Hackr WatrCoolr: Tech News Aggregation With No Mouse Required

A couple weeks ago, in an article about Microspaces, I said that Web entrepreneurs are finding new ways for you to navigate their sites, and many are now incorporating keyboard input, to jump to new comments or pages. Though I mentioned it in a quick tweet on September 25th, I thought it was worth highlighting the Hacker WatrCoolr, a site that displays headlines from many popular tech news sites, and lets you quickly flick through them using only your keyboard - no mouse required.


A Headline from ReadBurner on WatrCoolr Tonight
WatrCoolr shows the latest headlines from Digg, Hacker News, Del.icio.us, Techmeme, Reddit, RSSmeme, Slashdot, Yahoo! News and ReadBurner. Each headline shows its recency, and the destination URL (e.g. nytimes.com or makeuseof.com).


Scoble's Post Hits Techmeme and Makes it to WatrCoolr
But unlike many other news aggregation sites, the Hacker WatrCoolr doesn't shoe-horn them into one busy page, like AllTop. Instead, it displays one headline at a time. To scroll through older items from the same source, you just need to hit the down arrow key. To see a new source, hit the right or left arrow. And to read the article, you just have to press the "r" key, or press "n" to have it open in a new window or tab.

While Hackr WatrCoolr is not looking to replace your RSS reader, some of the functionality is very similar to that of applications like Google Reader, and it's a very easy way to get all the top stories from each of these sites in one place. It may be a little experiment, but it hints at one way the Web could go to make the process of our news gathering even that much more easy. I hope to find more Web developers who are thinking different about how we navigate today's often-formulaic and static Web sites.

DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner, and hold a small equity position.

Top Resources to Help Stay Informed In a Crazy World

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

I completely suck at numbers. I could give a crap about the stock market. I tune out politics since I'm sick and tired of the same old rhetoric. And if you're like me, you most likely skip over all the panicked headlines about how the $700 billion bailout got kicked from Congress.

I mean really - why would all this junk be relevant to regular people like us? The headlines are too damn depressing and most importantly - we don't have power, money or stature for any of this to really matter anyway - right? Wrong.

Listen to me, you guys: Now is not the time to tune things out.

Why is this important for people like us? Because well... I kinda sorta wanna know if I should close all my bank accounts and hide the cash under my mattress - don't you? It's also ... uhhh... election year, too. And as much as I want to turn the other way, this time, I can't. All the signs are pointing to: our country is in deep s--t.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the rest of America doesn't seem like they know what's going on either. Just ask someone to explain the stipulations of the 110-page bailout and how/what we (Americans) need to do to protect ourselves moving forward. Or the presidential candidates' action plans to rectify this economical disaster. I guarantee not everyone can - regardless of who they are or what their pedigrees are.

So you see, now is the time - moreso than ever, that we the regular people, need to come together. And if enough of us get together, our voices WILL matter. How do we do that? It's all about information.

Yes, I know reading the headlines is depressing, but educating ourselves so we're aware of the current happenings is a must; so we can get involved to make differences. How do we get involved? Well that's up to you - the reader to decide.

But what I CAN do for you, is provide resources to keep and stay informed. Hubs, if you will, so you don't have to dig through and search to stay involved. Please remember, to take account all sides, know your options, and if and when action is called - don't hesitate and go for it. Whether it be by voting, informing people around you, or just informing yourself, knowing and keeping up with the current situation means you have power to decide what to do with the knowledge.

So without further ado, I present to you:
"Mona's Top 5 Resources to Stay "Smart" - the Lazy Way"

1. NPR's Planet Money:
   NPR tags all articles pertaining to the financial crisis. It's just one click, and it pulls up all recent articles. The layout is easy on the eyes and there's no hunting or pecking through a mountain of pages to stay up to date.
   
   
2. Google News: Top Stories:
   I prefer Google News over Yahoo News because it's
   • Customizable
   • I can personalize it
   • Easy on the eyes
   All the top headline news from various sources are aggregated there. Pretty neat.
   
   
3. Harvard Business Online's Guide to the Downturn:
   A bunch of articles from really super smart people that are free. Plus the layout is nice, easy on the eyes, and surprisingly, the information is relevant to normal people, too. Don't be fooled, go check it out. Even if you think it's irrelevant, you can namedrop like I do. "OH YEAH? Bet you don't know what HARVARD professors are saying!" - or something close to that. ha!
   
   
4. Google Power Readers:
   Explore news sites read by McCain, Obama and political journalists, and see articles the campaigns and political pundits are sharing with Google Reader. What's better than knowing what they're reading and sharing!
   
