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.
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…
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Very neat – An elegant script to highlight terms when someone arrives at your site from a Google search. Textism Tools: Google Hilite Now if everyone did this I wouldn’t need to hit the Google cache to find what I’d searched for on a page.
Apple: it’s all about the brand “Ask marketers and advertising experts why Mac users are so loyal, and they all cite the same reason: Apple’s brand. “ Evan Williams pokes fun at Wired’s not too clever article on Apple, “the silly thing about this article is the notion that Apple’s brand and products are completely unconnected”. Marketing people often get confused about the difference between a company that offers products that have unique features and one that doesn’t. The most primitive see brand and features but nothing in between. Pepsi is all about brand and Tivo is all about product. In the middle, however, there are intangibles, things that are not the result of pure marketing spin but do not really offer anything different from competitors from a feature perspective – design elevates these intangibles. The PC industry is becoming mature and saturated in terms of features, people will buy…
Online search is expected to generate more than $2.5 billion in revenues in 2004. That gives an aggregate Market Cap. for all search companies of around $12 billion. Assume that Google gets 40% of this and Google would have a potential value of $5 billion. But Google is perhaps different – it will win a battle with Overture for paid listings, and will dominate the search space – and search is the bedrock of the Internet. Microsoft owned command line access to your own machine and built on top of that. Google owns the command line for access to other machines, a very powerful place to build a company worth much more than $5 billion.
Jeff Jarvis, who knows much more about publishing than most, looks at the New York ‘Cityblog’ and explains why listings on their own don’t pay. My issue with Cityblog and with collaborative blogs like Boingboing is that weblogs are primarily about people. Weblogs are publishing taken to its ultimate extreme in terms of efficiency where there are no distribution or production costs other than the time and effort of the writer and its ultimate utility in terms of benefit for the reader – I read to hear what the writer has to say, and as I get to know the writer the nuances are easier and the communication better. This is why the byline free Economist is so damn frustrating. With weblogs I’ll read whatever Jon Udell says about web services or Jason Kottke says about web design and, because they are all published separately, I can jumble them up…
Jon Udell: Scale-free networks and mirror worlds The inimitable Jon Udell writes about networks – about Javaspaces and Tuplespaces, loose coupling and grid computing – and I can’t help thinking that these uber trends which would seem to be profound leaps and bounds in the punctuated evolution of computing are often to do with very banal issues, often involving the relative strengthening and weakening of various points in the information processing chain that only exist because of cost. Is there a trend towards clustered cheap servers because the weak link between disks and RAM (that justified expensive Sun hardware with a fancy BUS) is no longer needed if you keep things in cheap memory? Is it in turn, the availability of these swarms of cheap boxes that is really driving the possibilities of grid computing? What would happen if the on board memory on a chip were as cheap as…