SiliconBeat

Journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, but with 5,000 articles spontaneously materializing out of the ether each time Google makes a product announcement, you’d be excused for wondering what, if anything, is left to be written in the second draft, which is traditionally a more heavily researched and thoughtful long-form manuscript.
The answer, in the case of a new book by Richard Brandt, a former long-time Business Week reporter who also spent five years editing Upside magazine, is quite a lot.
“Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain,” which will be published in September by Portfolio, is chockfull of new insights about one of the world’s most thoroughly scrutinized companies. It illustrates the value that thorough, straightforward, extensive shoe-leather reporting can bring to a even the most over-exposed subject.
Gracefully written, the book compares the project to create Google with the effort to build the Library at Alexandria in the third century BC. Starting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s noteworthy success in out negotiating two of the world’s most influential venture capital firms at Google’s inception and continuing through the short tenure and mysterious departure of renown medical activist Larry Brilliant from Google.org this year, Brandt’s book sheds light on the unique management style of Google’s co-founders.
Unlike a series of recent books on Google that seek to capitalize on the company’s success, Brandt’s book is more than a cursory clip job. He spent several years interviewing current and former employees of the Internet giant and attending meetings and events at the Googleplex in Mountain View.
As a result, Brandt gets a number of things right. Most notably Brandt, manages to avoid easy cynicism, which is the first trap of any newbie reporter or book writer who takes on the company as a subject. And as a long-time technology writer, he knows the difference between cloud computing and client computing and doesn’t let technical details get in the way of his story.
In contrast, the newly published “Google Speaks,” by Janet Lowe, appears to be based almost entirely on other articles, which led the veteran author to such bizarre assertions as the patently wrong claim that Flickr was bought by Google and the more puzzling statement that Hewlett Packard once owned the Altavista search engine. (Flickr was bought by Yahoo, and Altavista was created by Digital Equipment Corporation, which was sold to Compaq in 1999, which was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2002. In 2003 Altavista was sold to Overture which was then bought by Yahoo. So Lowe is technical correctly about the chain of ownership while simultaneously appearing totally confused about which facts are relevant in Silicon Valley’s complicated corporate histories.)
Demonstrating an equally shaky grasp of technology, Lowe also asserts that Google is using “deep-packet inspection” to observe a user’s Web browsing experience, a puzzling attempt to link Google to a controversial intelligence-gathering process. In reality, Google can observe users’ Web browser experiences not because it uses a sophisticated technology, but because users choose to allow Google to store their personal data.
In Lowe’s defense, writing about technology and covering the technology industry is usually a full-time job, and it takes time for even the most brilliant and talented writers to get up to speed.
That is the advantage Brandt holds. Readers interested in acquiring a deeper understanding of Google’s world would be hard-pressed to find a more knowledgeable guide.

When Barry Parr started Coastsider.com in 2004, he was one of the few local news sites in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Fast forward five years and Parr, a co-founder of Knight Ridder’s Mercury Center who later helped start CNET’s News.com, is now a patriarch of an exploding local blogging movement.
Parr believes this is the future of local news, even if the business potential of the sites is still shaky.
For Parr, 53, Coastsider started as an interesting experiment and a community service. He had lived in Montara, a small town located along the San Mateo County coast, since 1999 and keenly felt the absence of a vibrant online community news source. And as a pioneer on the business side of online media, Parr had some informed ideas about how a hyper-local site could be successful. So after he left CNet during the fall-out of the dot com bust, he decided to try them out.
The turning point for Coastsider was April 2006 when Devil’s Slide, a notorious stretch of steep hillside along Highway 1 spilled tons of debris over the two-lane highway, forcing a 12-week closure.
Coastsider.com had the scoop, and its traffic quadrupled. “What we learned is that intensive coverage of local breaking news really matters,” Parr said.
More recently, Coastsider’s reporting on a local cable-access television station helped trigger a grand-jury investigation. “They found the problem was a lack of oversight from the county,” Parr said.
Coastsider also highlighted the threat to communities, as local access channels disappear and the news they once provided becomes harder and harder to find.
Today, Parr estimates he reaches one out of six residents in the coastal area. Six months ago, he started selling advertising.
Since then he’s learned a few lessons about what works and what doesn’t. Google AdSense, for example, delivers particularly poor results. “It’s completely impractical for smaller Web sites,” Parr said. Most of the ads aren’t locally relevant and readers don’t click on them, he explained.
Instead, Parr sells ads directly to local businesses the old fashioned way. That is surprisingly successful.
Parr said the businesses don’t carry about Internet metrics like ecpm (clicks per thousand), they just want their ads to be seen by folks who are potential customers. “We really believe there is an advertising base out there to support local journalism at a smaller scale,” he said.
Parr, who up until recently had been working full-time as a technology analyst for firms like Forrester and IDC, said he nows earns the equivalent of a decent part-time job from Coastsider’s ad sales. Still, he cautioned that the business potential of local blogs is still nascent. “I don’t think you can support a family doing this right now,” he said.
Parr’s success has inspired others. Up the coast there is Pacifica Riptide started in 2007, in Alameda there is The Island and in San Francisco there is the SFist and the SFAppeal. Oakland has a myriad of local sites, with A Better Oakland and The Oak Book being among the most prominent. “I think what we are seeing is a renaissance of grassroots journalism by concerned community members,” Parr said.

