Dear Phil -
  Why should we conference in person when the virtual has been so enriched?

• The virtual's not that rich.
• The virtual's mainly broadcast.
• And you miss the interactions that occur during breaks, meals, pub crawls, and the other cracks in an official programme.

So I leave my computer, my home, my city, my country.

Recently, AD:TECH ("Eyeballs for sale! Fresh steaming eyeballs!") and PlaNetwork (Kumbaya embraces digital identity), both in San Francisco.

Coming up:

I'm going to try for the Bio 2004 conference exhibit hall, this week. Especially interested in new bioinformatics and the publications systems that try to promote innovation without giving away secrets. Innovation World's Michael Boland and Mary Kate Stimmler are blogging from the conference.

This week and next are full of East Bay Kerry stuff. A Democratic Party Meetup where East Bay Kerry recruits volunteers. Committee meetings for Fundraising, Chairs, Media Relations, Visibility and GOTV, and Writers. We're having our first Speaker Training & Kerry Teach-In. And a big bunch of us are going to the Oakland A's vs. Pittsburgh Pirates game to show Kerry love to all those Pennsylvanians watching the game. Gary Hart is signing his latest book. And we're sending envoys to other political meetings, like the Lamorinda Democratic Club and the MGO Dem Club. All the time compression of a startup, none of the cash flow, and hard deadlines.

I've started going to Mark Finnern's Future Salons. Smart people, challenging topics. Next one June 18th at SAP Palo Alto. Saw him at Planetwork, first time in daylight. You owe yourself a venue to talk about 10, 20, and 50 years out. Great context and fodder for work and life planning.

In two weeks I'll attend the first day of Supernova, blogging a technical and policy discussion of today's convergence. Time to bone up on spectrum allocation, grid computing, WiMax, and more. I'm glad the wiki (thank you, SocialText) and rss feed (thank you, TypePad) are up.  

I'm spending July 4th in Vienna, Austria, for BlogTalk 2.0, the conference by Thomas Burg and the Center for New Media at Danube University. Getting there a little early to spend time with the Actionable Sense Troupe ("How do you switch between Discussion and Action?") and BlogWalk 3.0 in beautiful Krems. 

Then to Bloomsbury Square for the first London Symposium on Social Tools For The Enterprise, 12 July. This scans like etiquette and finishing school. It's really about blogs, wikis, social networks, IM'ing, and the like. And turning them into workplace tools. Matt Mower of Evectors Software put it together. Stowe Boyd's there too. I'll have a week in London. Favourite pubs, bookstores, museums, clubs, bordellos? Blogger events?

Back in town for the BlogOn conference. Read Susan Mernit's post. They have a boot camp, similar to workshops I proposed for London. What do bloggers know that others don't? To understand social software, managers need the insights that make blogging and other social tools "click" for users, and to frame those "Aha! moments" into a useful context.

What should I do this fall?

Initiative. Voice. Democracy.

We got'em.

We're gonna use'em.

John Kerry's Media Corps is a new site on JK.com.

http://www.johnkerry.com/onlinehq/mediacorps/

From HQ to volunteers to the mediasphere.

Talking points.

Issues of the day.

Attacks recorded.

And the tools to put them to use.

We have five months
    to bring the message
        through the volunteers
            to the voters.

So let me tell you about the Rapid Response Model, how Kerry's Media Corps builds on it, and what makes this a beta release.

The John Kerry Media Corps

Embracing the decentralization message, volunteers put together the Dean Rapid Response Network in 2003. Last week John Kerry's staff launched the Media Corps, their first cut at rapid response.

Components:

• For each message (presumed weekly)
  • An assignment
  • A deadline
  • Background
  • Feedback email link
• Other tools
  • Research materials on the assignment
  • Recent television ads
  • Link to the D-Bunker (removed after the first week)
  • Tips for writers and callers

That's the anatomy. What's the whole?

