Surfarama

A little over a year ago I discovered a Cold Fusion Q & A site, cfanswers.org (via Matt Haughey). I don’t know anything about CF, but I was totally taken by the way the site was put together…it was what Yahoo! Answers and the rest of them should be like. Beautifully simple and with just the right attention to UI to make it a pleasure to use. Stuff like having links to download .txt versions of particular answers, and nice ajax flourishes for rating answers etc. It was just really well done, so it’s sad to see that the site hasn’t survived and the domain now seems to be dead. [...]

The whole Chuck Norris facts things is kinda over done, but I still get a kick out of it...and this one is pretty funny too:

1. Goto Google.com
2. Type in “find chuck norris” and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button
3. Chuckle

(via Shanti)

It's World Data Privacy Day on Monday...

The U.S. and Canada have joined 27 European countries to celebrate Data Privacy Day 2008 this Monday, January 28th.

Official Google Blog: Celebrating data privacy.

Cool idea, and Google have put together some nice resources, including this booklet on how Google handles consumer privacy issues (PDF), and this slide deck for parents and educators about Teen Privacy Online (PDF). They’ve even got a whole YouTube channel dedicated to the issue, The Google Privacy Channel, and the latest video is a nice introduction to cookies…

I think privacy is going to be a theme this year.

I might get around to a proper post at some point. The short version is that I broke my ankle mountain biking at Woodhill last week, and am now sporting the following new hardware:

Oddly my ankle doesn’t actually hurt that much. I also bruised my ribs pretty badly and that is proving way more painful.

Mahalo isn't a search engine. It's a "human powered" reference resource, and it's a pretty good one…but calling it a search engine is rediculous.

Try searching for "pizza in [your town]" and see what kind of job it does. Mahalo will never be a comprehensive search engine in the way Google, Yahoo! or MSN is. I know it is semantics, but it annoys me that they call themselves a search engine.

As a reference resource focussed on the most popular search terms with an advertising business model it is also an SEO play, and in this respect they are a doing a decent job as well. Witness the stats from Hitwise ~ solid traffic growth and c.76% from search engines.

Mahalo receives most of its traffic from Search Engines (76% last week)

Read the full post on the Hitwise blog.

Boy, this is interesting:

The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

Google developed Goog 411 to train their speech to text technology. Via Waxy who remarked it is a neat idea but seems kinda inefficient...I dunno, seems like a super smart way to get access to a huge set of data to work with, and if it results in a way superior technology then the ramifications would be huge.

I'll probably post more on Knol soon, but my immediate observation about the announcement was..."Doh! Who forgot to check the .com domain was available?"

I reckon this Industrial Vacuum Company will be getting lots of traffic in the near future. Whoops.

I have read every one of Seth Godin's books (I even went way out of my way to meet him once at a blogger meetup in London). He’s a terrific marketer and normally you can’t fault his observations, but in a recent post about Googles announcement of Knol he makes some very odd comments about the nature of search…

The challenge for Google, I pointed out (and was echoed by others on the panel) is that the 'algorithm' that drives the search engine doesn't favor trusted partners. The New York Times should get the benefit of the doubt, for example, more than it does. It's easy to argue for the democratic nature of search results, but both the business environment and human nature demand elements of promotion and trust.    

read the whole post, "Building a platform (and thinking about Google's Knol)".

Um...First of all, Google does rank trusted sources. There’s been lots written about how their algorithms reflect the concept of trust, so called “TrustRank”. If the New York Times isn’t ranking or getting enough referral traffic from Google it is for other reasons.

Second, and more strangely, it sounds like he’s suggesting that it would be fine for commercial interests (‘trusted partners’) to rank better in organic results. If this is the suggestion I’m dumbfounded. The very reason that Google owns search today is because more than any other search engine they’ve fought to ensure that their organic results are based on algorithmic meritocracy (editorial votes, contextual analysis and trust amongst other things). This is so fundamental to the idea of quality search that I can hardly believe I have to make this point. Suggesting Google do otherwise is to launch an attack on their very reason for being. Odd.

UPDATE: A characteristically insightful post from Bubblegeneration explaining why the writers strike is dragging on...

Ultimately, it's because boardrooms still don't have a clue about how or why media and consumer economics are in shock...read the rest.

--
My parents still have a VCR! They've only got one tape mind you, an old copy of Top Gun recorded off the TV many years ago...I have watched that movie so many times I can just about quote it verbatim:

"Don't screw around with me Maverick. You're a hell of an instinctive pilot. Maybe too good. I'd like to bust your butt but I can't. I got another problem here. I gotta send somebody from this squadron to Miramar. I gotta do something here, I still can't believe it. I gotta give you your dream shot! I'm gonna send you up against the best. You two characters are going to Top Gun." ~ Stinger

That there's some classic Hollywood screen writing, written back in the 1980's when Studios didn't have to worry about the internet, DRM or peer to peer distribution...you know, the good old days.

Fast forward 20 years and we're now in the midst of the big writers strike which is all about how studios renumerate writers for online distribution of their content. I met an LA based screenwriter in Sydney last weekend who explained in the simplest terms he could muster how it is all going down, and the gist seems to be that Studios have no fricking clue how to make money through online distribution, or even if they can make money online...Which is the problem, because if the Studios don't know how to make real money with online distribution, then they don't feel like paying the talent much for that.

Of course everyone knows that the future is online, so with contracts up for renegotiation now it's unsurprising that the writers are looking to address this. And they are being supported by the actors whose contracts will be coming up in 2008 (or sometime soonish), and will be looking for similar changes.

Anyway, the whole point of this ramble is that the Studios are kinda screwed...

The very thing they are worried about is being accelerated enormously by the strike. What do they expect the writers are all doing with their downtime? Aside from rostered picket lines they are all busy writing the independant content that they've always wanted to, and then they're co-opting their industry friends to produce it for next to nothing (digital baby!), and sometime in the new year there is going to be a flood of really cool content onto the web. The screenwriter I met confirmed as much, he's working on his own thing (something about "Reservoir Dogs with midgets"). I can't wait.

It's good to be the talent right now. Right now the talent has everything they need to be successful totally on their own terms. And when I say talent I mean it in the very traditional sense of the word...there's no question that the democratization of media creates an awful lot of noise (and an awful lot of rubbish content), but the real talent will rise to the top. And perhaps once they get a taste of independent production and direct distribution the talent will start to wonder why they need the studios so much.

"Wow, you guys really are cowboys." ~ Iceman

This news about tight Flickr and Picnik integration is awesome. I reckon Picnik must be one of the coolest untalked about web apps around, and it is amazing they havn't had more press. I've been using them for a few months now and only yesterday signed up for a premium membership which I can now take advantage of directly from my Flickr stream, sweet!

For major amateurs like myself Picnik does pretty much everything I imagine I'd ever use Photoshop for if I only knew how, plus it is entirely web based, visually gorgeous and fast...amazingly fast considering all the heavy lifting it does (and I'm all the way down here in NZ). This partnership is going to do huge things for Picnik in terms of users. Surely the acquisition announcement must be imminent.

The pic is a picnik remix of Flynn & me at the park...a little Lomo filter and a bit of drop shadow(!)

UPDATE: I think Picnik is feeling the impact of integration with Flickr and the sudden load, which they presumably expected, but for whatever reason it is running slower than it has in my experience...hopefully they can address this smartly.