Battelle is on the ball again

John Battelle has yet another interesting blog post in which he describes his intent to not create yet-another-social-network.  He is right on the money in his assessment of Google's and Yahoo's respective strategies.  I think he raises an interesting point regarding Google's response to Yahoo's integration of social networking with the personalized web: will Orkut be raised from the dead?  Frankly, Yahoo has come back so strong in its rush to meet Google that it has actually shot past it and taken the lead in terms of emerging technologies for personalization.  Now of course Google with their Earth and Maps services is light years beyond Yahoo's offerings.  Bloggers have been buzzing the last few days about the usefulness of the Google Earth API in news stories.  For better or worse, some news organizations are using Earth to map out where the explosions occured in London.  Techdirt has the story.  The families and friends of the victims are in the thoughts and prayers of us at Minority Rapport.