Buried within the comments of Jermey Zawadny’s post about Feedster is this comment:

“I don’t recall Feedster ever being all that useful. But I also don’t find Technorati particularly useful. Why can’t someone just create a simple search engine for feeds/blogs?”

The truth is that it is very difficult to build a search engine with real-time updates, since search engines are optimized for retrieval and usually use batch indexing. In addition, the majority of weblogs are spam, further compounding the problem.

Blog search, which may once have seemed niche, will eventually be a standard part of search engines. At the moment, nobody, including Google, have a weblog search product that works.
If they did it would be very useful.

The real reason this is important is that it has nothing to do with weblogs, long term. There are only two things that matter in search - freshness and relevancy.

At the moment search engines like Google do not have a button that says order results by date - they will, eventually, and from that comes blog search or from blog search comes that.

Feedster Will Die in 2006 (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

Heh, great post.

Having never had a proper job since i left architecture, I used to fantasize about doing job interviews since I could really tell the truth if I wasn’t looking for a job.

Now that its possible to bootstrap a modest web service, I fantasize about really telling the truth to VC’s.

Top 5 fantasy replies to questions in a presentation to a VC:

Q. How big is your market?

A. $0

[The current market size is $0 because I haven't been doing any paid work because I have been building this product for a marketplace of 1 - me. I built it because I really want this and believe in it.]

Q. What is your burn rate 6 months from now to fund growth?

A. No real growth will be apparent 6 months from now.

[We don't really need that much money the burn rate won't be that much, I'll be doing things on the cheap since I am as tight as a Camel's ass in a sandstorm and if the growth is exponential it'll likely look flat for 6 months.]

Q. Do you suffer from founderitus - i.e. would you step aside for more seasoned management?

A. Yes and No - but Yes. Steve Jobs is just super duper.

[I suffer from founderitus in spades, the reason I start companies is that I have a problem with authority. Steve Jobs is my hero not Sculley. However, I'll be moving to take a 'founder' role at roughly the speed of light, if I'm out of my depth.]

Q. Pages 2-20 of your business plan, after the bullet point introduction read ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’, over and over again, can you pass me an uncorrupted copy?

A. I don’t want to do a business plan.

[I'm going to write the business plan after the business becomes clear and we have adapted to it in a Darwinian fashion - it'll make for a much better read. I don't think you can truly design things in advance, I don't believe in crap like Intelligent Design.]

Q. Here is our term sheet, its pretty standard, I think you’ll agree?

A. I’d never sign an agreement based on that.

[Unless you remove the conditions on the pref shares I won’t be saying looky here, ‘we have a term sheet’ - I would rather have a one in ten chance of making $1M than a cats chance in hell of $100M, my risk isn’t spread across a portfolio, and if it isn’t going to be a billion dollar company I will still be trying to make it worth something.

Digg is the real deal for web 2.0, in the sense that, for all the hype, it does absolutely nothing new but is about to render obsolete, geek central itself, Slashdot.

Zawodny goes through the usual ideas as to why digg is successful - and then hits it on the nail - ‘Lets face it. The slashdot guys are getting old’.

Sure there are some improvements over Slashdot in the way the Digg does things, but this is not the product shakeup of Google Maps vs. Mapquest. Digg wins because the community has more vitality.

Digg is about fashion, it makes Slashdot look like a bunch of ageing rockers. We are seeing the first generational switch in web applications - and that is really web 2.0.

If this is natural churn, then someday someone else will beat Digg, and if this is a precedent then the lifespan of an otherwise very successful site could be less than 10 years. This is more than a nightclub or a teenage fad, but much less than offline companies.

Slashdot is Going out of Style in 2006 (by Jeremy Zawodny)

It seems that a war is brewing between the carriers (Verizon) and the service providers (Google). The carriers want to tax revenue generating traffic based upon the revenue potential rather than the traffic, and they want to charge both the sender and the receiver of the traffic.

This is like charging Walmart trucks more than other trucks for a bridge toll, just because Walmart make more money than other companies, but where the equivalent of the toll has already been paid for by Walmart’s customers.

