TiVo Tries To Give Us What We Want…

Over at Boing Boing Cory's got a good rant on TiVo's attempt to free video from the opaque prison most commercial PVRs have become. But he finds the DRM TiVo has imposed too limiting. From his post: What's funny about this is that it's the exact opposite of the traditional…

Over at Boing Boing Cory’s got a good rant on TiVo’s attempt to free video from the opaque prison most commercial PVRs have become. But he finds the DRM TiVo has imposed too limiting.

From his post: What’s funny about this is that it’s the exact opposite of the traditional way of running a disruptive technology business: no one crippled the piano roll to make sure it didn’t upset the music publishers, Marconi didn’t cripple the radio to appease the Vaudeville players — hell, railroad barons never slowed their steam-engines down to speeds guaranteed to please the teamsters.

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Yahoo Getting Into RSS Aggregation Game

While I was down in the Valley Weds. I heard word that Yahoo's aggregator was up and running. But then I couldn't find it when I got home. Seems they put up a brief beta in MyYahoo, then brought it back down again. Internet.com has a story on it…"Insiders at…

While I was down in the Valley Weds. I heard word that Yahoo’s aggregator was up and running. But then I couldn’t find it when I got home. Seems they put up a brief beta in MyYahoo, then brought it back down again. Internet.com has a story on it…”Insiders at Yahoo confirmed the plan to add an aggregator as a module within the ‘My Yahoo’ section but described the public appearance of the beta Wednesday as an accident.”

Also of note, NewsGator has a new service to push RSS onto mobile devices.

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NYT on MSFT

As a curtain raiser for CES, John Markoff gives the ever morphing MSFT strategy w/r/t search/MSN a good once over in light of recent video/access/search biz model shifts. From the piece: The Microsoft executive who heads the MSN service, Yusuf Mehdi, said that Microsoft generated $1 billion annually in online…

As a curtain raiser for CES, John Markoff gives the ever morphing MSFT strategy w/r/t search/MSN a good once over in light of recent video/access/search biz model shifts.

From the piece: The Microsoft executive who heads the MSN service, Yusuf Mehdi, said that Microsoft generated $1 billion annually in online advertising revenue and saw growth opportunities in creating a Yahoo-style Web portal and Google-style search-based advertising.

For more context, here are columns I wrote on both MSFT’s search strategies and video/advertising strategies…

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Good Overview of Local Search

Comes, as usual, from Search Engine Watch. My posts will be brief for the next day, as I am taking Friday off, but this is worth a read if you care about why local search seems to be a big deal……

Comes, as usual, from Search Engine Watch. My posts will be brief for the next day, as I am taking Friday off, but this is worth a read if you care about why local search seems to be a big deal…

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Baidu: A Chinese Google? OK, I’ll Bite

Via Reuters, Forbes reports on another Chinese search company planning to go public, this one called Baidu – the name "comes from a Song dynasty poem about a man searching for his lover." The company claims to be profitable, and to serve 30 million searches a day ("one seventh that…

Via Reuters, Forbes reports on another Chinese search company planning to go public, this one called Baidu – the name “comes from a Song dynasty poem about a man searching for his lover.” The company claims to be profitable, and to serve 30 million searches a day (“one seventh that of Google”) – the largest in China.

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Friendster = Big Brother? Nah.

In a recently published article, an analyst at the Pacific Research Institute argues that social networking sites pose serious privacy risks, and that in fact Friendster and its kin may well be building a private sector version of the much derided (and currently unfunded) Terrorist(nee Total) Information Awareness Program. Bah….

In a recently published article, an analyst at the Pacific Research Institute argues that social networking sites pose serious privacy risks, and that in fact Friendster and its kin may well be building a private sector version of the much derided (and currently unfunded) Terrorist(nee Total) Information Awareness Program.

Bah. Unless terrorists are using Friendster to declare their intentions, I doubt this is where Poindexter and his sucessors will be looking. On the other hand, there is a shitload of personal data on these sites, and it will be abused under the blanket provisions of the Patriot Act(s), of this I am sure. This is worth remembering. Also, the analyst points out a TIA-like private/public partnership called MATRIX (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange). How tone deaf can you be, to name your government information/control program MATRIX? I mean, didn’t they see the movies? Don’t they get how stupid that is? Following that logic, let’s rename everyone in the FBI Agent Smith and just get it over with…

To be honest, I wanted to post this item mainly for the graphic. I mean, who would have ever thought that social network logos swirling around the TIA’s all-knowing eye/pyramid would look so…dope?

