Lycos: Gone Goose
November 28, 2008
Years ago I was involved in a Web directory and classification project. A company grew out of our effort and in the mid 1990s, we sold the company, the code, and the servers to Lycos. Most people don’t remember The Point and our Top 5% of the Internet backlink play. I read in PaidContent.org here that “Lycos Europe has finally conceded what had become increasingly clear – no one wants to buy the ailing portal.” Lycos was one of the first Web indexing systems. I recall a wizard named Fuzzy who was the indexing and search guru. At one meeting, he perched on a rubber ball. That’s a pleasant memory, but now the Lycos service seems to moved from the Search Engine Death watch list to the failed system category. I will root through my files and see what information I have about the system. Too bad. I fear more search systems will find themselves in the same dank pool of red ink.
Stephen Arnold, November 28, 2008
Knowledge Plaza
November 28, 2008
Whatever, a Belgian enterprise solutions start-up, just rolled out Knowledge Plaza Platform as a Service for search and multi-user companywide knowledge management combined into one shareable, customized interface. The idea is to tap all user data and experience. In theory, no knowledge is lost, and users can learn from others in an interactive environment. See features detailed here, and note the Expert as Search Engine (EaSE), which searches user bookmarks in both the plaza and online so that one employee can search other user assets. There’s also a wiki setup and browser and e-mail integration.
Check it out at http://www.knowledgeplaza.be. They’re scheduling demos now. The product appears to be in the same category as Yakabox, which we talked about here. As I get more information, I will pass it along.
Stephen Arnold, November 28, 2008.
Peeping in Google’s Windows
November 28, 2008
Silicon.com has an interesting but partly functional 17 picture photo series about Google’s secretive laboratory. You can access the images here. Each photo has a snippet of text providing appropriate “Go, go, Google” cheerleading. A fellow named Tim Ferguson created the photo series. Now if you think you are really going to see secret stuff, you want to recalibrate your expectations. The majority of the images are screen shots of products and services, not spy camera type info. Nevertheless, if you are a Google addict, you may find this useful and interesting. One of the pictures is of the now killed Lively service, so this may have nostalgic value for you. When I ran the photo series, I saw zero images from image 8 to 17. You may have more luck than this goose.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2008
Google: A Tactic, Not a Strategy Shift
November 28, 2008
Techdirt’s “Google Is No Longer Silicon Valleys’ Legal Defender” here makes a good point. With regard to Google’s deal with publishers for the Google book scanning project, the decision “appeared to signal the end of Google’s earlier position of fighting certain legal battles on principle.” I did not think of Google fighting legal battles for a higher purpose than achieving its goals. I also had not considered Google as fighting legal battles for Silicon Valley. My view of Techdirt’s point is that Google is being pragmatic. I thought the legal battles were designed to force certain decisions to go Google’s way. The idea was that by picking certain legal fights, Google could in effect create a decision foundation to make it easier for Google to push forward with greater aggressiveness because Google won certain battles. I see the deal with publishers as one made so Google could move forward with books and begin a different assault on traditional “dead tree” publishing. My view is that Techdirt’s point is well taken, but I think the Google will be pushing forward to commercialize the information it has and it can have created. In short, Google is on a path to become a 21st century Gutenberg. Paying a trivial amount to move forward is little more than a tactical decision, not a change in Google’s broader policy of picking which battles to fight.
Stephen Arnold, November 28, 2008
Bebo Says Google a Nightmare
November 28, 2008
This story is getting pretty tough to locate online. I found a version at Mad.co.uk, and you can try to access “Bebo’s Burns Labels Google a Nightmare to Deal with” here. The story is hooked to Kate Burns, a person who was according to the story by Suzanne Bearne was “Google’s first employee in the UK.” Apparently the comments were made at a public forum in the UK. The article reports that another speaker described Google as a “parasite”. The most interesting comment in the article, in my opinion, was this chunk of prose:
Kelvin Mackenzie, chairman of Myvideorights.com and former editor of The Sun, said, YouTube is a fantastic idea but the piracy issues involved with the company are “a disgrace for smaller companies.”
My pal Cyrus, the world’s smartest person in his mind, often accuses me of Photoshopping Google information. Here is the screen shot I made of the Mad Web page. Sorry about the resolution Cyrus, but that’s the way WordPress handles images.
Source: http://www.mad.co.uk
I have several thoughts in my addled goose brain which I intend to capture:
- A former employee had to learn how to deal with Google. This suggests that Google is changing, so that former Googlers may not be able to provide the “inside Google” knowledge that many organizations want
- The word “nightmare” is quite colorful and its suggests that my mental image of Googzilla which I débuted in early 2005 is works for me. Your mental image of Google may differ from mine, of course.
- The combination of Google’s culture and the YouTube.com service seem to be an explosive combination for some non-Googley types. However, I bet their children are hooked on YouTube.com and mom and dad won’t admit that from a demographic point of view, Google may be rooted for the long haul.