One can assume that everyone is being superficially friendly but playing hardball in the background. The problem is that its impossible for the carrier to know the value of a single ‘bit’, since it varies according to what the ‘bit’ contains - is it part of an app, an ad, a video or text.

Verizon want a slice of the action because they know that some people’s bits have a high value-add and they themselves have been charging an absolutely massive premium for voice bits which are now being arbitraged to nothing.

The problem is that they cannot both the sender and the receiver, and they cannot charge the sender based upon the value of the data, without knowing what that data is.

This will be a titanic fight and everyone will lose, but nobody more so than people like Verizon, even if they do get people like Google to pay up in the short term. Equally the free ride is over, for the likes of Google, but they wont be paying what Verizon want. The Internet is more like the road network than a railway network - and Verizon are thinking in terms of railway networks.

I’m sure Om Malik will disagree, but then again, what do I know - he really understands what’s happening here.

InformationWeek | Broadband Networks | Verizon Says Google, Microsoft Should Pay For Internet Apps | January 5, 2006

Last Year’s predictions.

Technology:

1. Digg gets acquired.

2. Google releases Google Calendar and Google Micropayments and OEMs Google maps as a UI for portable iPod like GPS handhelds. Click spam becomes a real worry.

3. Microsoft does a $10billion plus acquisition.

4. Apple takes on Tivo with a Mac Mini style product with Front Row built in.

5. Energy scares and middle east politics dampen the economy such that 2006 is not like 1999 for Web 2.0.

Not technology:

6. US switches foreign policy away from direct military involvement to insurgency funding in Venezuela and ups anti-Chavez rhetoric.

7. Castro dies and Chavez threatens to stick his nose into Cuba.

8. Cracks appear in the Saud’s control over Arabia and information leaks suggesting that Ghawar oil field is water logged.

9. Natural gas prices spiral, US house prices cool and plans for renewed US nuclear power push are drawn up.

10. The first signs of long term problems between the US and China appear over disagreements over Iran.

Lee Smolin’s answer to this year’s Edge Question: ‘What is Your Dangerous Idea’ is my favorite, touching on something I’ve been thinking and reading about for the last year.

Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein; seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin

1. All systems leak - so they are fuzzy and relative.
No system is fully open, or it ceases to be a separate ’system’ and no system is fully closed, or it cannot be observed. Yet most science looks at or approximates closed systems. Just as the motion of objects depends on a frame of reference, I suspect the notion of how systems interact, how entropy flows between them, requires sensitive measurement to provide predictions , since all systems will tend to interact at a fine boundary between chaotoc and stable conditions, over time. Because of the required accuracy, these measurements will be dependent on something analogous to a ‘frame of reference’ since at some level, on the one hand, clear boundaries between systems are impossible and on the other any ‘observing’ system will only be able to perceive boundaries relative to itself.

2. All systems interact over time, and there may be emergent patterns in these interactions creating defined periodic cycles as with living or growing things.
If this is so, why should biological theories of evolution apply only to biological systems of systems made by living things, such as economics? What I mean by this is that evolutionary ideas apply to iterative systems that teeter on the edge of chaos (i.e. crystals presumably only evolve very very slowly) - but what if all interactions between systems tended to become iterative. Only recently has science begun to look quantitatively at the rules governing iterations between systems as over time. i.e. algorithms rather than formulae. I suspect that any all encompassing theory of evolution applies to any set of interacting systems (living or non living)

My dangerous idea is that Darwinism can be expressed in terms of physics, in terms of patterns in entropy flow between systems and more specifically in terms of a new and relativistic look at thermodynamics.

I suspect there may be a relativinstic view of thermodynamics and that a fourth law of thermodynamics may include an extended idea of natural selection, defined in terms of the physics of interactions between systems, where all linked systems tend to become either linked, or ‘iterative’ over time.

I normally beat up right wing incompetence, but time to have a go at left wing paranoia.

Unlike stories of outing spies etc., many people in technology know that using tracking pixels or cookies is ubiquitous, accepted practice, i.e. neither unusual or sinister.

So the thing that can be learned from the story below, is that if something sounds sinister, people will report it as such and one can assume that this is the case for other accusations against the government.

ABC News: U.S. to Probe Contractor’s Web Tracking