1. Media Corps is a boundary communication channel. It pushes memes to volunteers. The campaign's politics and communications teams design messages. Media Corps throws them over the wall.
2. Media Corps is an end run past the political press corps. It tells volunteers to take the memes and run with them. To local media. To audience participation channels. To letter writing and other P2P channels. Can you spell disintermediation?
3. Media Corps is a memetic amplifier, making messages louder and reaching further. No longer are TV ads the only place you're likely to experience the campaign's message. The community reinforces broadcast memes with their own versions. This improves what advertisers call reach and penetration. 
4. Media Corps minimizes memetic drift, keeping volunteers on point. Its centralized and standardized seed message is the reference version. Unlike a game of "telephone" where messengers garble the message, Media Corps always gives a public point of origin.
5. Media Corps is a localization strategy, tailoring messages. Politics remains local. No national message works everywhere. Most advertising is wasted just trying to find its audience, let alone delivering the right message. Volunteers translate
6. Media Corps is a memetic biodiversity play, a lab for new ideas. Media Corps pushes its memes through thousands of channels, each reinventing the message. Some versions will spread further, survive longer, and have more impact than others. No single campaign office or market research firm can imagine or test all the variations the way the Media Corps can.

Why does it matter?

• Money. Every minute of "free media" is a minute more trusted than advertising. But the payoff is dollars that don't have to be raised.
• Message Innovation. Marketing sciences are all about developing the right sequence, timing, and presentation of the right messages for the right people. The right message is the hard part. Media Corps is a force multiplier for the communication team.  
• Measurable Results. Powering the feedback loop. Managerial gold. 

The Rapid Response Model

Most of the money in this election will be spent on television ads.

Every presidential campaign staff has a political director and a communications director. Typically a political director picks the ideas, issues, facts, and positions that will win voters to the candidate and money for the campaign. Then the communications staff wraps them up in events for the media to cover, things for voters to read, oratory for the candidate to propound, and all the other stuff that gets the word out. Advertising and branding, product management and media relations. Promotion.

Campaign communications are dynamic.

Hot items in the press change a campaign's message strategy hourly. For example, right now Rumsfeld is defending his performance in Iraq instead of attacking Kerry's war record. While a candidate's staff is small and agile enough to respond to attacks, it's not enough. Once leveled, an attack can fester in the air for weeks. And character attacks are best fought by anyone but the candidate.

That brings us to "rapid response."

Rapid Response has four parts:

1. Prepare
2. Detect
3. Respond
4. Feedback

Preparations include:

• Write, edit and test talking points
• Recruit a cadre of first responders
• List traditional media channels by locale
• Write procedures for responding to each channel/program/publication.
• Building training materials for effective response
• Set up a database of responders

Detection in three steps:

1. Notice an attack, through surveillance.
2. Report the attack to your rapid response network
3. Prioritize the attack.

The US has about 300 million citizens, about 106 million voted in the 2000 general election [US Census Bureau]. There are tens of thousands of newspapers, radio stations, television channels, mailing lists, and web sites. Two "free" strategies:

• Volunteers adopt a program/publication. "Mike will read the Business Section of the Miami Herald."
• Automated clipping services, like Google News Alerts.

Response. Every attack should be met with a swift and effective response. Prioritize only when you don't have the resources to respond everywhere. When you choose among multiple attacks, watch for the attacks which:

• are coordinated,
• reach a bigger audience,
• are authentic,
• are more potent, or
• open a new channel or issue.

Join fights:

• You can win.
• Where you can be seen or heard.
• Where you need to learn something from the engagement.

Response has three steps:

1. Assign. It doesn't make sense for everyone to respond to the same thing. Make sure your response team covers all the attacks worthy of response, and that people are matched to the assignment.
2. Draft. Every attack is a little different. So tailor your response.
3. Engage. Mail the letter, call the show, post to the bulletin board.

Feedback serves four goals:

• Risk assessment. Attacks going unchallenged? Attacks with disruptive potential?
• Message improvement. What's working? What isn't?
• Resource allocation. Where should we drive volunteer time and attention?
• Channel/medium profiling. What can we learn about media outlets to improve our effectiveness?

Prepare. Detect. Respond. Learn.

Challenges?