   
5. Aggregation Sites like FriendFeed
   Since signing up for FriendFeed, I've been exposed to a lot of new blogs, different views, from so many different sources. The best part is, you can see what others are sharing, and choose if you want to read it or not. If you see the same headline shared by numerous people, it's a sign telling you: "READ IT, STAT!"

That about wraps it up. I hope this can help you, as much as it's helped me.

And remember, this is an election year. Our economical and country's future is dependent on us - We the people.

Update: Head on over to Scripting News. Dave Winer has a great write-up: "The US Economy After Katrina".

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits.

Google at 10 - a Decade of Innovation - But Challenges Ahead

By Charlie Anzman of SEO and Tech Daily (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Yesterday, Google posted a fascinating timeline of the past ten years.

For those of us that have been around since the days when Yahoo! dominated search (and Google wasn't 'here' yet), the timeline brings back a lot of memories, and also causes some pondering about the future.

Google's juice has always been their corporate culture. I've written about it before. A few weeks ago, Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, commented that they try not to buy a lot of companies because it's easier to innovate from within, rather than to try and change the way a company does things. (Paraphrased).

Others are complaining about Google's stock price. A careful look at insider trading over two years showed many (current) employees cashing out in the 300's per share. Was 700+ in 2008 ever really in the cards? Did Wall Street expect a little too much?

Now we see Google literally firing on all cylinders. A new Web browser (Chrome), a significant upgrade to Picasa (and Picasaweb), and lots of other upgrades, APIs, additions and announcements made over the past two months.

There's little disputing the fact that Google (and the Internet) have literally created and/or eliminated exisiting business models (or significantly changed them). Not just Internet models but brick and mortar businesses as well. They've also created opportunity for those who continued to read, learn and took advantage of it.

Now, people don't Yahoo-it, or MSN-it (even though they do), the vernacular is Google-it ... and that alone is HUGE.

Interestingly, for you advertising buffs, Google has no tag line. There is no 'what we are' or 'what we do'. Obviously, someone recognized very early on, that the Internet (and the world) was changing so fast, it was difficult to predict exactly where Google's strengths would emerge. That continues to be the case.

I find I now have the same reaction to Google's success that I did to Microsoft's many years ago. Both serve as an example of how just a few people can create something BIG in just a few short years and set an example for those thinking about doing just that.

Like Microsoft, and many others, Google is a role model of sorts for entrepreneurs everywhere.

As they grow and mature, it will be difficult for Google to maintain their corporate culture, but not impossible. The perks of working at the Googleplex make complete and total sense. Help people forget about their mundane day-to-day worries so they can think, be creative, and work.

So …. Happy Birthday Google! One can only imagine (or better yet vision) what the next ten years will bring.

Read more by Charlie Anzman at SEO and Tech Daily.

Google Says Apple Owns the Letter "i", and Craigslist the "s"

Search engines work best when they have specific phrases to search for, or better yet, when they have parameters for when the Web page was posted. But if you get more abstract, going to single words or even letters, they typically don't know where to start in terms of finding what you want. Taking a look at Google's first answers for the letters of the Roman alphabet, it's interesting to see what the search index is guessing as the best answers. Google gives its own Gmail the letter "g", cedes Apple the letter "i", and Craigslist the "s", while kindly passing on the "Y" to Yahoo!, effectively dividing the alphabet as cleanly as the many nations who have laid claim to a slice of Antarctica.

For those not given to tech companies, the results weigh heavily with Wikipedia, as might be expected, with explanations of the letters, and periodic table elements. Also interesting, there are a pair of movies from IMDB that take the #1 spot, a pair of obscure scientific journals from the American Physical Society, and what looks like some great SEO by the Massachusetts Boston Transit Authority and Cirque du Soleil. The full list is below. All results were done with my own Google account signed out, so my Web history would not influence the rankings.

As of September 21, 2008:

a = Links in HTML documents from www.w3.org.
b = Physical Review B from aps.org.
c = C (programming language from wikipedia.org.
d = Physical Review D from aps.org.
e = E! Entertainment Online
f = Ford Motor Company Stock from Yahoo! Finance.
g = Gmail from Google.
h = Hydrogen from wikipedia.org.
i = Apple: iPod + iTunes from apple.com.
j = The Letter J from wikipedia.org.
k = The Letter K from wikipedia.org.
l = The LaTeX project from latex-project.org.
m = M (1931) from imdb.com.
n = Nitrogen from wikipedia.org.
o = Cirque du Soleil - O - Las Vegas from cirquedusoleil.com.
p = Phosphorus from wikipedia.org.
q = The Letter Q from wikipedia.org.
r = The R Project for Statistical Computing from r-project.org.
s = Craigslist.com.
t = Massachussetts Boston Transit Authority from mbta.com.
u = The Letter U from wikipedia.org.
v = V Magazine from vmagazine.com.
w = W. (2008) from imdb.com.
x = X.Org Wiki from x.org.
y = Yahoo.com.
z = The Letter Z from wikipedia.org.

