Google is for Geeks - Microsoft for Nerds [Best of June '08 #4]

Jonas Bolinder — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:32:32 +0000

This week started slowly, but turned out really interesting (June 23-30 2008):

Working at Google vs. Microsoft:

I left [Google] because Microsoft turned out to be the right place for me. [...] I like engineering, but I love the business aspects no less.
[...] the culture at Google values 'coolness' tremendously, and the quality of service not as much.

In other words, Google is for geeks and Microsoft for nerds.
Tags: Google, Microsoft
The next version of Windows, code name "Windows 7", seems to build on the same core architecture as Windows Vista, which is a problem according to Randall Stross of the NY Times, since: "[Windows] has become an obese monolith built on an ancient frame. Adding features, plugging security holes, fixing bugs, fixing the fixes that never worked properly, all while maintaining compatibility with older software and hardware".
Tags: Windows 7
A recent study challenges the Long Tail theory and suggests that the real money is in the head, writes Matt Asay. The study may have some flaws though.
Tags: business
More news on the problems webmasters are facing with the antivirus software AVG 8.0. The pre-scanning of the links from a web search, that the software does, is now even more difficult to distinguish from a real user, writes the Register. I'm still using AVG 7, and it seems to continue to update its database, despite the updating was supposed to end June 25th. The annoying upgrade messages have also stopped.
Tags: web analytics
NoiseRiver, a FriendFeed filtering service reviewed by Louis Gray.
Tags: news filtering, FriendFeed
Top-level domains are finally set free, and will soon (in 2009) be available for registration by anyone that can present a business plan, writes the BBC. However, the cost will be high, probably around $100.000.
Tags: domains
Twitter died June 27th, according to Dave Winer: "So the conversation moves to FriendFeed. True, I am ignoring the flow I have on Twitter. Easy come easy go. The flow there is pointless."
Tags: Twitter
This week's bonus video, a perfect elevator pitch delivered by 15-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky for his startup Teens in Tech.

Tags: teens

Twitter is Cooling Off, but Noise is Heating Up [Best of June '08 #1]

Jonas Bolinder — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:46:07 +0000

Some of the interesting posts this week (June 2-8 2008):

The much hyped messaging/micro-publishing service Twitter is losing in interest among its users, partly due to the frequent and prolonged outages of the service. Dave Winer, for example, writes that Twitter is a ghost town:

[...] the upward momentum is gone, the new idea every 24 hours that so inspired us is a distant memory. Now we're going the other way. When I log onto Twitter these days, it's empty, quiet, a ghost town.

Though a recent announcement from Twitter infused Dave with some hope for the service.
Tags: Twitter
Marshall Kirkpatrick has an interesting article about noise in news, and why it might be a good idea not to filter the flow of information coming at you. For example, a study by Sanda Erdelez shows that "the more total information our minds are exposed to, the more particular items we'll be able to recall in the future." Marshall also refers to a post by Hutch Carpenter, who defines people as "signalists" or "discoverers" based on whether they "filter in" or "filter out" information with a certain content. For example, a signalist would read only content about Apple, whereas a discoverer would read all content except about Apple, for example.
Tags: news filtering
Marshall at ReadWriteWeb listened to my request last week for a comment policy, and wrote a post about how to comment without being spammy. In short: Be transparent about who you are, be super humble, and add value to the discussion. Then it's OK to provide a link to your own business.
Regarding the question of comment ownership, Dave Winer weighs in, and suggests that "I own the collection of comments on my blog, and you own the comments you've placed on my blog and all others," which is in line with my opinion on the subject.
Tags: comments
Facebook released part of their platform code as open source this week, and hardly nobody notices. A reason could be the unusual choice of license, CPAL (Common Public Attribution License), which Mike Gunderloy at the OStatic blog gives a good description of. CPAL is based on the more familiar Mozilla Public License, with a couple of modifications. One being an attribution requirement, which acts as a "poison pill" according to Mike.
Tags: open source
Mike Gunderloy in another post reports on Wikia Search, which promises to be a truly open search engine, with not only the underlying software being open source, but also the search results themselves being open to editing. A paradise for black hat SEOs and spammers as it sounds, but hopefully that could be fought back with a strong community. After all, Wikipedia manages to be fairly spam free, despite the open editing features.
Tags: open source, search
Alex Iskold writes about Zemanta, a "lazy man's" semantic blogging tool that automatically suggests related content – images, articles, videos and links as you type. Fred Wilson currently tries Zemanta, and I decided to try the provided WordPress plugin too. I had some issues with the service updating too frequently, which hangs the UI temporarily and makes the experience frustrating. It would be really nice to be able to disable the automatic updating.
Tags: blogging, Semantic Web

impl.emented» news filtering

Google is for Geeks - Microsoft for Nerds [Best of June '08 #4]

Twitter is Cooling Off, but Noise is Heating Up [Best of June '08 #1]