Monday, April 12, 2004

The latest innovation from Grumetware.  

MotorFreaks of the Netherlands on RSS.  

The Nation: "A small but signficiant White House cover-up fell apart this past weekend." 

Jakob Nielsen: "It's apparently easier to tune out the continuous drone of a complete conversation, in which two people take turns speaking, than it is to ignore a person speaking and falling silent in turns." 

A two year old joke about engineers is still funny.  

Reminder: Today is the last day to sign up for Friday's dinner at the Durgin Park. If you signed up but can't go, uncheck the box and click Submit. 

Declan McCullagh: "Google's current management seems trustworthy enough. But who will be running the company in a few years?" 

Boston Globe: "Moblogging allows bloggers to add postings to their blog sites from almost anywhere at any time, using a cellphone, RIM Blackberry, or wireless handheld computer." 

NY Times: "Having a successful, high-profile venture capitalist with hundreds of millions of dollars in personal wealth devote attention to microfinance initiatives is invigorating for the fledgling industry." 

Free idea for search engines 

This is a little technical.

A search engine views the Web as a set of pages. Before Google, they were unrelated pages, but Google started a practice where pages were considered more relevant to a topic if other pages linked to them using the topic as a key word. The more relevant the page doing the pointing, the more relevance it transfers to the pages it points to. It was and is a brilliant and very useful idea.

At roughly the same time we were developing weblogs, RSS and aggregators. They change the unit of the Web from a page to a post. And because RSS is becoming quite common, it means that search engines can become more relevant to users in a different way, by precisely finding the context of a pointer, and perhaps relating other pointers that are nearby. The RSS helps introduce certainty into the concept of "nearby."

I'm not an expert in search engines, but I've yet to see Yahoo, MSN or Google return a hit for a news item in a weblog or news site, so I assume they don't understand RSS. If they did, they might be able to provide a richer service to users.