I was really surprised when Michael told about a couple new hires they've recently brought aboard. Jon Glick, looks like the guy from American Pie but all grown up and geekier, has left Yahoo to join the Become team. Chris Kermoian, formerly of Alta Vista is the Vice President of Product Management and has some great new features in the pipeline for Become.

Additionally, Yeogirl Yung devised a great way to filter the developer applications they received during their first phase of hiring. The process was so effective that Become has been able to go from conception to beta within 9 months. For those of you who know what's involved in creating a search engine as well as an incredibly unique algorithm that required a patent application, then you'll understand why Become is a bit different from other engines.

BitePR is handling Become's publicity and they're doing a fantastic job. Part of being fantastic PR firm means being amicable to bloggers. BitePR has done a pretty good job with me so far. When I got to the hotel last early this morning [after almost 12 hours of travel] there was a bottle of wine sitting on the table with a letter from Michael Yang. I have no idea how BitePR even found out where I was staying much less that they actually appreciated me posting about one of their clients. Traditional PR firms typically view a blogger as an enemy but Bite's viewed me as an allie and it shows.

Ever wonder what a beta preview confirmation email looks like from a PR firm with a clue? Now you don't.

Hi Jason,

On behalf of Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, we are thrilled that you are attending our exclusive preview event for Become.com. The following is confirmation and logistics information including restaurant location, directions and parking information. Should you have trouble finding your
way, you can reach Andrea Heuer or Trinity Blyth.

Who: Become.com's Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun
When: Thursday, February 10 at 4:30 pm PT
Where: Il Fornaio Restaurant
520 Cowper Street, Palo Alto
Phone: (650)853-3888
Why: Preview Become.com's specialized shopping search engine beta. Drinks and hors d'oeuvres will be provided


Directions to Il Fornaio Restaurant in Palo Alto from the 101:

Exit off the 101 on University Avenue. Go west on University Avenue past Middlefield Road to Cowper Street. Take a left onto Cowper Street. Il Fornaio restaurant is located at 520 Cowper Street on the right hand side next to the Garden Park Hotel.

Directions to Il Fornaio Restaurant in Palo Alto from 280:
Exit off 280 on Sand Hill Road. Take a right on Arboretum and then a left on University Avenue past the Stanford Shopping Mall. Follow University about two thirds of the way through town until you reach Cowper Street and take a right. Il Fornaio is located at 520 Cowper Street on the right hand
side next to the Garden Park Hotel.

Parking is available in the restaurant lot off of Cowper Street. You can also find FREE garage parking across the street from the restaurant. The lot is called the Cowper Street Garage. Valet parking is also available next door at the Garden Park Hotel for $6.

We look forward to seeing you at the event!

Best,

Trinity

trinity blyth
bite communications
www.bitepr.com

So what do you give a public relations firm that "gets bloggers"? More publicity of course!

So I guess taking the latest flight possible from Orlando to San Francisco wasn't the best idea. I didn't get to the hotel room until after 5:00 am Eastern Time. That's due in part to the flight being delayed due to rain in Atlanta [my layover] as well as an increased headwind coming in from the left coast. Needless to say, I made it here in one piece [kind of]. Not sure if it's just because my eyes dried out on the flight or what but my left eye feels like the lower eyelid is one big stye. Man oh man does it hurt. Hopefully my eyedrops will clear it up but I can't wait to meet Tim O'Reilly and Dan Gillmoor tonight looking like I just got mugged.

When I arrived at the airport I attempted to find the rental car area but had no luck. Then another person [Rhett] had the same issue and we joined forces in search of the rental car area. I guess since Rhett's from NYC he was willing to risk appearing rude to the police officer giving us directions to the location of the rental cars. Rhett asked for the "best route" and within 5 minutes we were both standing in front of the Hertz counter, way to go Rhett!

On the flight over I sat next to an Apple PR Rep. He and I shared thoughts on what I dubbed Apple's new "Mini Marketing" approach and how I felt it will probablly result in me becoming a Mac convert because price is no longer an issue. I also said I don't feel the new line of inexpensive electronics is going to erode their marketshare, no matter what Business Week says about it. Later he came up with an idea of placing a bar code on a business card and using the iSight camera's OCR abilities coupled with the delicousmonster.com db to provide all the information on the owner of the business card with the wave of the card in front of the iSight camera.... I said brilliant and that banter went on for another 5 minutes or so.

