WSFinder

Web 2.0 Conference - Prosumer Media

Mena Trott , Mark Fletcher, Rich Skrenta

Mark - I started bloglines to scratch my own itch. It's really turned out to be true.

Rich - We're all about directing people to great content. The folks at newspaper companies are savvy about the net. It might be in FEMA.org, Weblogs inc. There's more and more content everyday and people need to be directed to that.

John - What do we do about the

Rich - if you put up a website then you want traffic. Google is a great site but there are going to be a lot of other sites with a lot of traffic.

John - I remember reading a blog post that you made about big or small.

Mena - It stemmed from a conversation wtih Jason from 37 signals. You don't need capital or servers. In defense of big (100 people in Six Apart). There is a reason to be bigger, you need accountability. We wanted to do something to create a real impact. The day we took funding we wanted to do something more than that.

What's Web 2.0 - after this week it seems like consolidation. I like where we are.

John - I use all the products here. Let's ask the Google weather question? What do you think about the google feed reader?

Mark - I think you're joining the list of companies that have a feed reader. It validates those companies. We get the response that Bloglines changes the way people use the internet.

John - In someways Google is a competitor and a partner.

Rich - Google is a great partner and helped us make money. Google does that with Ad Sense. When I was at Sun they wouldn't let me use powerpoint on my laptop. We all compete with Microsoft but we can still use their stuff.

John - Competition is pretty direct with Blogger right?

Mena - We are competing with all the big players.

John - thre's something about the creation by the individual and the sharing of that creation. Do you believe that the companies that you guys are running will create a shift for people? Do you think there will be a populist shift?

Mena - I want a tool that people find easier to use. My mom doesn't want to publish but she needs to communicate.

John - Are you in the media business or the communcation business?

Mena - It's the communication business.

John - you've built businesses that sit on top of a roiling platform of conversations. What do those conversations look like in 10 years?

Rich - We're really early. With prosumer media we're going to follow the same trend as with web pages. In the next 2-5 years we're going to go from 1 million bloggers to 10 million bloggers. How will you find people that you want to read?

Mena - Live Journal is for things that are private, for private audiences. blogging doesn't have to be a performance art.

John - Is there going to be audio/video feeds?

Mark - Hard to skim video or audio like you can text. There will be video and audio but not in great numbers. Text is king for the forseeable future. Internet is a communication system. 20% of all email on the internet goes through Yahoo Groups. We'll continue to come out with more mediums to communicate.

Mena - Everyone is trying to figure out how many bloggers there are. No one really knows how many bloggers there are. Activity is the real issue. How do you get people to be engaged and keep doing what they're doing. That's what we're focused on.

John - Spam. An earlier presentation from Dave Sifry we saw spam spikes. The tragedy of the commons forms. Is it a threat or will it be managed.

Mark - We have a natural filter. We only crawl sites that users read.

Rich - Where spam is a problem is email. I get 4000 emails a day to my email account because of spam. The existing search engines became overtaken with spam. Google had a great relevance trick that cut through the spam. Employing automated techniques is key.

Question - I'm a religious bloglines user it hasn't changed much and it doesn't itself take advantage of features that other sites do. I'm concerned that once companies get bought innovation stops. How are you going to continue to innovate once you get bought?

Mark - We gotta stop sitting around drinking scotch and smoking cigars. The challenge for us and many companies is for one of scaling. We've doubled users in the last six months. Yesterday we sucked in 2.8 million blog articles. Before the acquision we didn't have a great architecture. We focused on the core experience. If we don't have that we're dead anyways. We've got most of that solved but you will start seeing us innovate again.

Question - Topix competes well with Google News. We have 50,000 users of blogs and they're on your service. How can we monetize it. Where does that put you? What is the revenue strategy.

Mark - Business model hasn't been settled on yet. It hasn't been a focus for us. Lots of different ways to go. Uncle Barry - no Mister Diller. You our content providers and partners we don't exist without you. I don't know when the decision will be made.

Rich - I'll say flat out that we want to have a good relationship with you. If we're not sending you the pageview there's got to be a benefit to you.

Question - I've met so many intelligent and entrepreneurs here. The only business model seems to be acquired. How do you grow the business and we don't have a business model or business plan. What do you tell people in the room that there's no business model besides use adwords.

Rich - We self funded so we really cared about revenue. We innovated around technology and product that we have an ad engine that optimizes that. We wouldn't have built it unless we needed to. The hygiene is important.

Mena - If we wanted to flip we should have done it two years ago. We're going to create a software services company. It's a long game.

