Mittwoch, 10. August 2005

First Excerpt. This post will be the first of a number of excerpts from my book. Over the next month I'll post as many as I can. This first one is from a chapter I wrote on Bill Gross, who has founded many search companies (his latest is Snap), but Overture (nee GoTo nee Yahoo Search Marketing) was his biggest hit. I think Bill makes for one of the best stories in the book, and I hope I did him justice. This is a small portion of the chapter, titled "A Billion Dollars, One Nickel at a Time." Each chapter in the book is broken into sections, this excerpt starts with a section, about a third of the way through the chapter, which focuses on Gross's early insights into market economics. As with all things book related, I look forward to your feedback and clarifications/corrections. The Sugar Daddy: It’s All About Arbitrage When he was twelve, Gross lived in an apartment building in Encino, California, outside of Los Angeles. There were hundreds of kids in that complex, Gross recalls. “We all roller-skated together, played baseball together, swam together, did everything together,” he tells me. And when they had saved up enough money, they all made the pilgrimage to a local pharmacy, where they’d buy their fix of candy. “We used to hop the cinder-block wall surrounding the complex and go buy candy for a dime at the West Valley Medical Center,” he recalls. “We’d go there all the time.” Now here’s where it gets interesting. In Gross’s words: “One day I was at Savon [pronounced Save-on] on Ventura Boulevard and saw they had a special on candy, three for a quarter. So I bought five dol- lars worth—at eight and a third cents each—and brought them back to my apartment, where... [John Battelle's Searchblog] 5:23:10 PM    comment []

Microsoft debuts RSS in IE7 Beta 1. Jane Kim, program manager for RSS in Internet Explorer, has written a useful post detailing the new RSS features in IE7. A few comments from me... 1) Microsoft has decided to call RSS "web feeds", at least for now. Jane says they're "still actively exploring what is the right name to use for RSS feeds". Although I agree that end users need not be concerned with knowing what RSS is - they just need to see the benefits of syndication and subscribing to information - I don't think 'web feeds' is any clearer than 'RSS'. Personally I think RSS and its orange branding has gotten too much traction on the Web already and it's too late to change it now. Don't mess with the brand Microsoft - it's bigger than you. Even the Atom proponents admit that RSS is the brand name. 2) Discovery: "If a web feed is found, the web feed button on the toolbar lights up." Additionally it can play a sound. Bing! This is good stuff - it will help promote RSS feeds to normal Web users if it is highlighted in this manner. Apparently publishers will be able to control this setting. Naturally the user also can tweak their browser settings. 3) That format thing: "Beta 1 of Windows Vista and IE 7 for XP currently supports the web feed formats RSS .9x, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0. As Sean mentioned, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 support will come in a later release." I suppose the Atom folks will be slightly miffed. But how many feed-enabled blogs and websites don't have at least one varient of RSS .9x-2? (I actually don't know the answer to that, so someone feel free to enlighten me). 4) IE7 will display a browser-friendly version of the RSS feed - much like Feedburner does with my RSS feed. Again, this is a good way to make sure RSS gets adopted by the mainstream. Summary Not a bad start by Microsoft. It doesn't appear they have all the functionality they promised at Gnomedex ready to roll out yet - e.g. there was no mention of support for Simple List Extensions. This Beta 1 seems to be aimed at users, rather than developers. Having said that, there was also little mention of the RSS Reader functionality that IE7 will have. I expect we'll hear more soon. [Read/Write Web] 11:57:41 AM    comment []

53 million pages licensed. Yesterday Yahoo! announced that their search index had grown to 20 billion documents. That, along with continued adoption of Creative Commons licenses, explains 53 million linkbacks to our licenses according to Yahoo! linkback queries. In May, when Yahoo!'s index apparently consisted of 8 billion documents, we found 16 million pages with license links. So discounting the growth of Yahoo!'s index, the number of Creative Commons license links have increased by approximately one third in the past three months alone -- 53/(16*(20/8)) = 1.325. Take the exact numbers with a lump of salt, but the indication of growth is impressive nonetheless. You can search for Creative Commons licensed content at Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons. [Creative Commons Blog - rss] 11:54:18 AM    comment []

