Posts from March 2004

Michael Kanellos of News.com profiles Language Weaver and MetaCarta, two search companies funded by CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel. Language Weaver provides functional translations of Internet articles or video clips on the fly. MetaCarta allows you to determine geographical location based on text descriptions. "There are 44 cities and towns called Paris and 69 called Al-Hamra around the world. Most places on the globe also have more than one name, which further complicates searches, he added. Filtering out irrelevant results remains a huge task."...

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Tonight was the Corporate Blogger's Dinner. The attendees, starting to my right: Don Park Jay Fienberg Rauno Saarinen John Dowdell Russell Beattie Phil Stanhope Venture Frogs had a strong wireless Internet signal. The conversation did not focus on corporations or weblogging but instead flowed, as it should, from one topic to the next. I learned that Microsoft showed off some new mobile weblogging software today at Mobile DevCon. Rodney Brooks has a robot summer camp for kids. We also discussed the weblog echo chamber, what do readers expect, do we care about those expectations, and what are the next big...

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Saul Hansell writes about phishing scams in today's New York Times. Brightmail of San Francisco, which filters e-mail for spam, identified 2.3 billion phishing messages in February, 4 percent of the e-mail it processed, compared with only 1 percent of its messages as recently as September. Phishing got its name a decade ago when America Online charged users by the hour. Teenagers sent e-mail and instant messages pretending to be AOL customer service agents in order to fish, or phish, for account identification and passwords they could use to stay online at someone else's expense. After AOL switched to a...

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This is my 500th blog entry. Exciting that I now have a history of more than 500 posts over the last 4 years....

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The European Commission has concluded, after a five-year investigation, that Microsoft Corporation broke European Union competition law by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems onto the markets for work group server operating systems and for media players. Fine of € 497.2 million. Jupiter Research has a first take on the decision. Microsoft must provide a version of Windows XP without Windows Media Player. They must also provide interface documentation for server interfaces. What does this mean for Longhorn? Pushed back another year?...

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Tomorrow night, Wednesday, at 7 P.M. is the Corporate Blogger's Dinner at Venture Frogs in San Francisco. I view corporate blogging as a marketing tool to a user base in search of something more trustworthy than a PR spin. Mark Cuban's blog is corporate blogging. Why? It makes you more interested in the Mavericks. You fee involved, part of the action. Even if you have never been to a NBA game. How do you put a face and a name to a product people love or will grow to love? Weblogs help establish a community around your product(s) or company...

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William Hung (aka Hong Kong Ricky Martin), of American Idol fame, is now available in the iTunes Music Store. Currently the #5 album....

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Eric Schimdt talked about Google's social networking service, Orkut, at PC Forum today. News.com covers the speech. He noted that most products at Google stay in beta for about a year. Google hopes to help provide better searches for people through social networking software. "We believe that these social networks will have a tremendous amount of information." Three engineers are currently working on the service....

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Ben and Mena Trott of Six Apart will give a presentation to the Silicon Valley WebGuild on Wednesday, April 14 at 7 PM. Free for members or $5 for non-members....

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Technorati is sporting a new look this morning. Dave Sifry mentions the new features of Technorati in his weblog. Three free email or RSS watchlists for members. The developer tab is nice. "Site reliability and faster response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve the user experience." Good. I want to build some nice things using the API, if only the backend was more reliable. It would nice to mention working hard to improve developer experience as well, since it will ultimately lead to new users....

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