Twitter’s popularity is beginning to raise alarms among scientists.
In May David Meyer, a professor of cognition at the University of Michigan, warned that incessant use of social-networking technologies encourages “excessive, addictive, counterproductive multitasking.”
Extreme multitasking not only can lead to chronic stress and potentially damage the cardiovascular, immune and nervous systems, it may also increase the time it takes to complete tasks by 100 or more, Meyer wrote in the New York Times.
Shlomo Breznitz, a cognitive psychologist who is the founder of Cognifit, a brain fitness company, wrote in a recent blog post that constant distraction created by services like Twitter could have a long-term effect on a person’s ability to perform “more demanding intellectual tasks like inferential and deductive reasoning or critical analysis.”
Breznitz advised Twitter users who are finding it more difficult to concentrate to limit their engagement with social-media to specific times and to declare certain periods of the day to be “Twitter-free zones.”
But before you sign up for Twitterers Anonymous, you may want to get a second opinion.
A study of UCLA students found that a small amount of distraction actually helped the students recall sets of word pairs (country: Russia, fruit:lemon, flower:lily).

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine gained less ground on Google than many observes had thought since its release last month, according to data released this morning from comScore, an independent research firm.
Doug Anmuth, an analyst with Barclays Capital, writes in a research note this morning that Microsoft’s share of search queries increased from 8 percent in May to 8.4 percent in June.
“While the share gain is positive for Microsoft, & Bing was the only one of the 3 large search engines to increase queries M/M, we had expected Bing share to come in between 10-11%,” Anmuth wrote. “As a result, we believe the search data is a slight positive for both Google & Yahoo!, & it should serve as a sigh of relief to some investors who were concerned about the early impact of Bing. Bing’s gains did come virtually all from Yahoo!, but the overall impact was still less than anticipated.”
Google will report its second-quarter earnings on Thursday.

Four of America’s most accomplished entrepreneurs shared memories of embarrassing moments and personal challenges at a soiree held in their honor in private home Atherton on Thursday night.
Recognized as visionaries by SDForum, Silicon Valley’s venerable software developers organization, Jim Clark, Vinod Khosla, Kay Koplovitz and Judy Estrin accepted their awards with a series of self-deprecating stories that highlighted the high-tech industry’s culture of grit and perseverance.
Clark, who famously co-founded five companies, including Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Shutterfly, denied that he ever caught more than one glimpse of the future when he co-founded Netscape and unleashed the Internet boom. But Clark allowed that he may have had been acting as a visionary when he figured out how to escape poverty as a high school dropout in Plainview, Texas by joining the U.S. Navy. Clark added that his “next visionary step was getting out the Navy.”
Clark also described how being in the Navy and learning about pay-day loans give him his first idea for a company. He recalled that he “started a loan shark business” after enrolling in Louisiana State University.
Kay Koplovitz, the founder of USA Network, the first basic cable network delivered via satellite nationwide, said she got hooked on the idea geosynchronous orbiting satellites after hearing a lecture by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke while she was a college student visiting London. She stuck with the idea even as USA Network struggled for years, going through multiple ownership changes.
Now a unit of NBC Universal Cable, USA Network will be more profitable this year than all of NBC, according to Tom Wertheimer, a former executive at MCA and ABC who introduced Koplovitz to the audience, which was made up of a who’s who of the Silicon Valley tech industry.
Judith Estrin, a networking pioneer who served as chief technology officer for Cisco Systems, recalled how she was “not completely sober” when she first heard Bob Metcalfe talk about the Ethernet, which became a networking standard. She had been celebrating her 21st birthday with a group of friends before Metcalfe’s talk at Stanford. Luckily Metcalfe, who endured a bit of heckling from Estrin and friends during his talk, was also at the celebration, she said.
Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and venture capitalist at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, said he was initially rejected from Stanford University’s MBA program. But Khosla refused to take no for answer. Looking over at John Hennessey, Stanford’s president, and a past recipient of the award, Khosla said Stanford finally yielded “four days before classes started — on September 21, 1980.”
Khosla said he believed what is recognized as “vision” is “bumbling around long enough” to finally get something right. “It is sort of embarrassing to be called a visionary,” he joked. “But I guess its better than being called a past visionary, as some of the name tags of the past award winners say.”
Over the years, SDForum has recognized Bill Gates, John Chambers, Michael Mortiz, Carol Bartz and other industry leaders at the annual fete that is held in the home of Heidi Roizen, venture capitalist and former Apple executive. The event was sponsored by Deloitte, Microsoft, Nokia and Nitro software.

