Mar 06 2003
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Do online businesses profit from laziness?

Posted by | business | No Comments

If you subtract the amount of money that people pay Blockbuster in late fees from their revenues then Blockbuster is unprofitable. Then take Netflix, which is premised on not having the revenues that make Blockbuster profitable but leveraging instead the greater effiencies of web based distribution, and subtract the amount of revenue from people who watch less than a few movies a month then you have a non-viable business model. Despite the logistical and technical efficiencies of online businesses, I wonder if many are paradoxically based upon the inherent inefficiency and laziness of people. (People like me, who have had the same 3 movies out on Netflix for 2 months now.)

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Mar 05 2003
0

RSS comes full circle

Posted by | rss | No Comments

Over on RSS-DEV: “There are millions upon millions of people who use services like My Yahoo for customized news, stock quotes, etc. Why not start sending them to an RSS aggregator instead?” Funny how some things have their time, I think the battles are over for RSS, version 2.0 gives the majority of people what they want, extensibility through modules, but stays simple, and for those that really need RDF, they can go back to version 1.0. More surprising is how the idea that RSS could rival My Yahoo is seen as something new – this is where it started, several years ago there was an RSS aggregator: My Netscape.

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Mar 04 2003
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Drawing the line on anti-Americanism

Posted by | politics | No Comments

I may be a dove on the war issue – but largely on grounds of practicality and execution. A war in Iraq should not be fought now if it hinders a war on terrorism by: 1. Alienating the Arab world. 2. Creating insurmountable diplomatic problems with former allies at a time when the US needs support. 3. Defocusing, draining resources and creating long term instability without a clear post war plan and budget. However, the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a resounding victory and if the capture of Al Qaeda operatives solicits anti-American sentiment then so what, there is no option. Surgical removal of Al Qaeda terrorists is a good thing. BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | ‘Al-Qaeda brain’ praised as hero

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Mar 04 2003
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Top 5 technologies that are perpetually almost there

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Hungarian is the language of the future – and always will be. Top five technologies of the future – and they always will be: Speech recognition (weren’t we all supposed to have ditched our keyboards by now?) Virtual reality (whatever happened to VRML?) Smart cash (can you believe there are online services that write checks?) The Semantic Web (the pedantic web) Monorails (outside of Disneyworld, where are they?)

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Mar 03 2003
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Search engine landscape

Posted by | Uncategorized | No Comments

The image above shows what the US search landscape looks like after recent consolidation. It is based upon a PDF document at Bruceclay.com There are 10 principal players out of the original 19, however in terms of supplying services and technology (the outbound arrows) there are only 5 companies: Google; Overture and Yahoo with AskJeeves and Looksmart trailing. 1. Google 2. Overture (+ FAST/Alltheweb, Altavista) 3. Yahoo (+Inktomi) 4. AskJeeves (+Teoma) 5. Looksmart 6. MSN 7. AOL (+Netscape, DMOZ) 8. Lycos (+Hotbot) 9. Iwon (+Excite) 10. Go

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Mar 03 2003
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Why is so much business still conducted with paper?

Posted by | architecture | No Comments

‘The paperless office is as useful as the paperless office’, so goes the saying. Since computers have become ubiquitous, paper consumption has actually increased. It always amazes me that banks and credit card companies have to store vast amounts of paper copies of transactions, that there is still no low cost EDI network and people still send paper invoices and purchase orders and that paper exists at all for anything other than luxury items such as books. Paper documents are often an inefficient, costly, dangerous anachronism and yet the pace of their replacement is business is seemingly glacial. Take architecture. The vast majority of litigation in architecture (and there is a vast amount of litigation – buildings are complicated and often leak etc.) stems from inconsistencies between contract documents. In the UK there are three principal documents, the plans themselves, the specifications and the bills of quantities. CAD software was…

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Mar 03 2003
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03/03/03

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

At 12:34 on the 5th June 1978, I was in a Maths class at St. Johns School in Northwood, Middx. (12345678 – the day precedes the month, military style, in European date nomenclature). It was a hot day and the windows were open and the smell of newly mown grass wafted in from the playing fields. The maths teacher stopped the lesson and told us to remember the date and where we were – I did. Today is 03, 03, 03, I was alseep at three minutes past three this morning.

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Feb 28 2003
0

My personal opinion is that…

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

I’ve always thought that the disclaimer: “the personal opinions expressed here are mine not my employers” was tautological. For a weblog, this equates to: “the personal opinions on this personal opinion site are personal opinions not someone else’s opinions”. I may add that to my sidebar. Although more accurately it should read: “the personal opinions on this personal opinions site are rarely my personal opinion but more usually the result of a deeply immature desire to disagree with anything anyone says” Meg elaborates: A personal opinion – megnut.com

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