All in all, the flight wasn't too bad but I'm totally beat and I'll be busier than a one legged man in a hopscotch tournament today.

Today I'll be goin back to Cali, more specifically I'll be in Palo Alto, San Francisco and MountainView for the Become prelaunch event. Posting will be light since I've got some high priority tasks at work and I have yet to pack. My flight's leaving Orlando Int'l at 6:15 and right now all I can think about is work.

So, stay tuned for the next two days as I'll be covering the Become search engine launch in detail. If you have questions you'd like me to ask the Become team you can send an email to jason.dowdell [at] gmail.com and I'll evaluate them.

Oh yeah, last night Michael Yang called and gave me some really exciting information about some stuff going on at Become. I promised not to post it until after/during the prelaunch tomorrow night but as soon as it's public knowledge you'll find it here first so stay tuned.

In my previous post I misspelled Tom's name, the correct spelling is Tom Foremski. Thanks for the catch Candida.

Tom Forenski at SVW has a great post about hailing a cab with his Treo, talking to the cabbie about blogging, and then converting the cabbie into a blogger. Sounds like a page out of my book.

Here's a teaser from Tom's post...

Monday evening: I’m running late for dinner and I need a cab...I quicken my walk and head to Geary. I pull out the trusty Geek Beacon (my Treo 600) and switch on the display. I wave it high above my head and within seconds a cab pulls up. Bingo, the Geek Beacon does it again...

Btw, if you're not aggregating his blog already and you're into technology / marketing then you need to do so. I'll make it easy for you, here's a link to his rss feed.

The cat's out of the bag, Google has released it's own mapping application. It's a direct competitor to MapQuest but it will be interesting to see how much grass roots press it gets in the coming days. I wonder if they're using any of the technology from Keyhole, their last acquisition.

via Slashdot

Dan Farber, blogging at ZDNet, discusses the ability of Google to help parents answer those questions we know are easy to answer but just can't ever remember exactly what the answer is.

For example:
Why does the moon come out every night?
Why is the sky blue?
Why does it snow?

The list goes on and on but it's a good post and well worth a read. TechDirt has commented on it as well. I'm sure Shannon and I will be using Google more and more as Piper nears te 3 year mark.

The owner/founder of Bloglines [Mark Fletcher] confirms the acquisition rumors on his blog this morning. Here's the post from Mark's blog.

Yes, the rumors are true and we’re all really excited. Now that that is out of the way, I'll try to answer some questions.

1. I won't be going anywhere. I'm fully committed to Bloglines, and we've got great things in store.


2. The Bloglines web site will keep on going, business as usual. One of the things we liked about Ask Jeeves is their multi-brand strategy, and we'll be operating as one of their independent brands.



3. So what will change?
   
   We'll have a lot more resources available to us. For example, we'll be integrating Ask's killer Teoma search engine technology within Bloglines. This will vastly improve our blog search capabilities. We don't think that world-class blog search exists yet; with Teoma and Bloglines that will happen.

Since we launched in June 2003, we've had an organic growth policy, both for the web site and for the company. And that's worked very well for us. Over the past year and a half, we've had many conversations with several great VC firms about funding Bloglines. We've also had conversations with many companies about acquiring bloglines. We've been in a very fortunate position where we did not have to take any money, and we turned down all offers. But Ask Jeeves was different than the others that approached us. They wanted us to continue to run Bloglines as a stand-alone property, and also integrate Bloglines into their other properties where it made sense. And they were willing to commit a lot of resources to Bloglines to help us expand our features and capabilities. Just as important, it was clear from day one that the Ask team understood us, and our service. In fact, many of the execs at Ask Jeeves were already addicted Bloglines users. More subjectively, we thought they had much more of the start-up/fast moving mentality than any of the other companies we talked with, and that approach made them feel like the right partner for us.

Speaking from experience, I know that the acquisition of a service that you use and depend upon can be unnerving. I also know that after acquisition some services wither.I am confident that won't happen here. There is a shared passion and vision for Bloglines, and I'm very excited about the future.

