Semantic search engine Hakia has just released a new social networking feature, called Meet Others (MO). The basic idea is to "meet others" who asked the same query. This is something I've never seen in a search engine before - and actually I'm not convinced that social networking is a good fit with search. But let's take a look at how this works, using an example provided to us by Hakia:
1. You ask a query and then receive your search results:
2. You will see an icon in the top-right of search results that says "Meet Others who asked the same query". If you click on the button, you enter into a room (if the room exists) of people who have a) asked the same or similar query; and b) decided to post a message to the room.
The very controversial service PayPerPost, which pays bloggers small sums for writing about the products of advertisers, will change its name tomorrow to Izea. Izea will be the parent entity of a wide variety of services the company provides, from PayPerPost to various other projects that I've never been able to hold my nose long enough to look at closely. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.net reported first on the change. Rowse says it's a good move as the company's varied services are used by some bloggers who love the PPP brand (like the charming Chad W. Smith in the video below) and others who hate it.
PayPerPost is a venture funded Search Engine Optimization scam that threatens to torpedo the reputation of the already widely questioned blogosphere. It may also be a perfectly fair way for small time bloggers to make a living, depending on who you ask. You won't see a lot of moms or retirees among the more financially comfortable A-list blogger set, though those bloggers making substantial sums of money from blogging have had to work almost as hard as a mom to get where they have.
None of us are pure and there are few firm lines established regarding what is and is not acceptable when you're trying to make money blogging (I called a paid review service brilliant just last post) - but disclosure of payment is one of the most basic requirements for paid blogging to be ok. Even with disclosure, PPP is a sketchy operation; the disclosure story at PPP has always been a little murky. The company instituted a requirement of some on-site disclosure at the end of last year, but even some major brands patronizing PayPerPost require "no in-post disclosure."
Just a quick note so that the next time you see the name Izea, you know who you're dealing with.
The consumer product review site SharedReviews.com will announce tomorrow that it has taken an undisclosed sum of investment from parties in the domain buying industry. Those investors include Frank Schilling, one of the world's most successful domain buyers, Seattle based early-stage VCs Monster Venture Partners and the big domainers at Internet Real Estate Group.
Content from SharedReviews will subsequently be leveraged to populate a vast swath of parked domains. Genericly named domains, misspelled domains, random domains that show up in search results - now they'll have real live (syndicated) content on them, in addition to contextual advertising. Though it's easy to look with suspicion on anything that big domainers do, this might not be so bad for the rest of us.
JumpBox is a virtual appliance platform that simplifies the deployment of server software on local machines. By utilizing virtual machines and cleverly packaging an operating system, web server, database, application, and any necessary additional libraries or components into a single appliance, JumpBox has made the process of deploying server software exceptionally simple. Instead of spending hours setting up complex programs like Trac, JumpBox deployment slims the process down to a couple of minutes.
JumpBox currently offers virtual appliances for Joomla, Drupal, SugarCRM, vTiger CRM, MediaWiki, TWiki, DokuWiki, PunBB, Trac/Subversion and Wordpress. A number of new appliances are planned for beta testing in the next few weeks, including TikiWiki and Bugzilla.
JumpBox, which launched on July 19 of this year, has attracted over 200 customers that pay for premium services, like technical support, and value added features such as a built in backup and restore mechanism. They currently support virtualization software from XEN, VMWare, and Parallels. Tomorrow they will be announcing a partnership with Microsoft to make JumpBox appliances compatible with Microsoft's Virtual PC and Virtual Server software. Next week, they plan to announce a partnership with Virtual Iron.
Digg's Jay Adelson has an interview in today's London Guardian that includes a few interesting nuggets concerning the future of the site. Yet more social features are coming and further integration of Digg functionality into other sites around the web is likely but complicated.
Adelson told the Guardian that in addition to the forthcoming Images section of Digg, the increased engagement that's come from enhancing user profiles has also created the conditions that will allow for recommendations and alerts to be offered. Recommendations and alerts would be a huge value ad for this Digg user.
It's hard to talk about Digg without at least wondering about numbers.
Google's stock price broke $700 for the first time today, reaching as high as $704.79 in morning trading. That means it has taken Google under a month to go from $600 per share to a staggering $700 share price.
Since mid-September Google has added 30% to its stock price and an additional $53 billion to its market capitalization -- or about one and a quarter Yahoo!s. Google's market cap is hovering in the $220 billion range, this morning, and the stock has gained 723% since its IPO in August 2004. Amazingly, despite its phenomenal growth over the past few months, Google has actually been outperformed by a number of other tech stocks this year, including Apple, Amazon, Research in Motion, and Baidu.
Dot-com era tech business magazine "The Industry Standard" will be making a triumphant return in the form of a blog and community site in December, reports Reuters. Founded in San Francisco in 1998, the weekly tech magazine touted itself as the "the newsmagazine of the Internet Economy," until its own bubble burst in 2001 and it was shut down by publisher, IDG.
Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the magazine might be making a comeback, and yesterday IDG CEO Bob Carrigan confirmed the "experimental" relaunch slated for December. "We're going to have fun with it - it's an experiment," he said at the Future of Business Media conference in New York.
The new Industry Standard will be located at the magazine's old website, www.thestandard.com, and will include blog and editorial content, as well as contributions from the reader community. Carrigan noted that the site had already sold out its ad inventory for a substantial length of time, according to Reuters. Let the talk of the new bubble commence: doomsayers, start your engines!
A few weeks ago, Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, published a long technical paper on his blog about
Amazon's highly available storage system called Dynamo. The paper itself is quite complex and technical and includes a description of the architecture,
algorithms and tests that Amazon has been doing with the system.
Yet, even from a casual glance, it is clear that Amazon's work is very important. Since early last year, the e-commerce giant has been making forays into becoming a Web OS company. Amazon has been methodically exposing pieces of its own infrastructure as commodity web services, and in the process confusing Wall Street analysts and making thousands of startups quite happy.
Techcrunch has sniffed out details on Google's new social network project, named OpenSocial (set to go live Thur US). OpenSocial is not a social network itself, rather it is a set of three common APIs that allow developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:
These are 3 fairly generic API calls - specialized data will remain the responsibility of the "hosts", which currently include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. Developers already signed up include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide - who you will recognize as being 'power developers' on Facebook.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and a number of other organizations will hold a press conference tomorrow calling for the creation of a national "Do-Not-Track" list, according to a report today in AdvertisingAge. While on face the creation of a method of opting-out of browser history and other tracking seems reasonable, as Steve Rubel points out - this is just the first shot in the coming Behavioral Tracking Wars.
Railing against cookies is back in style. The Whois system of publicly available records about who owns any particular website is under attack for privacy reasons.
In the vast richness that is the open web, personalization and recommendation are two of the most powerful areas of opportunity for all of us - advertisers included but also every user of the web. Having the opportunity to opt-out is good, especially on a case-by-case basis, but the Behavior Tracking Wars should not drive us into an online Dark Ages any more than it should bring about a Minority Report dystopia of ubiquitous tracking.
While vendors serving those of us who love information are moving to respect our desire to have control over our own aggregate data, this blogger fears that moves like this latest by the EFF run the risk of forcing the software vendors we interact with to let our data run down the drain unused. If you don't want vendors to control your data that makes perfect sense, but insisting that it not even be captured in the first place does not.
