Quick: What post on Searchblog elicited the most comments of any post ever? Answer: My post inviting you all to join the limited beta of Farecast, the airline pricing search engine with a twist. So, it's worth noting that Monday, Farecast goes national. More here at Siliconbeat. Update: No…
Update: No need to ask me for invites, folks – it’s not a closed beta anymore!
I've written about this before, the deja vu of covering Google now, and Microsoft back in the early 90s, when MSFT ruled the (less large but no less self absorbed) IT roost. Paul Graham, one of my favorite occasional Google commentators, notes the sad case of Kiko, a Google…
What I love about Paul’s conclusions:
There’s another encouraging point here for the new generation of web startups. Failure is not a disaster when you’re very light. The total amount raised by Kiko in its existence would be about six months’ salary for a first-rate developer. There’s a good chance they’ll recover most of it by selling their code. They only had one employee besides themselves. So this is not an expensive, acrimonious flameout like used to happen during the Bubble. They tried hard; they made something good; they just happened to get hit by a stray bullet. Ok, so try again. Y Combinator funded their new idea yesterday.
I've said that over and over, and the implications are very, very large. I'd love to see a study which tells us how much stuff on YouTube is commercial content produced for YouTube. Stuff like this, for example….
That's how much Google stock Google execs have sold. I really don't think much more needs to be said. It's quite a figure….
Google is a verb in our culture, in fact, it's more than that, it's a representation of a new way of understanding our relationship to knowledge. That's A Pretty Big Deal, and it's also got to be insanely frustrating to a company like, well, Yahoo, which had the chance…
So I found this announcement interesting – Yahoo is asking its users to remix its brand, in what seems a clear attempt to nudge the Yahoo brand next to Google’s in our cultural reference set. In fact, the blog entry announcing the contest acknowledges Google’s dominance in the field:
There’s been some reports about how Google is trying to stop people from using the term, googling. When I heard about it, I was like, “Hello, gift horse, mouth!”….People don’t often do what you want them to do, and brands are more about what consumers think, than what companies want. We’re ok with that. You want the yodel? Have it anytime you want (just mouse over the ! on the front page and click). Is Yahoo! a verb, noun or exclamation? Maybe it’s all of them.
Read MoreReader JG writes: We as Web 2.0-enlightened people all believe that consumers are now content creators, right? So isn't a query I've typed essentially a "performance"? And if not a query, then a whole series of queries? A whole series of queries is pretty substantive, as we have all found…
This is really worth reading if you're at all interested in the issues I've been on about for so long…some tidbits: …The Wall Street Journal Online invited Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group, to debate the issue with Markham Erickson, executive director…
…The Wall Street Journal Online invited Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group, to debate the issue with Markham Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, a lobby group for Internet firms including Google and Yahoo. Their conversation, carried out over email, is below….
Bankston: …the DOJ’s position is that ECPA doesn’t apply to the search engines and search terms, the search engines themselves refuse to say what they think, and it hasn’t been litigated yet. In the meantime, how the law does or does not apply is being hashed out secretly between DOJ investigators and search engines’ compliance counsel; the public has no idea how the law is being applied, just as they have no real idea of what the search engines are doing with their data.
Read MoreFinding pictures in Picasa Google acquires Neven Vision, a mobile photo search company, to bolster Picasa. Though there aren't any special features to show off yet, Google says "one day" image search could be "as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects." Blinkx becomes a studybuddy Blinkx moves its…
Blinkx moves its business model towards direct-paid services. In a recent partnership with AOL, Blinkx will provide an education-focused subset of its index to StudyBuddy.com. Blinkx founder and CTO said, “You are going to see us do more of these kinds of deals where we power video search on other sites and either get paid for it or share in the ad revenue that’s generated by it.”
Blotter
Dapper unveils a new service that gauges blog popularity. Blotter graphs link stats over time based on Technorati data.
If you have deja vu, then, yes, this story was first discussed by Vint Cerf in his Searchblog interview….Google is – for now anyway – not claiming to have plans for a national Wifi network, even as it launched its Mountain View Wifi net officially today….
According to AdAge: The cable operator has bulked up its online-sales team and plans to open its Comcast.net portal to all its customers — increasing the potential audience from its 10 million high-speed-data subscribers to its 23 million video subscribers. And that's just for starters. According to TV network…
The cable operator has bulked up its online-sales team and plans to open its Comcast.net portal to all its customers — increasing the potential audience from its 10 million high-speed-data subscribers to its 23 million video subscribers. And that’s just for starters.
According to TV network executives familiar with Comcast’s plans through content-carriage negotiations, the cable operator has Yahoo-size ambitions and sees the internet as key to raising its profile, and share of ad budgets.
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