In addition to these results, Google offers up stock quotes for Ford (F) and Qwest (Q) atop the other search results, and provides scientific details like the speed of lightfor "c", "e" as a mathematical constant and Planck's constant for "h".

While Google's search engine is ubiquitous, by some measure around 90% of all searching, it's clearly still got an extreme bent toward academia and science. Apple's capturing the letter "i" is a great feat of marketing, as is Yahoo!'s "y", but should Craigslist get the "s" and Gmail the "g"? Those are more curious.

Where You Get Your Tech News Shapes Your Tech Views

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

FriendFeed seems to be the source of most of my interesting conversations these days. Sometimes the benefit of FriendFeed is not even the conversation itself, but finding a link to a blog post that I normally would not read. This happened this week when Jesse Stay shared a post to a story on newspapergrl.com. I read a lot of what Jesse shares, but this site is one I had never read. I found the post interesting because it was about tech news and how slow things are:

I just got off the phone with my friend Chris and we talked about how we hardly blog anymore. Also about how nothing seems that exciting in tech lately. It's mostly about Google and the iPhone over and over. Are we just cynical or have things quieted down considerably?

I had no idea that this is what people thought. This was not written during the iPhone hype, this was written a few days ago. So, I decided to look and see what news was posted on Thursday, July 31st.

First, let us look at what TechCrunch had to offer.


Click to Enlarge Image
Out of 16 stories in our selection, 4 were tech financial news, 3 streaming video stories and the remainder (9) were about various sites and their features. For a technology news site, that seems very reasonable.

ReadWriteWeb tends to have more opinion and review posts than TechCrunch and their stories reflect that.


Click to Enlarge Image

You can not tell from all of the headlines, but of the 16 posts, 6 were opinions and reviews. 4 of the posts were about video, image or mobile devices. The remainder were about various sites and their features. Again this is a reasonable breadth of information.

The last "heavy" technical news site I want to look at is Mashable. They tend to be not as news-heavy as TechCrunch, and have more of a social application focus. So, what did they post?


Click to Enlarge Image
Out of Mashable's 16 posts, 5 were about video, audio or images and 10 were opinions or reviews of various sites. Lastly, there was 1 self-promotion post. Given the specific content focus, this is also reasonable. So, we have looked at the 3 popular tech sites that many early adopters read. In order to contrast what a mainstream user might read, I took a look at what stories Yahoo Tech News listed for the day.


Click to Enlarge Image
For Yahoo, we again sampled 16 stories. Of these stories, 5 were financially related, 2 were about cell phones, specifically controlling kids use and cancer risks. 3 of the stories were about server products (VMware, Microsoft "Midori", and SharePoint). 3 more stories were about video games, 2 of which were about WordScraper/Scrabulous. The last 3 stories were the Chinese internet censorship, a Blu-ray player for Netflix, and 6 Ways to Save on Groceries. A simple breakdown does not really show the difference, except for the groceries story. The 3 stories on server products were mostly business related. VMWare giving something away, another product trying to replace SharePoint, and what "Midori" could do for Microsoft.

Most of the stories on Yahoo contain little or no technical detail. You do not see anything about social networks or other social applications. There was no announcement for the SocialMedian release or the redesign of Delicious. So, why is this important? It is important because most people are not reading about the same things that an early adopter is reading. Obviously, there will always be some overlap, but the mainstream users care about very different things. Given the various discussions about passionate users, early adopters and mainstream users, maybe we need to take a step back and think about how we bridge that gap. If you do not agree, then find your most non-technical friend and explain why they need to use Twitter and FriendFeed. Do not be surprised if they ask whether they could find more than 6 ways to save on their groceries.

Seeing The Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking

This afternoon, I caught a video broadcast with Wayne Sutton and Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net, where Corvida had the opportunity to share her story of asking Verizon to drop their relationship with Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, in light of his controversial video parodying African American bloggers. While both carried on a strong conversation around the issues of race, bigotry and getting ahead through hard work, their efforts were dwarfed by some of the most hateful, shameful, racist speech I've been exposed to in a very long time.

It's common knowledge that anonymous commenters often fall to the lowest common denominator. The wider the audience, the less respectable the discussion, with YouTube being a perfect example.

