A Brief Interview with Michael Wesch (The Creator of That Wonderful Video...)

Michael Wesch, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. If you've been reading Searchblog, then you know him as the guy behind this amazing video.

After I saw the film, I had to talk to the man who made it. Michael is a very thoughtful fellow, as one might expect, but he comes to "Web 2.0" from an entirely different perspective than your typical Valley entrepreneur (yet he seems to know more than most of us!). For more, read on....and keep in mind the Michael has agreed to answer your questions in the comments field, should any come up!

You did your fieldwork in a Melanesia, and teach at Kansas State. How did you end up making such a compelling video, one that resonates so deeply with folks like, well, those who read Searchblog?

For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization.

My friends in Papua New Guinea are experts in relationships and grasp the ways that we are all connected in much more profound ways than we do. They go so far as to suggest that their own health is dependent on strong relations with others. When they get sick they carefully examine their relations with others and try to heal those relations in order to heal their bodies.
In contrast, we tend to emphasize our independence and individuality, failing to realize just how interconnected we are with each other and the rest of the world, and disregarding the health of our relationships with others. This became clear to me when I saw a small boy in a Papua New Guinea village wearing a torn and tattered University of Nebraska sweatshirt, the only item of clothing he owned. The grim reality for me at that moment was that the same village was producing coffee which eventually found its way onto shelves in my hometown in Nebraska, and this boy may never be able to afford to drink the coffee produced in his own village.

So if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind. I’m not being overly utopian and naively saying that the Web will make this happen. In fact, if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.

So that’s some of the more personal and philosophical background behind this video. I wanted to show people how digital technology has evolved and give them a sense of where it might be going and to give some momentum to the all-important conversation about the consequences of that on our global society. I did not know it would reach so many people, but I had hoped that for those it did reach it would spark some reflection on the power of the technology they were using. Because without proper understanding and reflection, “the machine” is using us – all of us – even those that don’t have access to the machine at all.

Your video was quite sophisticated about how the web works, and the production quality was quite high as well. Where did you pick up those skills?

I made my first website in 1998 using notepad and HTML while I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. It was slow- going but I saw a tremendous potential for transforming the way we present our research. Since then I have had a passion for exploring the latest technologies and how they an be used to communicate ideas in more effective ways. I like to learn these technologies on my own through trial and error, because sometimes the errors turn out to be new uses for the tool that I might not have discovered through formal training. I’m always looking for ways to use tools in ways other than for what they were intended. The great thing about our current era is that the tools are not only easier to use (as evidenced by an anthropology professor being able to learn them in his spare time), they are also more flexible than ever, allowing for some creative uses that seem to re-invent the tools all over again.

What tools do you use out there on the web that you find useful? Are you a devotee of any of the "Web 2" tools?

One can think of the Web as a place where multiple overlapping global conversations are taking place simultaneously. To keep up with these conversations I have established my online home at Netvibes, which allows me to integrate almost all of the tools I use and organize them into different “tabs” in a way that fits with my online life. I have a tab for blogs and comments which allows me to track multiple online conversations, along with a blog search module that updates whenever somebody posts something related to the topics I am currently interested in.

To keep up with parts of the global conversation that might not have a simple RSS feed, I use feeds from social bookmarking services like Diigo and Del.icio.us. As a visual anthropologist I also need to monitor parts of the conversation taking place in photos and videos. Sites like Flickr that allow photo tagging make it easy to monitor the photos, and with new video services like Viddler, Mojiti, and Bubbleply that allow users to tag, comment, and create their own content within and on top of existing videos, it will soon be possible to be alerted the moment somebody uses a tag to describe any particular piece of an online video. On the other end of the media spectrum, it is now easier than ever to keep track of traditional paper-based journals as well, as many are now providing RSS feeds and putting the articles online. This has created tremendous potential for Cite-U-Like, a social bookmarking service for academic journals, which I use to alert me whenever somebody uses a certain tag, or when somebody with similar interests as me tags anything.

The best tools are those that are flexible enough to be used beyond that for which they were intended. The more a web service can build this kind of flexibility in, the better, as it can tap into the collective intelligence of those using the service to extend its possibilities. Netvibes has this built right in by allowing users to create their own modules. With the help of an “API maker” like Dapper, we can create almost anything we need and integrate it into Netvibes, further extending our ability to keep track of those parts of the global conversation that interests us the most.

