everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2005

  • Diller to buy Jeeves says New York Times

    Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp is set to buy Ask Jeeves, the 4th largest search engine company (5th according to the WSJ lead) for $1.9 billion (Reuters confirms it’s $1.85 billion) in stock writes the New York Times.

    Ask purchased Bloglines, the web-based RSS aggregator, last month. 70% of Ask’s revenues come from advertising served by Google so we might see this change as search results drive traffic to network commerce sites owned by IAC such as Expedia, Ticketmaster, Home Shopping Network, Match.com and CitySearch.

    No word on the TypePad-powered Ask Jeeves blog at this time.

    UPDATE: In a Reuters recap of a conference call, Diller is quoted as saying, “Global search is the gateway to everything.” Sounds like we’re heading back to the portal days of old and that search engines are once again the core to any portal. How many months before people start talking again about search engine lock-in and adding hooks to make a search engine more than just another bookmark?

    Still no word from the Ask Jeeves blog or ask.com.

  • All Grown Up

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    John & Yuko Garrett, two old friends from Tokyo, were visiting San Francisco this weekend and brought a bunch of us together for a BBQ and to meet their daughter, Emma Peach. It was great to catch up with Tom Watanabe, his wife, and others from the Linc Computer crowd.

    A couple of the people there are, like me, married to Japanese and are trying to raise their kids to speak Japanese. Two of the couples speak nothing but Japanese when at home which I admire. It’s not only good for the kids, it would be good for me. Izumi’s English is much better than my Japanese and, frankly, I’m too lazy and too easily slip back into English.

    We also met Joshua (on the left) who is building a house completely powered by solar. He figures he will make enough energy during the daylight hours to sell power back to the local utility which will more than make up for any energy he has to buy from them in the evenings. The total cost for the system is about $20k but with various government rebates and credits, all in costs will be more like $13k. Amortize the loan over 10 years and it works out about $150/month which is about what he’d pay for power anyway. Once it’s paid off, it’ll just make money for him, especially when you think that the price of electricity isn’t coming down anytime soon.

  • code or developer, chicken or egg?

    Found this by browsing the popular links page on de.licio.us. Google has countered Yahoo’s Search API page with a revamp of their own API page. Links out to sample APIs, documentation, and even a blog. One major difference is that they are also posting links to projects that they have released as open source.

    The URLs tell you something about the two companies.

    code.google.com or developer.yahoo.net

    At Google it’s about the code, at Yahoo it’s about the developer.

    PS. Six Apart has just launched its own version of the above. www.sixapart.com/pronet/docs/powertools so I guess that means we’re not about the code or the developer. It’s the tools and we hope you use ones that give you Power!

  • Microsoft RSS Reader, Start.com

    I first heard about this from Richard MacManus’ Read/Write Web and only now am getting a chance to play around with it. The server-based reader is part of Microsoft’s experimental sandbox area and there are two versions posted. One is a web-based RSS reader and the other is an online bookmarks list. Unless I’m missing something, there’s nothing to earth shattering here. The reader doesn’t let you search or profile against any of the feeds and the bookmarks, once you upload them (via an ActiveX control), are there to stay.

    I’m sure all this stuff will get worked out so when you try things like overwriting your bookmarks by uploading another version the browser won’t crash. It’s still the sandbox. What is more interesting is that this is the clearest indication yet that Microsoft views RSS as an integral part of any portal. It’s right there next to the Search tab so it’s only a matter of time before they extend Search to RSS feeds. Likewise with the bookmarks, the next logical step is to extend what’s on the page out to others in the MSN network as is done in de.licio.us.

    I smile when I see that it’s called these efforts two flavors of a Start Page. I have a bit of a history with this moniker as I spent many long hours debating what to call a revolutionary new section of the Factiva.com product and we ended up calling it the very same thing, the Start Page.

  • Statistically Improbable Phrases

    Via Paul Bausch is news of a feature in Amazon.com that runs analysis on books scanned into Amazon’s Search Inside index. From Amazon’s site:

    Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

    Yet another tool to hook you back to the Amazon mothership. Here’s a list of books that list the improbable phrase, thumb tribes.

  • Blogging and Meetup

    I’m going local on you, I know but I just wanted readers in the San Francisco/East Bay area know that Ginevra and I have taken on organizational duties at two local blogging meetups and will be hosting events next month. If you’re in the area, stop by, we look forward to meeting you!

