Technik

Bloggers Hack the Search Engines

How blogs increasingly "clog" online search results. While
commercial websites are paying to enhance their placement in search
results via keywords and other means, Wired says that "with no deliberate
effort, many dedicated weblog publishers are finding their blogs rank high
on search results for topics that, oftentimes, they claim to know
practically nothing about." Blogs often place high in search results
because of the frequency with which bloggers update their sites, and
because blogs often have lots of inbound links from other sites - two key
factors in typical search engine rankings. "More and more, I'm running
into myself on Google," said blogger Russ Beattie. The story is likely to
add fuel to the rumor that Google is preparing to remove blogs from its
main search results and create a separate search function for blogs.

Exponential Blog Growth

The number of weblog updates is not just growing but in last few months has grown faster - a report indicates that the outing of blogging which happened around the start of the war is now being reflected in the statistics of blog usage.

Blog Use Growing Like the Web Used To

Kevin Werbach's Werblogreported today that an analysis of weblog.com statistics shows that the number of weblog updates is not just growing but in last few months has grown much faster. Thus the outing of blogging which happened around the start of the war is now being reflected in the statistics of blog usage.

Ontology Recapitulates Semanticity

The blog phenom has drawn the social web out of darkness. Many social web advocates are slipstreaming blogs. Two interesting recent examples, both reported on by Esther Dyson, who is now a blogger herself.

Lafayette Project: Blog Mining
Started by Meg Hourihan, co-founder of Pyra (brand name: Blogger), now owned by Google. She wants to find a way to let people know what is new on the web, in a personalized manner. Contrast with Technorati, which shows what is new in a mass market manner. Worth looking into, Florian.

enLeague: Ontological database
Bought by Dwight Lodge out of The Coca Cola Company. Enleague attempts to use semantic tools to analyze legacy data from billing systems. The key idea is to create a 'semantic' or language based on the 'ontology' of the Coke supply chain. Coke had developed a logic engine called Cerebra to look for patterns in their transactional data. EnLeague now wants to go across other verticals, beginning with healthcare. What I found interesting is in idle conversation with a VC, tthe VC made the leap from 'enterprise blogging' to enLeague without splitting an infinitive or ending a sentence with a preposition (something up with which I will not put) - so he too sees the blog world as outing this other world of ordering unstructured data through semantic webs.

Why Blogs Haven't Stormed Business

Good insight, that the flat-file blog needs to give way to an enterprise blog with a database foundation. A database blog allows better control over security, access and re-use.

Highlights bolded, below:

Ray Ozzie on Computers 3.0

This article below by Ray Ozzie is worth reading in full.

Computers 1.0 was the mainframe era from the IBM 360 to the final DEC VAX.
Computers 2.0 was the PC era from the 386 chip to today.
Computers 3.0 is now developing and has yet to be cleverly named.

The precursor to the PC era was the PC boom & bust cycle from 75 - 85, just as the precursor to Computers 3.0 has been the Internet era from the Mosaic browser to today. We had Apple go public in 1980 at the unheard of value of $2B, and Netscape do the same in 1995 at $5B - which turns out to be $2B in 1980 dollars.

The key insight is that when the PC first emerged, besides being a game machine, the powers-that-be saw it is a shrunken minicomputer, and tried to load on it the apps which drove the mainframe ea - accounting mostly. But what drove it to success were a new class of apps, productivity apps, beginning with the spreadsheet.

The question du jour is what is the spreadsheet of the 3d computer era? Ray Ozzie does a great job of explaining why it is NOT an extrapolation of what we have seen in the past 10 years of the Internet.

Snippets:
Just as the first generation of personal computers was mostly about personal productivity, the first generation of the Internet has largely been about centralized Web sites, used for publishers, transactions and e-mail.

Personal productivity tools will become joint productivity tools designed for online use instead of a paper-only world. A rich cadre of collaborative online writing, media management, presentation and consumption tools will move to the forefront of our daily electronic lives.

A distinct third layer will emerge between the operating system and productivity layers. Think of it as a "virtual workspace" layer that links together all of your own computers and those operated by people with whom you work.

O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference

Lots of good stuff on mesh networking, blogging, social web and similar new technologies at Wiki.