• Deeper-memes. Can you build a sequence of messages that assert an underlying value or point? For example, can "competence" and "character" be built in to how we talk about economy, environment, security?  
• Listen well to feedback. Listening doesn't scale, that's why we vote. And why we summarize. You need a combination of structured ("on a scale of 1 to 5...") and unstructured ("What did you say?") input.
• Positive Reinforcement. Bring volunteers back for new message cycles. Acknowledge people and teams for effort, creativity, and results.
• Experiment with the Process. This means consciously trying messages and talking points with different characteristics. How many words can fit in the bumpersticker version? What's the best day of the week to launch a campaign? Best time of day? Can we run two at once? Four at once? Does it have to be a whole week, or can we run one from start to finish in 48 hours? Test. Measure. Test again.
• Tailored Experiences. Support both high and low energy volunteers.
• Speed. Keep the cycles short. Look to IM and SMS for alerting to new threats.
• Memory. Help volunteers expose successes and failures to each other.
• Quick Help. Attacks aren't homogenous. In addition to research for this week's campaign, put response research for the 25 most common attacks, and 5 responses on each issue.
• Training. Build volunteer knowledge and skill. It's summer: recruit 50 high school teachers to craft tutorials on each issue, on each medium. Interview successful writers and callers for their story. Feed lessons learned back to the volunteers. 
• Attack. Initiate an issue. Seed the conversation. See how long it takes for big media to pick up a meme. See how long other groups take to respond, both friends and foes. Change the rhythm, put opponents off-balance.

I wrote Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign, my assessment of a new project from the John Kerry campaign. It's a recap of the political Rapid Response model, an analysis of the John Kerry Media Corps version of that model, and a checklist of things for the JK campaign to work on.

Not included: the idea of the grassroots web site network.

When you blend:

• "all politics is local" with
• "the edge of the network has the power" and
• "nobody trusts campaign commercials" 

You turn to free media.

John Kerry HQ is doing it with Media Corps, but not to weblogs.

Both the Dem and GOP professional staffs are resisting publishing decentralization.

Otherwise they'd host the biggest network of blogs in the world. Blogs for each county, each precinct, every meetup, each working committee. Aggregators that tie local groups together. Both content and event/activity syndication. And promotion of those sites to the local news media, community groups, and political clubs.

The ROI? Better communication, coordination, cohesion, and collaboration. We need it as groups form, as citizens swell their ranks, as we commit time and energy to making momentum. Tools to help them follow the campaign's lead while making local sense of issues and messages.  

But they're not. The people who understood and supported this vision are no longer part of the Kerry staff. Instead, we're seeing incremental marketing. 3 of 5 Cluetrain Points.

Maybe next time.

[aka public policy]

Other metaphors I like...

California bans smoking in office buildings. People slip out for a smoke and huddle around the doors or the ashtrays in smoker exile. For those 5-15 minutes, your small group of fellow addicts shares the moment. Sometimes you break out in conversation. Usually casual, sometimes deep, occasionally the start of a labor union or a new product or a lawsuit. Despite yourselves, repetition of exposure fosters trust. And people take it from there.

Sometimes I think of blogging like amateur night at a comedy club. You step up on stage for your five minutes, probably at one in the morning, greeted by a random audience who laughs at you and maybe your painful story told in a funny way. You thank the audience, who were just barely awake anyway and who were never vested in your barely coherent ramblings, and you leave the stage. Until tomorrow. When you come back for more. And the next day you look at the world a little differently, noticing things that could be material for your set, and you rush home, write them down, and that night you try it out on a mostly different audience. And your material gets better, and you start to build a reputation, and you relax into the doing of it and start to pay attention to the two-way conversation that takes place between a performer and those cheering and jeering on the other side of the microphone. From utterance to rapport.

Company cafeterias or regular happy-hour spots are as much about being seen, and with whom, as it is about the conversations you have. Food? It's a heartbeat check, a status reinforcer, a clique definer. Depending on your role, it may not matter at all, or it may be everything. Presence is everything.

An automotive supply store (tires, I think) had a big sign by the street. Each night the owner put a new witticism, twisted proverb, or insightful comment on the sign. And commuters on Atlantic Ave chuckled or thought on the way to school or work each morning. 10 words or less, but those "posts" became a landmark amid the drab clutter of an interchangeable commercial district. Now in Oakland, California, about 500 miles away, the owners of the Grand Lake movie palace put one side of their historic marquis into the hands of their movie programmer. He writes strong messages about blackbox voting, the Patriot Act, a possible military draft, the Iraq war. Some people think he's an ass, others applaud, but everyone slows down to see it on the way to the market. In both cases, the author had no control over readership. A consistent voice, regular updating, and strong points of view defined both personal and corporate identities.

Dina, Ton, Peter, Gary, Scott, Drakaal, back to you.

