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There's an amusing site called Google Sightseeing whose sole purpose is to point out cool/curious/amusing features that people can pick out from the (amazingly cool) satellite images provided by Google Maps.
Inspired by the pictures in today's feed I remembered that Target stores have a cute image on the roofs of their stores, so I went looking and found this one right in my own neighborhood!
Being a veteran of the groupware movement (worked at Lotus for years, and co-founded eRoom Technology) this item caught my eye:
"Liquid Systems, a venture-funded software company that is focused on enterprise messaging and collaboration, according to sources familiar with the company's plans." (from InfoWorld)
I guess only the InfoWorld headline refers to "groupware" but it's a very 80's term, that even in the 90's we at eRoom avoided like the plague.
Technorati Tags: collaboration, groupware, vc
There was a recent interesting article in the New York Times describing some new, unusual search engines:
"Search engines are so powerful. And they are so pathetically weak. ... When it comes to digging up a specific name, date, phrase or price, search engines are unstoppable. The same is true for details from the previously concealed past. For better and worse, any information about any of us..." (from New York Times)
None of them blows me away, but in case these are useful or of interest:
Technorati Tags: searchengines
I recently wondered out loud (on a couple of mailing lists) how much action there is with RSS and Blogging within the Academic/Research/Scientific community.
The reason for that question was that I was considering that with those folks refereed, scholarly articles are what counts which seems diametrically opposite to the casual, ad-hoc, first-person rants that are generally associated with blogging. (Ok I am just exaggerating to make a point.)
I learned that there's actually lots and lots going on with RSS and Blogging in that world. Here are some interesting from a more or less random collection of serious science and academic pubs all of which have RSS support of some kind. This is, I am sure, nowhere near comprehensive, but it was eye opening to me.,
Pretty cool, eh?
Can someone explain why my referrer log for this site is full of spamish-looking like urls, none of which actually have a link to it? For example:
texasholdemcenteral.com, www.freewebs.com, skate.cyberfreehost.com, google.co.uk/search, www.myspace.com/nyjeter2ox, images.google.ca/imgres, images.google.co.uk/imgres, evilplots.com/texas-holdem, www.texasholdemcenteral.com, online-casino.blest-casino.com/ , www.favorite-casino.com/online-casino, www.sportscribe.com/poker-party, com/texas-holdem.html, favorite-casino.com/casino.
And so on? It's got to have something to do with page rank and Google, but I would love to understand HOW and WHY they do it.
"IBM has announced that it will be joining the Harmony open source Java project. Although right now, IBM's role is limited to providing thoughts and suggestions, it is likely that IBM will be contributing code to the project in the future according to Rod Smith, Vice President of Advanced Technology at IBM.", from JavaLobby.
While Java is great as a language and as a platform, there has been reasonable concern about Sun's stewardship of it, both short and long term. The fact that IBM seems to be throwing their hat into the ring of making an alternative, open source, Java platform, can either be good by itself or because it gives Sun a kick in the pants. Either way, I think it could be good!
Technorati Tags: interesting, java, IBM, puppy
Check this out: Microsoft Announces Plans to Acquire FrontBridge... Is BlogBridge next?
(ok, you know I am only joking, right ;->)
For a while now I've been fascinated with my Flickr SmartFeed of the Maldives. The pictures are one more beautiful than the next. Maybe this betrays my Caribbean heritage, but this one just blows me away.
Technorati Tags: flickr
Scoble has been really picking on Technorati recently, and I can't figure out why. Given the megaphone that Robert has it has got to be really hurting Technorati. There has been a lot of detailed commentary about this, some of it quite good, for example David Berlind and Dan Farber on ZDNet and Padawan.info.
My modest contribution to the debate is this: Why does it shock anyone that the number of links reported by Technorati is different than the number of citations counted by Bloglines? These are statistics for which there are no objective definitions. Both sites are measuring something but are they measuring the same thing? No!
Unfortunately (sort of) neither site gives the detailed objective definition of what they are measuring. I say "sort of", because, guaranteed, those definitions would be inaccurate and dated, and no one would read them anyway.
(Update: I am pretty sure that my modest contribution is not original but it what is screaming out in my mind each time I read about this topic.)
(Update 2: Maybe a better analogy would be feigned surprise that Fox News poll results differ from The New York Times, or that the statistics about how many people have died from AIDS are different depending on who is reporting. I mean, this isn't the speed of light we are talking about here.)
Technorati Tags: bloglines, scoble, technorati, truth
Here's something I hadn't seen before: I IM'd a friend of mine at a Big Company and the message got rejected because it included a URL. I have to suppose that it's any URL that gets bounced, but who knows?
