We’ve Moved!

InsideGoogle

now at google.blognewschannel.com

or google.blognc.com, if you’re lazy

RSS 2.0&nbsp&nbsp&nbspComments RSS 2.0

InsideMicrosoft

now at microsoft.blognewschannel.com

or microsoft.blognc.com, if you’re lazy

RSS 2.0&nbsp&nbsp&nbspComments RSS 2.0

That’s it. My blogs have now moved to my own site and dedicated hosting. Only its more than just dedicated hosting. I put out the call not long ago for some good people, and I’m gathering together some very talented bloggers and net programmers to create the next thing in blogging, a blog news organization. We want to create a network of blogs that works together to create a news site, but without all the crap of traditional media (and I should know, I work for the bad guys as well). The Blog News Channel aims to be the first news organization to provide personal news, written by real people who you’ll get to know, each covering a beat obsessively like any good blogger. Everything you liked about blogs, all in one place, arranged and organized in one place.

For now, we’re still building the interface that makes it all tick, but four blogs are already up and running for you to digest. InsideGoogle and InsideMicrosoft retain exactly the same obsessive focus that brought you here in the first place. BusinessBits (RSS 2.0 / Comments RSS 2.0) written by Devin Reams, a business major at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will have a focus on corporate moves and the stock market (stay away from Google and Microsoft!). Finally, The Society Junta (RSS 2.0 / Comments RSS 2.0)is our look at politics, from “BFranklin”, a longtime political blogger and insider. You can also go to our Open Source (RSS 2.0 / Comments RSS 2.0) blog, where Amit Agarwal will soon begin blogging about the open source movement and all those subversive computer movement like Linux and Firefox (think of it as the anti-InsideMicrosoft). Coming blogs will focus on independent films, Apple Computers, and Gadgets, plus I’m still recruiting bloggers for other subjects (if you’re able, email me at random12345@gmail.com).

I think this can be the start of something special and new. If you’d like to be a part of it, let me know. I’ve got ambitious plans for www.blognewschannel.com/ (for now it just says hi, but bookmark it, because its going to get real interesting), and I’ll need good people to lend a talented hand. Everybody, make the trek over there, because this post is the last one you’ll see either at BlogSpot or LiveJournal, so I’ll need you to change your bookmarks and RSS. I want to know what everyone thinks, so email and comment your butts off. Let’s welcome the New Year with the Blog News Channel!

Postscript – I’d also like to give a major shoutout to Matt from LSBlog, who has given me an enormous amount of assistance. Without his help, this would have taken weeks, instead of six days. Check out his blogging software, LSBlog, at lsblog.com. It has some major advanced features you wish your blogging software offered, and is definitely worth it.

Advertisements

Happy Holidays

I ‘d like to wish a merry Christmas to all those who celebrate it, and happy holidays to everybody else, or at least happy vacation. Whether or not this is a special time of the year for you, use it as the opportunity it is and spend time with your loved ones. I’ve been to far too many sad occasions these last few months and trust me, you never know when you’ll get another chance. Please, party, talk, and just sit around, but make the most of it.

Google Suggests Guts Disassembled – Part 2

Slashdot introduces us to this analysis of Google Suggest, which goes even deeper than previous dissections of the Google Suggest engine. Some of the interesting discoveries:

A simple program which finds all possible suggestions for any given starting term.

Google Suggest ignores quotes.

Order is more important than the actual terms.

The number of suggestions is actually smaller than expected, making it possible for someone to implement Google Suggest on their own server, even implementing the whole thing in RAM (its that small).

The most startling thing is that Google Suggest is actually based more on searches than results. To explain: Google Suggest returns results that are not in Google’s index, or for terms that Google can never get to, because it indexes searches made as well as searches found. What does this mean? If you have typed a UPS tracking number into Google (something typical, because Google has searches for tracking numbers built it), it can find its way into Google Suggest. Just go there and type in “1ze” and watch the numbers pop up (all from packages delivered in the last six weeks). Does this mean credit card numbers could be in there as well? Less likely, but possible. Ironically, if you’ve ever searched for your credit card number to make sure it wasn’t publicly available, you may have inadverantly added it to Google Suggest. Oy.

