Posts from October 2006

Google's moves into application bundles and collaboration software are setting it up for a bigger enterprise play, taking on Microsoft in an area that consistently feeds their R&D. Maybe you read about the JotSpot acquisition this morning on the Google enterprise blog. We look forward to putting those wikis to work. Google currently searches the enterprise through its search appliance, a brightly colored box you place in your rack and configure to crawl behind the firewall. Just one application on this box seems like a waste of space and could perhaps open up some more applications for small to...

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The ability to save a URL has been around since Mosaic 0.2 but is currently experiencing a transformation as we learn more about the pages and content behind the pointers and share our findings with others through social networks. Hotlists, bookmarks, and favorites are changing and this month's SF Tech Sessions next Monday will take a look at a few new companies changing the way we think about sharing bookmarks. Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid The inspiration for this month's SF Tech Sessions came out of a conversation with Jeff Weiner and Joshua Schachter of Yahoo! earlier this...

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Google Alerts now supports blog search content. If you subscribe to a Google News alert for your brand or topic of interest you can now receive the same style alerts for content in the Google Blog Search index. Google Alerts tracks news, blogs, Usenet groups, and Google Groups discussions using the same search syntax found on their respective website. The new blog search e-mail notification will be an easy extension of vertical search for existing users. Advanced users can setup an advanced search, or choose to receive general updates via web feeds and critical updates via e-mail. I expect Google...

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I like small, focused events especially in the early days of an industry. Om and I organized the Widgets Live! conference to bring together the major players creating widgets, gadgets, and modules and the major endpoints of deployment. Many decisions were made along the way, and I'll share just a few in this post. When? We knew lots of people from around the web industry would be in San Francisco for O'Reilly Media's Web 2.0 conference November 7-9. Scheduling the widgets conference adjacent to the Web 2.0 conference creates a convenient opportunity for a few people to extend their visit...

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I've been busy over the past few weeks organizing the Widgets Live! conference. I've talked to lots of people interested in various aspects of the conference industry, so I'll summarize a few logistics in this post. Venue costs Event venues typically charge a room rental fee combined with a minimum catering expense. All prices quoted are usually a "list price" and negotiable depending on factors such as the length of the conference, number of rooms booked at the hotel, your total catering spend, and your repeat business if you host multiple conferences a year. Many venues will waive the room...

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Google has added new features to its tools for webmasters, allowing us to request Google index our site faster and more thoroughly than before. Crank it up! Control Googlebot crawl rate You can now control how frequently Googlebot crawls your site over the next 90 days. Webmasters can ask Googlebot to slow down or speed up for the next 90 days. Your choice may affect your total bandwidth usage but the tradeoff is possibly more frequent visits from Google's discovery and indexing tools. Enhanced image search Webmasters can now opt-in to Google enhanced image search. If you opt-in Google may...

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When I lived in L.A. it seemed like everyone wanted to be a movie star. The Starbucks barista waiting to be discovered as he pronounced "Frappuccino," friends scheming to be placed on a reality show and win a trip to a tropical island, and the many writers trying to get their latest script into the hands of Steven Spielberg. The recent boom in online video and its associated capture hardware has created a new class of stars. The next American Idol might submit a cover song to YouTube and video of a child's first steps are uploading to the Web...

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Online audio is definitely on an upswing, fueled by the iPod revolution, improved online playback, and broadband penetration. Audio search is keeping up with demand for new content, thanks in part to national security spending in the Cold War and beyond. In this post I will outline the current state of audio search, and how machines make sense of spoken word, progressing from easy to difficult. First, let's define the space. I'm interested how a search engine might index content with non-professionally produced metadata. The President's weekly radio address contains a full transcript. Music catalogs are available for purchase from...

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A picture is worth a thousand words, especially to search engines trying to match a brief search query to a set of appropriate visual results. How can a web search engine collect enough data about a particular image to provide a user with relevant results? In this post I will outline image search concepts, the current state of the art, and outline some of the challenges with still image search. Image on your website You might recognize the depiction above as Yoda, a popular character the Star Wars movie series. More specifically this is a picture of a Yoda statue...

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The Bluetooth SIG announced wireless transfer of contact, calendar, and notes information via what it's calling TransSend. It implements the OBEX standard you may have used to "beam" someone your contact information in the past. You can send vCard, vCal, vNote, plain text, or image files from a PC to supporting handsets. An ActiveX plugin for Internet Explorer lets users send content from a web page to their mobile phone. You can send driving directions, your contact info, or event data. Sounds cool, but it looks like the plugin is relying on proprietary markup for recognition instead of using...

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