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Sergey Brin

John - It's been a long strange trip. How are you handling moving from Stanford to where you are now. How's your head?

Sergey - I think the biggest factor contributing to Google's success is luck. We were lucky to start grad school at Stanford. We worked on the web and search because it was interesting or promising but not because it was a big business opportunity. We found we had something useful and wanted to do something impactful. We talked about opensourcing everything. We really needed money to pay for the computational resources.

It's been an exciting wild ride. Getting used to it a bit.

John - Google's come up once or twice. Respond to the conversation with Terry Semel where he said how much the technology is extraordinary but let's judge Google as a portal, Google is #4.

Sergey - I read some stories and that makes Google the underdog. At the Google cafe the food is pretty good and we try to improve it. If you rank Google as a cafe we're not in the top 100.

John - Yusuf said Microsoft was the underdog which gives us permission to do things we couldn't do before.

Sergey - If we're # 4 then how can we be the underdog? I think that I'm excited to be viewed as the leader in technology. We're not the #1 company in terms of doing big business deals or creating platforms. But from technology and development we're a leader.

John - You own search and there's an extraordinary price associated with that. Are you comfortable with that? Is there an expectation with that.

Sergey - I'm not a valuation expert. In terms of search marketshare I'm delighted that so many people use the product and that it spreads through word of mouth. Primarily the reason people come and stay with Google is the search experience.

John - One of the reasons you're so successful is a clean blank box. Is that going to continue.

Sergey - I hope we continue to be clean. There are other kinds of products. It's arisen out of need. I don't know how many people have gmail accounts (everyone raises hand). It came from a frustration that people in the company had and there are some pretty interesting things there. How many people have had their quota's grow by a factor of 100. There are areas that are overlooked by the industry much like Search was in the late 90s. I think that we have a lot of technologies and distribution that helps and we'd be foolish not to make an impact if we can.

John - Google as the Weather. In the early 90s, people would worry about Microsoft doing their same ideas. You announced a feed reader today. How do you make decisions about what to do next? What about the ecosystem around you?

Sergey - I don't know what's going to happen with the feed reader. They are all about to get a lot of calls from other people like Yahoo etc. There will be more investment spurred because of this. The other thing we really care about is enabling other businesses. We think Ad sense is the right ad platform. We knew we could do banner ads. We were going to use that and then we started to do Google Ads. Earthlink, AOL, ASK uses Google Ads and thousands of other non search sites use it too. When we did that we wanted to expand advertsing base but we were also worried about great content disappearing. There were sites that were shutting down and search would be less useful with less content. We have helped sustain online businesses.

John - Barry Diller, Terry Semel and Johnathan Miller all talked about content being important. What's your view of that? Is google going to be involved in the same way that others are in content creation?

Sergey - We believe in sending people to other sites. We don't feel the need to create the content ourselves. If you look for Google stock quote you go to Finance site on Yahoo. We are really not about trying to create our own content, we're about sending people off. They may watch video on Google but we didn't create it.

Question - There has been a lot of buzz around Google Office? Are you interested in that a lot of stories being written.

Sergey - I don't think that taking existing applications and porting them onto the web necessarily makes sense. I'm not saying that's what office is. I think that the web and web 2.0 give you the opportunity. We don't have any specific plans that.

Question - We heard the other night that clickfraud is not a problem. Especially as it relates to the syndicated network is clickfraud is not a problem?

Sergey - It's something we work on. We spend a lot of effort but there's already a lot of protection. We have fraud teams like credit cards. It's really quite rare. A lot of our advertisers care that they're getting conversions and gettings sales. They know the exact ROI that they're getting. The ad system is fairly complex and it's not so simple to negatively impact an account. That doesn't completely protect people. On the whole I think it keeps it at a very low level.

Question - What areas are you going to focus on? What's safe to invest in?

Sergey - I think that areas we enter are not poor investments. In general we have several kinds of projects, ones that are core and we will be strategic about. A lot of things you see are bottom up projects that surprise. Google Maps or Google User are not successes that execs think were a good idea. They have come up with some things that really pan out well. Some of the most successful Google projects are not those directed from Google management.

Quetsion - They ended up being the things that seem to be directed as a portal even if they're not. It creates the illusion of a plan even if there's not.

Sergey - There's still a lot that's missing. I think that our teams are dissatisfied with existing services.

Question - When Terry Semel was up there 5% are search, 40% is communication and 40% is content consumption.

