everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Work

  • Rip-cord

    Today I announced my resignation from Factiva. I’ve been contemplating a move for several months now and the starts aligned in such a way to open up a door for me (thanks Mie!) at Six Apart, the folks who put out the software that allows me to create this site. I’ve had a good run with Factiva, starting in 1996 with a stint at Dow Jones based in Tokyo, the birth of a Factiva, relocation to the Princeton headquarters, and a two year run at managing the flagship product, Factiva.com. Everytime things got a little boring, Factiva always managed to find something interesting for me to sink my teeth into. A lot of thinking went into this decision and it’s become clear to me in this process that an incremental change of job title is not enough and it’s really time for me to shift gears and jump into a new company.

    I made the decision last night to accept Six Apart’s offer and while waiting for my boss to get off the phone so I could tell him of my decision, I strolled down to the credit union to close my account. I was grilled by the teller there for my reason’s to close down the account:

    “Why do you need to close your account?”

    “I’m transferring (me not wanting to break the news before telling my boss)”

    “A lot of people keep their accounts even if they are located elsewhere”

    “I’m, err, actually transferring to another company.”

    “That’s ok, you can even get your new company to deposit their paychecks here, I just want to inform you of your options.”

    “Um, that’s ok, I’m actually going to be quite far away.”

    “That’s not a problem, we have electronic. . .”

    “No, really, that’s not necessary. I just want to close out the account. . . “

    “OK then, but you know there’s a $5 charge to close your account. Good luck to you.”

    Today was a day of telling selective people the news – after the first few, it became easier and easier to broach the topic. I feel like a skydiver who has just pulled the rip-cord and now am reaching terminal velocity for what I hope will be a safe landing – GERONIMO!

  • The Independent on Search

    Charles Arthur, who writes for the UK paper, The Independent puts the Search conundrum in plain English,

    Yet it’s strange that it’s a lot easier to find something on the web than on my desk; and easier to find something on the web than on my computer. You would think one would store the things that are most important in the closest, most accessible locations; after all, you don’t leave your wallet and car keys at the bottom of an unlit stairwell locked in a safe while keeping your entire wardrobe within arm’s length.

    Instead, Google, halfway around the world, is the default for a lot of the horsework, looking up phone numbers, checking facts, finding references…. But why do we let computers make our lives hard for us? Partly because we”ve let them remain stupid. The graphical user interface, with its metaphors of “files and folder and desktop”, has remained unchanged since 1983 when Apple introduced it with the Lisa. . .

    I believe it was Bill Gates who once admonished his developers that it was ridiculous that it took longer to find a file on a local hard disk through Windows than it did to find a document among billions on the open web via Google. This became the rallying cause behind including a SQL based file system for Longhorn.

  • Email is broken

    Peter Coffee writes in Goodbye to Email that spam, phishing, and the hide-and-seek games that spammers play in trying to outwit new email filter schemes is causing so much headache that some Enterprise IT manager’s are looking at alternative communication channels such as application-to-application links.

    . . . the fraction of e-mail comprising spam rose from 58 percent in December 2003 to 64 percent in May, according to measurements by anti-spam provider Brightmail. That’s an annual growth rate of 83 percent in spam per desired message, but total distraction grows even more quickly as people use e-mail more often: Nucleus Research estimates the average worker receives 29 unwanted messages each day, more than twice the figure of 13 that the company found a year ago. . .

    The blank slate of e-mail has given enterprises the freedom to visualize and experiment with future communication tools. Now that those rough sketches have taken form, it’s time to produce more rigorous blueprints, using more focused and less readily abused technologies such as Web services. E-mail will still have a role but not as the central nervous system of the 21st-century workplace.

    The breakdown of email as the "killer app" is driving next phase in the evolution towards business-to-business integration that is driving developers to pick up where they left off in building some of the "connectors" promised with systems such as Microsoft’s BizTalk Server but updating their work with more standards-based, web services interfaces. Such an evolution will only serve to hasten the availability and use of the web as platform.

  • High-Tech Tour

    The 101st Tour de France started on July 3rd and Lance Armstrong will be going for an unprecedented sixth consecutive win. It’ll be a sprinter’s race for the next two weeks (yesterday’s finish of Stage 2 ended was clocked at speeds of 67 kms!) leading up the mountains where the men are separated from the boys. In the meantime, here’s a post on the latest gadgets at use in the peleton.

    I’ve already signed up for SMS pages of the daily results.

  • Search, not Sort

    Wired files this story on Apple’s announcement of Spotlight.

    In Jobs’ scheme, the hierarchy of files and folders is a dreary, outdated metaphor inspired by office filing. In today’s communications era, categorized by the daily barrage of new e-mails, websites, pictures and movies, who wants to file when you can simply search? What does it matter where a file is stored, as long as you can find it?

    Microsoft is already doing this with something called “Search Folders” on Outlook 2003, Apple is extending that paradigm to the entire hard drive and indexing in the background to improve performance.

  • Spotlight Developer’s Kit

    Just dug around a bit and see that Apple will be providing a Developer’s Kit to extend Spotlight’s search engine to other applications.

    But the search engine also works contextually within applications such as Apple’s Mail, Address Book and System Preferences—and Apple is giving developers at WWDC a software development kit to help them build Spotlight into their own applications.
    eWeek, June 28th

    I guess they’re going to reach out to their developer’s community to connect Spotlight to the internet. This should be interesting.

  • Wall Street Journal picks up scent

    Front Page of yesterday’s Marketplace section has two stories, side-by-side, picking up on the meme of universal search with a graphic of two bloodhounds trying to get their way into a PC. One covers the announcement of the beta MSN search interface announced yesterday and the second looks at Apple’s Spotlight utility for desktop search. Both articles pose the theory that each of these companies are edging into the search space as a key differentiators. Microsoft’s approach is to create a better portal to the internet and Apple is working on getting an integrated desktop search out the door ahead of Microsoft’s Longhorn launch which promises better desktop searching.

    If Microsoft is launching a better internet search engine to couple to their improved desktop search tools launching with Longhorn, and Apple is bundling better desktop search with Spotlight, the only thing missing is Apple integrated with an internet search engine. Apple’s Safari browser already integrates Google without the need of a separate toolbar – wonder what will happen to Sherlock which was Apple’s first attempt to embed internet searching into the desktop? Will Apple build its own, partner with a partner like Google, or reach out to the developer community to add on to Spotlight internet search integration?

    Not exactly an admission, the article about Spotlight digs in to ask if either Google or Yahoo are looking at getting into the desktop search business themselves,

    Google, which has become synonymous with finding information on the Internet, is working on its own tool for searching a PC, according to people who have talked with the company. A Google spokesman declined to comment on any product plans. Analysts say Yahoo may also get into desktop search. “If we think that’s something we need to do, we’ll look at it,” a Yahoo spokeswoman says.

  • MSN Search Preview

    Microsoft announced a new, cleaner UI that clearly identifies paid advertisers and provides drop down access to predefined content sets such as News, Stock Quotes, Movies, and Shopping. This is part of a $100 million investment that Microsoft has made in this space which clearly underlines the importance Microsoft is placing on getting this experience right.

  • Spotlight

    Apple announced the next version of their OS, codenamed “Tiger” which has an improved local search feature called “Spotlight” with the marketing tagline of, “Find anything, anywhere. Fast” Although it is limited to an index of local files and does not extend searches to the internet, it promises an improved index of local files and their metadata that builds dynamically in the background so that it is constantly updated. Spotlight is being released with a documented API so one can assume that Apple will leverage its developer community. It’s only a matter of time before someone publishes extensions to open web search engines.