What's a "Why Sayer"? LEO says:

I suspect it may be an attempt at a play on 'nay-sayers' -- people who never do anything but criticize. 'Why-sayers' is a coinage that emphasizes positive thinking, creativity, and questioning authority. (Go Ikea!)

On a flyer at Ikea:

We're Hiring
Why
Sayers

People who want to make things better. Make things more fun. More clever. People who aren't restricted by convention, but challenged by it. People who fit perfectly at Ikea. Because it's the why that makes us successful. Just give us a call and submit a voice application. We'll be in touch with you as soon as possible.

Call (866) 831-8611
or visit us on the web at
www. IKEA.com.

On the reverse...

Tied together by a hand-drawn triangle:

The Dream
to create a better everyday life for the many people

The Business Idea
by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them

The Human Resource Idea
by giving down-to-earth, straightforward people the possibility to grow, both as individuals and in their professional roles, so that together we are strongly committed to creating a better everyday life for ourselves and our customers

Followed by:

The Realization
it takes a dream to create a successful business idea
it takes people to make dreams a reality

Things I love about this: 

1. The inner rhetoric of the organization, plainly exposed to the public. Values, goals, the mental model holding things together. Do you speak our language?
2. Psychographic positioning. Being stark about who you are improves the quality of the inquiry pool. Are you in or are you out?
3. Simple action directions. Call us.  
4. The promise of prompt human contact. Competitive advantage in an era of form-letter-non-response.

[aka staffing]

I received this email from Anne Collingwood this morning.

Phil,

I am frustrated about the lack of attention the Internet is being given by the national campaign.

I see the need, but I am clueless. I am interested in your thoughts about both the following questions and about how to improve the Kerry Internet Effort.

Best, Anne

I’m working in Ohio with a grassroots organization called Cleveland for Kerry. My friend Matt is working in California with East Bay for Kerry.

The following issues came up during a phone conversation we had tonight. Would you be able to help us think through the solutions?

1. Is it too early to see the (state-of-the-art) potential of the Internet realized? How significantly can the power of the Internet diminish the need for television ads in this election? In 2008? In 2012?

2. Are bloggers more rigid in their thinking than others? Would you equate it to letters-to-the-editor in real time? Can there be actual debate online?

3. Are moderated discussions valid? Can a moderator censor some comments and still claim that they are listening to the people?

4. Did the Internet help facilitate the apparent cult of personality with the Dean folks? If so, was that kind of emotional investment wise; did it alienate folks not previously on the bandwagon?

5. Do bloggers feel betrayed if their advice is not used? Do they tend to extend trust to the candidate? How can a trustworthy candidate gain trust with new folks through use of the Internet?

6. What were the differences between young people attracted to Dean during the primary and attracted to Kerry during the primary?

7. The Internet offers campaigns the posting of data, mail, conversations, live broadcasts, tax revenue (just kidding :), and…?

There is no paid staff in Ohio. There is no staff that Matt knows of in the East Bay other than professional fundraisers. We see the Kerry Internet team working on live webcasts, fundraising drives, and the website. There are, however, "local websites" popping up all over the place, and we have no clue about what we can do with them.

If you don't have time to respond directly, we certainly understand. If you can refer us to someone or to websites, we'd appreciate it.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Anne Collingwood

What are your answers to these questions?

I'm sure the folks at Pyra and MoveableType were winners with their own elevator pitches, but those were for tools. Lee LeFever won for the internal pitch, for the hey, boss, let's try this thing.

First, think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders. The value it provides is context — the Journal allows readers to see themselves in the context of the financial world each day, which enables more informed decision making.

With this in mind, think about your company as a microcosm of the financial world.  Can your employees see themselves in the context of the whole company? Would more informed decisions be made if employees and leaders had access to internal news sources?

Weblogs serve this need.  By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company — context that can profoundly affect decision making.  In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events.

First off, read it out loud. Take a moment.

This is an OK pitch. Say what you propose, frame it, and say why it matters to the listener. Use the language of the pitchee. Terse language is good, flowing is better. This pitch hangs together.

LeFever's pitch does some things well. It explains what weblogs are. How they're used. How they affect daily life and the bottom line. It's focused on the workplace and the specific problems of harnessing intellectual capital, of herding cats, of decentralizing decisions. There's a nice analogy to the Wall Street Journal as a context baseline, and that you need one of your own.  