One final thought: this story is getting hard to find. Yahoo 404s. NewsNow.co.uk reports zero hits. No reference in AllTheWeb.com news. But I found the story using the query “bebo burns” on Google News at 10 44 am Eastern on November 27, 2008.
That’s interesting to me. Now I want to run the query “google nightmare.”
Stephen Arnold, November 28, 2008
Microformats Primer
November 27, 2008
You probably know everything there is to know about microformats. If you are a bit shaky on this approach to making stupid documents a bit smarter, you can read about these conventions for using descriptive class names to add semantics to content. Click here for more information. Emily Lewis, A Blog Not Limited, has created a series of articles about microformats. You can access them here. A happy quack from a non Thanksgiving goose to Ms. Lewis for her work.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2008
Google: No Semantic Search
November 27, 2008
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Google Not Interested in Semantic Search.” You can read the short article on Tech Startups 3.0 here. The source of the statement is Marissa Mayer. In the article Ms. Mayer makes clear that Google is not chasing the natural language processing juggernaut. The article reported that Google can do semantics with Google’s “large amounts of data.” In my opinion Google is dragging a large, quite smelly red herring across this topic. If you are curious about Google’s interest in semantics, you may want to look at the five patent applications filed in February 2007 by Ramanathan Guha. You will need to brush up on Dr. Guha’s background; for example, he was involved in writing the W3C semantic documents, and his technology delivers what Google calls “context.” Ms. Mayer is separating Google’s approach to semantics from Microsoft’s approach. My thought is that Google’s method of communication is designed to keep Google the warm fuzzy company everyone used (not the tense) to love. I don’t buy this statement for a devalued US penny. What about you? If you can locate a copy, I contributed to an analysis of Google’s semantic technology published by Bear Stearns in 2007. Too bad the company is history. The report suggests that Ms. Mayer is doing some wordsmithing if the Tech Startup’s story is on the beam.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2008
Enterprise 2.0: May Be a Winner
November 27, 2008
My high school English teacher made me sit in the hall for two years. She disliked me and my writing style. For example, I tried to sidestep the word “may”. I also tried to avoid “would” because I have had a dislike for what I call “woulda, coulda, shoulda” reasoning. You may know what troubles me. You look at the price of Yahoo today, which is about $10 per share, and you buy $100,000 worth of stock. Then you look at the value of Yahoo in three weeks and its is for the purposes of this example $6 per share. You then say, “I should have bought Microsoft at $19”. When I received news of a Computerworld article about the transference of Web 2.0 technology to what is cleverly labeled the Enterprise 2.0 I almost ignored the link. But click I did and I read “Wikis, Social Networks Should Find Significant Success in Enterprise” by Heather Havenstein. You must read her story here.
The point of the article is a new study from a high flying technology consulting firm called Forrester Research Inc. The study didn’t do much for me. What caught my attention was this comment in Ms. Havenstein’s article:
The report also noted that a number of Web 2.0 technologies are underutilized in the enterprise. “Enterprises don’t know what to do with RSS even though it is all around the Web,” Yehuda said. “They have not been able to figure out how to leverage RSS for their own benefit internally. Mashups and widgets are similarly underappreciated, but there is a future for them if enterprises can plan effectively around the whole ecosystem of information production and information consumption.”
Why did I find this interesting in the context of my “woulda, coulda, shoulda” mindset. Three reasons. Hang on to your Hat 2.0:
- What the heck is Web 2.0? Last time I looked the Internet was being used for communications. Er, email has been around for a week or two. Granted it is asynchronous, but moving comms to synchronous mode is not exactly a revolution. Where there are bits and a network, humans will do what humans have done for a while–communicate. Other technologies are equally obvious, and I am not convinced that the buzzword Web 2.0 communicates much of anything. For Madison Avenue, the notion of Web 2.0 might sound cool, but I think it is–well–labored.
- What the heck is Enterprise 2.0? I have a feature on this subject which will appear on December 1, 2008. I want to start your month with a bang, not a whimper. I break down the components of Enterprise 2.0 and point out that it is a push cart filled with odds and ends. More significantly, the stuff in the cart range from the unfathomable such as a firm’s culture to the complex such as cloud computing. A collection of stuff is a yard sale, not a discipline. I don’t want to be a master of the yard sale. I will stick with the one thing I think I almost know a little bit.
- What’s with appreciation? Last time I checked a major publisher has stopped publishing books for an unknown period of time. The Federal government is borrowing more money so my neighbors can buy a new Mercedes or go to South America over the New Year break. Executives are refusing pay raises, and even the big dogs at GM have returned one of their corporate jets. These are hard times, and I don’t think some technology is appreciated unless it delivers cash right now. My dog appreciates me because I feed him. A company appreciates technology when it [a] works, [b] makes sales directly or indirectly, and [c] is economical because no more heads or fewer heads are needed to perform a task.