Sergey - The % is fair. We have focused on where we can focus on things where people spend time. Email is where people spend a lot of time and we could make it more efficient. There are obviously ways that communication could be improved and there are a lot of good ideas.

Question - From a personal level did video search on google address what you wanted to do.

Sergey - People understimate the quality of information in video. Some of the best quality content we have is in video form because so much energy was devoted to it. Making it searchable will really unlock the value.

Chris

 

Web 2.0 Conference - Mental Images - Rolf

So Rolf shows a lot of movie clips of cool special effects. We've all seen these before in theateres so not super interesting.
Photo realism in industrial design and architecture. Some cool photo level quality images of cars that have been rendered.

He talked about challenges to 3d on the web and how it works currently (which is badly).

At this point I really have to say... SHOW THE COOL DEMO. This is supposed to be a Show Me session and giving us a bunch of slides about this doesn't really interest or capture my attention.

Ok finally we get to the demo. Now that's cool. You can scroll around and see all aspects of the model. Really really cool stuff. It's a little slow because of the bandwidth but it's some pretty cool stuff that I can't wait until we have this over there web.

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Future of Entertainment Panel

I was bummed I missed the beginning of this but needed to chat with Fred Wilson for a little while.

Participants

Mark Cuban
Reed Hastings
Michael Powell
Evan Williams

John - Here is my server. I'm going to put up my video on it. Is that going to work?

Mark - No way. We started with VHS and moved to DVD. Now we have hi-def cameras. Your expectations are changing. We have to have higher quality. Comcast is not going to lay more fiber, Fox isn't going to put more satellites up. We don't have the delivery mechanisms to keep up.

John - All my expectations are destroyed now. I thought we'd have everything. Why is Korea ahead of us?

Michael - 80% of Korea lives in high rises. US is different technology problem. We think of infrastructure policy like broadbrand in the same way as we do about oil. It's more than that. It's

I disagree with Mark about expections and the things that people put value on. More consumers are willing to accept a drop in reliability vs. ability to be mobile. My child thinks that he should have free cell phone service. He is ready to spend $40 a month on ringtones.

John - I hope someday I won't have to ask this question in a few years. Why do have content producers suing their customers?

Mark - How many studio head jobs are there? 10? The #1 job of the head of a team is to keep your job. It's a good job. As long as there's piracy it's never their fault.

Michael - Hiring lawyers and suing is harder than being creative. Industry is missing that consumers want to be

John - Did they see Netflix as competitive. Were there barriers?

Reed - We don't use special licensing. A physical good is easy to license.

John - Do you agree that IP transport won't replace US Postal service for delivery?

Reed - If you could deliver at night and cache you could get multiple hours of delivery and it would be a better experience than they get now.

John - Can you sketch for me what isn't being done that should be done to get to where we want to be?

Michael - Everything is far from perfect. Policy problem is that it assumes that telephone company should be a monopoly. So for 100 years you have laws and customs around this.

Depending on how you provide your service (even if it's the same service) you are treated differently. Tearing down these differences is key to advancing. Government should get out of the way. Government should think of it all as bits.

Mark - Yeah it makes perfect sense

John - Why didn't that happen when you were in office

Michael - Some of it did. Wifi. We won't tell you how to use the license. At the end of the day, the congress needs to move on it.

John - Always congresses fault... In order for people to be prosumers they need to get content that they can remix. It's illegal to do that right now. You can unleash a lot of talent to let people play with this stuff.

Reed - We're about to find out. They're only illegal in the US. DMCA prevents you but doesn't stop you in Canada. We haven't seen creative efforts outside of US yet..

Ev - Content will come from a lot of places. I question that you need to remix to create good content. Some of the most important content to people is stories from friends and relatives. You can do this today. You can say that it's not media but it really is. People are choosing to consume this because of personal connection and interactivity.

Mark - Is it a labor of love? If it is then great. but how do you create a hit?

Ev - Sure they won't be hits. But they could sit next to the hits. Bloglines has both NYTimes and blogs from friends at the same point.

John - What do you make of Yahoo, IAC creating content.

Reed - Blogs etc. are great, they're not going to attack TV shows but rather extend it.

John - Something about Terry Semel and Barry Diller who are icons in Hollywood are declaring intention to create content for Internet. What does that mean?

Mark - I'm going to start a soap opera called the Spot and I think it'll do really well... It's really about $20 CPM for audio and video. Advertisers like rich media.

Michael - I'm bullish on the technology power. There are more people in the content development space and we should see better content with more competition.