    The San Francisco Movable Type Meetup – April 11th @ 7 pm
    The Alameda County Weblogger Meetup – April 20th @ 7 pm

  • Ketchum on Blogs

    Nicholas Scibetta and Adam Brown at Ketchum discuss how the art of Public Relations can benefit from blogs in this interview style post on the Ketchum website. Their observations show that they understand the power of blogs to initiate a dialog and their insight into the future points to a rich set of opportunities for savy public relations firms.

    What
    do you consider the next steps that public relations must take to ‘own’ blogs and be able to most effectively use this medium for companies and clients?


    AB: I think there is about to be a shakedown with blogs. Advertising is trying to own blogs the same way it took ownership of the Internet. But the way information is shared on a blog isn’t appropriate for advertising. Advertising is about a call to action. PR is more about information transfer and information sharing. It’s about changing someone’s thoughts, beliefs, emotions and perceptions of a company, product or brand. And that’s what blogs are about. I think we need to take the initiative and demonstrate what blogs are best suited for. Blogs are for information transfer, and PR is about information transfer, and that’s why the two go together.


    NS: That’s a great point. PR has a snug fit with blogs. And we as practitioners need to embrace blogs wholeheartedly. We need to really dig deep to understand what the mindset of bloggers is and what we can do to foster mutually beneficial relationships with them. We are, as Adam said, different from advertising in terms of the call to action and the straight sell. The truth is you couldn’t have asked for a more organic development of a tool to emerge to suit the objectives of PR.

    Good PR is about “information transfer” and blogs are great for that. Not only do blogs conduct a signal with little or no impedance but also amplification of that signal if the message is provocative. The one improvement we all need to work on is a way to reduce the distortion of the signal over time and space but that’s a problem that’s as old as history.

     

  • Fluid Market for Ringtones

    In the March 7th New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones writes about the cell phone ringtone industry which, in 2004, generated $4 billion dollars in worldwide sales (only $300 million from the US). In Korea, the ringtone market outsells the CD single market. There is a newer, higher quality version of the ringtone that is just gaining popularity. But there is more than just better quality that makes the mastertone interesting; there is commercial appeal,

    Record labels, convinced that they have lost millions of dollars in CD
    sales to MP3 file-swapping, have been especially attentive to
    ringtones, and they love master tones. Polyphonic ringtones are
    essentially cover versions of songs: aggregators must pay royalties to
    the publisher, who then pays the songwriter. But master tones are
    compressed versions of original recordings, which means that record
    labels—the entities that typically own recordings—are entitled to
    collect a fee, too.

    She goes on to explain the royalty deals signed to get these songs were extremely one-sided pushing up to 25% for some record companies. This boosts the overall cost of the mastertones which keeps people from adopting them. Kind of killing the hen before it can get around to laying it’s golden eggs.

    This arrangement is unlikely to last. There are now Web-based
    companies, like Xingtone, for example, that will convert songs from
    your collection into master tones. Or you can do it yourself: some new
    cell-phone models can be connected to a computer by a data cable,
    allowing you to create master tones from MP3 files at home. However it
    is done, transferring music that you own to your phone is legal under
    copyright law.

    Like a water balloon, exert too much pressure and the market moves around you.

  • Little League

    Little League

    Tyler debuted on his little league T-ball team this past weekend. In Japan they have something called a koen debut which is the first time a mother takes their child to the park. It’s a stressful occasion because this is the time when mother and child learn if they are to be accepted into the community.

    Taking your son to Little League has some of those elements. I’m the first to admit that I’m not a yelling-at-your-boy-from-the sidelines-to-pick-it-up type. I don’t even play baseball. But still, you always wonder if you’re both going to be accepted into the community.

    I missed the buying of Tyler’s first baseball glove which, according to Izumi was memorable. Passing a rack of guns on the wall of the local sporting goods store Tyler questioned loudly why firearms were for sale, “Guns are bad, they shouldn’t be selling guns.” Right on. That’s my boy.

    Each of the Little League team is named after a major league team and, seeing as Tyler and everyone on his team are just starting out, it seems fitting that he’s playing for The Nationals, the recently transplanted Montreal Expos, now reborn as Washington DC’s newest team.

    I think it’s going to work out great. The coach is really nice and very patient working with the boys and is very good at explaining the basics. This week they worked on catching grounders. Hey, I might pick something up too!