Clay Shirky, a long-time deep thinker on web matters, discussed the problems of managing groups online. Groups go through predictable patterns before settling down: a flirtatious/sex stage, a vilification-of-enemies stage, and a religious-fervor stage (where heretics in the group are flamed as not getting it). Thus you cannot separate technical & social issues - must empower group to govern itself or the flirts/xenophobes/mullahs will take it over. You then learn that members are different than users - a core group arises to 'garden' the environent. Although gardening may violate the libertarian instincts that typically spawn the group, it is necessary to keep the community useful. Implication is quite profound - despite or maybe because of the whizziness of the technology, social forces may doom groupware.

Dan Gilmore discussed Journalism 3.0, his term for interactive journalism. WiFi & blogging are changing journalism dramatically. Will a Gresham's Law rule (bad money drives out good) - fast but inaccurate rumor will drive out slow but checked reporting? Good news is that Gresham's Law is empirically wrong. Dan noted that there have been many experiments on blog journalism, but no clear model yet for monetizing the new approaches. As a starter, he calls for improving the tools: WYSIWYG editing, integration of email and blogs, and addition of rich media (pictures, streaming, peer-to-peer sharing).

Dan's session evolved into a panel discussion on warblogging, and included a surprise guest speaker over the phone - Stuart Hughes, a warblogger from Iraq who lost his foot from a landmine. Check his site out, an remarkable attitude for such a devastating incident.

David Sifry explained technorati, a mucho cool site which is experimenting with new ways to show breaking news based on what bloggers are blogging.

So we come back to the question - how will blogging change Journalism? One view is it will commoditize the newsletter business. Gresham's Law again? But Dan and Stuart Hughes both are more optrimisitrc. The consolidation of news outlets which had been occurring is now facing massive decentralization, and the introduction of new voices. Stuart further comments that the BBC is learning that it needs to engage with its audience - Interactive Journalism can bring the viewers back.

Technik Perspective - Virtual Workspace

When the PC first emerged as more than a game machine, the powers-that-be saw it is a shrunken minicomputer, and tried to load on it the apps which drove the mainframe ea - accounting mostly. But what drove it to success were a new class of apps, productivity apps, beginning with the spreadsheet.

This insight should be taken to heart. Each new era of computing is driven by new applications, not by repurposing old apps. That comes later.

If we skip the first 20 years of computing (1945 - 65) as laying the groundwork for what followed, we have had three eras of computing:
* Computers 1.0 was the Mainframe Era from the IBM 360 in 1965 to the final DEC VAX in 1985
* Computers 2.0 was the PC Era from the first 32 bit PCs in 1986 to today, when it seems that hardware has raced too far ahead of software
* Computers 3.0 is now developing and has yet to be cleverly named.

Each era was presaged. The precursor to the PC era was the PC boom & bust cycle from 75 - 85, just as the precursor to Computers 3.0 has been the Internet Mother of All Asset Manias from 1995 to today. Both had blow-out IPOs: Apple went public in 1980 at the unheard of value of $2B, and Netscape did the same in 1995 at $5B - which turns out to be $2B in 1980 dollars. Is Google next? Overall, the amount of investment that went into the mania stage exceeded the returns. It was only after the mania that the winners emerged, and the contours of the new era took shape.

This has profound investment implications, as spotting the winners of the new era early leads to enormous wealth creation - placing PC bets in 1986 when the winners were clearer rather than 1980 at the start of the mania returned a stunning 40x to the clever few who did this.

The question du jour is what is the "spreadsheet" of the 3d computer era? Ray Ozzie is one of the entreprenuers whose track record says his opinion matters. He was the force behind Lotus Notes and is now pushing a peer-to-peer groupware system called Groove. His recent Perspective: A Mosaic of New Opportunities is worth reading in full. He does a great job of explaining why it is NOT an extrapolation of what we have seen in the past 10 years of the Internet. Snippets:

* Just as the first generation of personal computers was mostly about personal productivity, the first generation of the Internet has largely been about centralized Web sites, used for publishers, transactions and e-mail.

* Personal productivity tools will become joint productivity tools designed for online use instead of a paper-only world. A rich cadre of collaborative online writing, media management, presentation and consumption tools will move to the forefront of our daily electronic lives.

* A distinct third layer will emerge between the operating system and productivity layers. Think of it as a "virtual workspace" layer that links together all of your own computers and those operated by people with whom you work.

Taking Collaboration to the Masses

From Above the Crowd by Mark Jones, executive news editor at InfoWorld: a look at Groove vs. Microsoft's InfoPath.

Hiptop Nation

Wonder about the overlap of blogging and cellcams? check this link and wonder no more. info is as banal as most blogs, but that is the point - it is designed for micro-communities not for masses so has little value to most of us.