A new wrinkle in the search landscape emerged this morning with the announcement that Ask.com is now offering Compete traffic stats inline for the sites on results pages. (Disclosure: Compete is an RWW advertiser.) This move itself may not shake up search but it does beg the question, how much room for meaningful innovation is there in search and to what degree is Google vulnerable in the market it so dominates?
I'm listening now to a telephone press conference with top Microsoft execs about the company's new strategy shift towards Data Portability and Interoperability for their high volume products like Windows and Office. Ray Ozzie says it is opening up the same APIs that internal developers use out into the public at large. Has Google made announcements like this? Believe it or not, Microsoft may be putting a stake in the ground that's ahead of Google on openness and other important directions for the future. Details from the call dampened my enthusiasm a bit but the announcement is notable none the less.
Google today announced a pilot program (read: closed beta) of their health records application. The program will be conducted at Cleveland Clinic hospital in Cleveland, Ohio and will include under 10,000 patients. The pilot program will run six to eight weeks with the eventual goal to roll the program out to a broader user base if the test is a success. While there are certainly upsides to having medical records stored in a single, patient-accessible location, there are also serious privacy concerns.
Cloudo, a Swedish-based based startup, is now inviting developers to sign up for the alpha of their Internet Operating System. The Cloudo IOS, previously called Xindesk, is a virtual computer on the web. Cloudo's offering closely resembles a PC-like experience, but also has some unique features which could make it stand out from the crowd, most notably, an automatic sync which copies files from your desktop to the web OS with no action required by the user.
By Nitin Karandikar Much has been written recently about the concepts, approaches and applications of the Semantic Web. But there's something missing. In terms of understanding, finding and displaying content, there is no doubt that the Semantic Web is slowly becoming real (e.g. there were some great demos at a recent SDForum meet ). However, there is a gap emerging with Content Authoring tools, which have not yet made this paradigm shift.
Late last night Marshall Kirkpatrick published an epic post entitled Fail: Social News on World Events, Like Cuba. It is a great analysis of how web 2.0 news services covered a big mainstream news story. And the comments to the post are just as interesting. We actually got some kickback, with many commenters saying that the Castro news wasn't important enough for social news sites to cover in depth. That line of thought was started by the first commenter, Shannon Clark. So well done Shannon, for your efforts you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Here is Shannon's full comment:
After nearly a year in closed beta, Google is expected to announce tonight that its AdSense for Video program is now open to publishers. When the program's pilot was announced last May, AdSense for Video was intended to serve up video-in-video ads. Today the video part is gone, replaced by CPM banners and CPC text overlays.
Launch participant Brightcove said in a release tonight that "Publishers and content providers can control which videos get which ads and when the ads play in each video." Am I the only one that hates those damned pop up text overlay ads that show up on other services' videos?
On their blog today, web site monitoring service Pingdom took a look at web hosting services ten years ago and compared them to today's hosting services to see what has changed. The answer -- prices have gone down while included storage space and bandwidth have increased. Or, in other words, hosting hasn't changed much, but it has become a commodity service. Did many hosts miss a golden opportunity?
The REAL ID Act of 2005 is said by some to pave the way for a United States National ID Card and has come under heavy criticism from a wide range of people in the US. Some recent developments indicate that a National ID card could be tied to the federated authentication standard called OpenID.
At the most basic level, this would mean that you could sign in with your National ID card to all the websites where today you can login with a Yahoo! or AIM or other OpenID. Hmmm...
Recently, the International Olympic Committee announced that they would allow athletes and other accredited persons to blog at the Olympics in August. The committee decided that this would be allowed, since blogs are a form of personal expression, and not a form of journalism. That's great, except for one small problem...with the recent release of the official guidelines, bloggers are finding some very strict rules in place. Specifically, the rules prohibit the posting of still pictures, sound, or moving images.
