The River

• John Battelle’s Searchblog: Browse your Genome, anyone?
  wild
  (tags: google DNA)

Seen in Gmail. The AdWords battle — for, and against — right there in AdWords itself. Love it.

FM’s own Justin Watt, using Google’s new Co-Op project, has created the Federated Media Search Engine, which searches all of our authors’ sites. Nice!

I’ve started to get the first video search referrals via Yahoo!/AltaVista to my personal, family blog (where I posted videos of my son soon after he was born). Kind of creepy, in a way, because although I expect text to be indexed, I hadn’t realized video of my son would be “out there” in quite the same way. Such are the internets, I suppose. Most of the more recent stuff is going up via VideoEgg or YouTube. Not sure how that’ll be indexed, or if it will be, since it lives more on other people’s servers (OPS).

Anyway, the search term that’s sending folks my way is “first bath,” and here’s the video detail page about the content in question. Kind of cool to see video search delivering appropriate traffic, without any metadata. (While the text linking to that video says “getting a bath” the word “first” surrounds it pretty closely in other videos titled “first minutes”.)

UPDATE: Fixed the link to the video detail page. I guess I sort of gave away that I was posting this at the same time as I was shopping for a flame thrower for the garden. (We bought it, too, and it is very cool.)

Rebecca (my boss) posts about the scuttlebutt on our official ClickZ blog.

P.S. Yes, this is somewhat self (ClickZ, anyway)-promotional, but also very interesting.

I agree with Gary when he agrees with David Card and Charlene Li. When I wrote about Google Base yesterday for ClickZ, I focused on the classifieds- and eBay-threatening aspects of the initiative (because we write about advertising), but those are only small pieces of the larger picture. This is about Google getting into structured data. And because it’s Google, and it has the power to direct lots and lots of traffic, people will submit their structured data.

I talked a while at the Web 2.0 conference with Bob Wyman, CTO of PubSub, about Structured Blogging. The idea behind it is that people should publish (blog) in certain formats, basically tagging their posts to indicate whether it’s, say, a movie review or an event announcement. A movie review has certain standard parts — the name of the movie, the rating (# of stars), the review text. A structured movie review can have those parts labelled as such. An event announcement also has standard features — date, start time, end time, description, venue, etc. If people publish things in the proper formats, with posts and their component parts labelled as such (via tags), all of the data becomes much much easier to parse and deal with (even break apart and reassemble).

It’s that conversation with Bob that I’ve applied in my thinking about GoogleBase. They’ve got all of these standard types of things they suggest you submit — housing, products, reviews, services, travel, vehicles and want ads — which presumably all have standard component parts. If people and businesses are willing to format it the right way — and, as I’ve said, because it’s Google, they will — one could do an incredible variety of things with that data. Classifieds and eBay-style solutions would just be one option.

UPDATE: Charlene Li’s post is attracting a lot of interesting comments.

UPDATE: Sergey Brin in the NY Times this weekend: “Google Base is as much about classified as it is about zoology.”

In case you haven’t seen the hilarious Googlepark at Channel 9, point your browser over there immediately. Great Friday afternoon fun for watchers of Google and MSN. (Links to previous “episodes” at the conclusion of the one I’ve linked to.)

Callum and I made a foray down to San Jose yesterday to visit the big Search Engine Strategies conference and exhibition. Kind of strange mixing maternity leave with search and wheeling a stroller around the conference venue, but it was great getting down there. I met with Rebecca Lieb (my boss, pictured with Callum). Also got to chat with Incisive Media’s CEO and SES’ (not to mention ClickZ’s) new owner Tim Weller (interviewed today in WebProNews). We also ran into Kevin Lee, Gary Stein, and Omar Tawakol of Revenue Science, among others.

We were shooting for a picture of Callum in front of a SES banner, but — despite his being incredibly good and quiet for most of the time — he was getting a little fussy as we passed the convention center entrance. Alas.

So, I have a ClickZ Experts column due every other Thursday, and I spent a decent amount of time yesterday trying to get one step ahead. Then, this morning, I went to finish it up and saw the file I’d been working on — and diligently saving on a regular basis — wouldn’t open. Then I looked at the directory and saw it was listed as being 0 kb in size. Uh, oh.

After looking for temp files, etc. I fired up Google Desktop Search. There I found 3 or 4 different cached versions of the file — one not too far from up-to-date — which I could easily cut and paste into a new file. *Whew* Who would have thought? Anyway, many thanks, Google.

Blodget on Google (on Bambi’s MarketWatch column):

You would have to be drunk not to be uneasy about Google today. The stock and company are screaming along at half the speed of sound, and everyone involved is just hanging on for dear life. Maybe they’ll get where they’re going (world domination). Maybe they won’t. But it won’t take much of a bump in the road to send the company and stock careening into a ravine.

Stock price at post time: $279.25 (down $3.50 on the day)

UPDATE: Battelle links to yet another story in which Blodget weighs in on the Google valuation.