Most of the time, the places I engage in social media (and real life) are civil. But as Corvida and Wayne talked about her family's efforts with Verizon, and how black tech bloggers are often stereotyped, with Feldman's video as an example, the Yahoo! Live chat screen filled with filth, with racist words, references to Kentucky Fried Chicken and watermelon, comments on Obama, and discussion of penis sizes.

Essentially, you name the negative stereotypes and hatred that could be spewed against the African American bloggers, and they were there.

I don't want to spread the filth that was said during the chat, but it's worth exposing these purveyors of hatred, to illustrate the nonsense. If only there were a way to break through their anonymity...

There's no question the work was done by a few anonymous malcontents, but it was eye opening to unfortunately be reminded those people are out there, and are willing to share their nonsense in an attempt to intimidate both Wayne and Corvida, in hopes of persuading them to stop. But it didn't work. As Wayne said the issue of Loren Feldman was "a wake-up call for African Americans", today's nonsense was an unfortunate wake-up call for me.

I'm glad both Wayne and Corvida maintained their professional integrity in the face of ridiculous nonsense that could have brought weaker people to tears, but there was absolutely no reason they should have had to put up with that horrible behavior, which, as it was undoubtedly intended to do, made me quite angry.

Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and with all the advancements we think we've made in Civil Rights, we still have to see this horrible, ridiculous, ignorant junk. I was appalled at what Corvida and Wayne had to suffer through, and I wish I never had to see it again. These people do exist, but they don't deserve a platform, and in this case, there should have been ways to either increase filters, block by IP address or reveal the real names of the trolls.

I am very sorry Corvida and Wayne had to suffer through that in what was otherwise a very engaging disucssion, and I hope this filth doesn't slow any person of any background down for a second.

Mint's Latest Additions Make It My One Stop Financial Hub

For years, I've manually edited a custom portfolio in Yahoo! Finance in an attempt to track all my financial details in a single place. That meant copying and pasting trade details from eTrade and checking in with Fidelity every two weeks to get an update from my 401k. But even then, it wouldn't have bank data from Wells Fargo, or credit card debts, so I haven't had a perfect picture on a single page - until now. With the addition of investment tracking capabilities at the end of April, Mint has now morphed from a simple curiosity to becoming my long sought after single point for financial details.

Mint came to my attention last year, like it did for many people, when it won the best presenting company award at the inaugural TechCrunch40 event.

While some have said storing financial login data on a 3rd party site makes them nervous, I've always erred on the side of trusting the Web, and I registered right away. But site slowness, and Mint's initially not offering support for my investment accounts at eTrade and Fidelity meant it wasn't all that useful for me. I wasn't interested in following their little tips on how to save a few bucks here and there by switching my bank or credit cards, so I largely left my account dormant.

But now, Mint shows me everything in one place. After synchronizing my Checking and Savings accounts, my investments and my credit cards, I now get a perfect picture of available funds. And Mint, having more than 200 days history of my activity since I first signed up, also has some educated guesses on where I spend my money most frequently, trends on whether I'm spending more than others in my geographic area, and even records of which vendors.

Now, according to Mint, I can see I've spent $155 on iTunes since October 1st of last year, in 16 different purchases, I've spent $798 at Safeway in 9 tracked purchases, and $332 at Chevron in the same number of visits. Of course, with more than 1/3 of my spending being marked as "No Category", I have some work to do to get the data even better, and there are some amusing bugs, like the one showing I've spent $6,891 at "Louis Shoe Shop", in four transactions. My guess is that's supposed to be where I've made credit card payments, and I have no idea why it's called "Louis Shoe Shop". Are they confusing me with Imelda Marcos?


One month's financial tracking within Mint.
Regardless of those rare oddities, the simple fact that Mint shows me all my activity in one place means that I don't have to go to each of the individual financial sites to get my data. On occasion in the past, I've gotten hit with late fees on my credit card just because I had forgotten to log in before the bills were due. Now, if I can just log in to Mint instead, I can not only see when money comes in, but when money needs to go out. And I'm done messing around with Yahoo! Finance, manually entering owned shares data and estimated per share costs. Now, Mint does all the hard work for me. It's the way Web finance tracking was supposed to be.

LinkedIn Company Detail Shows Silicon Valley Carousel

How Select Tech Titans Stack Up (Click for larger image)

Last night, LinkedIn rolled out a major upgrade to the professionally-oriented social network and career/recruiting database, adding new company profiles, giving corporations the same kind of dedicated page to their background as their individual employees have had for roughly five years. (Here's mine.) While corporate profiles have been around forever, LinkedIn adds "special sauce" through its large user database, determining where employees come from and leave to, what other companies they are connected to, and who may recently have changed positions or joined the company. Good stuff.

