Churbuck.com

Google Blog Search

Is live. And "beta" (imagine that).

Advanced search doesn’t show much functionality specific to blogistan. No indication of permalinks and trackbacks. Still, it will conquer all …. 

The Amazon.Com Customer Service Page 

 Customer service hacks? Pissed off at Amazon, want to vent? Good luck finding their customer service phone number. Unless you visit this page.

The Anatomy of a Sale–Ours, Part 1

Good fly-on-the-wall tale by Bo Burlingham about the sale of Fast Company and Inc. 

PaidContent.org: September 12, 2005 Archives

Interview with Vivek Shah on the merger of Fortune.com, Business2.com, FSB.com with CNNMoney.

"On opening the walled garden: Fortune.com was the first Time Inc. site to go behind the wall, requiring a subscription for access to most content. Now it will be one of the first Time Inc. sites to open up. Breaking news and current articles will be accessible — as has been the case on CNNMoney.com — but archives and some features will be behind the wall. "As they roam around and they find something (behind the wall), that’s when you can say they now need to become a paying customer. …It’s all about serving your audience in a respectful, smart way."

Genuine VC: Seven Founding Sins

Fred Wilson points out this great post by David Beisel. Like Fred, I’ve added Beisel to the blogroll.

The sins are:

• Inauthenticity
• Sloth
• Extravagance
• Taciturnity
• Greed
• Arrogance
• Indecisiveness 

I pre-ordered John Battelle’s new book, The Search, a few months ago, and returned home on Friday to find that Amazon had delivered it. I took it with me to the beach on Saturday and got the first two chapters in before some ankle-biters took up camp behind my beach chair and tried to bury themselves in a storm of flying sand.

First impressions — good book on the way to becoming a great book as I read further. I hope to knock it off this week and will post a full review when I’m finished. The first chapter tries to put a big too heavy an import on the role of search as the ne plus ultra of all technology. While I certainly won’t contest that search is central to navigating information, I think the next book should be titled The Understanding, following through with the ever brilliant insight by Danny Hillis that it isn’t the finding and locating of information that is important, but ultimately leading the seeker to some understanding that is the driving goal.

This has been a good year for tech writing with this and Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said making for some great reading these past six months.
 

Blog spam gets complimentary: "Your site is also very interesting, very calming effect just reading it. Will spend more time with certain areas. Well done and good luck with your work."

Matt McAlister :: A Web 2.0 business model for publishers

Provocative piece by former InfoWorld Online guru Matt McAlister on business models for publishers. The upshot of Matt’s thesis is the keyword not the article is the pivot point. Tag the term and share the package under creative commons and good things will follow. 

TNS Unveils First-Half Numbers, Top 50 Advertisers for June

Revised downwards from 11.2 forecast. These figures do not include paid search.