So there you have it. I'm interested to see what happens over the next 2 - 3 months with the bloglines service. I have some enhancement requests but I know they'll be on hold while they start the scaling process. Good luck Mark!

Scoble says bloggers can and do keep secrets and I whole heartedly agree. He was responding to a claim by Frank Barnako of Marketwatch that bloggers won't keep a secret.

If you're a blogger worth his/her salt then it's a well known fact that you've got a bag full of secrets you're not going to unloose on the public. Why won't you release these juicy tidbits that would result in tons of traffic and 15 minutes of fame? Because people trust you and when the trust is gone then you'll not be privy to any more secrets. The relationship between a good blogger and his sources is no different than a journalist's relationship with their insider informants.

It's a simple fact of life that some will sacrifice their reputation for fame because the tempation is just too much for them to handle. Others place more value on lasting relationships with people who expand their minds and enrich their lives with intelligent and challenging converesations. I subsribe to the lasting relationship school of thought and have found that single decision has brought me more professional fulfillment in blogging and business than the 15 minutes of fame approach.

Good bloggers are like the old iceberg analogy, the part of the iceberg you see on the surface is just the tip and the vast majority is beneath the ocean surface. If you have the chance to look beneath the surface just once you'll find yourself captivated by the sheer power of the iceberg's presence and you'll want to come back for more. Each visit spent beneath the surface of the ocean exploring the iceberg creates as many questions as it answers and this is the essence of good blogging. You always want to see what's going through the blogger's brain, especially as it relates to the industry and areas they're interested in. If a good blogger forsakes his sources and starts handing out secrets like candy he not only ruins his relationship with interesting sources but he does his readers a disservice. Because now the blogger doesn't have the insight he once did because doors begin to close that were once open. Now he's just an another outsider looking in wondering what's going on.

As a personal note I'd like to say that many doors have been opened to me with the understanding that I'm not going to disclose the information shown to me unless my sources want me to. Maybe we'll have some secrets revealed later this week, who knows. Anyway, Scoble's spot on and this goof from MarketWatch needs to get his head straight. Honestly, his comments on bloggers is pretty funny and doesn't surprise me one bit based on the fact he's from "Corporate America" but wants to be an expert in what's hot and cool online and today that's blogs. With that in mind I've got to say that I think Robert Scoble is doing a good thing at Microsoft. Even though Bill Gates gets a lot of flack for being the capitalist we all love to hate, he's got a good thing in Scoble and I hope we'll see a lot more from the upper left coast in the near future.

Btw, in the links to the sources above, Scoble gets some Google juice and MarketWatch gets the ol' rel = nofollow treatment for being ignorant. peace out.

There was talk about Google updating it's image search a while back but I didn't see any great results out of it. Now they've finally got a lot more images in their image index and it's great. My vanity search returns more info than I'd like but it's all good.

Word has it Google's dancin again and the latest Google update is dubbed Allegra. I don't follow how / why these updates are given their names but so far it's looking decent. I've received complaints that folks sites have disappeared and others have increased in the rankings but that's nothing out of the norm. As I dig into the changes I'll provide insight.

Some rumors include an emphasis on GeoLocation with regards to sites and this would fit into the Local tab being moved to the Google homepage but right now it's just speculation.

Here's another good article on the Google Allegra update . They think they've already found a spam trick that's gaining ground called 302 hijacking. Basically, you 302 a url to someone else's url and you begin to rank well for their keywords. I think this will get fixed next month but we'll see.

Did Bob Parsons [GoDaddy CEO] have any idea his second SuperBowl ad would be pulled? He's getting a ton of grassroots analysis today via bloggers and ad rags but was that part of his plan? Did he know all along that there was a chance his 2nd ad would not air and that he'd have a great chance of getting his money back from the NFL? Smells a bit P.T. Barnum to me and I like it.

Here's a snip from Bob's blog.

The NFL persuaded FOX to pull our ad.
We immediately contacted Fox to find out what happened. Here's what we were told: After our first ad was aired, the NFL became upset and they, together with Fox, decided to pull the ad from running a second time. Because we purchased two spots, we were also entitled to a "Brought to you by GoDaddy.com" 5 second marquis spot. They also chose to pull the marquis spot.

