Salon suggests that Elliot Abrams' appointment top policy advisor on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could prove disastrous. Salon.com News | Bush's frightening Middle East appointment
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Even parents at the service in Maidenhead, Berkshire, were shocked to hear Mr Rayfield say it was scientifically impossible for Father Christmas to deliver so many presents so quickly.
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Everybody's talkin... about decentralization at Supernova. Chris Gulker posts some fascinating weblog metrics which demonstrate that in ultra networked communities like weblogs popularity shows a power law distribution where traffic naturally centralizes. So although the Internet may be a meritocracy of equal opportunity, some become more equal than others.
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Carter warns of "'catastrophic consequences' of a pre-emptive US war on Iraq" in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, whilst former Conservative UK Prime Minister Thatcher praised opposition party Prime Minister Blair "for backing the United States in its war against terror" as she received an award in Washington for her pursuit of political freedom.
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Jason notes that Amazon customers who wear clothes also shop for clean underwear and wonders what naked customers shop for: kottke.org :: Nudist in aisle 6. Well according to Dealtime, they like leather bikers' jackets, it must be that second skin thing.
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David Coursey, "Here's what I think the next Windows will look like", writes that Longhorn, Microsoft's next generation operating system, won't be ready till 2004 and that it will be later rather than sooner. One of the key components of Longhorn is a long awaited overhaul of the Windows file system that will allow proper full-text searching. File systems built on top of databases are not new, IBMs AS400s have had this for years, so it could be argued that an update to Windows is not technological progress but fixing inelegant software architecture. The Internet has made the use of full-text search familiar and necessary and the lack of this 'must have' feature in Windows is now embarrassing. If this is not going to be available till 2004 then perhaps there is an opportunity for Google. Imagine a Google toolbar that provided indexing of files on your computer, rather like...
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Its that time of year again when I am missing one of the UKs more venerated traditions - the office Christmas party. In London, respectable restaurants will be chock full of lecherous, drunk, salivating bosses. Bars will be full of dangerous, chanting mobs and gangs of half-naked investment bankers carrying open bottles of liquor will stop traffic in the financial district. Ah, the Christmas spirit. But even if this year's celebrations will be dampened by the dreary economic climate, one British, office party institution is sure to remain - dropping your pants and photocopying your bum. According to a recent survey 4% have photocopied part of their body at an office party. Ananova - Two million workers embarrass themselves at Christmas party says survey
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DaveNet : How to revive AOL Dave Winer discusses AOL but makes a profound general point about how the music industry should deal with digital music: make a distinction between new stuff and archives. Its a very elegant solution. At the moment you have copyrighted media and non-copyrighted media. Classic books that are out of copyright are much cheaper than new ones. The cost being not much more than the printing and distribution. The archive solution creates three categories of digital media: copyright held new media that is being marketed and is paid for on an individual basis; copyright held media that is no longer being marketed and is sold as part of a bulk subscription to an archive; non copyright held media which is free since with digital media there are zero distribution or reproduction costs.
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Faceted metadata is very interesting. The notion of dynamic taxonomies and adaptive search criteria is very important for news databases where topics and attributes change much more rapidly than general search engines. For Moreover this is a crucial area. I am less sure about XFML led by Peter Van Dijk, where the serialization of topics and facets seems to only allow 2 levels of hierarchy i.e. don't see how you can have subfacets of facets or subtopics of topics. Now it is true that you don't stricly need hierarchy beyond facet -> topics, but you get bloat, rather like flat file databases. Someone correct me if I am wrong. dive into mark: XFML XFML home
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Ben Hammersley's eagerly awaited book on RSS is out in April: oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: Content Syndication with RSS Mine's a Guinness Ben.
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So what's going to happen in the online search industry? Here are my predictions: Overture will buy Espotting who have the biggest market share in paid results in Europe. Paid results and editorial results companies will merge. i.e. Overture will merge with either Inktomi or FAST. The industry will be dominated by the above merger and Google, but Google will dominate. Yahoo and Microsoft will use anyone but Google. i.e. Yahoo will look at an alternative to Google for editorial based search results. Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Google will be the destination sites that matter. Because Google own one of these destination sites they will not be held to ransom by giving up too much revenue share in the same way that Inktomi, FAST and Overture are.
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