Wednesday, September 08, 2004

AdSense Update. Well, so far, no response from Mike at Google, save what I updated in the previous post. I did just now get an answer to my tech question, in two days - not bad for a company with millions of such questions, I guess. Long and short: It sometimes takes up to 48 hours for Google to index new posts. In the meantime, readers have pointed me to many sites with non-compliant wording above their AdSense ads, including at least one that has "Paying the Bills" as its header, just as I did. I'm not going to name them, as that might get them busted too. I have also learned, through reputable sources, that Mike from Google is in fact a person, though clearly he's... [John Battelle's Searchblog] 9:32:50 PM    comment []

whither Google? Medigle?. I just posted a column at ZDNET <http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107_2-5318295.html> that basically says Google won - despite all the Wall Street-tinted press that says the "reasonable" price the IPO achieved was a failure.  It meant that Google and its early investors may not get as rich as they hoped quick, but long-term the company in particular and markets overall will be healthier.  Going forward, Google will still be able to attract employees with fairly priced options, it will not have a corps of disappointed investors...  For the market overall, the Google IPO will make it harder for other companies – whatever IPO method they choose – to reap surplus value.  With this offering, Google may not have reached the small investors it naively hoped to.  But it did do a good job of coming up with a reasonable price and setting an example for other companies in the future.  Investor pressure for more realistic  pricing of IPOs overall should increase.   As for Google’s own  future: I don’t think Microsoft or Yahoo! will beat it at its own game, but I do think that this game (like operating systems, browsers and other things) will turn into a commodity battle.  Google needs to keep on pioneering.  If you look at where things stand now, it has acquired Picasa (photos) and Blogger (guess what?).  And it has built Orkut and gmail.  Clearly, more user content – from shared photos and blogging  to personalized search – is in order.   [Now here comes what I *didn't* put in the column, because it's way too speculative.. just right for blogging - and I'd welcome feedback.]  In other words, Google is serving users their own home cooking.  (Not that other companies – in droves – are not doing that.)  But it has the opportunity to be the best at it if it leverages its own strengths. Where could it go from there?  If I were pressed, I might say it should start a service for users to post and manage their own health records – with very strong privacy protections.    Google got where it is by serving individuals.  That’s its technology and its ethos.  One of the biggest unserved needs (as opposed to a served need such as various online financial services) is user-centric, secure health records.  The obvious provider is your doctor or  your health insurance company or your employer….except they all have their own agendas.  (Ever try moving records from one doctor to another?  Or ever want to release only some information to a particular provider or employer?)   It’s a matter of trust.  Google may not be the most trusted institution around, but it’s pretty good on that scale. And you don’t have to trust it  the way you have to trust your health-care provider or employer, because it has no vested interest in knowing about you other than to sell ads for medications.  (Yes, there will likely be the free ad-supported service and paid ad-free one.)  And it has a long-term interest in earning and keeping your trust.  It could act on your behalf to release information selectively to third parties that you specify - either specifically or on the basis of clear, intelligible policies.   Maybe it’s just that this is an area that’s on my mind lately: I’ll be covering health care in a future issue of Release 1.0 (see you at TedMed). I’ll be covering it because I think it’s an important area… and it’s one of the primary unserved markets for user-generated content. To me the excitement of the Internet is how it changes the balance of power between individuals and institutions.  And health care is an area where that balance of power is most out of whack.  It needs a large-scale supplier whose vested interest is in helping individuals take care of their own data. [EDventure] 9:32:37 PM    comment []

Full text RSS on MSDN gets turned off. Steve Maine: what the hell happened to blogs.msdn.com? RSS is broken, is what happened. It's not scalable when 10s of thousands of people start subscribing to thousands of separate RSS feeds and start pulling down those feeds every few minutes (default aggregator behavior is to pull down a feed every hour). Bandwidth usage was growing faster than MSDN's ability to pay for, or keep up with, the bandwidth. Terrabytes of bandwidth were being used up by RSS. So, they are trying to attack the problem by making the feeds lighter weight. I don't like the solution (I've unsubscribed from almost all weblogs.asp.net feeds because they no longer provide full text) but I understand the issues. I know of a major broadcaster that refuses to turn on RSS feeds because of this issue too. We need smarter aggregators and better defaults. I only pull down RSS feeds once per day -- right before I start reading my feeds. But, clearly, RSS is losing some of its advantages. More and more sites are not providing full-text feeds. I can't fight this one alone. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] 9:31:17 PM    comment []

Question of the year: what is Google up to?. Tejas Patel notes that Google wants to get into instant messaging. He also takes an inventory of what Google's done already. Adam Bosworth, who now works at Google (he pioneered Microsoft's XML efforts) is working on "stuff mom can use." And Joe Beda left Microsoft last week to go to work for Google (he worked on Avalon stuff for Longhorn). Hmmm, what is Google up to? (I have my guesses but don't want to give these smart guys any more ideas than they already have). [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] 9:31:07 PM    comment []

Calendaring standards developments. Yesterday saw the end of the IETF Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group. What this means, in effect, is an end to work on the Calendaring Access Protocol (CAP). CAP was supposed to be the standard for client-server interaction on shared calendar servers. My (admittedly non-developer) perspective is that over the years of discussion, CAP grew to be so large and... [Oren Sreebny's Weblog] 7:17:16 PM    comment []