Douglas L Ross: Knowledge Management

Open Source Search Engine

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 16:01:57 GMT

Dave Winer investigated a new open source search engine called Nutch.

DaveNet: Nutch, an open source search engine. [Scripting News]

Online Journalism Review

Mon, 11 Aug 2003 21:43:16 GMT

The Online Journalism Review is taking notice of blogging and some of the other implications of changing technology. Here are three articles

Participatory Journalism http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1060218311.php

Personal Broadcasting http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1060223904.php

When Bloggers Commit Journalism http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1032910520.php

Targeted Advertising

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 17:33:18 GMT

This article is about the expansion of the bid-for-ad-placement concept from strictly the search domain to the general "web-site" browsing context.

If You Liked the Web Page, You'll Love the Ad. Online publishers are beginning to sense the possibilities of having Google or Overture serve ads to their audiences. By Bob Tedeschi. [New York Times: Technology]

The Amazon.com Portal

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 17:47:01 GMT

Amazon is apparently trying to do what the Library of Congress probably should do, that is make archived book content searchable.

Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books. Amazon.com is negotiating with book publishers to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of thousands of nonfiction books. By David D. Kirkpatrick. [New York Times: Technology]

Autonomy Acquires Virage

Thu, 10 Jul 2003 12:24:45 GMT

Autonomy (Nasdaq: AUTN) announced the purchase of a small company called Virage (Nasdaq-SCM: VRGE) which they apparently intend to integrate with their existing Dremedia division. Dremedia software uses Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating LayerTM (IDOL) technology and enhances it by providing a technology platform that automatically analyzes, understands, and manipulates video and audio content.

Acquiring Virage adds a software product suite that covers the creative side of video production, Internet publishing and webcasting. Virage is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and was established in 1995. It's products include:

VS ProductionTM for professional video production
VS PublishingTM for developing content into compelling Internet programming
VS WebcastingTM for planning and producing interactive, live and on-demand webcasts

The company has ~400 customers including: Cisco Systems, Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, Harvard University, NASCAR, Oracle Corporation, Pfizer, the United States Senate, Xerox and others. www.virage.com.

Here's an article in The Register about the acquisition. Autonomy swoops on Virage. Video Play [The Register]

Trusted Computing

Thu, 03 Apr 2003 17:48:21 GMT

Wave Systems announced their earnings for Q4 2002 today. According to their press release [see exerpt below] they are looking for strategic partners.

"Steven Sprague, Wave's president and CEO, said, "In order to raise the additional capital required to fund Wave's operations, we have engaged an investment banking firm and are exploring a number of financing alternatives which include debt or equity financing (or a combination of both) or one or more commercial or strategic transactions."

"The personal computing industry is now committed to a historic transition to trusted computing. The most influential players -companies including Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, AMD, National Semiconductor, Infineon and others - have publicly committed to a trusted PC environment secured by a hardware chip. Without a doubt, today's inherently insecure PC is morphing to tomorrow's secure and trusted PC which will offer a range of productive services for users. Wave's long commitment to hardware and services-secured trusted computing has made us influential in the evolution of this huge and evolving market opportunity."

Information Aggregation

Fri, 07 Mar 2003 13:41:41 GMT

The LISFeeds portal is a centralized RSS aggregator for library science professionals. We have a similar aggregator at Harvard Law. [Scripting News]

Google

Wed, 05 Mar 2003 14:48:40 GMT

An interesting summary of what Google is by a guy named Jason Kottke: "Google is not a search company." via Kevin Werbog's weblog. [Werblog]

Sony Wants To Buy Palm O/S or Symbian

Wed, 05 Mar 2003 14:35:34 GMT

Tony Perkins (of Red Herring fame) intervied Sony's Idei at Davos and reported on that in a website called "Always On" which The Register picked up on and is now reporting in this story:

Sony keen to buy PalmSource. Or Symbian if Palm won't sell [The Register]

Google and Targeted Advertising

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 20:04:09 GMT

Google announced today (http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/advertising.html) a "content-targeted advertising" service which proposes to replace general website ads with "relevant sponsored links" similar to those displayed in its own search engine, and in the search pages of its affiliates.

Here's how "content-targeted advertising" by Google appears to work:

Google's proprietary classification engines identify "the meaning of a web page"
Based on that, and presuming a 3-way arrangement between Advertisers - Google - Websites, Google then automatically serves "relevant" ads from its stable of participating advertisers
Relevance to a website is [apparently] based on Google's classification scheme, and the order of relevant ads served is [apparently] based on Google-measured click-through response rates [now competing with Double-Click and others].

Here's a link to a Motley Fool article about this: Google's Banner Day. The search king moves into third-party advertising. [The Motley Fool] and another in Wired News: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,57900,00.html

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 14:11:42 GMT

'Reassurance' a key word as Google grows. The search site's move into blogging, and its further expansion into advertising, has some concerned about a conflict of interest and whether Big Brother could be Googling you. [CNET News.com]

Overture's Acquisition of Alta-Vista

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 19:51:28 GMT

What up with the Overture acquisition of search engine company Alta-Vista?

Here's a good article about it in InternetNews.com: http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/1587871