American Madness

Picking up on John Battelle’s concept of the database of intentions, I was thinking yesterday about where Google and its rivals will eventually end up in the business world. All the major search portals are adding new features everyday, and acquiring new companies in a race to become the most sought after site on the Internet. This basic model is what you’d expect, because more visitors and more users means more advertising revenue. However, advertising seems like it could eventually become just a side business for the giants of search, a stopping off point in their development.

There are a number of things happening, which lead me to the conclusion that search advertising, while a lucrative business, is really just the beginning of something huge. I haven?t read Battelle?s book just yet, but I believe that his thesis is similar. According to Battelle the database of intentions is, ?The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result.?

Google stores everything that it possibly can store about its users, and if you use Gmail, Google stores and scans all your most personal information as well. When properly analyzed, all this data reveals what people are interested in at a particular moment in time. This includes their wishes, desires, passions, fears, everything. All other databases and information sources are being made public domain by the big search companies, but the one database that they are all keeping to themselves is this one precious database, or at least their piece of it.

These companies covet their precious piece of the pie, because with this database of intentions they can predict markets and make the right business decisions with a much higher accuracy than ever before. The possibilities of what might come out of this database have only just begun to be explored. Right now, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL talk about targeting advertising to their users, so that results are more relevant. Come on, really, is that all you?ve got?

How about advising Wall Street on where the markets are headed. A 1% improvement in accurately predicting financial markets would net billions, maybe trillions a year in revenue. It would make all Internet advertising revenue look like chump change. It?s only a theory, but it seems that capturing and analyzing this database of intentions might just make some of the fickleness and eccentricities of freewill a little predictable, at least to the extent that the weather is predictable.

The basic scenario that I am thinking of is that Google Labs: Wall Street sends daily data on market directions and consumer interests to the businesses involved in these markets. In this way, the business managers and investors will have a virtual weather report on what is coming in the next day or week, and they?ll know whether to bring an umbrella.

It?s a far out concept for now, but I think that in the near future it will start becoming much more real. There are some scary implications for the future, as the world’s knowledge is slowly consolidated into a few hands. For now it?s anyone?s game and the owner?s of the database of intention seem to be a bunch of fairly well intentioned geeks.

It will be interesting to see what happens when these well intentioned geeks have the power to make and break world markets, industries, etc.

By Ben Munson

Apple came out with a few new goodies today. My reactions can be summed up in a few short blurbs:

- A new remote control for a Media-Center-like experience? Sounds good. It even sticks to the side of the Mac magnetically when not in use. And it appears to be a bluetooth remote, since it works with Macs which have no IR port. Very, very, very cool. IR is so 1970s. I just hope “Front Row” (their new Media Center shell) is available for older Macs.

- While I like the addition of the iSight to the new iMac, I do have to wonder what will happen when the camera gets iBroken. Computers are best when everything is interchangeable and nothing is integrated to a ridiculous degree (Speaking as a man who owns a computer which is *completely* integrated, I pray that this principle holds only in the breach, and not in every circumstance).

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By Matt Friedlander
The British have their own way of saying just about everything, and when they do say things the way we do, they tend to pronounce them funny. But what could be weirder than the old country’s engineers not even knowing the proper Internet jargon?

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The blogging community is getting down to the business of making money this fall. Advertising is popping up on blogs everywhere, and the big boys and girls of the blogosphere are striking deals with their favorite mega media conglomerates. All this is fine and I hope to see my associates enriched in the coming months, hopefully in time for the holidays. Maybe, this year we won’t have to make our own gifts! But, there is a sad side to this money train. Blog content is becoming boring.

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If you haven’t read any Malcolm Gladwell, catch up!

His most recent piece on healthcare really frames the issue:
The Moral Hazard Myth

A reportorial/research prodigy, Gladwell makes it clear why we need to reform healthcare, a useful focus. Most articles assume we should fix healthcare without really delving into the shame of our system AND how badly we trail behind the rest of the industrialized world.

Our push for tech innovation and our puritan desire to produce ever more have for some time resulted in diminishing returns, and, in many cases, in regressive returns! See the above and today’s NYTimes editorial: Net National Happiness.

Big Media partnerships and buyouts ramp-up.

AOL to buy Bloglines

Warner Brothers launches viral campaign via BuzzMachine

Gizmodo partners with VNU to launch European sites

Yesterday, I was catching up on my backlog of podcasts from ITConversations, and heard an interesting piece on biotechnology.

The interviewer (Dr. Moira Gunn) was speaking with the Senior Vice President of BioGaia, Anders Zachrisson, about their discoveries and products. Zachrisson and co. are using so called “good bacteria” to counter digestive tract infections with “bad bacteria.” In particular, Lactobacillus reuteri eradicates Helicobacter pylori. Translated to english, that means that a helpful, natural bacterial that resides in our digestive tract can kill off a nasty ulcer and cancer causing bacteria that was previously only treatable with massive doses of antibiotics; antibiotics which many strains of the bug are quicky developing a resistance to.

Their clinical results have been incredibly positive, with a high cure rate and zero side effects.

In a strange coincidence, as I was listening to this yesterday, two Australian researchers were being awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery that bacteria cause ulcers. That discovery has lead to the development of treatments such as L. reuteri, and will change the way modern medicine treats ulcers and other digestive tract ailments.

Italy is the first market to allow the usage of L. reuteri, and it’s already helping millions of people there. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes the product to make it’s way through the FDA approval process here in the US.

• Listen to the interview

Today, I stumbled upon the essays of Tina Blue.

Blue, a lecturer in English at Kansas University, writes plainly and pointedly about the plight of the average American.

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