Do you think LeFeber made his case? Is this the right case to make? Would you buy a blognet from this man?

Brian Sarrazin turned me on to this Social Networking Forum at Cal. Wednesday, April 28th, 2004, 7p-9:15 pm. Wells Fargo Room on the Haas Campus. Topics look worthwhile:

• the economic incentives of SNT and the concept of “incrementalism”
• the efficacy of SNT in building long-term relationships
• the opportunities of ubiquitous computing, efficient user interfaces, database scaling and more intelligent query engines
• the global marketplace as facilitated by SNT; market consolidation

The poor sods roped onto the panel: Eytan Adar of HP, Bobby Chao of Chinese friendster YeeYoo.com, VC Skip Fleshman, Andy Halliday of Spoke (formerly of In-Q-Tel), and Marti Hearst of Cal SIMS. Bonus: PhD Research Presentation by Harvard's Wayne Lim. $15 includes a quick dinner; rui@berkeley.edu for tickets. Bring Bullfighter but listen to voices of skepticism and experience, to what isn't said.

[aka community]

Grassroots  journalism, meet grassroots fundraising. It took 1 form and about 5 minutes. Now I'm on my way to raising $10,000 for John Kerry by inviting other bloggers to join my Citizen Journalists Kerry 100 Club: 100 people at $100 each.

Take a moment to grok this.

A handful of volunteers in the beach resort of Santa Cruz, California, adopted an offline fundraising practice. Work your circle of friends. Colleagues from work, fellow students, the gardening club. Ask them to match your $100. It worked fast and easy on the ground.

So they took it to the web. A quick Deanspace installation, a little screen scraping of the JohnKerry.com donation site, some writing and graphics, and they're helping people give.

What they're not doing is just as important. No money kept; money goes straight to the campaign. No incorporation. No federal election rules to worry over. Frictionless. And two weeks from idea to go-live, maybe?

What can we learn from this?

1. Test human behavior before designing tools.
2. Free platforms that do 90% of the job speed everyone's time to market.
3. Open code platforms invite innovation and adaptation that create new kinds of value.
4. Campaign architectures can become hubs for innovators, leveraging prior financial, regulatory, branding, and systems investments. I can't wait for the DNC APIs.

While you're pondering, pull out your credit card and click here, why don't you. It's for a good cause and in a good name. Or create your own club.

Virality, anyone?

[aka community]

I'm judging Judith Meskill's 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'Elevator Pitch' Competition. Here's how I've been thinking about it.

Look to the three cores of blogging for inspiration.

1. Discovery - finding interesting sources and posts
2. Reading - what, where, when, and how you want
3. Writing -  what's relevant to you and your audiences

When we talk about blogging and the blogosphere, we're talking about these three activities. Nearly all the blogosphere's tools support one or more of them.

Your challenge in any justification is to:

1. Tie investment in your blogging project (time, people, tools, attention) to any of these three activities (what people will do with your project's outputs) and
2. Tie the activities to business benefits
3. While catering to your stakeholder's common sins (Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, Sloth) or to appealing to their virutes (humility, kindness, abstinence, chastity, patience, liberality, diligence, prudence, temperance, courage, justice, love, hope, faith).

For example, "If we spend just a thousand bucks on a blog server for the MarCom department, we'll get better press than the competition and that cute PR guy will be putty in your hands, Maam."

Let's just talk about reading for a moment. No blogging environment is complete without tools to help you read blogs. For example, Rocketinfo offers an enterprise newsreader. They pitch:

The Value to You:

• Increase the breadth of news you look at
• Improve the research and dissemination process
• Leverage and maximize your existing information investments
• Increase and/or measure the consumption of research across your organization
• Increase the efficiency of your research department, enabling you to do more with less

You get the idea. Read more, save time, and get info to the right people.

Implicit:

• Discover/Don't-be-surprised-by new threats and opportunities
• Don't be the last one to know among your company's competitors, or your internal competitors
• Get credit for solving the problem

Please don't tell me about your contest submissions until the contest is over: Judging is blind. Good luck on the competition.

[aka klogs]

Judith Meskill tipped me that Silicon Valley Web Guild is hosting a panel on social network systems, another evening of YASNS puffery. May 6. Four smart people are speaking for their products. Tribe's Mark Pincus, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman (whom Marc Canter says I must get to know; Hi, Reid!), Adrian Scott (who preceded Ryze with an insightful essay on why you must scale your address book), and Spoke's Andy Halliday.

