Niall Kennedy's home on the web
Another day, another startup opportunity. Mark Fletcher has left Ask and is undoubtedly working on his next startup. Mark’s company, Bloglines, was acquired by Ask 16 months ago in February 2005.
Officially Mark is leaving to “spend time with family.” In reality he is working on his next startup, assisting entrepreneurs in the valley, and perhaps investing some angel money as well.
The Wall Street Journal reports Google will release a web-based spreadsheet application tomorrow on a limited test basis. Combined with Writely and Google Base it gives Google a mini office suite in what might be compared to Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and Access offerings.
Is there room for an online PowerPoint (Google Pages + S5 perhaps) to complete the suite?
A multi-billion dollar TV almost didn’t happen. A television producer was eventually able to find one person who understood his vision to reinvent television and was persistent enough with his idea to help an old industry grasp a new concept.
British producer Mark Burnett had an idea for a new reality TV show but needed support from network gatekeepers to make his vision a reality. In the late 90s Burnett went all over Hollywood pitching the show to whoever would listen, including the cable networks. No one was interested and the idea of reality television had not taken off.
Mark Burnett’s business manager doesn’t give up and placed a call to the executive assistant of Ghen Maynard, a lower ranked executive at CBS who wants out of his cubicle. Ghen happened to major in social psychology at Harvard and understands the appeal of reality TV to the masses. He gets excited about Burnett’s idea and pitches it to CEO Les Moonves. Moonves supposedly calls the “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”
After a little more persistence Les Moonves reconsiders. Survivor is born, and makes CBS millions of dollars and reinvents the reality TV industry.
Story based on Bill Carter’s book, Desperate Networks.
Mugshot is an open-source social networking application and developer platform created by Red Hat. The project features desktop applications for Windows and Linux (OS X is partially supported) and server software if you would like to build your own system nodes.
Mugshot features link sharing and collaboration (a link swarm), and music and TV tracking, sharing, and recommendations among other things. My afternoon’s a bit too busy to dig into the platform, but if you’re interested in open social networking features built on top of XMPP, Firefox, and GNOME check out the Mugshot developer wiki for more information.
Ask.com unveiled its blogs and feeds search offering tonight using index data captured from Bloglines subscriptions. Users can search for feeds (good for subscription suggestions) or individual posts sorted by relevance, recency, or popularity and scoped anywhere from the last hour to the first time a user added the feed to Bloglines. The new offering is most similar to Yahoo’s feed search based on the My Yahoo! feed index.
Ask’s relevance search is based on the ExpertRank algorithm and a few other pieces of proprietary secret sauce. Most recent is a reverse chronological sort for the search term. Popularity search is most likely based on the number of inbound links but could also apply special weightings for URLs bookmarked, added to an Ask user’s saved history, or Bloglines subscribers.
Binoculars appear below each search result, displaying the current content of the entire feed on hover. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of any search result item, or subscribe to the search itself (although Ask.com does not markup the page using a link alternate). You can also post to social bookmarking sites such as Digg and del.icio.us directly from the search result view.
Overall I like the Ask.com blog search engine and its integration with other services such as feed aggregators and social bookmarking sites. It’s lacking an easy way to specify a URL and I imagine most bloggers will continue to track links to their blogs using Technorati and other search engines.
Mark Fletcher told a few media sources last spring to expect “world-class blog search” from Ask in summer 2005. A year later and it’s here.
You can now search for contacts, events, and reviews on Technorati using microformats search. The new feature exposes content from the Technorati index containing special HTML markup within a page or post.
Sites such as Upcoming.org and Yahoo! UK Movie Reviews currently markup their content using microformats out of general interest in distributed structured markup but new search engines such as Technorati’s beta search product might send enough traffic to publishers to cause a shift in publishing behavior and templates. Many individual publishers will not notice the change as blog platform providers such as Six Apart’s Vox will collect data in special input fields for publication as hReview or other specialized markup.
Technorati’s indexing of distributed structured data described by microformats available on any web page is a stark contrast to the Google Base model requiring publishers to submit data in Google’s format to a Google uploader. Google drives a lot more traffic than smaller sites such as Technorati, and publishers are willing to take a few extra steps for preferential treatment in the Google index. Technorati could introduce preferential treatment of its microformats in its search result pages, possibly driving a higher proportion of site traffic to microformat publishers.
I immediately see the potential for Technorati to be overwhelmed with spam and run into some of the same problems as Google Base. Contacts for every camgirl! Mesothelioma consultations during specific hours at Joe’s Law Firm. Glowing reviews of the popular pill of the month.
Overall I see Technorati’s microformats search as a necessary step towards more widespread adoption of microformats. The next time publishers wonder who is listening when they add special markup to a page Technorati and other proponents of microformats can drop a link to the Technorati kitchen and gather feedback for the next version of the search results page.
Update June 1: Kevin Marks announces microformats is a seperate index on the Technorati backend, including non-blog sources such as event listings and contact databases.
Wharton professors Sarah Kaplan and Rebecca Henderson recently published a paper in Organizational Science about big company inertia when dealing with new industries and changing times. If you are a managerial econ geek you’ll enjoy the full PDF of the paper, or you can check out the summary in Knowledge@Wharton.
One example of the inability to change was Kodak’s entry into the digital photography business. Chemical processing was a lucrative business and making the company a lot of money. The company staffed its new digital imaging division with employees more familiar with this world of chemical processing than image sensors and processing. The cognitive and collective frames present in the management of the chemical business persisted, and the company struggled to compete in the digital market with management practices and incentive systems tied to an old business.
Yes, the article makes me think of Microsoft and its Windows Live initiative. Hopefully Microsoft management reads papers like these and learns from the past and mistakes of others.
FeedShow is an online RSS aggregator from France hoping to create a business around splitting advertising money with feed publishers. A publisher may opt-in to the advertising system and display up to two contextual advertisements alongside their feed. FeedShow receives a 50% split of the advertising revenues from publishers participating in the program.
FeedShow created a new RSS namespace allowing feed publishers to define their ad provider, account number, and additional provider data such as an AdSense channel.
While ads alongside e-mail created new businesses and accounts for a large percentage of private e-mail usage today, feed publishers seem not too happy about an advertisement displayed in their readers’ chosen application.
I remember chatting with Lawrence Lessig last year about feeds displayed in ad-supported readers. I expected the issue to be the big fair-use debate of the blogosphere in 2005, but I think this year there may be enough new online aggregators of various business models for publishers to start to take notice.
Over 50 people will be at tonight’s blogger dinner at Henry’s Hunan in downtown San Francisco. If you are in the San Francisco Bay area you should come too.
Henry’s Hunan is located at 110 Natoma Street, about 2 blocks from the Montgomery BART and Muni rail station.
AdSense has a new API, allowing users to create and manage AdSense accounts programmatically using SOAP.
Sounds ideal for all the spam bots creating new scraper pages for asbestos and cancer news. If your bot creates a new bot account and earns over $100, you get $100 too!
Yes, there are more serious uses such as a reputable blog provider creating an AdSense ID for its members, put I just see the piles of web spam getting worse.