What stopped my web feet in their muddy hike to the pig pen was the headline’s use of these two words, “Should Find”. Just because some one cooked up a clever name for Web functions does not in my goose brain translate to the leap that these technologies have a role in an organization. What regulated industry dealing in drugs or financial instruments wants to use a technology in a manner that could lead to a problem with the regulatory authorities? What executive wants to deal with a legal discovery process that requires figuring out what information was where and what it said in a social communication system that was not secure or archived? Not me, gentle reader.
This Enterprise 2.0 buzzword pivots on the “woulda, coulda, shoulda” logic. What happens has zero connection with the actions as they are. I find the “2.0” buzzword interesting, and I will keep my beak in the water looking for more information on this “should be” argument. I should be as agile as TO, the star for the Dallas Cowboys. But I am a goose and not silly enough to thing “shoulds” become reality. Do you?
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2008
Autonomy: Swifter than Google Again
November 27, 2008
A plumb content processing and information infrastructure project found itself a happy home at Autonomy. the win wraps up a strong November 2008 for the Cambridge-based company. You can read the story here. Autonomy said that:
the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a global provider of secure financial messaging services and the acknowledged leader in international standards-setting for the financial industry, chose Autonomy to power its corporate Web site, www.swift.com, Intranet and Extranet. Autonomy’s core infrastructure software the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) was chosen after a competitive procurement owing to its unmatched conceptual capabilities, scalability and mapped security model.
For me, the key point is that this is another big win for Autonomy. In the last year, Autonomy has focused on identifying and winning big deals. Some vendors announce agreements to index Web sites, a business that Google is eroding with its free Customer Search Engine. Not Autonomy. The company hunts whales. Swift is as swift does.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2008
Google: A Glimpse of 2009’s Tactics
November 26, 2008
CNet’s Tom Krazit wrote “Google Admists Breaking App Store Rules.” You can read the full text of this article here. My thought was that only those in the know would understand that “App Store” meant Apple and its fuzzy wuzzy policies regarding what’s in and what’s out on the iPod software store. I also considered the idea that the notion of Google “breaking” one or two “rules” would be ignored. Big companies often do what’s best for themselves, not doing what upholds a Platonic ideal of “good” for others. For me, the most interesting comment in the story was:
A Google spokesman confirmed Tuesday that Google Mobile uses undocumented APIs (application programming interfaces) in order to use the iPhone’s proximity sensor to prompt a verbal search. iPhone developers were only supposed to use the APIs that Apple published in its SDK when they create their applications under the terms of that agreement.
However, as an idle and addled goose, I did more thinking about this Apple-Google connivance. Here are my thoughts. Please, keep in mind that I am expressing an opinion. Hopefully making this statement will spare me the sugary emails that Google’s brilliant PR minds fire at me like cotton candy missiles from the sorority or fraternity house second story windows during a toga party. To wit:
Google is going to throw its weight around and companies–even mountain top opeations like Apple on Infinity Drive–will go along to get along. In fact, I am considering 2009 the year that Googzilla gets into the Mixed Martial Arts’ ring with some other, more cantakerous combatants. Fighters in the featherweight division will want to steer clear of the heavyweight fights that are now almost guaranteed.
Why is the GOOG getting more physical? Three reasons:
- I think the GOOG’s cash flow, while still good, is flattening. Google’s own math gurus don’t need to do much pencil sharpening to figure out that the financial downturn is going to make getting braces put on Googzilla’s children a trivial expense. The GOOG is going to tighten its belt and fight to generate revenue.
- The competition is exposing its neck and liver to killer blows. In my opinion, Google’s competition is getting weaker, not stronger. There’s Yahoo. I don’t think that company is much of a threat for the foreseeable future. There’s Microsoft which is again distracted with legal hassles, many products, and the curse of the Wii, the Zune, and Microsoft Fast tie up. There’s the evil Hulu, but video is a black hole of cost. In the search and content processing sector, the GOOG is hugely disruptive. Even though competitors are making sales, Google continues to seep into organizations with Maps, Apps, and Gmail without much organization or direction. Therefore, a big of muscle might just make it possible for the GOOG to get more revenue quickly.
- Regulators are clueless. Google continues to do what it wants because people are just darned happy to have a Googler give them a flashing lapel pin, a T shirt, lunch at the Google headquarters, or one of those candy colored mouse pads. People fawn over Googzilla, overlooking the fangs, the claws, and the really bad predator breath. I am still surprised that the GOOG doesn’t sell its own brand of mints.
To sum up, Mr. Krazit’s story evoked these thoughts, which will sail right over the Webby world in which we live. This goose sees the future behavior of Google in this tiny, trivial, single Google judo chop to Apple’s policies. Are you exposing a vital part to the GOOG? A good defence may be the best offense in 2009.
Stephen Arnold, November 26, 2008
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