PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast

Episode 35 of the PodLeaders show - 25 mins 05 secs

My guest on Podleaders today is John Battelle. John is the founder of Federated Media Publishing (FMP) but is probably better known as the author of the book on search called, appropriately enough, The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture. John is also one of the original founders of Wired magazine, the founder of Industry Standard magazine and website, and band manager of the collaborative weblog Boing Boing.

Here are all the questions I asked John along with their times during the interview:

John, first of all can you give the listeners a bit of background. Who is John Battelle? 0:36

FMP is only for bloggers at the moment. Do you have plans to expand that to Podcasters or other media? - 1:33

You were the co-founding editor of Wired and the founder of The Industry Standard. What lessons have you learned from your involvement with them? - 2:44

John can you see any new and upcoming companies give Google, MSN and Yahoo a run for their money? - 3:48

You wrote the book on search - your book is called The Search - why did you feel people needed to know about search? - 5:22

Privacy now is a myth, isn’t it? The era of privacy is gone… - 8:15

How do you see Technorati and the blog search engines affecting the likes of Google? - 8:44

I was talking to Alex Laats of PodZinger today. PodZinger’s search is another vertical. Do you think this is something Google is taking an interest in? - 11:00

Audience Questions:

Damien

Can you name one thing MSN, Yahoo and Google could be doing much better and then one thing that they have nailed? - 12:57

Is Google turning into MSN? Their rate of turning out innovative and funky products seems to be slowing. Google Talk wasn’t very exciting, Google Base seems like a mess at the moment and Google Pages is very hit and miss. Do you think they’re losing focus? - 15:05

Can the search engines cope with the new wave of home produced “content” and I use the term loosely because a lot of it is going to be bebo/mySpace type junk. Do you think the big boys will get their head or their crawlers about Microformats and microcontent which is evangelised by the likes of Marc Canter - 16:17

John, you’ve interviewed a lot of people through the years. Who was the most interesting? Also, who would you like to interview that you haven’t and what would you ask? - 18:01

How did you hook up with the BoingBoing folks and become their “band manager”? - 20:46

Finally John, can you tell us about the current book you are working on? - 22:40

Download the entire interview here
(11.49mb mp3).