Mark - I think there's a huge place for user generated content. I don't think that the internet will be the only delivery mechanism. My DVD player will have a USB port and I will start shipping content on hard drives.

Question - what's going on with Netflix and Tivo? There's no technical problem. When will I get it?

Reed - It's not a technical problem. It's a licensing problem. Even the studio owned franchise Movielink can't get all of the content. Itunes launched with 60% coverage. Movielink has much lower.

Question - [couldn't hear the question]

Reed - you've got regulatory approaches to keeping the internet open.I have better bandwidth than I had ever thought I'd have.

Question - How can we produce great content without spending millions of dollars. How do you see the convergence happening?

Mark - tools are there. how do you get it to an audience to a large enough audience to get your money back? We ended up buying channels and movie theaters.

Question - What does the Netflix longtail success mean for creating the next big little thing.

Reed - The cost to make a film has dropped a lot. To get your film known is hard. The economics are very challenging. People obsess about downloading but that's not where they spend money. It's not 60% of the cost to stamp dvds. Internet needs to help with demand creation. We can use DVD to build that out for now because licensing is easy.

John - Search engine is great at demand creation. Google and Yahoo help get it. Weblogs Inc. didn't have a marketing budget.

Reed - Movies the brand doesn't keep growing. Serialized content keeps going.

John - What about Star Wars Revelations? It just got found.

Comment - I think we're missing that something can be big enough and good enough. The volume from where money goes from blockbusters go vs. long tail.

Question - I love everything you say but are you willing to participate Open Source Media and software? Are you willing to get involved in that rather than embracing hollywood?

Michael - I don't think I'm doing penance. All day today I heard about proliferation of sources. The media rules are only about broadcasting and not about media. It's only one small and declining area of media. The real conversation is around empowering platforms that help move the content.

Web 2.0 Conference - Jason Fried

Jason Fried from 37 signals with a really interesting concept. Do Less. Get less money. Less people. Do less features.

Do less.  Don't do a functional spec. There are illusions of agreement with specs. Make mistakes as you go. Solve simple problems.

I agree with him in general that you should do less and make what's there work better.

I think he's dead wrong on the spec side because it IS important to figure things out on paper before you waste a lot of time figuring them out in code.

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Dave Sifry

18.9 million weblogs and doubling every 5 months for the last 36 months. No signs of slowing. 70,000 new blogs every day. 50% of bloggers are active 6 months later.
15 to 30% are updating weekly or more.

There are spikes in the blog numbers which are the result of blog spam. 8% of blogs are spam.

Tremendous growth in China and Chinese blogs.

Well over a million posts in the blogosphere every day. Spikes also caused by major world events.

Blogs vs. mainstream media - how many links are linking to the page as a proxy for attention. NY Times, Wash post getting largest attention.

Boing Boing, Daily Kos and Instapundit are top 3 blogs in his list.

Shift happened in January with mainstream media companies - We need to embrace them. He anounced an integration with people like Washington Post.

Almost a third of blog posts use tags or categories. Showed a fairly content free little video about the tag usage.

BlogFinder. Lets the community tag their blogs.

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Late for Semel

Got here a little late becuase of traffic and lack of sleep...

Terry - Joined Yahoo because he thought it was a great opportunity during the downturn.

John - Did you feel like what is this old hollywood hand doing in Silicon Valley?

Terry - I was looking for a new thing. I wanted to be part of what the young people are doing. When Jerry Yang first approached me I thought no. Then I went home and said this is a great company, great products, great people.

I read all the articles about this moron from Hollywood but this moron saw something worth investing in.

John - You got a lot of attention for hiring Lloyd Braun and opening an office in Santa Monica. Is Terry Semel trying to turn Yahoo into the interactive studio of the future?

Terry - In my old industry the technology innovation happened every few years, you got a dvd etc. that came along. Now you need to be a technology company. You need to have technology, content and distribution. 400 million users is distribution. Content is what Yahoo is all about. Technology is key.

The days of being just a technology company or media company are over. You need to be both.

John - People are scared that Yahoo is moving into their space. You just hired a journalist to go to a war torn area. That seems like CNN's job.

Terry - What Yahoo does is content. There are three ways to generate content. User generate content - 360 is important here, flickr is important. Great area for the internet, great area for yahoo. Look to partners who want distribution on Yahoo. Finally we want to create the framework that moves forward into new technologies.

Encourage you to create your own, to look to yahoo as a distribution platform and to pave the way to teh future.

John - Yesterday Barry Diller answered much the same way about creating content. Is he a formidable competitor.