Related posts:

Google Suggest – 12/10

Google Suggests Goooooooooooooooogle – 12/10

Google Suggest Tools – 12/11

The Google Suggest Complete My Sentence Game – 12/15

Google Suggests Guts Disassembled – 12/18

Google Suggest Poetry Generator – 12/20

Googlers Grateful For Free Grubs

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article about Google’s cafeteria, which provides 4,000 free meals for hungry Googlers all day. Apparently, 85% of the food is “healthy”, like wheatgrass, grass-fed Angus beef, and all other sorts of organics. Hmm… I wonder if they also provide ethnic and religious foods, like a kosher or halal cafe?

Anyway, from what I’ve been told, Googlers like the food, but not as much as they like that its free. Some Google employees have been known to never purchase groceries anymore, getting three squares a day at the Googleplex, and making up for non-working days by eating out and ordering in. Come to Google at lunch, and don’t be surprised if a large number of people who are eating there are not Google employees at all, but their family, guests, and business partners. Plenty of people who have access to the cafeteria, take advantage of it for the free food.

Well, good for them. I would too. Who doesn’t want a well-prepared entirely free meal? Do you have any idea what it costs me to eat in Manhattan?

Hmm… Does Google’s New York office have a cafeteria?

Google Doodle IX.5

What the—? So the water both froze the logo and turned the snowballs into snowcones? Are there normally rabbits in the arctic? Are they selling the snowcones, that they made for free? I know you guys are confused, because the last post got a bunch of comments. Does this new Doodle confirm or inspire any new wackjob theories?

Well, the Google Blog has commented on an element of this “controversy”. Apparently, they received an email:

In reference to holiday illustration #3, I am curious as to how the larger polar bear learned, over a period of a few days, how to roll blobs of snow in almost perfect spheres. I mean, wouldn’t this require a few thousand years of mental evolution, not to mention the concept of throwing objects and the idea of guessing how much power to put behind their throw in order for the snowball to land in an acceptable radius of the target…

…Well, we won’t have to worry about this because apparently the larger polar bear got preoccupied with hosing down the O for no apparent or logical reason. And how exactly can this hose have running water if they are in the Arctic tundra? I’ll give your illustrator the benefit of the doubt but come on… Unless the polar bears have developed a heating system for their water supply in order to prevent freezing, this wouldn’t be possible. And please, don’t use the common “well, they stole the hose from the humans which already have heating methods under development.” That is such a cliché…

…Also, considering the size of the polar bear and the circumference of the hose, why would he or she even need help with controlling it? It just seems like the back polar bear is holding up the hose just for the sake of holding up the hose. I mean, these are powerful bears. They can control a small hose with a medium sized jet of water gushing out without requiring the assistance of another bear…

…And where exactly did they learn that holding the back of the hose stabilizes the front part? I’m assuming there isn’t a television anywhere close to them. Did they just somehow, by the luck of the draw, decide to hold the hose in that certain way which is so conveniently similar to the method fire fighters use to stabilize their hoses? One final observation: there are more snowballs in picture number 3 than there are in picture number 2. Where did the extra ones come from and why did the polar bear decide to leave them sitting there if he took the time to neatly organize his previously?

And their response:

Dear User:

Thank you for your recent email. We appreciate your concern but must confess to considerable bewilderment with regard to various statements you make about the home page doodle of 12/22/04. First, what makes you assert that those are “almost perfect spheres?” If you look more closely, you’ll see that the snowballs in question are in fact somewhat oblong, which is to say, wholly producible by a polar bear paw. Second, why would you assume that the polar bear threw the snowballs into that pile, when placing them there would be much easier?

[regarding the running water in the Arctic] Again with the erroneous assumptions. In this case, you conclude that the presence of a heated hose derives not from nearby humans, but from some technologically advanced and therefore highly unlikely polar bear society, because having humans produce the hose “is such a cliché.” Well, life is full of clichés; their prevelance, in fact, is precisely what makes them clichés. As for why the polar bear is hosing down the O: we expect that the past few days have by now made clear that this series of doodles is telling a story whose conclusion none of us have yet to grasp.

