Time Warner closing bell: Cleaning house after search mess

Time Warner stock today closed exactly where it opened, $16.50. Most of the Time Warner news centered around consequences from the recent data release/privacy violation debacle at AOL. Thus far, the person who released three months worth of search queries has been fired, as has that person's direct supervisor. Maureen Govern, AOL's chief technology officer, resigned.

In what I am certain is a completely unrelated piece of news, Time Warner signed James Gandolfini, aka Tony Soprano of The Sopranos, to a three year deal with HBO. Maybe Gandolfini will be the new privacy policy enforcement officer. In addition to his hit series (no pun intended) on HBO, Gandolfini will also develop at least one documentary for HBO, tentatively entitled Occupation Iraq. It wil center around the lives and stories of ordinary soldiers serving in Iraq.

Perhaps consumers need not worry so much about AOL's inadvertant search query data release. According to Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post, the single most queried term did not deal with porn. It was Google. In her August 17, 2006 article, Nakashima stated that AOL's data release is the "first widespread public glimpse of how people search the Internet." Despite the fact that AOL pulled the data from its site, and terminated its participation in the academic project that prompted the data release, the information has already been copied on www.dontdelete.com and other sites. From AOL's own research from the data, 15% of searches were categorized as "other," meaning they were too diverse to classify. Entertainment and shoppping searches figured prominently. Porn queries accounted for 7% of all search queries, a surprisingly low figure.

Not everyone is reading porn. Popular Science, owned by Time4 Media, has scored 16.5% increase in newsstand growth since the revamped design was launched in January 2006. Popular Science is the world's best selling science mag, with circulation in excess of 1.3 million. Online page views are up 50% and online subscriptions are up 70%.