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Saturday, July 30, 2005
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 Saturday, July 30, 2005
started 7/30/2005; 5:28:20 PM - last post 8/3/2005; 1:20:07 PM
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Doc Searls - Saturday, July 30, 2005 
7/30/2005; 9:28:20 PM (reads: 5582, responses: 3)
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Tripmark 
| | How do you bookmark a trip, to come back later? |
| | That's what I'd like to recommend to Dave, for Cooperstown and its environs. The place is spectacular in the Fall, crowded and hot at Hall of Fame time, which is now. |
| | One of those places I've always wanted to revisit. |
Freshness
| | I'm worried that the "buzz" signal might get tuned too far in the wrong direction. It would be tempting to say that the fastest is the best... which seems to be what Doc is implying. |
| | We need to have reasonable speed of communication. It seems obvious to me that a blog-only search engine should be able to keep the response time down to a day or two, but it needs to do it for everyone, regardless of rank. I feel it's very important to make sure that everyone gets to participate in the conversation. When you use a search engine, you're looking for quality, and not merely the first post. (ala Slashdot) |
| | I'm not implyling that fastest is best — except at being fastest. If you're searching the Live Web, the part that is conversational and human and not static and not a set of "sites" that are "constructed" but instead is a vast pile of live journals, "buzz uptake" or speed to index matters. A lot. |
| | It's also the aspect of syndicated feed search that is most different from what Google and Yahoo do. |
| | It's important to remember that what the syndisphere — the World Live Web, or whatever else we want to call it — is very different in kind from the static Web of "sites" that all the mainstream engines have been searching since Lycos was a project at CMU and Infoseek charged on a per-search basis. We have journals here. We may not be live, exactly, but we're a lot closer to live than real estate projects that are "designed" and "constructed." |
| | RSS search is still new, and still innovating and adapting all over the place, as what they search keeps changing too. As Mary Hodder is showing us, these engines are all doing different things, in different ways. The results, across the bunch of them, are far more varied (and for my money, interesting) than the results across Google, Yahoo and MSN. |
| | They differ most from the traditional search engines in one clear way: freshness. Currency. Live-ness. They excel in their ability to help users participate in conversations and to drive knowledge forward. For that, buzz uptake or time to index may be their most important distinction. It's just as important to note, however, that this is still one among many distinctions, owing to the fact that what they search has to do with people and time, and not just sites and subjects (though they're about that too). |
| | And let's not forget that new technologies, practices, standards, topics and concerns keep coming along too. Tags, for example. Outlining. Microformats. Attention. Identity. Aggregation. Integration with other technologies, such as browsing and email. Plug-ins. The list goes on. All that stuff gets followed (or led) by the RSS-activated engines as well. |
| | That's another reason I don't look forward to the big traditional engines either buying up the RSS engines, or coming out with competing services. Independent developers are at the base of any healthy software ecosystem. The Live Web is still in its paleozoic. Let's let it grow naturally. |
Scary
The going gets uglier
High Noon on the Commons
| | The untold backstory is that Prof. Larry Lessig (the developer of the Creative Commons thing) wrote to me complaining about my jumping to conclusions and failing to grasp, uh, well, anything! |
| | He challenged me to a duel. Actually a debate, but in the modern era, it¹s the same thing. He made it clear that he wants a verbal, not written debate. I considered that an off-handed compliment. But I¹m not a complete slouch verbally — just slower. Some years back Lessig suggested putting together one of those crossfire type TV shows where the two of us ream guests from our two different perspectives. We¹ve worked togehter in various venues. I¹m from Berkeley and am a fiscal conservative-libertarian while he¹s from Stanford and is an old-time progressive. What could be more entertaining! |
| | So I'm thinking that maybe we should produce this debate for TV and podcasts. my lawyer friends tell me that I¹m likely to have my ass handed to me unless I beef up my weak arguments. Meanwhile, Lessig went on vacation. |
| | By the way, John has been pro-blog for some time. |
Good company
Quote du jour
| | Tom McMahon: I found that Self-Referential Quid Pro Quo stuff ungodly boring and nauseating. |
| | About following A-list bloggers. |
Obedience
Ride on
Coincidence?
| | I was born yesterday, fifty-eight years ago. The Governator was born one day later, today. In Austria. Basically, only a few hours later. |
| | And we're so similar. It's amazing. |
discuss
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Julian Bond - Re Freshness
7/31/2005; 1:07:20 PM (reads: 796, responses: 1)
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I'm curious about Google's approach to freshness. Consider this:-
- As Blogger is part of Google they have access to every update to every blogger blog as it happens.
- Any Blog with Adsense adverts on it, gives them knowledge of new web pages containing ads very quickly. The first time somebody (including the author) requests that page, Google knows it hasn't been indexed.
- Any Feed with Google Ads in it, does the same.
- Google Sitemap provides a mechanism to ping Google when new pages appear.
- Google could consume feeds from the Ping services like weblogs.com in the same way that Technorati and the others do.
So I have to assume that Google is aware of the problem, and it has tools to make their index fresher. So maybe the big question is "why don't they".
Where it gets interesting is in the area of news and tracking "Attention" or "Buzz". del.icio.us/popular in particular is a totally different approach. And this is in start contrast with googlenews, yahoonews and MSN News which seem to be largely just a tracker for Reuters and AP!
discuss
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Doc Searls - Re: Re Freshness
8/1/2005; 2:05:53 AM (reads: 857, responses: 0)
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I've been told by many sources that Google has had the means to do RSS search for a long time, and (for whatever reason) they have simply chosen not to deploy it.
Yet.
There were rumors that they would come out with RSS search in June, but it didn't happen.
Could be they don't want to be a bad guy and flatten the pioneers in the market. This isn't likewhen they were the underdog to Hotbot and Yahoo and Altavista. They're Gozilla now. The RSS engines are all Bambies. It would be bad form for them to smash 'em all with one foot.
If they can. Which is another question.
The whole category is changing very fast. Most of the innovation is coming from the independent developers. Maybe it's better to watch and wait. Let the pioneers blaze the trails.
Google is a big company, but it's also frying a LOT of fish, all at once. They can't do everything. And when they do it, they clearly want to do it well.
In that way, they're kind lf like Apple and Pixar. A friend who works for Apple told me Steve Jobs doesn't do anything unless he's sure it will be a hit. None of this throwing 50,000 SKUs at a marketplace, like Sony does, to see what sticks. Better to take extreme care and only put out goods that people are sure to want. I suspect Google is the same way.
That doesn't explain why they've let Blogger fall behind, but then, all rules need exceptions, no?
discuss
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Dave Polaschek - Re: Tripmark
8/3/2005; 5:20:07 PM (reads: 657, responses: 0)
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