The new company profiles on LinkedIn are a gold mine for reporters who want to get data beyond what the PR guys may want to dish out. (See: LinkedIn Is a Paradise for Smart Reporters)

Want the average age of an employee? A good estimate is on LinkedIn. Want to know if there is a high level of turnover, and people don't stay long? LinkedIn has that too. It also can provide hints as to whether a company is so strong that folks aren't leaving at all, or if they are leaving in exodus. And if you peer closely enough, you can see the Silicon Valley carousel, as employees move from company to company in search for the next big thing.

You can see employees move from PayPal to Google, Yahoo! or LinkedIn. You can see Friendster employees went to Yahoo! and Zazzle, or from Napster to Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google. And if you think Google is getting all the good employees out there, there's no question they get their share, but so far, it looks like Facebook is getting a lot of new hires, and nobody's leaving - a boomtime for the social networking giant.

Interestingly, due to Apple's tenure, and the company's rising from the ashes with the return of Steve Jobs, you can see employees that once left the company have returned, having never lost the Mac religion. You can also see longer median tenures at the more established companies, like Microsoft and Intel, who also feature an older employee base.

Gender-wise, men dominate LinkedIn data for the tech industry, with between 60% and 70% of all employees at the companies I selected. Could that be the case, or is there an overweighting of men who use LinkedIn, compared to the true employee base? Maybe it's both?

LinkedIn opening up this data will keep company marketeers and PR on the alert to see how their data is being portrayed, just as they should be watching their coverage on Wikipedia, for in this case, it's their employees' collective data that is pushing the details, without a filter, and just maybe, the truth will reveal more than they had ever imagined. I know I'll be spending a lot more time poking around LinkedIn now myself.

MyBlogLog LifeStream Gets On Topic

At the end of February, MyBlogLog debuted their entry into the lifestreaming market, aggregating your services from around the Web, and should you choose, showing you those activities from your MyBlogLog contacts. While I wasn't blown away with their first attempt, the Yahoo! subsidiary has come back with a new MyBlogLog-only wrinkle, dividing the lifestreaming activity by Topics, aggregated around specific tags. Now, instead of seeing the lifestream from just your contacts, you can see who the top members are by topic, and see a specific topic stream as a whole.

Early pre-launch screenshots from the new MyBlogLog Topics showing streams for "Web 2.0" and "Apple", for example, show how blog posts or del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with those terms fill the topic feed, with mugshots of "top members" and top community thumbnails also tagged on the right side. You can even subscribe to the Topics feed by RSS if you want to take the stream with you. (See: MyBlogLog: Topics: Apple)

Soon, MyBlogLog promises that over time, users can join topics just as they are able to join communities in MyBlogLog today. These new Topics tabs will eventually fall alongside the "New With Me" and "New With My Neighborhood" tabs there, called "New in My World".

While MyBlogLog hasn't been the loudest social network of late, they are growing. There are now nearly 300,000 MyBlogLog sites, and the service is serving up more than 20 million widget impressions per day, including a small fraction from louisgray.com. (See the right sidebar) The introduction of Topics is an interesting one, and we'll stay tuned to see if it can help the company's offering gain even more traction.

MyBlogLog LifeStream Is a Quiet Trickle

What? You thought because I wasn't the first to jump on MyBlogLog's new lifestreaming option, that somehow I had missed it? Wrong. Sometimes, life can get in the way. And the travel to and from Boston meant just about everybody's already done the usual, anticipated, immediate analysis, response and FriendFeed comparisons before me. And so far, MyBlogLog doesn't look like it's winning. By and large, most reports see it as an interesting update, but not one that puts it in a leadership position by any means. Unfortunately, I have to agree.

(See: WebWare, VentureBeat, Webomatica, bub.blicio.us, and TechCrunch)

Two weeks ago, we first got an e-mail titled "MyBlogLog Profiles Going Dynamic" from Ian Kennedy, Product Manager for MyBlogLog, who said the new feature, called "New with Me" would "aggregate your latest activity on sites such as Twitter, Last.fm, Digg and YouTube." The idea? "Transform your static profile into a dynamic one."

