The landscape for both John Battelle and the search industry is significantly different since we last met with John Battelle. In 2005 when we heard from John down in New Orleans, John's book The Search : How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, had just hit a few bookshelves. Since that time, there has been a firestorm of activity in John's career.

Since we last heard from John:

• The Search has rocked in and out of the top 1000 list on Amazon.
  
• Federated Media Publishing (FMP) was funded.
  
• FMP has signed up a huge number of authors and sites to carry advertising and contribute content on the FMP self service ad network.
  

I first met John a few years ago through a mutual project. I'd been working with CBS news on a story they were producing for The Biography Channel. The story was the biography of The Google Guys. Somewhere in that interview process, I was passed off to a stringer working on a story for the famous CBS 60 Minutes. It was in the middle of all those back-and-forth discussions that the name John Battelle kept coming up. After all, educating a greenhorn New York TV reporter on the finer points of PageRank is not a one phone call task. CBS was very curious to know what I thought about John. At the time, he was a vague acquaintance that I had run into at a few conferences. He was always that guy we knew from his days at Wired, and the ill fated Industry Standard.


After I got off the phone with CBS, I figured there was certainly something I was missing here. So I did a classic Googling of John for a few hours. Somewhere during that session, the heavens opened - light bulbs went off - and it dawned one me that John was behind The Search Blog and he *is* the band manager behind the awesome blogernaut Boing Boing!

So when CBS called back the next time, I was more than ready to answer some questions about John. What I couldn't figure out was why they were interested in John for a story about Google? The answer became clear when I spotted John on 60 Minutes a few weeks later. It is the story that is best known in this community as the one where Matt Cutts is walking down the halls in blue jeans while while the report says something to the effect, "Google is the home of scruffy college kids." Alas, my part in that story ended up on the cutting room floor. I did end up in the original Biography story though.



What a couple of years for John it has been. The Book, The Blogs (1,2), The Site, The Conference, The Interviews (2), and the articles written about and by John have invaded and pervaded the search and net landscape. Probably the most notable acommplishment has been the spectacular growth of Federated Media Publishing. The depth and number of sites signed up is pretty spectacular.


All that change means that this year's keynote by John will be very different from the last time we heard him. He has an entirely different picture of the web now that he did a few years ago. We are really looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

-bt