Google shared one of the closely guarded secrets of its success with a roomful of developers Wednesday morning, revealing the tricks it uses to get Web pages to load in less than a second.
“We really think that if the Web gets better and the Web gets faster it is good for everyone,” Marissa Mayer, a vice president of search products, told attendees of the O’Reilly Velocity Conference.
From its launch in 1998, Google distinguished itself from competitors with a focus on speed. While competitors like Excite and Yahoo weighed down their home pages by turning them into massive portals, Google’s page featured mostly white space.
For years, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder has joked that the reason was he refused to learn HTML, a computer language used to design Web pages. But there was another important motivation: White space loaded instantaneously.
When Mayer started working at the search engine ten years ago, she recalled, her boss closely monitored her code to make sure that she didn’t add a single extraneous byte of data.
As Google grew the number of Internet searches its computers conducted ballooned from several hundred thousand in 1999 to several billion in 2009. Speed became more important than ever. The home page was pared down and new products were vetted in a “latency lab” that measured how long a user would be forced to wait.
The results sometimes led to surprising decisions. When Google launched an online payments system in 2006 called Google Checkout, engineers were instructed to render the blue shopping cart, which was the site’s identifying icon, in painstaking HTML. It was as if a newspaper had ordered its typesetters to revert to hot type. “Who would have thought that this big blob of HTML would load faster,” Mayer said. “But the latency lab showed that it did.”
It turns out that a delay as short of the blink of an eye — about 400 milliseconds — could turn users off. Last year, Mayer said, Google experimented by injected a 400 millisecond delay into its delivery of search results. Searches per user started dropping. After six weeks, searches per user had fallen nearly one percent. That seemingly small figure represented several hundred million dollars a year in potential ad revenue, Mayer noted.
Mayer said Google has started sharing tips for speeding up Web pages, because it believes the faster the Web becomes the more people will ultimately use it — and use Google.
On Tuesday Google unveiled a new Web site it had created for developers containing tutorials and performance tools. “Many Web sites can become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the entire Web,” senior vice presidents Urs Hoelzle and Bill Coughran wrote in a blog post. The new site can be found at code.google.com/speed.

Yahoo announced Monday it would start selling self-service display advertising to small businesses.
The ads, which require a minimum payment of $30 per day, will let advertisers target specific segments of Yahoo’s giant global audience. For example, a clothing store could show ads to women in San Jose between the ages of 18 and 24 years old when they visit Yahoo.
Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesman, said advertisers could choose among 800 ad templates provided by AdReady, an advertising-technology company based in Seattle.
Google began self-service display ads that run on its AdSense partner network last October.
Diana Adair, a Google spokeswoman, said the display ads are proving more effective than more typical text-based ads. For example, she said, the Wilshire Grand hotel in downtown Los Angles has seen online reservations increase by 12% since beginning its ad campaign.
Last month, Google announced that its ad-builder template would be available in 40 languages and 100 countries.
Yahoo’s product, called My Display Ads, is currently only available in the United States.

Speaking at Stanford University on Sunday night, Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz said it has been a “distinct pleasure” to have Carl Icahn, a famous corporate raider turned shareholder activist, on her board.
Last year, Icahn led a proxy fight to oust former Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang and replace other members of the board of directors after Yahoo rejected a $47.5 billion bid from Microsoft. Icahn later dropped his challenge in return for being given control of three seats on the 11-member board.
Speaking at the 15th annual Stanford Directors College Bartz, who replaced Yang in January, said she was “fortunate” not to have been at Yahoo during the proxy battle but added that it is “better” to have Icahn around and described him as a “smart guy.”
Bartz, who won respect for turning around a hostile board of directors while she was chief executive of Autodesk, said corporate boards need to have more members who are involved and willing to speak up. She also said boards need a diversity of ages and should be selected from different industries and positions — not just chief executive officers.

Google added Farsi to its translation service Thursday night, giving Iranians who are protesting what they claim was a rigged national election an additional tool to communicate directly with the rest of the world.
Farsi is the forty-second language to be added to Google Translate.
Franz Och, the principal scientist on the project, warned in a blog post that Farsi was added quickly and that the service would likely be imperfect.
Google began its machine translation initiative six years ago.
The Mountain View advertising giant relies on a method in which computers “learn” new languages by comparing identical texts written in different languages. This works well when there is lots of material available, for example for French or Spanish and less well for languages like Farsi.
Still, Ochs is hopeful the service will work well enough to help out journalists looking for information that is only available in Farsi. It will also help Iranians make sense of documents written in foreign languages. “Google Translate is helping break down the language barrier,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Justice has sent civil investigative demands to at least two publishers asking for information about the Google Book Settlement, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The requests were received by Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group and another publisher who requested that his name be withheld for unknown reasons.
The settlement ended a lawsuit that a group of publishers and authors had brought against the search giant for copying out-of-print works without the permission of the copyright holders.
A wide range of publishers, authors, librarians, academics and public interest groups have objected to the settlement because they are concerned it will give Google a de facto monopoly over the digital versions of millions of out-of-print books whose rights holders are hard to find.