As a university professor I have also found Facebook to be useful. I was inspired to use Facebook for teaching by something I saw while visiting George Mason University. Like many universities, they were concerned that the library stacks were rarely being accessed by students. Instead of trying to bring students to the stacks, they brought the stacks to the students, placing a small library right in the middle of the food court where students hang out. We can do the same with popular social networking tools like Facebook. Facebook is not only great for expressing your identity, sharing with friends, and planning parties, it also has all the tools necessary to create an online learning community. Students are already frequently visiting Facebook, so we can bring our class discussions to them in a place where they have already invested significant effort in building up their identity, rather than asking them to login to Blackboard or some other course management system where they feel “faceless” and out of place.

Would you be open to answering any other questions readers might have in the comments section of my site?

Sure, sounds fun.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:48 PM
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A Few Questions For Joe Kraus

Joe Kraus, a co-founder of Excite (image credit), recently sold his latest company, JotSpot, to Google. I’ve known Joe for quite some time, and thought a quick email interview might be in order given his long history in search and Internet media. (Joe introduced JotSpot at the Web2.0 conference two years ago.)

Did Google buy JotSpot, or your team? If the former, what is the plan for the company? If the latter, what's the plan for the team?

Simply put, I think Google bought both the technology and the team. In *most* acquisitions, you are acquiring both and ascribing value to both.

Google has invested substantially in collaboration (Groups, Docs&Spreadsheets, Google Apps for your Domain) and JotSpot is a part of that trend. In my opinion the first wave of productivity apps (seen in the 80s) was about making an individual more productive. Word, Excel, Powerpoint were all about making me, as a worker at my desk, able to create more work per unit of time. But, I think we've eeked out the last bit of individual productivity gain at this stage. I mean, does the new ribbon on MS Word make me more productive as an individual? Probably not. It's a great interface, but it's unlikely that there is a massive gain in personal productivity.

This next wave that we're in is about productivity gains achieved NOT by making the individual more productive, but by making groups more productive. The massive penetration of email means that we're in touch with one another like never before and dependent on teams like never before. That means that there is a huge opportunity for productivity gains through more effective collaboration. That's what Google is trying to do in their efforts and that's the theme in which the JotSpot acquisition fits.

I can't talk specifically about product plans, but I hope that the above gives you a general sense of direction.

It does, thanks.
Now, personally, isn't it kind of a mixed emotion joining Google? I recall a conversation earlier - 2004 or so - in which you expressed some reservations at the giddy growth and presumptive optimism of the place. I think like many of us you felt perhaps Google was due a needed, well, life lesson, one that you learned at Excite, and I learned at The Standard. What say you now to such sentiments?

Well, I have to say that I think "the rumors are true". Google has collected the smartest group of people I've ever encountered under one roof.

In terms of emotion, you know, it's an understandable question, but honestly, there's no mixed emotion -- I'm honestly just excited to be here. I think that comes from two things -- more than the former founder of Excite, I was most recently fully occupied as the CEO of JotSpot. I had 28 employees that were working very hard, who had given up other very good opportunities and and for whom I wanted a great outcome. There's no better outcome than to be at Google (it's a wonderful nerd paradise -- a place that nerds like me can thrive in) and there is great satisfaction in that. Second, I left excite 6 years ago, and at a personal level, my life has gotten a lot more rich and fullfilled from a variety of sources -- marriage, kid, non-profit work (as well as my for-profit work). So, it's not that I don't love my work and feel very passionately about it -- it's just that I'm not defined by it the way I was when I was in my 20s.

What can you do at Google that you can't do outside of Google? And a follow up, what can't you do at Google that you "gave up" to be there?

What can I do at Google that I can't do outside of this place? I think there is a lot here, but the short answer is the pretty obvious one. Google operates at a scale that startups don't approach. And, while that provides its own challenges (making sure your stuff can handle high numbers of users), it provides a ton of opportunities to get your ideas exposed to a large number of people and get a large amount of feedback. Also, if you are pursuing very forward-looking ideas then a larger company like Google provides staying power in the market. There's that old adage in startups "being early is the same as being wrong". In a startup, if you're too early for the market, it feels like there is no market at all. It's hard in a startup to really tell the difference between early and wrong and in most cases it leads to startup death. Google is a place where there is strong interest in the long term and that is a very unique thing.

