He’s also being interviewed on Thursday, April 29th at 4pm ET in a live Webcast. The topic: “New Marketing in the New Normal.”

As with earlier Webcasts in this series, I’ve been invited to watch and tweet my thoughts as I do. You can do the same if you like–the Webcast interface has a built-in Twitter interface. And if you have any questions for John right now, you can leave them here as comments (or tweet them, using the hashtag #HPIO). We’ll round them up for the event.

(Further full disclosure: The Webcast is sponsored by HP and hosted at its site–hence the @HPIO hashtag. Photo of John Battelle by me, taken at last week’s Chirp conference.)

China mandates Web-censoring software.

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Opera 9.7 for Windows Mobile.

Epix streams movies in HD.

Panasonic’s new featherweight HD camcorders.

New Walkman may run Android.

Search startups: Wowd and Yebol.

Twitter will certify celebrity accounts.

The best way to get a taste for what Squared does is to check out some results, which it calls Squares:

Here’s a search for “small cars“

Here’s one for “superheroes“

And here’s one for “U.S. states“

All of them get some things right, figuring out logical columns of information for the search at hand (such as “transmission” for small cars and “first appearance” for superheroes) and filling in rows of information. But the randomness factor is high–it’s not clear why the first three cars that Squared fills in are the Scion xB, the Volkswagen Jetta, and the Subaru Impreza, nor why the fourth car is the 1999 Volkswagen Beetle. It gets confused easily–in the Superhero Square, it thinks that Alex Raymond created the Flash, when he really was responsible for Flash Gordon. Occasionally, it’s just plain dada–it appears to believe that U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is a U.S. state.

The examples above are mine, but Google’s suggested searches on the Squared home page provide results that are just as eccentric: A search for “digital cameras” lists the manufacturer of a Sony camera as “Carl Zeiss,” and there’s a “Color Support” column with entries such as “rhythm and blue,” “1 year warranty,” and “black.” All of which proves something we already knew: It’s really hard to grab facts from a place as loosey-goosey as the Web and turn it into structured, ordered data.

And while the service logically gives you some tools for editing the results–you can add edit cells and add rows and columns–it lacks others you’d almost certainly want if you were using Squares as the start of more extensive research, such as the ability to reorder or sort rows and columns. (I’d love to see Google Squared let you plunk a Square into Google Docs’ spreadsheet application, so you got access to all of its editing tools.)

A few folks have made noises about Squared being a Wolfram|Alpha killer, but that’s nuts: Alpha, while imperfect, is ready to do all sorts of useful things right now. Squared feels more like the initial proof of concept for something that may take years to get right.

None of this matters much if Squared is in fact a very rough draft of an idea that Google has a lot of faith in. A Squared that pretty much figured out the right columns and rows for all kinds of searches, and filled them in with correct info in the right order, could be a tremendous research tool. Which is why I hope Google sticks with this idea. I’m guessing we’ll be able to tell within a few months whether the company sees it as an idiosyncratic party trick or something that might evolve into the next Google News or Google Image Search…

Google is saying that the idea is a work in progress, and won’t always do what it’s supposed to–the demo also included a search for vegetables in which the search engine got confused and started populating the row for “squash” with information on the sport. But users can edit the results and save them–the notion is that a Google Squared result can be the starting point for big research jobs like choosing a dog.

It’ll be impossible to judge just how practical Google Squared is without doing a bunch of searches once it’s available, but the fact that Google is launching it at all is evidence of the semantic understanding of Web results that it’s gaining–the whole feature is dependent on the ability to turn unstructured text into highly regimented, database-like fields.

Also new today is a feature called Rich Snippets, which makes the little bits of text in results more useful–by identifying that a result is a review by a particular person, for instance, or extracting the location and profession of a person in a result so you can tell if it’s the person you’re looking for. And the last demo of the morning was for Google Sky Map, a virtual planetarium program for the Android platform that uses a phone’s accelerometer to let  you look in the sky and get a map of what you’re looking at.

Okay, some appallingly bad images of Google Squared in action (I shot these off a display at the Googleplex during a demo). Here’s a search for roller coasters, with a name column, one with an image, one with a description, one with the height and more:

Here’s a look at how Squared lets you see multiple items that might be appropriate for a cell in a square (which is what the spreadsheet-like views are called) and pick the best one. Note also that it shows where the data came from–and that Squared’s understanding of the data goes only so far (it has trouble distinguishing between a coaster’s height and the minimum height required to ride it):

Here’s a square of information about digital cameras (if Squared works well, it could be a potent research tool when you’re shopping for big-ticket items):

And here’s a square that a Google employee showed us when TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington asked to see results that didn’t work well (it’s for pizza, and shows restaurants in New York, Oakland, and Las Vegas):