Terry - I would imagine that his content relates more to his key businesses. We will compete in travel. User generated content is key here. Example of showing blogs and reviews.

John - What is Yahoo? There seems to be a lot of different businesses. News business sees itself differently. Yahoo recently had an incident where they provided information to China that resulted in the jailing of a journalist. Traditional news organizations say they'd never do that.

Terry - 99% of what we do in news is aggregate news. You can participate in news any way you want. When asked by a NY Times reporter how they judge news division, it will be different than TV. Will judge this 18 months from now.

I don't believe there is a company that publishes or distribute in China that doesn't follow the laws in China. I wouldn't confine this issue to China per se. There are many laws around the world that are different in different places. You face a moral and legal issue that you need to follow the laws of the country if you operate there. All companies have this issue.

John - is there a dialog you can haev? Can you protest? Is that impolitic?

Terry - You can make the governments adhere to the letter of their law.

John - You can lobby the government to change but companies don't do that.

Terry - Look at traditional media companies, most of the media has problems with piracy in China.

John - How important is China to your business.

Terry - 400 million people using cell phones and devices. You are better off playing by the rules. Part of the process is to expose people to the Western way. We can't automatically tell them to stick it. It was better for us to be there and hold them to the letter of their law.

John - Let's switch the topic to Google. What do you make of Google's strategy? What is Google's strategy?

Terry - \Google has done a great job in search. They were the pioneer. Yahoo is now full speed ahead. Others are coming into search as you heard from Microsoft. I think that's healthy. Whenever you have one of anything it's better for the user.

I don't want to minimize it but only 5% of the internet is related to search but a big percentage of monetization of search. Search doesn't have personalization, community or content. In order to accomplish this they said we need communications products, shopping, news or orkut. Well it looks like a portal now... how does it rate as a portal? Well as a portal it's rated #4. News is small compared to Yahoo, MSN. Shopping is very small. Mail is a good product but I'd got with WSJ and say that Yahoo's is better. Yahoo's mail audience is 10x the size of Gmails.

Good technology company. Trying to become a portal. Don't seem to have a real plan but maybe magic will happen tomorrow.

John - let's take the market perspective. P/E ratio much higher for google

Terry - 5% of pageviews = 40% of monetization right now. That means that 90% of pageviews have not been monetized well. Paying for things on the internet is growing. Communications and Content is where people are splitting their time.

I assumed that as content got better and become more engaging that there would be more clever ways to monetize those pageviews. No doubt that will happen.
[I totally believe this]

John - Google is going to get into more services that are more portal-like such as jobs. One might presume that they would scrape, aggregate etc. Will you give a feed of jobs to Google Jobs?

Terry - We have always been more open than they are. We see ourselves as an open platform where people can publish on Yahoo. We think the big change is not getting more and more unique users but it will be about deeper engagement as time goes on. All of personalization, all of our community, platform and search will be great. People will have a more valuable experience there. We're really well positioned for where we're going. Yahoo is very well positioned for where we're going.

[Umm... he didn't answer the question]

Question - I totally agree that Google would be rated as the 4th portal. What's the biggest strength that Yahoo has and Google's biggest weakness.

[very funny exchange where Terry asks if he works for Yahoo. Questioner says that he works for MSN - Awesome]

Terry - I don't spend a lot of time analyzing other people's weaknesses. That's not true. I do think about weaknessess a lot, I just don't share those thoughts.

Yahoo has a great diversified model. Advertisers are going to spending more and more online. Hard to judge it today, but we'll be in a lot of the areas.

Question - You talked about user generated content vs mainstream content. How important is the user generated content. Where will you make money in 5 years? User generated or mainstream?

Terry - We want to encourage and enable people to share and create on Yahoo. Let tehm do what they want to do. They want to let advertisers attach to their content so they get paid. Content will get more and more important on the internet. I don't think old media is going to be where people spend most of their time. As to which will be more important. 2 or 3 years ago what we used to call branded advertising or sponsored search which is more important. I have two children that are geniuses. Why do I have to choose one? If one is bigger than the other that's great. If they're both the same that's great too. I see content the same way.

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - End of Day 1

Well ok - technically it's the beginning of Day 2 but I was having too much fun yesterday night to keep blogging.

Here's a summary of what happened:

Dinner where I sat with some interesting folks, Ward (the wiki guy) , Bjorn (from the eclipse foundation), Ethan (Zvents), Paul (wsfinder) and a few journalists and a venture guy. Great conversation ranging from how much BS the Microsoft guys were putting out on stage to what people's favorite development tools were.