Stock Market Dependant Self-Watering Plant. In most cases I would naturally say an idea like this would be completely worthless, but this only escapes the grasps of worthlessness by being an extremely cool. This plant, purchased at Home Depot is controlled by the stock fluctuations that the Home Depot stock is taking. Once a week a wifi adapter checks the stock and sends the data to electronic components that controls the watering. The idea is if the stock were to go low enough that the plant dies, then the plant is simply returned back to Home Depot and replaced free of charge thanks to their unconditional plant guarantee. Rubber tree plant's health tied to Home Depot's stock price [BoingBoing] [Gizmodo] 11:52:50 AM    comment []

eBay Deal of the Day: WiFi Speed Spray. Somebody is making something up, I think. However, anything scientific has to be true, including intelligent design, so this stuff must work. But don't take our word for it. As your computer sends data, each bit also carries hundreds of invisible WiFi Speed Spray™ "scrubbing" molecules. It works at the speed of light. and even penetrates lead walls (not even Superman can do that!). Within .0025 seconds, the entire path between you and the receiver is cleaned, scrubbed, polished, and sanitized. You'll notice the improvement immediately as your productivity soars! I could use some increased productivity. I could also use a beer. [Thanks, Scott] Wi-Fi Speed Spray DramaticalIy Increase Data Throughput [eBay] [Gizmodo] 11:51:22 AM    comment []

Worldwide wonder. The 10th birthday of the internet as a mass phenomenon is rightly being celebrated this week to mark a decade since the explosive stock market debut of Netscape, which triggered the dot.com boom and unleashed a friendly browser to navigate the web. The Guardian reports. To understand the extraordinary revolution that swept the world so quickly, existing users need simply to imagine what life would now be like without email (on which corporate life depends), search engines such as Google, web companies such as Amazon, eBay and Yahoo, the ongoing explosion of online commerce, not to mention the burgeoning world of personal journals (blogs), downloaded music and films, free newspapers, web cameras, internet telephony (now the hottest thing on the web) and the growing convergence of the net and mobile phones. ... Although, contrary to the instincts of its early protagonists, the web has long since been colonised by commerce, it still nurtures its founding community spirit. More [Smart Mobs] 11:46:22 AM    comment []

Buddyping. [Thanks David!] Inspired by a mobile social network system named Dodgeball, UK-based Buddyping also brings social networking to mobile communications: If you're out on the town and want to find your friends, use buddyPing and your mobile phone (or the internet) to broadcast your whereabouts and to receive notification of your friends in the same area. Just log into buddyPing (either via text message or using the "Your Location" feature once you have logged in via the web site) and we will scan your designated local area for friends and notify you of their location. We'll also notify them of your location so all your friends can find out what you're up to and where they can join you. This all happens in real time, and will continue until you logout of buddyPing. [Smart Mobs] 11:45:02 AM    comment []

Seeing that link's performance on del.icio.us. Michal Migurski of Stamen Design has this site that gives a "visual analysis of del.icio.us popular links.The collection of stripes are a near real-time cumulative view of popular sites posted to the del.icio.us social bookmarking service,arranged left-to-right as old-to-new,in the order of first appearance.Color refers to relative growth (green) or decay (red) of the site's popularity on that day.Selecting a color chip shows a small graph of that link's performance over the previous month". vox delicii [Smart Mobs] 11:42:49 AM    comment []

RFID: To Tag or Not to Tag. Companies and government agencies increasingly use radio frequency identification technology to track products and people, and RFID opponents say it poses privacy risks. Here's what the technology is all about. By Kim Zetter. [Wired News] 11:38:41 AM    comment []

Sorting the Uproar Over Downloads. It seems like Hollywood won in the Grokster ruling, but the file-sharing universe will be largely unaffected, at least for a while. What the federal ruling against Grokster really means. By Jeff Howe from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 11:36:56 AM    comment []