Complicating Demand Media, Yahoo!/Associated Content and potentially Aol/Seed’s algorithms and content milling plans, Google has a patent in play to harvest users’ searches for publishers.

Via FT: Google obtained a patent this year for a system that would help it identify “inadequate content” on the internet, based on comparisons of what people search for and what they find, executives who have reviewed the filing, said. The filing said data from the Google system could be sold to online publishers or given away for free[.]

Back to the basics of the the Ten Spot - quick, relevant New Medici reads with an exact dose of interpretation.

1. For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point - NYT DealBook

The transparency brought about by Google search and Facebook community/beacon/(end of) privacy has created a slew of startups who cater to ripping open the social graph and letting everyone peek in, follow and link to your daily activities and habits.

From the likes of DailyBooth.com, Blippy.com and Groupon.com, the concept of “socially challenging” others to share interests in online creation and consumption is trending. The next logical step will be a return to a new and improved Facebook Beacon that extends the group mentality while providing multi-level marketing incentives to the individuals who create interest in new items, i.e., transactions (think ThisNext.com meets Groupon). This allows group rewards and either revshare or ranking points for the individual curators or arbiters of taste.

Blippy, which opened last fall, was the first site to introduce the notion of publishing credit card and other purchases. Last month it attracted around 125,000 visitors and closed an investment round of $11 million from venture capitalists. It hopes to one day to make money by, among other things, taking a commission when people are inspired to imitate their friends’ purchases posted on the site.

To Silicon Valley’s deep thinkers, this is all part of one big trend: People are becoming more relaxed about privacy, having come to recognize that publicizing little pieces of information about themselves can result in serendipitous conversations — and little jolts of ego gratification.

2. Mac & the iPad

Steve Jobs defies the odds (recovering Apple), the gods (surviving cancer) and yet his consumer design “sculpting” and management fearlessness are really the two definitions he will be known by. In this above must-read link, an insider opens up about the mindset and fearset of the leading Designer CEO out there.

From secrecy to ordering the best-of-the-brainstorms (in terms of his managed teams), Jobs is building a line of devices that separate the chaos, the noise and the hacks of more open systems to bring its users a little hardware clarity (and style)…  

Is super-sizing your funds a way to create venture runway to steer past or through the downturn and stay competitive in the global market? Many startups - like Mahalo, Ning and LinkedIn - pride themselves on raising enough funding to survive the nuclear winter of late 2008 and basically all of 2009. Facebook decided to add runway and incent its employees through a follow-on $100 million passive investment from DST, Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies group, who also put $180 million into Zynga in December.

Last Tuesday, Intel Capital and 24 VC firms set to put $3.5 billion over two years into US startups to bump up America’s competitive edge. Intel Capital is earmarking $200 million individually.

Via the NYT: in a program called the Invest in America Alliance, Cisco, Intel, Google and Microsoft, among other big tech employers, are hiring 10,500 US college tech grads to regain international ground lost. Per Intel’s Paul Otellini:

Unfortunately, long-term investments in education, research, digital technology and human capital have been steadily declining in the U.S. So, too, has the commitment to policies that made us such an entrepreneurial powerhouse for more than a century.

As many VCs raise more to create investment mines in nascent countries such as India and China, the market seems to be correcting in trending tides: first startups who squirreled away cash, Angel capital/investment groups who are finding High Wealth Individuals (HWIs) looking for early discounts, tech companies seeing their international talent and US competitive edges decreasing, and now VCs who see value in creating big funds.  

With the new Apple iPad receiving an iHype or iYawn from the tech and media communities, a former colleague and Applephile, Patrick Kearney, suggested that Apple was crazy not to just acquire Adobe and own/integrate Flash. I counterpointed via the socialnet, that Adobe would be more integral to Google’s apps and offer a serious checkmate on Steve Jobs’ ability to close out his Apple hardware and software ecosystem.

The Google Value in Owning Adobe:

1. Keeps Google intrinsic to Apple, especially if Bing replaces Google Search across Safari, iPhone, iPad browsers and devices.
2. Adobe owns Omniture, an online marketing, data mining and analytics company, which it picked up in September 2009. Like Google’s acquisition of Urchin which became an invite-only Google Analytics and is now free for anyone. Omniture could be the premium or pro solution for big brands that need the stepabove solution, and of course crave CRM. It’s more behavioral, offers paid SEO across all search platforms, so it fits accretively.
3. Launch Google lite version of Photoshop and Dreamweaver (and…?) for its Google Apps. Many people are moving over to Gimp, an open source Photoshop design app, from outdated versions of Adobe’s Photoshop. This would democratize the products, while still offering premium versions that require a monthly subscription to remove the contextual ads and continue to innovate the product features for power-users before they go mainstream and free. Think of it as R&D for the premium, paying crowd who want the full version, and then as features become common, they go to the open, Google app public. This model of lite versus full versions is working well for the Apple Apps Store, and could move to an online subscription model to avoid distribution fulfillment and other retail packaging costs.
4. Ownership of Flash enhances YouTube’s dominance in online video. Pretty clear, Google labs up Flash internally and figures out ways to make it pay out more for its slowly monetizing video flagship. YouTube’s choice advertisers get premium Flash benefits; innovations trickle down to other top UGC performers.
5. Google Phones benefit from mobile improvements to Flash. The Android and Nexus One become more marketable, and Google licenses Flash to the Blackberries and other mobile players.
6. And, of course, the obvious: every media-savvy site uses Flash and it rolls up 75% of online video, plus marketers like flashy display banners, so Google owns more of the food chain - from media co’s to video players to brands and their agencies looking to stand out in a very noisy internet environment.

