google

Google's Knol experiment to rival Wikipedia?

Last night on the official Google blog, Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, announced that Google is testing a publishing platform called Knol.

It's being compared to Wikipedia and Mahalo. While it's a somewhat different take on knowledge collection, these comparisons are apt.

From what we know so far, Knol is a wiki-like platform. Authors can create topics, and there are tools to interlink articles and content, but as Manber says, an article, or "knol," is "just a Web page." Where it differs from a wiki is its focus on the author. All knols … Read more

Ghosts in the machine: A review of Nick Carr's The Big Switch

I figured I knew Nick Carr's central thesis behind his new book, The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny, before I started. I've read Nick's blog religiously for years and was fortunate to have him keynote last year's Open Source Business Conference.

The thesis runs something like this: IT didn't used to matter very much because interchangeable software systems widely used throughout industries means IT no longer provides a basis for competitive differentiation (see pages 56-57). In the next phase (dubbed "utility computing"), traditional IT matters even less: data centers are the new utilities, allowing more efficient deployment of software applications than any one company could hope to build on its own. Jack into the network of data and services and get on with your business.

What I wasn't anticipating was where such nonchalance could lead socially. This comes in the second half of the book, and left me wishing that Nick's arguments weren't so lucidly advanced. It would have been nice to caricature his argument and move on. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's possible.

But first Utopia, before further discussion of Carr's Dystopia.… Read more

Episode 624: I can has monopoly?

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MySpace Brazil launches, entering the Orkut jungle

MySpace.com announced Friday that it has launched a localized site in Brazil, making it the site's 20th regional edition and the first one to be entirely in Portuguese. To spearhead the new MySpace site, the News Corp.-owned social network has hired Emerson Calegaretti as general director of MySpace Brazil and Haryston Oliveira as marketing director.

In addition to the main U.S. site, there are already localized MySpace sites for Canada, Latin America, Mexico, Australia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., Denmark, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Japan and New Zealand.

As a kickoff … Read more

FTC chairman won't recuse self in Google-DoubleClick

Updated at 3:00 p.m. PST with additional legal ethics expert opinion.

FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said Friday that she will not recuse herself from hearing the Google-DoubleClick merger case, arguing that the fact her husband's law firm is representing DoubleClick doesn't merit her recusal.

In a statement posted Friday to the FTC's Web site, Majoras said that her husband's law firm, Jones Day, is not representing DoubleClick before the FTC and noted that her husband is no longer an equity partner in the firm, meaning that his pay will in no way be … Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

Novell Financial Results for Fourth Fiscal Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2007. $22 million was from Linux Platform Products, up 69 percent year-over-year Photoshop Insider ? Nikon D300 Review by Scott Kelby. The Photoshop guru likes the D300. Autofocus, lower noise, sensor cleaning, HDMI output. Wants: noise as low as the D3. "The only thing that I can think of that my D2Xs has, that my new D300 doesn't have, is High Speed Crop Mode." Auto Adjustments; Always, Never, Occasionally?--O'Reilly Digital Media Blog. Are photo auto adjustments finally getting worthwhile? Scary Santa pictures. 178 photos of … Read more

Toolbar tussle for Internet Explorer

Browser wars? Check. Operating system battles? We got those, too. Web mail skirmishes? Search engine sorties? Nothing new there, except for a slightly drawn-out metaphor. We can also add to the list of hotly contested software the Internet Explorer toolbar. Having sort of fallen by the wayside in the past few years as Web-based widgets have replaced browser-based ones, the somewhat-ignored toolbar is seeing a resurgence, thanks to Google and Yahoo.

Google has just released Google Toolbar for IE version 5 beta of its feature-rich and ready-to-use toolbar for Internet Explorer, and Yahoo has also recently updated its powerful Yahoo Toolbar with Anti-Spyware that comes bundled with antispyware. How do they compare?

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Google: Don't give up on OpenSocial

When Google unveiled its OpenSocial developer initiative at the end of October, observers hailed it as the future of the social Web.

But is the search king already too late to the party?

It's been over six weeks, and OpenSocial--which uses open-source code to allow any participating social media site to implement a common set of application program interfaces (APIs) and create "universal" applications--isn't finished, though developers believe it will be ready early in 2008. In the meantime, a number of partners have launched independent developer platform strategies, and Facebook has announced that other social … Read more

My first "you are an idiot for that blog post" phone call!

After an especially difficult morning, I was welcomed to the office with a delightful voicemail from my new pal Jon Prall. Jon took offense to the fact that I think that MS Exchange should die and that Google is taking over the planet. Being that it was my first experience with this blog bearing human communication I did the obvious thing and called him back. At first he didn't want to tell me who it was until I said that I don't deal with anonymous comments (plus I had his phone number :>)

Jon was concerned that I, … Read more