Thanks Joe!!

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:58 PM
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A Few Questions for Dave Morgan, Founder Tacoda

Dave founded Tacoda, a behavioral ad network, six years ago now, and recently inked a deal to add Comscore demographic information to Tacoda's network. Tacoda is an FM partner, so read with that caveat, but I found our email back and forth interesting, and hope you do too.

Like Tacoda recently did, Google incorporated Comscore some time ago. Why is yours better?

Because TACODA is capturing and can target ads against anonymous browsing behaviors from more than 15 Billion page views per day on 4500 of the top news, entertainment and information sites on the web, from NYTimes.com to MSNBC.com to Orbitz WSJ.com to FM Publishing. This gives TACODA the broadest, deepest and most diverse database of user content browsing anywhere - more than Google or Yahoo! - though they certainly have a lot more search data.

By matching this browsing data to anonymous ComScore data, we now know not only what content they surf, but marketer sites they are visiting online and what e-commerce categories they are buying online. Since we can associate this with time, we can see users much higher up the purchase funnel than search marketing. We can see the users when they are still in the brand consideration phase. By the time that users get to Google, like yellow pages offline, they generally already know what they are going to buy, it's just a matter of price and vendor.

Will there be any change in how you charge for this?

We sell on a CPM basis only, since our efforts are focused on brand and branded response advertisers – folks that care who sees their ads and where they see them – rather than direct response. We see video as a big part of this future, whether it is on the computer, of IP-driven television or on mobile devices. Nothing beats sight, sound and motion for delivering brand advertising.

Given that you sell on CPM, but are a network, don't advertisers still want to buy site by site? Will you ever get into that business, or do you think all the behavioral and demographic data obviates site-specific selling?

I expect advertisers to buy both behavioral networks and site-by-site in their media mix. They buy individual sites for the strong, integrated branding opportunities, but they have to live with limited inventory and premium prices. Buying behavioral is a nice complement to that. With TACODA’s behavioral network, they get the audiences that they want on clean, well-lit sites. They get a lot of scale. They get lower prices. However, it will never replace site=specific selling. When someone wants a Wall Street Journal reader or a Boing Boing reader, the only place that they can be certain to reach them, and the only way to fully-leverage the sponsorship value of a great publisher brand, is to buy it site-specific.

As a behavioral network, I do not expect TACODA to get into the site-by-site selling business. It is much better served by direct or specialized sales forces working on behalf of the sites. We are focused on selling people, not pages. When advertisers want to talk to certain types of people, TACODA will be there. When they want to their messages on certain kinds of pages, that will be for other sales organizations.

So how is business at Tacoda? Can you give us a sense of your scale in terms of revenue and margins?

TACODA is doing great. As a private company, we don’t release specific numbers on our revenue or margins, but I can tell you that our last quarter’s revenue was up several hundred percent year over year, our margins are strong and growing, and our team has grown from 25 or so a year ago to more than 90 today, thanks in large part to the work of Curt Viebranz our CEO, who was our COO for the past two years and was the former CEO of HBO International and Time Inc. New Media. Over the past year, our publisher network has grown by 10X as have the number of marketers and agencies that advertise on our network. 2007 is starting out very well and we expect the strong growth to continue.

Can you be more specific on the size of the publisher network?

TACODA’s network today has more than 4500 branded content publishers – folks NYTImes.com, Dow Jones/WSJ.com, Orbitz, Cars.com, NBC, Tribune, BusinessWeek.com, Technorati and FM Publishing. These sites deliver 15-20 Billion page views per month to an unduplicated US audience of more than 140 million unique visitors and deliver real-time anonymous content browsing behaviors to TACODA’s servers with virtually every page and person that they serve. Since TACODA’s market focus is brand advertising, not performance and direct response, its advertiser customer base is quite different than other online ad networks. Among its top advertisers in Q4 were Coke, Snapple, American Express, FAO Schwartz

In your estimation, what are the hurdles/gates in the online advertising business right now?