I have a challenge for moderator Rosemary Remacle:

Channel danah boyd.

The honeymoon's over. Ask tough questions.

All these systems depend on people volunteering time and attention, on their pimping friends into the system, on believing you can turn virtual connections into social capital, web pages into gold.

• What's in it for me?
• Do social network systems (SNS) get you love, sex, or friendship? get you competitive career advantage? get you elected? get you productive?
• What's in it for the person who only has a few "friends"? 
• Do SNS's turn into anything more than a slightly smarter address book?
• What is your early conversion rate, the proportion of people who try your system and stick with it after 30 days? after 90?
• How do you avoid the Geocities problem of web page tombstones, profiles grown stale and abandoned?
• Why do you think your forms are a useful representation of me as a person?
• Are you modeling how people really interact or some oversimplification?
• Can I leave my contacts to my children?
• How do you turn my contacts into action?
• Aren't you making it easier for bad actors to be more effective at identity theft, stalking, and emotional abuse?
• Don't your systems burn my contacts, expending my social capital without real benefit?

Then ask about the enterprise version.

• How will this create value within a mid to large organization?
• Why is this more urgent than, say, spending another $100 per head on social skill training or antispam software or giving everyone a news portal?
• Will your system work within firewalls?
• How will your system work across firewalls? How do you expose just some of the profile of some of the people in an organization to some of the public?
• If my company has Spoke inside and my customer has the Google Orkut Appliance, how will they work together?
• What about cultural boundaries?
• Why should employees invest their time and trust in an enterprise SNS when they know their profiles will be left behind when they move on? 
• Why is your explicit declaration of relationships better than their tacit discovery?
• With what other enterprise IT systems will you integrate your SNS?  

Then speak for those of us who invest:

• How will you make money now?
• How will you compete when AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft follow Google into social networks? You know they're going to turn their buddy lists, email groups, blogrolls, and discussion forums into some version of an SNS. What will you do better and differently?
• Orkut was one programmer's side project. Where's the barrier to entry?

This should be a trial by fire, Rosemary.  They're smart and have been on the road for more than a year, bored to their gills. Do them a favor. Pull teeth until they give up the answers. Be the skeptical interrogator I know you can be.

[aka community]

Jeff Jarvis says Google email (gmail) is just another portal me-too.

I don't think so, Jeff.

Email has juice. Only telephones are used more.

40% of a company's knowledge is stored in its email boxes, hidden from intranet search engines, locked away on desktops. Email is rich with:

• social information (who is asked about what, who redistributes information to whom),
• time signatures (sent, received, read, forwarded, printed),
• threading and propagation clues (A sent it to B who replied while copying it C who forwarded it to...),
• urls pointing to the web,
• enclosures passed along, and
• entry points, from mobile devices to robots to business software.

evectors' ZOË demonstrates the value of combing through your mail to fuel search and reveal context.

For Google, this has three strategic benefits:

1. Better Google scoring. There's no reason Google can't collect a billion emails by this time next year. A million users times a thousand messages. The urls will inform PageRank™, and in near real time. If you thought weblogs got you Google juice, wait for email.
2. Ad Revenue. Either you'll pay for ad-free viewing or you'll get Google text ads tailored to your emails. A billion page reads of additional targeted inventory to sell.
3. Appliance sales. With Google search, weblogs, and email, Google will give Microsoft mail service a run for its money. Watch Google roll out Blogger in a Box this year, the better to clue the Google search engine to intranet content. A year from now, watch the microcontent of email and weblogs continue to converge, especially behind the firewall.

How does Yahoo differ from Google?

Where Yahoo sells communication, Google sells context.

Where Yahoo brings integration, Google leads with relevance.

Where Yahoo! lets you type up a "buddy list", watch Google tweak your orkut social network with clues from your mailing behavior, and vice versa.

Where Yahoo uses their toolbar to access their many services/properties, Google's toolbar will observe your browser experiences. And that includes now sending and reading email, surfing, news watching, reading and writing weblogs, following and posting to usenet, and shopping. With email, orkut and your toolbar, they now can create a compound profile of your interests.

Context, relevance, experience. Tough to beat.

[a klog apart]