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The Atom/RSS Fracas

Can anybody tell me why this is a big deal? This CNET piece makes it seem like there's a real war between RSS and Atom, but it reads to me like competition, which is good as far as I can tell. I mean in the long run, won't my aggregators…

Can anybody tell me why this is a big deal? This CNET piece makes it seem like there’s a real war between RSS and Atom, but it reads to me like competition, which is good as far as I can tell. I mean in the long run, won’t my aggregators and blogging tools just support both? As a non-technical guy, can someone give me the shorthand on why this matters that much? I’m not being flip (it may sound that way), I just don’t get it.

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POMO Conference Scene

So I'm here at etech, and everyone in the audience has their laptop open (self included), and they're tapping away (all these keyboards sound like waves of rain across a forest floor). But that's pretty normal for most tech conferences these days. As one would expect, the alpha blogging O'Reilly…

So I’m here at etech, and everyone in the audience has their laptop open (self included), and they’re tapping away (all these keyboards sound like waves of rain across a forest floor). But that’s pretty normal for most tech conferences these days. As one would expect, the alpha blogging O’Reilly community is pushing the envelope: as Joi sits up on stage discussing emerging democracy in Asia and Africa he is dwarfed by a live display, 10 feet wide by 6 feet tall. The massive screen is populated with IRC dialogue from members of the audience, Justin, Xeni, Howard, etc…all commenting on what Joi is saying on stage (as well as figuring out in real time where to go for dinner). Really something of a trip, for an old school conference dude like me. I remember doing something like this with IM at a conference in 1998 with Michael Schrage handling live input from the audience. It was a miserable failure, as I recall. This is…well, it points to some interesting things. And it’s quite fascinating and disconcerting at the same time as an audience member. Side note: two women here are in fact not online, they are instead … knitting. Somehow, it fits.

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Norway Gets a Netscape IPO?

OK, not quite, but Opera is planning to go public. The company recently posted a slight profit, and intends to raise money to compete with MSFT in the mobile arena. The lede in this Reuters piece brought on some odd deja vu… Norway's Opera Software said on Monday it plans…

OK, not quite, but Opera is planning to go public. The company recently posted a slight profit, and intends to raise money to compete with MSFT in the mobile arena. The lede in this Reuters piece brought on some odd deja vu…

Norway’s Opera Software said on Monday it plans an initial public offering in March to aid its race against giant rival Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news- people) to win customers for its Internet browsers in the growing mobile phone market.

Let’s hope Opera execs don’t dismiss MSFT Windows as a pile of “poorly debugged device drivers“….

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SEW Awards Are Up, Google Cleans Up

With little fanfare, the most influential publication in the Search space has posted its 4th annual SEW awards. Big Winner: Google, for Outstanding Search Service, Best News Search Engine, Best Image Search Engine, Beste Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Provider (interesting!), Best Search Toolbar, Best Paid Placement Service, Best Search…

With little fanfare, the most influential publication in the Search space has posted its 4th annual SEW awards.

Big Winner: Google, for Outstanding Search Service, Best News Search Engine, Best Image Search Engine, Beste Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Provider (interesting!), Best Search Toolbar, Best Paid Placement Service, Best Search Feature….

It was nearly a sweep for the Googleplex. Yahoo won a number of honorable mentions and the Shopping category. Voting was done as a combination of subscribers to SEW and final review by Danny and Chris at SEW.

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Cool Recommendation Service

Based on tech from a company called Choicestream, mybestbets.com is a free online service that uses a melange of approaches to grok what entertainment you might like and make recommendations. AOL has incorporated this into its 9.0 service; it's informing to the concept of personalized search in general. I've signed…

Based on tech from a company called Choicestream, mybestbets.com is a free online service that uses a melange of approaches to grok what entertainment you might like and make recommendations. AOL has incorporated this into its 9.0 service; it’s informing to the concept of personalized search in general. I’ve signed up and plan to compare its recommendations to TiVo’s.

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Search, Your Data, and Social Networks

Boing Boing points to this paper, in draft form, which discusses the implications of all this data we happily upload to private companies on the web. I am pretty sure I know how Scott McNealy feels about all this, but when you think about it in aggregate, all that data…

Boing Boing points to this paper, in draft form, which discusses the implications of all this data we happily upload to private companies on the web. I am pretty sure I know how Scott McNealy feels about all this, but when you think about it in aggregate, all that data we are giving to orkut, Amazon, Plaxo, et al, without any functional controls on how it gets used, it does start to feel a bit creepy.

The paper is clearly biased against corporations that gather personal data, but… under the present administration, paranoia doesn’t feel like an option. The paper focuses on Plaxo, and delivers a pretty through thrashing to that company’s privacy policy. Excerpts:

Social networks are a primary way in which suspicion is generated about individuals. Acquaintances of terrorists, terrorism suspects, terrorism financiers, terrorist supporters and terrorist sympathisers are at risk of being allocated into a grey zone of terrorist associates. A tag of that kind is potentially as harmful to a person as have been negative categorisations made in previous contexts, such as ‘etranger’, ‘subversive’ and ‘unamerican’……

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Nielsen and TiVo Unite on Ratings

MediaPost reports that TiVo and Neilsen are now working together to create a ratings report for the TiVo environment. This feels rather oxymoronic – TiVo has perfect information on its users, why does it need Nielsen? – but then again, Nielsen has a validating brand and distribution to the major…

MediaPost reports that TiVo and Neilsen are now working together to create a ratings report for the TiVo environment. This feels rather oxymoronic – TiVo has perfect information on its users, why does it need Nielsen? – but then again, Nielsen has a validating brand and distribution to the major advertisers. I can’t help but wonder if the service wil lbe entirely honest about how destructive TiVo is to the 30 second spot, but we’ll see. Note this quote, from the Nielsen guy: “The first step right now will be program content. We hope to get to commercial avoidance data later.” Yeah…as later as possible.

On the note of TiVo, I’m going down to see their CEO Mike Ramsay next week for the book and my column. What do you want to know about TiVo that I can ask him?

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Next Stop, Cover of Time Magazine…

Google was once again crowned top global brand by Interbrand. CNET reports….

Google was once again crowned top global brand by Interbrand. CNET reports.

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Slowly, The Battleship Comes About

Verizon's Yellow Pages is finally getting into the pay-per-click game, Wonk reports via MediaPost. The massive phone co. plans to revamp its Superpages.com website to focus on the local advertising market. Funniest quote: the Verizon guy claiming this is not in response to Yahoo/Google handing them their ass. He does…

Verizon’s Yellow Pages is finally getting into the pay-per-click game, Wonk reports via MediaPost. The massive phone co. plans to revamp its Superpages.com website to focus on the local advertising market. Funniest quote: the Verizon guy claiming this is not in response to Yahoo/Google handing them their ass. He does have a pretty funny slap at the leader: “If you want to find out about the history of plumbing, you go to Google. But if your sink’s backed up at 2 a.m., we get you right to what you want to know.”

I dunno, but if my plumbing is backed up at midnight, something tells me turning on the computer is not first on my mind.

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Gigablast: One Man, 8 Machines, And Now Related Concepts

Gigablast now has related concepts at the top. In his blog, Matt Wells points out that his engine runs on eight desktop machines. Check it out. It's damn fast (and good) for eight machines….

Gigablast now has related concepts at the top. In his blog, Matt Wells points out that his engine runs on eight desktop machines. Check it out. It’s damn fast (and good) for eight machines.

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