So they got their ad pulled but now they're getting a ton of free press out of it. Of course Bob Parsons would never say it was intentional or even a thought when he initially purchased the 2 SuperBowl ad spots but who knows. I find it all very interesting.

Supposedly the bloglines acquistion by AskJeeves rumor is true but it wasn't going to be announced until Monday or Tuesday. Not sure how it got leaked out but we'll see if it holds water. The acquisition is being discussed on a couple sites. Fergus Burns, the CEO of Nooked (rss service) gave me the tip on this one late Saturday evening. Here's what others are saying about Bloglines getting snatched up by AskJeeves.

PaidContent.org [link to post]

Bloglines, perhaps the biggest online newsreader/RSS tool and single-handedly responsible for making the usage mainstream (well, at least as much as it is), is being sold to, yes-you-heard-it-right, AskJeeves, according to Mary Hodder. Ask Jeeves will be integrating Bloglines into their search system. More as news comes out...

First take: Well, Bloglines messed up (in my opinion...no facts on this one) the chance of selling to the likes of Yahoo and Google, as soon as it named itself Bloglines. Talk about myopia in naming (I breathe it every day). Now about AskJeeves, it is trying desperately to get out the also-ran leagues: it tried to do it with the second-rate acquisition of Interactive Search Holdings, and where did it end up? At the same place where it started. Bloglines is its second attempt...(Notice how "second" is the operative word)...

Staci adds: I'm not at all surprised by the sale -- I actually thought about posting my own speculation of the week that Bloglines would go before MediaPost -- but have to admit to being nonplussed by the buyer. AskJeeves wasn't on any of my mental lists for this one. I have to think Bloglines could have done better strategically. OTOH, it should make Jeeves more attractive.

BTW, I heard from another blogger a couple of weeks ago who thought a sale might be in the works based on some search patterns he picked up. Neither of us could find enough to hang a legitimate report on, though.

A couple of other thoughts: As Mary points out, AskJeeves already has incorporated Blogines into its service, with a "search blogs" button that goes straight to the aggregator's search engine. The problem with that for me is that I think of Bloglines' search as its weakest link. If joining Ask means a vast improvement in that direction, then Bloglines becomes a more valuable service.

Selling is a great way to get around the problem of a viable business model. Mark Fletcher was on the verge of phasing in a version of adwords, which may turn out to be a good way to make money from Bloglines ... but selling should have a much faster return.

And here's Napterization's [link to post]

That's the scoop. Ask Jeeves is integrating Bloglines into their search system (it's not yet live on their main site, til Monday as reported).

Noted however that on Ask Jeeves new blog (it's a baby, three days old!) at the top, blog search, and the sidebar, Top Blogs and Most Popular Links go straight to Bloglines.

So Mark Fletcher will be their newest employee (starting next week?). Congratulations, Mark and Bloglines! Oh, and welcome to the blogosphere, Jeeves!

One thing to note, Ask Jeeves, or any other search company, could build a system like this very quickly. What they would have trouble doing is getting all the data, structured, organized and pulled, going back more than say, a month. That's because blog posts fall off the front pages (depending on frequency of blogging and how many posts the blogger displays) and go into archives. If you think about how many kinds of blog software exist, which means many different kinds of data structures for the blog post data, which then it's very difficult to get all the various types of data structured into a single database, just imagine how all the variants of those professionally and homegrown blog publishing systems differ for archival posts. Lots of people customize their archives, as I have in MT and other blogs I participate in with Wordpress, Typepad, etc. Spidering and structuring archives is really tough, tougher than getting the stuff on the tops of blogs right. The point is, a comprehensive database of blogs structured well, going back a couple of years, is really valuable. As is the knowledge of how to put that database together, and run it, along with understanding why this kind of search is very different than those done by Google or Ask Jeeves, whose results don't understand the temporal qualities of blog data, or other aspects that make it different.

Also, I'm sure Jeeves is asking himself how I know this. I learned it from a couple of folks. Once that happened, it seemed reasonable to blog it.

I'll let you know if and what I hear as more comes out on this story.