Googlers

Amagoozon

2003-04-03T12:36:00.000-08:00

2003-03-09T19:43:00.000-08:00

Roogle

Interesting... A Googalike specifically for RSS

2003-03-07T13:30:00.000-08:00

Security Flaws Found in Google's Blogger

"Pyra Labs patched a number of security holes in its Blogger Web-based publishing tool this week that could have enabled a hacker to publish thoughts on Web logs owned by others.

But isn't it supposed to be a dialogue? The fact that someone else might publish their thoughts on one of my blogs is a thought I find curiously exciting...

"Given the growing popularity of Web logs hosted by journalists, celebrities, and pundits in recent years, the Blogger security holes take on new weight, creating the possibility that hackers could supplant the opinions of well-known personalities and opinion-makers with their own."

Sounds like a fantastic idea. What part of this constitutes a problem, exactly?

2003-03-06T09:49:00.000-08:00

Ceci n'est pas une vache

This is not a link to the Raging Cow blog.

2003-03-03T20:24:00.000-08:00

Google goes public

Interesting, if somewhat obvious piece, coughed out by Michael Copeland and almost buried by the sound of the Red Herring's death rattle.

"While Google has become one of the world's most popular Web sites, its most vocal fans of the moment are the underwriters, venture capitalists, and stock junkies who think a Google initial public offering--perhaps valuing the company at a whopping $2 billion--could revive the comatose tech IPO market..." but "First and foremost, Google is not likely to go public any time soon. Quite simply, it doesn't need to."

For the record

2003-02-28T07:33:00.000-08:00

Pyra offers a faq about the immediate effects of its acquisition by Google:

Q: What does the acquisition mean to Blogger users?
A: Greater reliability, new innovative products and a whole lot more that we aren't ready to share quite yet (truth is, we're still figuring a lot of it out). Right now, we're mostly bolstering up our hardware -- making things faster and more reliable -- and getting settled. Next, we're going to be working on some killer ideas we've been wanting to implement for years. It'll be fun. More..

What if I want to know this much...

2003-02-25T20:19:00.000-08:00

I floated an idea, still wondering about its soundness. One part, hmmm; two parts huh?

I thought about what Google could offer in the way of serving me up the blogs I read most frequently--likeley a subset of my blogroll--on my m-blogging device (currently a t-mobile sidekick). Now, there are a couple of things about reading and blogging remotely. First of all, when blogrolls are on the left hand side, you have to scroll through a long list of blogs to get down to the first post. That's how it works on my sidekick--I don't know how it works for others. I want the posts--I want the meat--first.

In just learining about RSS and news aggregators, I admit to being behind the curve on that stuff. So maybe some of this is already possible. But what I'd like is my own customizable Google home page/portal for my sidekick where the latest few posts (in part) of the blogs I've indicated I want to read daily (through some gadget/selection device probably) are on a single page, scrollable, and then I can click [more] if I want to catch up with someone's latest posts, or just keep scrolling until something catches my interest. This would be cool because when you're mobile even more so than tethered, every click counts; every download counts. They take time.

The other idea, building on that, would be... okay it gets kind of dicey here... What if I could tell google to deliver me the ten blogs out of a group of 40 on my blogroll I read every day, and to get those 10 blogs as a subset of the 40, I can specify keywords I'm looking for.

Keywords can be general across blogs (technology, sex, law), or they can--more useful I think--get pretty specific within blogs. Maybe I only want to read Dave Winer when he's talking about "Google," "Harvard," or "War" in recent posts. Maybe I only want to read Shelley when certain keywords are not present in her posts, like "RDF," "RSS," and "Dave Winer." These topics are wonderful resources for other blog readers, for whom these keywords would be a perfect fit. But for me, I'd probably skip those posts, or maybe would want a way to click on them and save them on a subpage for "weekend reading" or something like that. At the same time, I DO want Shelley in my top 10 daily reads when she's writing about "writing" and "men" or whenever she posts one of her photographs. If we're talking RSS, then I want to have more time to drill down--a kind of easily accessible save-as for later among, perhaps, four or five other "save-as" posts from across blogs.

Too tired to think more. Okay--lemme have it...

Blog changes tracked by Google?

2003-02-24T19:49:00.000-08:00

Dave Winer: "BTW, speaking of weblogs.com, way back in December (seems like a lifetime ago) at the SuperNova conference, Sergey Brin from Google asked if there was a way to tap into the flow of changes on weblogs.com. There is. Lots of cool stuff has been built on changes.xml. It's updated every minute of every day. Then and now, competitor or not, it would be an honor to help Google find the newly changed weblogs."

Google Should Buy YACCS Too.

2003-02-24T14:20:00.000-08:00

Posts are only part of the blog conversation. There's probably a ratio somewhere that contrasts on average how many comments there are to each blog post.

In some cases--more often than I'd like to admit on my own blog--the witty, flirtatious, insightful, and sometimes irritating words within comments are better, more engaging, and more enjoyable than the original post.

That's why I think Google should pay some quick attention to the back-half of blogging, which are those post aftershocks known as comments. Whether they build a commenting service that hooks into Blogger or buy YACCS or a similar service, I hope they don't neglect this important and generally cumbersome part of our blogging experience.

2003-02-23T19:06:00.000-08:00

A Google representative said the company is not discussing its plans for Pyra's technology, but said some "exciting announcements" will happen in the coming weeks. Wired.

Google takes the Semantic Web

2003-02-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

I'd forgotten this piece by Paul Ford until Michael reminded us of it (in a comment on AKMA's blog). It's a bit of July 2002 sci fi, less fi today. Just a small excerpt:

Anyway, when you think about it, you can see why Google was a natural to put it all together. Google already searched the entire Web. Google already had a distributed framework with thousands of independent machines. Google already looked for the links between pages, the way they fit together, in order to build its index. Google's search engine solved equations with millions of variables. Semantic Web content, in RDF, was just another search problem, another set of equations. The major problem was getting the information in the first place. And figuring out what to do with it. And making a profit from all that work. And keeping it updated....

Do read the whole piece - Paul Ford is a must read anyway..

dynamic blogrolls, blog clusters, comments as bridges, desktop composite, team workgroups

2003-02-20T20:49:00.000-08:00

A bunch of great ideas from Phil Wolff:

Dynamic blogrolls, based on my last 5 posts. On my entire blog. On my physical neighborhood.

Translate my blog.

Bloggers cluster. Show me other clusters I should watch, so I can be a bridge. Understand that comment systems are also bridge material, associated strongly with the commentor's blog, medium with the subject of the comment, and loosely with the other commenters.

Create a composite page of pictures (and related links) posted by people in my neighborhood. Perhaps a screensaver.

Now imagine this in specific org contexts. Team workgroups. Project launches.

Google's agents have 3-to-4 fewer orders of magnitude less filtering to do. So, better quality, faster response. More tacit knowledge.

Enhanced language capability

2003-02-20T20:45:00.000-08:00

Give us more languages; more robust, accurate, clear translations; integrate it so I can publish/read in a variety of languages, and make it as easy as the blogger templates that let you change font size and color with one click. How it fits the mission: this will supercharge global conversations that generate genuine, timely, valuable information/opinion/entertainment.