The River

Posting will likely be light the next week or so as I will be at Ad-Tech in San Francisco. Will try to post daily with general thoughts and tidbits, but I’m making no promises. Looking forward to seeing old industry friends and making new acquaintances.

For those who’ve been commenting about my obsession with Google, let me share another obsession: punctuation. I’ve been reading this book — shockingly, a bestseller — called “Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” It’s fantastically funny, and it’s so pleasant to discover someone else get so riled up about apostophes.

A lot of interesting rumors, etc. roiling around re: Google. This company drives me crazy, I’ve gotta tell you. Anyway, I just wrote up something re: the New York Times piece (free registration) everyone’s talking about.

As for the rumors about Google “quietly” testing a terabyte of storage for Gmail…. I tend to agree with Danny, who suspects it was a bug. (Google hasn’t responded to my request for info, and my Gmail account has reverted back to saying 1000 meg.)

Then again, people I’ve talked to seem to think 1 gig is plenty of space for e-mail, so maybe this is more of the Google “Web desktop” idea. That’s the scenario where Google offers a Yahoo!-like suite that lets you do everything from store files, to keep your calendar, to maintain contact and task lists. So, let’s say the terabyte is the full storage amount for the whole suite….. Anyway, just an idea.

UPDATE: News.com’s story, which had been fanning the flames of the whole “terabyte” rumors, has been updated to reflect the reality.

Seth Goldstein shares his “I was there” musings on the beginnings of the paid search industry. Super long post, but interesting.

DoubleClick today agreed to acquire affiliate and search marketing firm Performics for up to $65 million. Nate has some interesting analysis of how the two companies will fit together, based upon a discussion with DCLK CEO Kevin Ryan. (Nate worked at DoubleClick before quitting to travel around the world and eventually join JupiterResearch.)