The stuff the Microsoft guys were putting was really terrible though. Don't get me wrong. I do like Microsoft and used to work there but their performance at the dinner was really off the mark for the audience. They just didn't say much. I told the journalist at NY Times and Barron's to make sure to note that are table was extremely disinterested in the Microsoft answers!

After dinner was the Google after hours cocktail hour. Thanks Google! It was great to catch up with old friends there from Jeremy @ Ebay to Kevin @ Yahoo.

Day 2 is going to be less blogging for me. I have a bunch of people that I need to meet rather than sessions to go to but I'll still be attending all the major stuff.

Chris

Cocktails and Dinner! Blogging break

Ok - I'm not sure how many folks are actually reading all this but I'm going to take a break from blogging for a bit and grab some drinks and dinner.

I suspect I won't be blogging for the rest of the night but will pick it back up again tomorrow morning.

Chris

Web 2.0 Conference - Omid Kordestani

John - Omid Kordistani figured out the business model for Google.

John - when you started in May of 1999 how was adwords?

Omid - It was non existant.

John - So what did you do?

Omid - I was first guy with a suit. Culture of hiring great people. How do we get the first folks in the door.

John - did you have a sense of what that was going to be?

Omid - I could tell when I met the founders that they were passionate about innovating. They would make the best of anything that they tried.

John - These ideas that Google is throwing up seems to be all targetted at a foe... What's your view of the fact that you're from Netscape and got eviscerated by Microsoft.

Omid - This area is very powerful. It's going to attract a lot of competition. We obsess about our users. We want to try new ideas. We only fail if we fail our users.

John - So are you saying you're not thinking about Microsoft?

Omid - We watch them but I think we'll fail if we focus on them.

John - Wallstreet, when you first read the S1 it was unusual. Seemed like a finger to wallstreet. A year and a half later do you feel pressure to meet the quarter's nubmers?

Omid - Absolutely but we felt this all along. I remembered worrying about making the quarter with Enterprise sales and how crazy that was. Yes the pressure is there.

John - Adwords, did people use adsense as their revenue stream? 3/4 search innovators use adwords as revenue stream.

What inning are we in? What % of the adwords potential market has been played out.

Omid - Larry says he counts when a query comes back. He says that it's not as good as they can and should be. Adwords can and will be improved.

John - Google is starting be compared to Microsoft in the 90s. Startups now need to answer the question - what are you going to do when Google does this? Is there a way to understand what business you're really in? You're doing so many different things.

Omid - This is something that we talk about. We don't want to be viewed as the Gorilla in the valley. We do have that sense of responsibility.

The VCs are saying that there's a lot of innovation in the valley.

Google is an innovation company. We are trying to be nimble.

John - I rean into Eric Schmidt and I asked how are you holding together. You're hiring more than 10 people today. How do you do this without blowing up.

Omid - We are trying to make it a science. We're in a mad rush to catch up with teh phenomena. Executive team looks at every hire.

John - What's next for Media and what's Google's role?

Omid - We don't have a choice. It's all changing. Podcasting changed everything for me. Google needs to make the information available.

John - Will google play a lead role like in Everybody hates Chris? Will that replace the upfront like television.

Omid - The ad models we have today won't keep wroking. Experimentation is good. Access to content is core to the mission.

John - Media companies, magazine companies fear you. They don't know that they  should trust Google.

Omid - Google doesn't sit around saying lets go crush a market. We say do what's best for the end user.

Question - As an publisher I want to get paid a percentage when a sale is closed. Is this a better way to fight click fraud?

Omid - We've made moves in that direction. If we think it's the best place to go we will move there. We are watching it now. We don't think click fraud is a big problem today. Click fraud exists but we're handling it.

Question - you've portrayed Google as a technology company. There's no sharing of information about what Google is working on. Why take that direction and when is that going to change?

Omid - The founders are academic and there is a lot of thinking about how to be a good citizen. [cop out answer but what could he say?]

Question - I have a question around the statement don't be evil. Google was saying don't sell your link status, but the people that were buying seemd like it was a double standard. Seems like a slippery slope.

Omid - When you have large networks. There is behavior that Google wouldn't stand for. We go after these things when we find them. It's not worth it to have a business that does not scale.

Question - Google Maps, license around data providers. You became an intermediary - how does it work with Navteq.

Omid - We do lots of contracts. I'm not sure about the specifics.

Question - All of a sudden we need to change the contracts because Google has become the distribution point.

Omid - Glad to talk about it offline. [Heh - tough question]

Chris