Advertisers need more scale and less friction and there is a looming shortage of quality inventory at cost-effective prices. If General Motors wanted to appreciably increase their online ad spend this year, they would have a tough time doing it economically and efficiently. All of the substantial auto content sites are largely sold out for 2007. Search usage is growing, but not nearly at the rate that online ad spend is increasing, and the rates for the best search terms are already pretty high. The vast majority of web pages viewed every month – probably 80% of them – can’t currently support premium advertising. They either lack an intuitive and valuable commercial context – they have news, social, email, photo and video sharing content, not technology, travel, cars or health – or they have unsuitable content. Unfortunately, these non-premium content pages are growing much faster than the premium pages. The majority of ad view growth on the web in 2006 was in social and photo and video sharing. Finally, while the “sight, sound and motion” of video advertising on the web certainly offers an attractive vision for the future, it is going to take years for it to truly come to fruition.

Any other thoughts for 2007?

I think that the big online ad stories in 2007 will be brand dollars, targeting and scale. This should play very well for all networks, but particularly those that they serve the needs of brand advertisers – who care about who sees their ads and where they see them. I think that we are going to see a lot of attention, and a lot of money, flow to sites further down the food chain than those few that have dominated this sector historically. The really big guys will do fine, but the mid-size and smaller folks will do even better.

Thanks, Dave!

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:25 AM
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Three Questions for Peter Horan: New Google Deal Next Year

As I posted yesterday, Peter Horan (image credit) is heading to IAC to run a suite of its media and advertising businesses, including Citysearch, Ask.com, and IAC's other media assets. I emailed him three questions, here are his answers.

So, what drew you to this job?

The door was opened by a personal relationship. Jason Rapp lead the team at The New York Times that acquired About.com in 2005. During that process and the integration, we came to know, like and respect each other. Jason joined IAC in the fall as SVP of M&A and suggested that I talk to them about this job.

As those conversations progressed, I was very impressed with IAC and realized that this job would let me focus on several things that I am passionate about: the evolving relationship between search and content; developing mobile solutions; and local web products that work. We have the resources, the team, and the brands to really advance the state of the art in all of these areas. There's also a proven sales team to help with the monetization.
It's a unique opportunity.

Did you have a vision for what IAC needs, or is it more that you're there to manage what already exists?

I am fortunate to be going into a situation where I can focus on growth and adding strategic value. There's nothing to fix. Under strong leaders, the individual businesses have been doing well. The goal now is to bring together IAC's amazing array of resources in new ways that benefit the consumer (and drive IAC's share). Mobile and local solutions will be high up on the priority list. I will also be working to find ways to use search to help power other IAC business units.

Early this year, we will also be evaluating our options for monetization and distribution. I expect that to be a vigorous process. The initial overtures have been very interesting.

Hmmm. Can you unpack "evaluating our options for monetization and distribution" a bit more?

IAC's Google contract comes up for renewal at the end of the year. The company has already started to explore options.
It will be one of my top priorities to make sure that we get the best deal for the company.
Economics will be a big part of that but so will distribution and other factors. Because this will be one of the most valuable parterships in play this year, we expect this to be a very vigorous process.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:48 PM
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Ask CEO on AskCity

OK, let's start from scratch. What is AskCity?


OK. Here we go: AskCity is a new local search application from Ask.com. You can find it in one of two ways: through the AskCity link on our homepage, our automatically, at the top of our standard results page, in response to your local queries.

AskCity is the fifth major search vertical we've launched this year, following Image, Maps, Blog/Feed, and Mobile search, and we're really proud of it. It stands out from the crowd because it seamlessly integrates four types of local search - business/service, events, movies, and maps - with the best local content on the Web, along with ergonomic design and features, to form an "all-in-one" resource. AskCity users won't have to bounce around to multiple sites in order to find, and take action with local information. In short, we get you from Point A to Point B faster.

Local has been around for ages. Why now?

Very simple. Local accounts for 10% of all Ask.com searches, and yet it is the vertical on our site, and in the overall search category, with the lowest user satisfaction. Our research showed that people felt that recent local products launched by our competitors focused too heavily on maps, or on "cool" fly-through graphics, and not enough on helping them dig deep into local content, or into helping them accomplish tasks. AskCity fixes that and then some.

