News.com announces Trackback and Pingback support

News.com officially announced support for TrackBank and Pingback links. Search engine optimizers are already excited by the prospect of “anyone linking to a CNET News.com story who sends the proper notification will get a link back in return” from the PageRank 8 site.

CNET is also referencing TrackBack and PingBack URLs as link relations in the page header. I like the TrackBack button for readers CNET uses for readers to look at other related sources.

I need to do some more reading on Pingback, still not sure what differentiates it from TrackBack.

Live search comparison

Tonight I was thinking about the importance of the number of indexed weblogs when choosing a search service. PubSub claims to track 6.6 million sources, Technorati claims to track 4.7 million weblogs, and Feedster claims to track 1.1 million feeds. What can the target audience of these services do with this information? I decided to do some comparative research from the point of view of a marketing department tracking the buzz around their new advertising campaign.

Kevin Kringle is a digital word-of-mouth marketing campaign created by Best Buy and SMG Reverb. The marketing campaign is officially under a month old so it should be a good proving ground for live searches. The search phrase is “Kevin Kringle” in all cases.

Google
22,500 results
Last mention 5 days ago
Yahoo!
10,300 results
Feedster
21 results
Last mention 3 days ago
Technorati
8 results
Last mention 5 days ago
Bloglines
2 results
Last mention 11 days ago

Still waiting on results from PubSub. Feedster’s results page shows 100 results even though there are only 21. Feedster phrase search did not display correctly on my results pages.

The big search engines (Google, Yahoo!) performed better than I thought they would although you cannot yet subscribe to a search from a big search engine. Despite errors presenting the data, Feedster appeared to have the most results and most recently updated listings. Technorati and Feedster could both do a better job with on-page promotions of persistent search capabilities.

Bill Joy on the future of search

I just finished watching The Charlie Rose Show from Wednesday, November 16. John Doerr, Bill Joy, and Jeff Taylor participated in a panel discussion at a TechNet summit at Google HQ.

Below is my attempt to transcribe the first question by Charlie Rose and the second part of Bill Joy’s response.

Charlie Rose: What’s going to transform the Internet the most in the next 10 years?

Bill Joy: We go out to this sea of information and in some sense we go fishing. Google is the best fishing rod. But in fact our lives are overwhelmed with information that’s coming at us and things that we have to deal with. It largely comes to us through the other major aspect to the Internet, which is e-mail, in a very disorganized way and we hunger for something that will make some sense out of that chaos that will look at all the things that are happening in the world and filter and order them in a way that is personalized to us. And that I think will be the next great revolution.

Rose: Personalization or?

Bill Joy: Something that takes not an index of the dead information on the Web, but the live information — the things as they’re occurring, as they’re relevant to us. So it’s real-time information, not just dead things, and it’s personal to us, not for everybody, so it’s got two aspects that make it different than what a search engine does, or the Web as we know it. And then presents it and sanitizes it and organizes it in a way that makes it sensible to our lives rather than getting all these e-mails that we have to deal with, it structures it in some way relevant to what’s going on.

Sounds like what Technorati, Feedster, and My Yahoo! are up to. Good to see the big technology players getting it as well.

The Canvas turns off all wall outlets

The Canvas is a café and gallery located on the edge of Golden Gate Park in the Inner Sunset district of San Francisco. It is a nice, bright space with its own parking lot, good food, and interesting people. They also have free wireless Internet access and you will notice many laptops alongside food and drink.

On a sunny weekend The Canvas can be crowded, and in the past The Canvas turned off their wireless Internet access to encourage turnover during their peak times. This weekend The Canvas decided to turn off all wall outlets, in what I assume is an attempt to increase turnover.

My PowerBook can last about 2.5 hours while connected to wireless Internet, beyond the stated ideal turnover stated by the café owners. Some other patrons I spoke with have old laptops with zero to no battery life and rely on the electrical outlets to get out and study for their medical exams (UCSF is close by).

if the electrical outlets were turned on I estimate there would have been about 8 laptops drawing power at one time. I am unsure of the associated electricity cost, but lack of electricity prevented me from buying another drink and debugging a project I was working on.

Is electricity plus free wireless Internet too much to ask from an establishment? The Canvas was even featured in The New York Times for encouraging community through free wireless access. I might have to rethink my café when I need to get some work done.

Russell Beattie consulting Yahoo!

Russell Beattie will join Yahoo! on Monday as a consultant in corporate development and strategy. Congratulations, you held out and waited for something good to happen, and did a lot of thinking about what works best in your future.

I commute from San Francisco to San Mateo every day, a bit short of Sunnyvale or I’d be up for a carpool. Yahoo! needs to compete with Google and get their own magic bus.

My first thoughts? Russell needs a gadget budget so he can play with new phones, services, and operating systems.

Adam Bosworth’s ISCOC talk

Adam Bosworth gave a keynote presentation at the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing in New York yesterday. Lots of good content covering programming languages, information overload, the need for simple technologies to warm people up to a bigger idea, and how the experts will still create the complex technologies while the simple methods coexist. “You want to see the future. Don’t look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload.

On the difference between RSS 1.0 and 2.0:

There was an abortive attempt to impose a rich abstract analytic formality on this community under the aegis of RDF and RSS 1.0. It failed. It failed because it was really too abstract, too formal, and altogether too hard to be useful to the shock troops just trying to get the job done. Instead RSS 2.0 and Atom have prevailed and are used these days to put together talk shows and play lists (podcasting) photo albums (Flickr), schedules for events, lists of interesting content, news, shopping specials, and so on. There is a killer app for it, Blogreaders/RSS Viewers. Anyone can play. It is becoming the easy sloppy lingua franca by which information flows over the web. As it flows, it is filtered, aggregated, extended, and even converted, like water flowing from streams to rivers down to great estuaries. It is something one can get directly using a URL over HTTP. It takes one line of code in most languages to fetch it. It is a world that Google and Yahoo are happily adjusting to, as media centric, as malleable, as flexible and chaotic, and as simple and consumer-focused as they are.

On the weblog reputation ecosystem:

The web becomes something like a giant room in which people comment on other people’s thought via posts in their own Web Logs. In so doing they put their reputation on the line. These are hardly cheap and anonymous posts. They take up real estate in a place that is associated with your own point of view and reputation. And thus the comments tend to be measured, thoughtful, and judicious. Furthermore if they are not, either you can decide that it is OK or you can opt out. It is like dueling editorials in a pair of news papers.

Apologies to Technorati

This morning when I checked my e-mail I found a note from Liz Westover sent to the Technorati Developers’ e-mail list. Liz mentioned some changes to the site David Sifry would announce later in the day but the developers received early notice.

One of the features mentioned was very similar to feature I knew existed behind-the-scenes on the Technorati site. Something anyone could enable but was unpublicized and not publicly known. Tantek Çelik and Richard Ault let me preview a new site feature and I was supposed to keep my mouth shut since the feature was not yet public.

Well I saw the related item was public and assumed it was okay to post about the unannounced feature. This information was not yet public and not ready for public consumption, and I apologize for releasing that information prematurely.

Verizon now offers RingBack tones

Verizon Ringback Tones

Verizon Wireless announced Ringback Tones, ringtones for incoming calls. When someone calls a user who subscribes to the service they hear music instead of a ring. Ringback Tones is a $1 per month service and users can license songs for $2 per year. Now available in Sacramento and Southern California, nationwide by mid-2005.

You can play for New Kids on the Block for all those people you wish would stop calling you.