John Battelle who writes one of the most interesting blog on search and the internet was out promoting his first book called The Search, here in the south bay (Books Inc in Mountain View)

Downtown Mountain View is about a 30min ride on the VTA from work in San Jose, I didn't have anything to read on the ride though I had some music courtesy of the shuffle. I quickly printed a few articles I wanted to check out, namely

- TIME.com: Stevie's Little Wonder, Time Magazine takes a look at the inception of the iPod Nano
- A Two-Day Tour of Tokyo, Stretching $500 Worth of Yen - New York Times, quite good, can't wait to go back to Tokyo myself
- Eat My Blog, an Observer reporter spends a day with our own local foodie Pim, apparently quite the superstar these days
- John Rock's Error, one of those really long and informative Gladwell articles dated 2000 on the invention of the pill, didn't finish

The train was clean, sparsely crowded and surprisingly punctual. I got to Castro St shortly after 7pm and Books Inc is a short walk 2 blocks away from the station. A relaxed Battelle (shirt and jeans) actually came out of Kapps Pizza as I was walked by. I didn't recognize him at first having only recently checked out his photo on the book jacket he posted. His shoulder bag sporting a logo for the Industry Standard shoulda tipped me. By the time all this came to me, it was too late of course, we had exchanged looks and waited silently for a light to change at a crosswalk

Anyway, he checked himself in with the good folks at Books Inc while I purchased my book. A steep $28.09 after tax at the store ($25.95 list price) versus the sweet Amazon price of $17.13. Oh well


The Search - "How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture"

I quickly sat at the front row as the people were still slowly coming in. John chatted a bit with a talkative kid from Plaxo, his coworker the infamous Mark fired-from-google-for-blogging Jen was to arrive later. John mentioned upcoming book tour duties at the Googleplex and also Microsoft

The lady who introduced him actually read his book for a change and read a bit of the author's accomplishments. I couldn't get over how much she was pronouncing his name "Patel", I dunno

John talked about the book, the blog and read some of his favorite passages. It was cool and chill. He was gushing over Bill Joy and the candy arbitrage story he already posted on his site. He brought up an interesting twist on improving search, results have to be better but also people have to become better searchers as well, entering the right keywords and scanning the results efficiently. It's a far cry from having the search engines know what you mean but it's an interim solution that will hold us over

After the readings, John fielded a few questions from the room
- What about Microsoft? Well it wasn't doing much when he was writing the book
- Search spam? It's here to stay
- The blog is awesome, why write the book? One of those crossing an item off a checklist thing
- Much more

The hour and odd minutes went by quickly and the lady from the store had to interrupt the Q&A to get the book signing under way. I was 2nd in line, congratulated him on the book and was outta there



Fun moment as a patron triggered the alarm at the store's doors, "Someone's stealing my book" -John Battelle

Finally John alluded to a piece of Google news he couldn't reveal until 9p, he posted later about Google lauching blog search, finally

I've only started reading the book but it should prove quite interesting from the excerpts on his site

Update: spruced up the post with excellent pics of by Terry Chay, here are some more