So the workaround? I sent the text for a Google query that returns the same url.
Further details: Discussing it with him, the logic seems to be that someone could send an employee a phishing link in an IM message.
I encounter more and more organizations or people who are collecting lists of feeds or blogs for one purpose or another. With BlogBridge we have the BlogBridge Topic Experts. Global Voices have their collection of international blogs (very cool!) And of course, anyone using a feed reader or aggregator has their own list of subscriptions.
Anyone who is making a list of blogs or feeds (or I suppose, URLs of any kind) that is not secret or private, would do well to record that in a simple OPML list. And the 'handle' to that list or collection is a URL.
Lets see. Instead of telling people, you can find my list of best restaurant blogs as a BlogLines list, or as this html page, or as a BlogBridge Guide, you refer to that list by the URL of the OPML.
It's a subtle shift: instead of thinking of OPML as a handy interchange format, start thinking of it as the most elemental format for representing a hierarchy on which all others are built.
(This insight is clearly inspired by Dave Winer's new OPML stuff, particularly the service which accepts and serves up OMPL files.)
Going on. If this is a good way to think about things, then this argues that the OPML service and format at its core should remain minimalist. That as people decide to layer other semantics (as they will and should) onto their lists and hierarchies, that these be kept separate or separable from the OPML. I am not sure where this leads.
I am just musing to myself (with all of you listening in.)
Scripting News: 7/15/2005: Dave points to the New York Times article by Rich Meslin, Blogs 101. It's a very nice collection of Blogs of general interest as a good introduction to the world of Blogs.
"If you want to get the feel of Web logs and blogging, visit some of these sites. Most blogs carry links to other blogs on related topics or that the author likes. This page is under development; feel free to suggest your own finds. Business and sports suggestions are particularly welcome." (from New York Times)
It's a really nice starter list, but Rich, how about providing your list as OPML as well?
Technorati Tags: Consulting
In the continuing efforts to rid my house of junk, we are donating a whole bunch of nice Tchotchke briefcases. For the heck of it, and to expand recent innovations in "laundry blogging" let me introduce you to Tchotchke Blogging.
Here you see a selected history of the computer industry in the last 15 or so years. Also, you see the evolution of my interests and attention. Let's see, there are several Demo bags of course.
And if you look, there are multiple (and in fact duplicate) Venture Capital bags. A couple of Java Ones (more recent obsession) and who remembers the Internet Showcase, a competing conference to Demo which lasted only a few years.
Ah, a trip down memory lane.
This is not about patents, it's about technology. In Google's recent patent application they reveal some interesting and possibly surprising tidbits of how they rank your web site. (via Sadagopan's weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld)
"How many years did you register your domain name for? If it was only one then Google could hold that against you. Why? Because the majority of Spam websites only register a domain name for one year. A domain name registered for a longer period implies that the owner is more likely to be legitimate and serious about their web site." (from Buzzle.com)
Technorati Tags: google, searchengines
All software has bugs, no doubt. So pulling out one story to make a point isn't really fair. (Especially recalling the story about stones and glass houses.)
But if I looked I know I could find story after story, including some that I could write from first hand experience, about the terrible rough edges on all the software on which our much beloved blogosphere runs. And from that observation and those stories comes the premise of this post. Here's one of the stories:
"It all started two weeks ago when I undertook the “drop-in” upgrade from Movable Type 3.14 to 3.17. Well, “drop-in” is not really the word. I had made some changes to my server configuration that I thought should not affect Movable Type and, in fact, did not for version 3.14.
However, because of a change in an open source library component that is a dependency for Movable Type 3.17, my configuration broke Movable Type 3.17. As a result, Movable Type was not properly pinging the technorati server to put my tagged links in their tag repositories. There were other smaller and larger issues that I independently tracked to this same dependency." (from "The Community Engine Blog, Distributed Tagging Hell", emphases added.)
From my observation of this and many other stories, there is no blog server or service out there that I would call commercial grade. I don't see evidence that the current incumbents are going to deliver what is required.
Here are some of the requirements for that, as I see them:
My bet is that with the growing prominence and publicity around blogging, around now is a good time to start a business to build just that.
And let's not get clever about this... It's got to be recognizably a blog server, not some crazy adaptation of an existing product that gets the word "blog" slapped onto it. And on the other hand, not some wild hybrid of blog, wiki, and knowledge management. Just a really great, industrial strength, blogging system.
I am convinced that such a beast would make money and that the time is finally ripe for it.
What is much less clear is whether it is sufficient to start a business. You know what they say: "Is it a business or just a product?" ... "Is it a product or just a feature?"
I think I will write more about this.
Technorati Tags: blog, commecialsoftware, money, vc