Month: July 2006

Bix

If American Idol is any indication, there’s a ripe market to serve the hopes of aspiring stars as well as their entertainment to a wide audience. Launched today, Bix hopes to answer with a platform to run home-grown talent contests in video, music, and other media.

The farthest hub from hip

Meet Wal-Mart’s miserable attempt to create a hip social video site: The Hub. Think MySpace stripped of content, striped with pending approval notices on what content is left, and emails sent to parents of teens who register.

THE IDIOTS RUNNING GOOGLE

Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells reporters:

“(During the 2004 IPO process), between the time we filed and the time we went public, the press was among the most unpleasant I have ever experienced.

“We (Google management) were ‘idiots,’ we were ‘useless’… I thought ‘God.’…It is a terrible feeling of being on the other side of that (press coverage).

“So we looked at (Google’s Web site) traffic and revenue and they were exploding… We had a very, very strong quarter right after the worst possible press about ‘the idiots running the company.’

“I don’t know what that tells you.

Schmidt then paused and begged the reporters to create a new Google press frenzy:

“So, yes we are IDIOTS — and please WRITE THAT DOWN.”

WE HAVE EVERY PROBLEM YOU CAN IMAGINE… QUICKER

Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “We have every known problem that a growth company has — quicker…Write down all the obvious problems, we have every one of them. So we make a list of them (potential problems) and we anticipate them.”

Reporter: Are there any non-obvious problems?

Schmidt: “No. no.”

Reporter: Is it a list of 10-15?

Schmidt: “I would say it is about 20.”

Also, Last.fm music search recently went live, completing a beta phase begun last fall. Last.fm creates personalized radio stations by combining a user’s favorite songs with an algorithmic recommendation feed taken from a network of users with similar tastes.

Last is similar to Pandora in its offerings (with the addition of a social space and communication tools between users). But Last’s analytics rely on the frequency songs are played (by a user and their social network) and a folksonomy of tagging. In contrast, Pandora radio derives from the more ambitious Genome Music Project, which uses musical attributes and elements to create its search analytics.

Q&A with Hayden on Social Search and JetEye

David Hayden, co-founder of Magellan, talks about with SEL about his vision for the future of social search and his new project, JetEye.

So in a word, social search will be mainstream, because it represents the pursuit of knowledge over information, and the pursuit of knowledge must be a mainstream activity.



Watson customizable search

Watson, the free, contextual search sidebar by Intellext, is now customizable with sites like MySpace and the WSJ. Waston mines data in engines, social sites, desktops, blogs, news, subscriptions, and networks.