As one of the loudest, most well-recognized FriendFeed advocates out there, I had personally asked Ian in December to add FriendFeed as one of the supported services for the popular "About Me" MyBlogLog widget. (See: Will There be One Profile to Rule Them All?) While his first response, saying "So many social networks, so little time!" made the trivial seem difficult, on February 19th, he followed up to say FriendFeed was added, but events wouldn't be pulled from the feed, given clear issues with duplicate items. (See: Ian's comment)

It's clear MyBlogLog, whether inspired by FriendFeed or not, fell in love with the idea of making the site something more than a stale page, which it had been for some time. Interestingly, this move toward lifestreaming is just about 100% the opposite direction of what I had expected out of them from a post in September, when I asked, "What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?" In that post, I wrote, "MyBlogLog is exactly what its name implies - it is My Blog's Log, not My Personal Log." I already have sites that cater to following me around. What I want instead, is something that more directly follows my blog around - with increased statistics, linkage and visitor details. I wanted MyBlogLog to get more in touch with what made it interesting in the first place, its communities, and networking individuals, not showing me what they are doing somewhere else. This move only makes the data found elsewhere more important, and what MyBlogLog first served to do even less important.

So why would I dump on MyBlogLog for doing what FriendFeed and others have tried? Because MyBlogLog is way behind on day one.

FriendFeed delivers significant value not just because they aggregate my Web lifestream, but because they enable interaction, through comments and discussions. MyBlogLog doesnt. FriendFeed also lets me choose my friends, and doesn't force them on me based on how many times I've visited a site in aggregate. It's enough to make me avoid sites I've visited before just to keep out of a community. As MyBlogLog preferences can be set to auto-join communities thanks to visit frequency, I may often find out I'm "friends" with popular news sites, not "friends" with my real peers, the way FriendFeed has. And making things worse, MyBlogLog is way slow. Right now, according to MyBlogLog, I haven't done anything online for the past three hours. But FriendFeed knows the truth. FriendFeed shows in those same "idle" three hours, that I added a blog post, sent one note on Twitter, and shared four items on Google Reader, for starters.

I want to root for these guys, but this time, I can't. On day one, MyBlogLog is underfeatured against FriendFeed. It has fewer services than FriendFeed. It doesn't accurately track my friends, and it doesn't enable communication. It doesn't track as quickly. And it doesn't give me more information about "My Blog", which is in the service's name, for crying out loud. While I was once worried that MyBlogLog had gotten too static and lacking in development, I now see they were just focused on the wrong things. Maybe they'll continue to update the service and surprise me with new directions, but for now, I'm all too happy to stick with their blog widgets, and dam up their lifestream.

Yahoo! Calls Microsoft Cheap, Will Reject Offer

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Yahoo!'s board will rightfully tell Microsoft to go pound sand on their offer, unless the total value of that offer is increased, more than 30 percent ahead of their initial approach, making the value of the deal not $44.6 billion, as originally planned, but now, nearly $60 billion.

As I mentioned last week, Microsoft came after Yahoo! at a time when the company's stock was depressed, and tried to "get the company on the cheap", offering, instead of a massive cash outlay, exchange for fractions of Microsoft shares, which at the time amounted to $31 apiece. But in the ensuing market downturn, the offer became less and less substantial, as Microsoft stock eroded, as repeatedly noted by Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider.

Typical in things of this nature, the conflict isn't over technology leadership or how the products and people would overlap, but instead, simply dollars. As Jason Calacanis tweeted this morning, "(translation: $5 bucks more please!)"

I believe that in the face of innovation by Google, Apple, Facebook and many others, Microsoft and Yahoo! don't represent technology leadership and forward-thinking the way they once did. Regardless of the price, Yahoo! should say no to Redmond, and take a new approach to their business to make themselves relevant once again.

Microsoft and Yahoo! Yesterday's News on Yesterday's Companies

In case you were concerned about me, I didn't miss yesterday's news about the proposed Microsoft takeover of my Sunnyvale neighbor, Yahoo!. I just felt that with everyone on the planet, and some in other planets, for sure, talking about it, I'd not only be lost in the noise, but seen as a me-too blogger, which I'm trying to avoid. But we saw it. And we think it'd be a mess.

(Peek at TechMeme for yesterday's million headlines)

Microsoft's goals with a Yahoo! acquisition are clear - try to become relevant in the Web space, including search and social networking. The company saw Yahoo!'s recent dysfunction and hoped to get the company on the cheap, while taking on Google in a more aggressive way. But this won't help their position against the competition, and may actually make the situation worse.

But, if you're Google, a Microsoft-Yahoo! alliance is just about the best thing that ever happened to you. It would combine two of the most confused and unfocused competitors you have, guarantees months to years of integration issues and slowed product development, concern about layoffs and jockeying for position amid increased political infighting. It wouldn't promise improved innovation and technology that would threaten your leadership, but instead take two companies with varying cultures and ask them to beat you together, where individually, they have failed.

If you're Apple, you see Microsoft aligning with Yahoo!, making Google more likely to align with you, which can only be good. You see the company who designed the Zune hook up with the company whose Yahoo! Music offerings went absolutely nowhere. You hope the company keeps making Mac Office, but you've got two backup plans, with your iWork suite, and Google Office.

