured that the guys who did the programming for the stereo didn’t put a lot of work in. I wonder if that’s the story with the iPod?

There are three guys outside our office building this morning dressed all in black — black clothes, black bulletproof jackets, and black helmets. Yes, they’re cops. And they’re carrying what look (to the untrained eye) like black assault rifles. Let’s just say they’re very big guns. I guess this is what the RNC in NYC means to me — even though I live in Brooklyn and work across town from the convention. Bummer.

UPDATE: My colleague, Rebecca, snapped a picture of similarly attired police officers outside our office the other day. Not SUPER easy to see, but they’re lined up along the scaffolding.  

I’m fond of telling people my hometown of Houston is a nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there. It’s hot, it’s humid, it’s spread out. You really have to know where to go and how to get there to have a good time. On the other hand, you can certainly have a good time. Additionally, my brother and his family have a gorgeous new four-bedroom house that cost them the same amount I paid for my small studio apartment in Manhattan. It’s a real city, with opera, theater, museums, etc. (Public transportation on the other hand… well, let’s just say the city places quite a bit of importance on the oil business.)

Some of those same thoughts are apparently behind a new, unauthorized marketing campaign for the Houston, which I read about in The New York Times (reg. required) this week. With a tagline of “Houston. It’s Worth It,” the campign seeks to acknowlege what many already know about the place — it’s hot, humid, sprawling, flat, and the cockroaches are of frightening proportions. Once that’s settled, the campaign goes beyond that to explain why, indeed, it’s worth it.

The centerpiece of the effort is the Web site (unfortunately constructed in such a way to where I can only link to the front page), where people are invited to explain their reasons for loving the city. (Update: Nate points out it is possible to link to the reasons, though the layout of the page is kind of weird.)

I think it’s a great idea and maybe the best chance the city has of explaining itself. It’s not some slick marketing scheme that paints Houston as “the space city” — which it is. It simply allows ordinary people to speak up for a city that many love. Seems like an idea worthy of the Internet age.

So, in my ClickZ column published today I make a stab at bringing transparency to our editorial decisionmaking process. I’ve done a lot of thinking about journalism vs. blogging, given that my day job involves breaking news (as well as features and columns), while I’m blogging here out of an interest in the phenomenon and a desire to participate in the ongoing conversation.

Looks like tomorrow’s the day for Google. I’ve gotta say I agree with Nate on this… Gary rocks, and I can’t begin to top him. So I’ll link to him instead. On Gary’s blog you’ll find a compendium of advice for the fledgling public company.

It looks to me that Google is headed the direction advocated by Rob Leathern and Gord Hotchkiss in Gary’s entry. Rather than becoming more of a media company, Google — as evidenced in part by the Picasa acquistion — seems to see itself as more of a tool company. I do wonder whether advertising will continue to play (it probably shouldn’t continue to play) as important a role for the company in the future.

More evidence: Larry Page’s statements in the infamous Playboy interview.

Playboy: With the addition of e-mail, Froogle — your new shopping site — and Google news, plus your search engine, will Google become a portal similar to Yahoo, AOL or MSN? Many Internet companies were founded as portals. It was assumed that the more services you provided the longer people would stay on your website and the more revenue you could generate from advertising and pay services.

Page: <... snip...> Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.

Best of luck to Google and to all its investors. Looking forward, as always, to see what the company cooks up and what the future holds.

ChangeThis, a project started by Seth Godin and a bunch of interns, launched today. The site/project/publication is designed to use “existing tools (like PDF files, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread.”

The idea is that if one feels strongly about something, one can draw up a PDF “Manifesto,” which can then be shared and discussed, etc. The site seems to be using e-mail, trackback, something resembling collaborative filtering, and Amazon-style rankings.

So far, Guy Kawasaki’s riffing on start-ups, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba are talking about customer evangelists, Evan Wolfson’s discussing marriage, Elly Markson exhorts people to learn how to use e-mail, and, finally, Amnesty International and Tyler Lackey are both holding forth about killing children (in very different contexts).

My husband was in town visiting (this bi-coastal thing sucks, I must say) this weekend, so we took the opportunity to splurge on dinner Saturday night. With the magic of OpenTable.com, we discovered just who had tables available in our time frame. We settled on WD-50, a Lower East Side semi-newcomer, and went for the 9-course tasting menu.

The place knows a little about viral marketing (the non-online kind). Our excellent waitress provided us with a helpful list of what we’d had, so I can tell you with full confidence the names of the dishes.

Really great:

Here I was wondering if the Bay Area had anything Gothamist-like, and Gothamist goes and launches a SF blog. The name, SFist, is a bit unfortunate. “Ess-fist” just doesn’t sound very… pleasant. Anyway, here’s hoping the new site can keep up the standards Gothamist has set. Looks pretty good, thus far. Ok, I guess there’s no excuse to avoid moving over there, now.

UPDATE: SFist’s editor comments (in the comments) on the naming issue:

Jackson, SFist editor here. We’ve caught a lot of the crap for the name. Not to name names, but the naming decision was made by a non-local. It’s pronounced “Esseff.” People and their dirty, dirty minds.

Jackson

Fascinating stuff sparked by the eBay/Craigslist deal from Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray in his Silk Road Newsletter:

We note that the large metropolitan areas such as New York or San Francisco have most likely just as much variety of merchants and offerings as you can find online. Searching and finding these merchants, however, is extremely inefficient and nearly impossible (the yellow pages is only efficient for broad categories, while consumers tend to search on a product basis). Thus, a consumer looking for a treadmill may well find the best offering right in his or her neighborhood, if such local business can have the same access to the web as the online business have had so far. In short, we believe we could be seeing an eBay-like phenomenon in the local listings, allowing consumers to easily find and transact with the local business (or other consumers, as Craig’s List provides) through an efficient online platform. How much could this impact Amazon, eBay, or other online merchant’s sales is not clear to us but we will be watching this trend carefully in the coming quarters.