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Crawler Available, Will Work for Free

From Boing Boing I learn that the Internet Archive is releasing its crawler for free under a LGPL license. Why is this news? As I've argued in the past, it's not cheap or easy to innovate in the search space, but the search space desperately needs innovation. If key components…

From Boing Boing I learn that the Internet Archive is releasing its crawler for free under a LGPL license. Why is this news? As I’ve argued in the past, it’s not cheap or easy to innovate in the search space, but the search space desperately needs innovation. If key components like crawlers can be snapped in place relatively easily, new ideas heretofore unthinkable become possible. I also like the philosophy behind the crawler, which is named Heritrix: “Heritrix (sometimes spelled heretrix , or misspelled or missaid as heratrix / heritix / heretix / heratix ) is an archaic word for inheritess. Since our crawler seeks to collect the digital artifacts of our culture (my emphasis/link) for the benefit of future researchers and generations, this name seemed apt.”

Way to go, Brewster!

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MetaCarta Gets MetaFunding

Ever wondered how local search is going to work, really? Or how the government might associate particular documents or databases with specific geographic locations? MetaCarta makes a business of wondering just that, and just got $6.5 million in a series B round, led by Sevin Rosen. This company has clearly…

Ever wondered how local search is going to work, really? Or how the government might associate particular documents or databases with specific geographic locations? MetaCarta makes a business of wondering just that, and just got $6.5 million in a series B round, led by Sevin Rosen. This company has clearly stepped into a significant role in “geographic search.” It’s customers include intelligence agencies, the military, and energy companies (Chevron is an investor.) What do they do? From the site: “With MetaCarta Geographic Text Search™ (GTS), analysts accelerate their efforts by searching text documents in a geographic context. MetaCarta GTS turns text documents into geographic data layers.  This accelerates decision support and analytic workflow.”

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Afternoon with Marc Andreessen; Friendster

Had a day of talking to folks about the book, including lunch with Marc (I've been meaning to talk to him about the book for months, as Netscape pretty much fired the search-driven starting gun, and Marc generally has a lot of really interesting things to say). I then went…

Had a day of talking to folks about the book, including lunch with Marc (I’ve been meaning to talk to him about the book for months, as Netscape pretty much fired the search-driven starting gun, and Marc generally has a lot of really interesting things to say). I then went over to Friendster’s new offices for a good chat with Jonathan Abrams and a few of his colleagues. Good crew, a lot of level-headed enthusiasm (interesting concept, eh?) evident there. Then I spent some time on the phone with the CEO of Dipsea (remember them? I pinged them back here). Then my site went down. All in all a busy afternoon.

Marc had great stories to tell about the early days of Netscape, and lessons to be drawn from managing extraordinary growth. Folks forget that they sold Netscape – a company with something on the order of $600-800 million in revenues – for $10 billion to AOL. Marc drew an interesting set of graphs showing how browser revenue imploded when MSFT came in, but how portal revenue – OEM’ing traffic, essentially – grew to nearly the same size, about $200 million. We also spent some time on the future of search as it relates to media models. Good stuff.

jonathan2.jpgJonathan was busy hiring folks when I stopped in, as were many others I met at Friendster. A good sign, overall, for the Valley, that smaller and younger companies are hiring, as well as folks like Google. F’ster had none of the bling bling associated with fresh VC money adorning the office, which was refreshing. All I can say about our conversation (remember, I have to keep some stuff for the book) is that they are quite serious about expanding the offerings there, and it ain’t just dating…

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My Site Was Funky, Now It’s Square

A number of readers have emailed me recently, concerned that my site had a/turned into the blog of a Chinese human rights activist, b/was now run by a fan of Charlie Parker who also is one of the best web hosting guys in the universe (my pal Scot at birdhouse.org),…

A number of readers have emailed me recently, concerned that my site had a/turned into the blog of a Chinese human rights activist, b/was now run by a fan of Charlie Parker who also is one of the best web hosting guys in the universe (my pal Scot at birdhouse.org), or c/is going text-only, as the images seemed to have disappeared. Never fear. All is back to normal, for the most part. Just had a rough changeover to new rackspace over the past day or so. Thanks for caring enough to send me email about it. Nice to know someone is noticing….

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