While Yahoo! once had the leadership position on the Web, and still leads in a few areas, including population on Yahoo! Mail, and a good portion of the portal space, they've fallen behind everywhere else, the exceptions being their smart acquisitions of Web companies like Flickr, MyBlogLog and Del.icio.us. Microsoft never could get there, and while they still own the world's most popular and most hated browser, in Internet Explorer, they've had very little success anywhere else. Even their massive acquisition of Hotmail has turned out to be an unrespected joke.

A Microsoft and Yahoo! combo would have the world's most popular operating system, and the world's most popular office application suite. You could presumably layer on top of that Yahoo!'s widgets, acquired from Konfabulator. You could then integrate Outlook with Yahoo! Mail, and combine MSN search and portal efforts with those of Yahoo!, but just look at what's happened with all the other search acquisitions on Yahoo!'s side: Alta Vista, Inktomi, and Overture, for starters.... have they made Yahoo! better and more popular than Google? No.

A Microsoft/Yahoo! merger would take two tech titans, remove one, and make the combined offering less successful and less innovative than the combined efforts of the original. It'd give Google a free pass and extend their head start. It'd eliminate thousands of overlapping jobs, and send many smart folks out on the street or off to new start-ups. But if Yahoo! knows what's good for it, it'll reject the underpowered Microsoft offer outright, tell Ballmer to pound sand, and take a renewed effort toward integrating its own services and competing aggressively in the market. I just hope they're smart enough to say "No Deal".

Using Del.icio.us to Track Blog Reactions

When it comes to tracking who is saying what about your blog, it's hard to beat Technorati and Google Blog Search. While the occasional site may link your way and escape both these search engines, requiring a walk through your referral logs, the two services do a fairly good job of tracking down the vast majority of reactions throughout the blogosphere.

But neither site has the full superset of referrals, so you can't simply post a link to one or the other to keep others informed to your Web presence. Also, as most companies in the real world only select a subset of total mentions as featured media coverage, you might want to highlight some of the more prominent or favorable pieces yourself, filtering out the spam links, or those less useful.

In the last week or so, I've started to build a library of posts linking my way, with the help of Del.icio.us, Yahoo!'s social bookmarking site. When I run across a site that links to louisgray.com, or mentions me by name in context, I've added the site to my Del.icio.us library, with the tag of "coverage". While it's not yet all-inclusive, and only spans the last month or so, it's a start, one I hope to keep building, and eventually, may feature in a static page on this site.

You can see this build out at: del.icio.us/louismg/coverage.

I typically tag a referring site with the "coverage" tag, and the post's main topic. Of late, much of the coverage has also had the tag of "Mashable", "Twitter", "FriendFeed" or "ReadBurner", given those topics' recent highlights here. This will help remind me when I look back at this site later just what the linked post was talking about. The date when I bookmarked it should help too.

I haven't done the best job of delivering an "About" page or other static pages, but as we find time to build the site out, one highlighting coverage will surely be coming, and Del.icio.us will share some of the credit.

Why Can't Del.icio.us Show Most Popular Bookmarks by URL?

I'm something of a late or reluctant adopter of del.icio.us, the social bookmarking tool absorbed into Yahoo! at the end of 2005. While I've had an account for years, I didn't really find any use for the service, keeping my bookmarks to myself.

But now, with the ability to post items into my FriendFeed by adding a bookmark to del.icio.us, combined with the ability to track the number of times my own posts have been bookmarked, thanks to FeedBurner, I've been using the service a bit more. By adding items to del.icio.us, I'm not just saving a bookmark for me, but for all those who follow me on FriendFeed.

Also, I occasionally add some of my more popular posts to del.icio.us, not out of narcissism, but out of curiosity, to learn who else has done the same. After all, for some reason, I can't do a search by URL within del.icio.us, but can only find this data by self-bookmarking, and clicking the "saved by 1 other person" link, revealing the fan and how they tagged the item.

And this... is broken.

Del.icio.us is very much a repository based on tagging. It's easy to search the entire site for specific tags, like friendfeed, facebook, or techcrunch, but it's evasively difficult to search on a specific URL and find out the most popular posts from a specific blog or Web site.


A screen capture of some bookmarked posts from louisgray.com
When I search for the phrase "louisgray.com" in del.icio.us, I get some clues, but that's only if the person who bookmarked included the URL in the title of the bookmark itself. For example, I can see 19 saved the story 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader, while 12 saved Facebook Google Reader App Rebrands As Feedheads, and 16 bookmarked Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control. And five people have bookmarked louisgray.com itself. But if I referred to the posts by their headlines without louisgray.com, my search results would be useless.

