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Jan 18 2005
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Poll shows French and British attitudes to the US are broadly similar, with Germans, Russians, Turks and Mexicans being the most negative.

Posted by | politics | No Comments

There is a lot of France bashing these days, on the basis that France is the most anti-US of its recent allies. The above poll shows that its the Germans, Russians, Turks and Mexicans that view the US in the most negative light, and that French attitudes to the US are pretty much the same as in the UK. Naughtily referencing image here cos it is in an annoying popup. This is where it was from, the rest is mostly yawn inducing usual stuff: BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Global poll slams Bush leadership

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Jan 18 2005
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When Push comes to Shove. Why Google can’t sort by date.

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

News search has one feature that is still lacking in search engines: sort by date. This is something which will eventually be a core requirement, and the search engines seem to be asleep at the wheel. Most search engines sort by relevance, but for subjects which change rapidly such as technology, freshness is an important component of relevance. Having just searched for some software on Google I realized that the top results were 4 years old and useless. It is not technically difficult to create date ordering, but it is computationally expensive and requires comparisons as documents are crawled. There is, however, one area where searching by date is already there: weblog searching. The model where content sites ping a server when there are updates soves the date problem cheaply and increases overall relevancy. The ping model is as different from the way search engines currently work, as push is…

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Jan 18 2005
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Who will buy the cool companies?

Posted by | predictions | No Comments

The Internet Stock Blogoutlines the case that Yahoo is most likely to buy six apart, because “Yahoo! has no blogging platform”. Dave Pell pointed out an interesting idea, that when a large company makes an acquisition in a particular area, then it is difficult for them to acquire a competitor to it, since there would be internal resistance or operational complications from the existing team within the company. Consolidation tends to happen on the outside. On that basis, Google has Blogger and Microsoft has Spaces. So maybe Yahoo would buy Sixapart? Perhaps, since Google have Picasa, Yahoo could also buy Flickr. With Sixapart and Flickr, Yahoo would have added two formidable services to their arsenal.

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Jan 17 2005
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Tagging squared

Posted by | metadata | No Comments

Jeff Jarvis has a spot on post about using tags for information about people. People tagging creates a marketplace by matching content against people’s needs and interests. In the case of jobs – a tagged job requirement matched against a tagged resume. As it happens I will be launching a new product soon that includes some of these elements. I want to eventually take tagging one step further and use it to create any type of metadata, allowing people to create tag/value pairs in their own namespace and create RSS modules on the fly. The premise of this is that at the moment the name portion of the name/value pair in a tag is ‘category’ i.e. if you tag something as a ‘resume’ you are saying ‘category=resume’. What is interesting is when you allow people to invent their own ‘name’ portions of the tag. e.g. ‘category=sushi_restaurant location=new_york’. That’s what I’m…

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Jan 17 2005
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Why this year is the year of VOIP

Posted by | predictions | No Comments

People say that Hungarian is the language of the future, and it always will be. Similarly, you get the feeling that speech recognition is the technology of the future and always will be. Until recently the same was true of Internet telephony. There are many technologies that fail because they don’t pass the ‘good enough’ test. Having noticed that more and more friends are using Skype these days, it seems that VOIP passes the good enough test, for once the marketing blurb is right – it just works. In fact, beyond that, two recent examples illustrate that it is now better than other means of telephony. Example one: a friend’s cellphone ran out of juice, he resorted to war driving to find an open wifi network to contact me, his web based email didn’t work, couldn’t get a good enough connection to Instant Message me, but VOIP worked just fine….

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Jan 14 2005
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The return of the 18th century coffee house. Startups don’t need offices

Posted by | business | No Comments

Wired News: Monster Fueled by Caffeine on a startup that works out of a coffee shop. After a false start with ‘hot desking’ in the 90’s freely available wifi, laptops and cellphones really do mean that in some case you can work anywhere. In this case, history has come full circle with some of the biggest institutions in the world, such as Lloyd’s insurance, having been started in 18th century coffee houses. Increasingly I am meeting people, that like myself would rather work out of a coffee shop than some anonymous cube hell that is the staple of most US work environments. I have a friend who is looking to buy a coffee house in San Francisco as space for his startup, whilst keeping it selling coffee to the public. From an architectural standpoint I see this as the perfect rebellion. Unlike coffee houses, office space does not have to…

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Jan 14 2005
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Creationist stickers ruled unconstitutional

Posted by | religion | No Comments

Reuters: “A U.S. judge on Thursday ordered a Georgia school district to remove stickers challenging the theory of evolution from its textbooks on the grounds that they violated the U.S. Constitution.” The creationist/ID folks will be up in arms about this, however to defend their case they would have had to show that their agenda is not religious. How many non-religious creationists are there. None.

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Jan 10 2005
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Bookmarklet question

Posted by | code | No Comments

One of the ways that you can overcome the 508 character limit for bookmarklets in IE 6 is to use a local bookmarklet stub that references a server side javascript file. See:Better Living Through Bookmarklets [JavaScript & DHTML Tutorials] The problem is that IE’s security model blocks document.write unless it writes into a new page, which is a problem if people have popup blockers. Does anyone know of a workaround? (Sorry, I have comments blocked cos of spam, so email is the only option to reply).

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Jan 09 2005
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The New York Times are a changin’

Posted by | media | No Comments

Business Week on the New York Times: “A majority of the paper’s readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering.” That’s a problem indeed, but nothing compared with local newspapers’ loss of classifieds to Craigslist and the like. I can’t help but feel that there may be an opportunity for newspapers in premium, Zagat-like online directory businesses. Joi Ito’s Web: The Future of the New York Times

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