Last day of the year, and pulling out those excerpts that have been gathering dust in the draft box. Stay tuned for the New Medici network to go live in Q1 2010, as well as a  breakdown of media companies for last year and going forward into the new year.

via How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions - WSJ.com

It is no secret that the odds against keeping a New Year’s resolution are steep. Only about 19% of people who make them actually stick to their vows for two years, according to research led by John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

But those discouraging statistics mask an important truth: The simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of 10. Among those people who make resolutions in a typical year, 46% keep them for at least six months. That compares with only 4% of a comparable group of people who wanted to make specific changes and thought about doing so, but stopped short of making an actual resolution, says a 2002 study of 282 people, led by Dr. Norcross and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

via How Google Can Combat Content Farms

• Neutralize the link dilution; A.J. Kohn, who further wrote that “the introduction of SearchWiki, their measurement of short-clicks versus long-clicks, the new domain/brand SERP listing, snippet links, and use of breadcrumbs all point to a gathering movement to help determine quality without such a reliance on an ever diluted link ecosystem.”
• Do a better job ranking authority; for more on this read Clay Shirky’s post on “Algorithmic Authority.”
• Introduce a user rating system; Tony Masinelli.
• Leverage sharing networks to determine where the quality is; Alex Kessinger.  
  

Ken Auletta’s new book is a journalist’s take on the Google phenomenon. He conducted interviews with some 150 current and former Google employees as well as the CEO Eric Schmidt and the normally media-shy founders Larry and Sergey.

Read the transcript from the Charlie Rose interview. And the addendum of 25 media maxims to create a consequential media empire in the digital age. Full download after the jump…

25 Media Maxims

1. Passion wins
2. Focus is required
3. Vision is required
4. A team culture is vital
5. Treat engineers as kings
6. Treat customers like kings
7. Brand often means trust
8. Every company should strive to take the risks out of capitalism
9. Every company is a frenemy
10. The speed of change accelerates
     

Breaking: The portal days are a-changing … again. Tim Armstrong, President of Google Sales, is now Chairman and CEO of AOL, a Time Warner company. With some younger and less traditional (cable) media blood. Borrowing from the Google thinkbank, Jeffrey Bewkes from Time Warner is trying to reconstitute AOL with fresh leadership. Definitely a “New Medici,” Armstrong is supremely ad/sales based, so it will be interesting to watch what level of new product definition comes out of Google - versus reviving its search (currently Googlized). As Google’s former president of the Americas operations and senior vice president, overseeing North and Latin America - and an investor/former chairman of Associated Content, Patch.com and FitPlanet, Armstrong has to redefine what AOL means to a marketplace of users looking for fresh content and ads. Can he reinvent advertising like Google reinvented search?  

How much is your Twitter account name worth (not your Twitter following or value of Twits) to you? As an individual, a personality/ celeb or a real brand? I recently took a drive through the oh-so-simple registration, and there’s still a lot of top level twits (TLTs?) available. Remember all of those domain names you couldn’t buy because domain squatters were holding them ransom? Well, my prediction is that the great land grab - this time around a kind of Twitfest Destiny - is back. The year of the Twitter squatters (”Twatters”) is upon us.  

One of the better jobs in the Google economy (and yes, that ‘Googleconomy’ has been halved, but is still backed by some of the most innovative minds in tech and beyond) - running Google.org’s active philanthropic arm - just got a little more active for Larry Brilliant, who’s transitioning to “Chief Philanthropic Evangelist.” Per Google’s blog earlier this week, Brilliant (luckily an appropriate, not ironic name) set out that he is more the ‘ideas and partnership’ maker than the operational executive. His long-time colleague Megan Smith takes over day-to-day running of Google.org. I’ve met Larry a few times at Google Zeitgeist conferences and via my past role at Participant Media; and, as a “rainmaker of change,” it’s good to see Larry move into a more idea-centric role. What made this announcement interesting to New Medici was: when should a thought leader move away from day-to-day operations and concentrate on advancing/innovating the company’s cause directly?  

It may be true that Nokia sells more phones in a month than Apple has sold of the iPhone 3G since its release last July.  It may also be true that the iPhone is not the ultimate expression of mobile computing and communication, or that the negatives associated with its closed platform will outweigh the positives.  And it is undoubtedly true that anyone who works in the mobile industry, particularly in California, is suseptible to Apple Fanaticism, the iPhone Bubble of Hype, and a distorted sense of the iPhone’s penetration across the country and around the world.  

Jeff Jarvis’ book came out this past week - yes, we recommend buying it immediately as we did - and then BusinessWeek does a related cover story. Most be a good week for Jarvis, whose BuzzMachine blog and regular Davos’ accolades help him challenge businesses to iterate more openly and innovate their practices. Per Chris Anderson (of the Long Tail): “Google is not just a company, it is an entirely new way of thinking about understanding who we are and what we want.” But where does Google go next?  

A great panel at CES today - “Wii Shall Overcome: The Triumph of Simplicity and the Lessons We Can Learn from Nintendo.” The panel were Wii believers in the clean, simple design which changed the physical gaming home environment; rough meaning, it was inclusive of all family generations. Wii was bigger than just Mii.

In 2008, many of our national billionaires gave much of their fortunes away, involuntarily. From Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas and Macau casino billionaire who lost $24 billion ($24B) to Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and the Google guys, last year was a very difficult year to amass. Now who’s to say that losing “a few personal billion” when you still have “a few” is an innovation problem - it matters when these entrepreneurs pull back on progress and humanitarian giving to stem private losses.

Per Forbes, Warren Buffet lost $16.5B, Gates was down $12.3B and Google’s Larry Page lost more than half of his g-trove: $11.9B.