Well, this being a holiday doodle and Google being a family-friendly company, the polar bear story has a family-oriented holiday theme; i.e., the daddy polar bear is spraying down the O as part of a plan to (as you must by now realize) decorate it in a festive manner, and the baby polar bear is “helping.”

Dude, in the interim of time which elapsed between doodle #2 and doodle #3, they made more snowballs, okay? And in the interim of time which elapsed since we began this response, our attitude toward you, dear correspondent, has segued from righteous indignation at your illogical attack on our graphic designer to warm-hearted gratitude that you cared enough to write to us in the first place. We love all our users, especially those who take the time to brighten our day with such graceful, witty emails. Enjoy the rest of Dennis’ holiday doodles. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Michael Krantz

Google Blog Team

Naturally, this answer was evasive and didn’t address the issues present in the melting colors, so I fired off an email:

Michael (or whoever answers the Google Blog emails),

We’ve been having a confused discussion over at InsideGoogle about Google Doodle IX. While the letter writer makes some excellent points, there is far more confusion about Doodle IX.4. No one seems to understand what in god’s name is going on when the hose causes the Google logo to melt and turn the snowballs various colors. What the hell is going on? Did someone at Google have too much eggnog at the office Christmas party?

Nathan Weinberg

InsideGoogle

Jeez, will this ever end (or at least make sense)?

UPDATE: Zorgloob also has the information that the filenames are all Korean, which makes sense since logo creator Dennis Hwang is Korean:

http://www.google.com/logos/winter_holiday_04_1.gif

http://www.google.com/logos/winter_holiday_04_dul.gif

http://www.google.com/logos/winter_holiday_04_sam.gif

http://www.google.com/logos/winter_holiday_04_sah.gif

http://www.google.com/logos/winter_holiday_04_o.gif

Will Google Buy Community Photo Service?

There has been a bit of quiet rumbling lately that we’ll see a Google aquisition of community photo service Flickr, or perhaps Fotki early next year. With Picasa 2.0 coming (source: USA Today), the word is Google wants the key to the new Picasa’s success to be photo sharing, and Flickr/Fotki would be the key. There’s a few reasons why this could happen:

• Orkut – There’s no shortage of people at Google who are dissapointed with the way Orkut is not catching on. Google really wanted to build a powerful community, and it isn’t going to happen through Orkut. Buying a popular photo service gives Google that, and a great base to build from.
• Google Images – Google hasn’t updated its image index in many months. Yesterday, when I posted about the Zeitgeist 2004, I got my images from Yahoo, because Google Images was bare. Google may be holding off updating the index until its finished negotiating with Flickr/Fotki, and then do all at once. Google Images will get more than just eight months worth of crawled images, it’ll get the entire database of whoever it buy’s users, plus metadata. Sounds like a great press release to me.

Adam Lasnik at BLADAM predicts Google will release Picasa 2 on February 15 (very specific… what does he know?), with the Flickr aquisition coming 45 days later. Picking uo Flickr, with fun attitude, small and smart team, open API, “not-evil” history, and considerably large user base (150,000 users and 1.8 million images, according to Fast Company) would be a great asset to Google, and repair the fact that none of its community products (Blogger, Groups, Orkut) work very well. This is an area Microsoft is making serious and successful moves in, and Google would do well to not cede this battle to Redmond. I would call it a very smart move.

Google Doodle IX.4

I don’t get it at all. Look at the sequence. First the bears are dancing. Then, one makes snowballs while the other builds a snow wall (fort?). Then they use a hose on the Google logo, which presumably freezes it. Now all of a sudden the logo is melting and turning the snowballs different colors? What?

Google AdWords Search Engine

Are you sick of searching Google and getting actual information? Would you rather just get only paid results, the most relevant ads for your keyword? Well, Search Engine Roundtable has noticed the link at the bottom of many ad blocks on Google Search that just says “more”. Clicking on it will get you all the ads for that keyword. What does all this translate to? A search engine for Google ads, arranged in a clear order that lets you know which ads Google considers most relevant. It is available via the URL http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=%5Bquery%5D, replacing [query] with the actual search term. Or, if you’re lazy, click this search for “fish” and then search from the search box at the top of the page. Sure, if this were the regular Google, we’d all be complaining, but by itself it has some good uses.