Upgrading our local capabilities will hopefully serve our users needs better, increasing their likelihood to adopt Ask as their primary search engine in a very competitive environment.

I really like user reviews/testimonials. Will AskCity have this feature?

We found in our research that one of the biggest causes of dissatisfaction with local search is an over-promotion of and over-reliance on the map, and limiting information to mere links. It reminds me of the over-reliance on comparison shopping in product search, as opposed to product research, which is 80% of online shopping. 
 
In response to this, with AskCity, we went deep on information, incorporating over 25 companies from across the Web directly into the product. We not only feature full editorial profiles of each business, but we include 10 years worth of reviews, both from IAC companies like Citysearch and ServiceMagic, as well as non-IAC companies like Yelp, Tribune, OpenTable, RottenTomatoes, TripAdvisor, InsiderPages, JudysBook, Fandango and others. 
 
An important differentiator with AskCity is the fact that we return these reviews right within the results, just beneath the full profile of the business, service, locale, movie, etc. We even have reviews of the movie theaters themselves.
 
Speaking of which, its important to note that AskCity is much more than just an online version of the yellow pages. Yes, you can use it to find businesses. But there are four types of search in the product - business/service, events, movies, and maps/directions. And we plan to add more next year.

But can **I** post a review?

Are you some kind of review monger?

No, but I do like to hear what folks have to say...

You don't write reviews directly on OUR site, but that's not our job. Instead, when you post it on Citysearch, Yelp, InsiderPages, etc., we will crawl them and post the top ones in AskCity. We also tell you how many reviews exist on each one of those sites for that particular business, and link to them. We also have 10 years worth of editorial reviews from Citysearch, which adds a different flavor.

We’re not currently a place where you can write them yourselves. But we are crawling those other sites constantly, so as soon as you write it there, they’ll be searchable on Ask. And the bottom line for this version of AskCity is that we’ve gone further than any other site to incorporate review content directly into our results.

How long did it take to pull this together, and is this the start of Ask.com becoming the "connective tissue" of IAC?

We worked on AskCity for the better part of the year, really turning up the heat over the summer, after our initial relaunch. With Local being such an important part of search, and something we weren’t doing very well, it was an obvious place to make an effort to do something really good and really original.

I look at the connective tissue thing a bit differently, in that to date I think people have assumed that meant we’d stick a bunch of links for IAC companies all over our homepage. But that’s not what people want from search, and going back to Pathfinder I don’t think that’s a model that’s worked well. Even today, we’re being used more and more for what you might deem “portal” content, because people find it easier to use a search box than navigate a page with dozens of services on it and going through a separate experience. If they can get it, people want one, cohesive experience. So instead of looking at Ask as the glue, I look at us as a chef that is remixing IAC into our own recipe, to create new, valuable products that didn’t exist before. AskCity is a great example, but IAC has leading brands in many other categories, so you’ll see us create new recipes for things like shopping, real estate, travel, etc. We develop things with a “quality over quantity” mentality, however, so it may take a little while to get there.

I know you've answered similar questions (see Om), but how does this change the positioning of Citysearch, which was a local search destination?

It doesn’t change anything. We’re the doorway, they’re the destination, and we both have well over 20 million users per month, respectively. With AskCity, we’re incorporating more of their content directly into our results than other search engines do, and that helps people make more informed decisions more quickly. This will raise the water level for both Ask and CS at the end of the day, and that’s why the Ask and Citysearch teams worked so well together on this one.

How important a launch is this for Ask.com - what are your expectations?

Very important from the perspective of doing a lights-out job on 10% of our searches, where we formerly had a pretty high failure rate. Any time you can do that, you build your foundation for growth. That’s been a key to our success all year against a very strong headwind, with a company that has few, if any, structural advantages over our competition. Image Search has been the fastest growing part of our site on the back of critical praise and industry-leading relevance. Even our Mobile search, launched last month, has been growing like gangbusters – well beyond my expectations – with almost no real press coverage. With Local, I expect even more. The product deserves it, because it delivers.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:00 AM
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