UPDATE – Dirson rightly points out that there is a much simpler URL: http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks.

John Battelle Predictions For 2005

John Battelle did a very good job with his predictions for 2004, and his look ahead for 2005 looks pretty solids as well. Go read his post in a new windows, and come back here for my thoughts.

#s 1-3 – He’s damn right, and you’ll see a lot of moves in that arena, including from myself. If got a team of very talented people putting that together right now (be ready to update your bookmarks and RSS feeds).

#4 – Old media will try, but any strides they make will be through purchases, not innovation. Old media is traditionally terrible at pulling off new technologies on their own, and they view many of these technologies as competition, and attempt to create incompatible “new” things. The urge to monetize will kill many of these efforts, since the vast majority of the internet will refuse any subscription services.

#5 – I think we’ll see Blogger take some pages from MSN Spaces, and design a “Plug-and-Blog” version of Blogger for the vast majority of people. We’ll start to see more industry standards as well.

#6 – Why would they stop?

#7 – Google needs to diversify its revenue streams, so this has been a given for a while. By this time next year, Froogle and similar non-advertising offerings will make up 10-15% of Google’s revenues.

#8 – I disagree. Microsoft will gain 3-5% of market share as soon as MSN Search Beta goes public. There’s no reason a company that has decent market share with horrible search wouldn’t gain share when it launches a very good engine. By year’s end, Microsoft will be marketted as the search engine that’s “just as good as Google” (it won’t be, but it’ll be close enough for most) but does more for you.

#9 – Firefox will reach 15% by March, but will not crack 20%. Microsoft will market the AOL browser as the new Internet Explorer, while taking all the lessons AOL learned from making the browser and putting it in an IE update at the end of the year. If MS doesn’t release an IE update, it will make sure to put MSN Explorer on as many systems as it can. MSN 10 will have many of the features Firefox has, while being more accessible.

#10 – Don’t be surprised if this is hyped, but never materializes. If it does, it’ll be like A9: very interesting, but nowhere near hitting the big time.

#11 – Search engines will become more like regular companies, dealing with the local issues, just like everybody else. Even capitulating to China is something they’ll learn to live with, because if they don’t someone else will, and there’s plenty of money involved.

#12 – Yup.

#13 – Double-yup. And don’t be surprised if Yahoo makes a spectular failed bid.

#14 – Apple will launch a video iPod, or it will lose a lot of market share. Portable video players already exist, and they will start to sell very well. The fight for portable media players will mirror the Palm/Windows CE battles. And Google TV Search is on the way, of course.

#15 – I have never believed in the market for mobile web. The mobile web will turn into the same thing handhelds turned into: useful for professional, but never as big as the hype made it out to be.

#16 – I will read John’s book, and give it a favorable review, because I have always liked his writing. Unless its a huge departure, in which case we will all discover new synonyms for “suck”.

#17 – John, good luck. I’d love to hear what you have in mind. I’d also love to beat you to it.

What else will happen? Will MSN Search continue to grab headlines and red state net users? Will Google finally open up and reveal what goes on inside its walls? Will blogging conquer its problems with ethics and editing? Will Desktop Search ever live up to the hype? Will Google conquer search spam? Will Google Images ever get updated? Will Slate still exist? Will MSNBC still exist? Will Steve Ballmer start blogging (Bill Gates never will)? Will newspapers ever catch on with younger people?

AOL To Offer Free Webmail

AOL is beta testing a free webmail service with its members that will soon be made available to the public. The service is called “AOL Mail on the Web” and offers 100 megabytes of storage. C|Net reports that the service has an advanced interface similar to Outlook (screenshot), with an address book, advanced message search, and spam control. This is part of AOL’s initiative to move services outside the subscriber firewall, and with the upcoming AOL Browser and AOL Desktop Search, 2005 may be the first positive year for AOL in a long time.