I'm curious to see what Del.icio.us has planned for site improvements in 2008, as the service hasn't changed much of late. Back on September 6th, the company said:

"Fresh news from deep within Tag Mountain: we just launched an early, limited Preview of the Delicious redesign we’ve been working on for the past few months. We’ve refreshed the UI, built an entirely new (and faster) search engine, and added numerous improvements based on your feedback."

Since then, the silence has been deafening. The company's blog hasn't been updated in more than three months, and at the turn of the calendar year, one del.icio.us representative wrote in the comments, "Probably a couple months or so, give or take a few weeks…ish. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re working hard."

So... who knows. Maybe it'll be Spring. Maybe not. And it's not clear if the updated search engine will solve this issue of finding bookmarks by URL, or offering the ability to rank by most popular, most recent, or finding out which users most often like your posts. All of these would be useful tools for bloggers out there who want to see where their content fits in the social scheme of things.

10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech

1) Google Will Trump Both TechMeme and FeedHeads

Amid the discussion of Google's sneaking in a social network, little has been said about Google Reader potentially tabulating and reporting the most commonly-shared items and most popular feeds. I believe that in 2008, Google Reader will start reporting the most popular feeds, clicked items and shared items. By the end of 2008, it will become equally important for bloggers, if not more so, to be atop this list, instead of on TechMeme. Google will also integrate this information for both Facebook and iPhone, competing head to head with Mario Romero's excellent Feedheads application.

2) Facebook Will Buy Digg in an All-Stock Transaction

With the company being valued at $15 billion, Facebook can offer around 5 percent of the company to Kevin Rose and team at Digg and net them pre-IPO shares of what's sure to be a white-hot 2009 offering. The all-stock transaction would value Digg above $500 million, the highest possible exit for the company. Public companies, including Microsoft, will counter with $300 million of real money and be rebuffed.

3) eBay Will Sell StumbleUpon to Yahoo! or News Corporation

eBay has done absolutely nothing with StumbleUpon since the service's $75 million acquisition. Unlike PayPal, which was a natural fit, StumbleUpon has no fit within the ecosystem of eBay. A more acquisition-savvy businesses, like Yahoo! or News Corp, will end up with the property by the end of the year. Expect this to accelerate alongside management changes at eBay and continued fallout after the Skype disaster. What it will do is pocket eBay some serious cash. This time, StumbleUpon goes for north of $200M.

4) Twitter Will Add Video, Photography Support

Moving outside of its 140-character niche, Twitter will enable bored microbloggers to show exactly what they are doing with still photos and 15 second video clips. Despite the novelty wearing off, many will continue to do so, gaining us precious photos of the window over their computer desk, overexposed facial closeups and pictures of their breakfast. The service will be integrated with Picasa, Flickr and Photobucket.

5) Apple Boot Camp Will Morph to Be Like Parallels, VMWare Fusion

Some time in 2008, Apple's Boot Camp application will no longer require a restart to run Windows applications. Users will be able to natively run Microsoft Outlook, Project, Access and all other Windows-only applications alongside their Mac OS X applications on any new Mac. While developers may decry the competition to Parallels and VMWare Fusion, Apple will remain quiet, and slowly take over the market.

6) At Least One Major Browser Will Embed Ad-Blocking

By the end of 2008, either Firefox, Safari or Opera will natively ship with the ability to block all ad banners and Google AdSense. Publishers and bloggers will make a lot of noise about it, while secretly avoiding ads themselves. A significant percentage of early adopters will change browsers solely for this feature.

7) Assetbar and FriendFeed Will Gain Early Adopter Audiences

Early adopters always looking for an edge will move away from Bloglines and Google Reader in search for something more cutting-edge. Many will turn to FriendFeed and Assetbar, following the latter's launch, to find a rich feed reader with social networking features. However, neither service will enjoy a significant market share prior to the end of 2008, and neither will be acquired by the end of 2008.

8) Video Blogging Will Remain Unpopular, Unprofitable

Despite advances in video capture and broadband speeds, Web users will not gravitate toward long-form video blogs, choosing instead to stick with text and photography. Only the rare extreme niche businesses will find any success with utilizing video for blogging.

9) iTunes Video Rentals Will Decimate Netflix, Blockbuster, Hurt Box Office

The introduction of video rentals on iTunes will not only force a dramatic subscriber exit for Netflix and reduced rentals at Blockbuster, but will also further slow attendance at movie theaters nationwide, as consumers find the service good enough, and much less inexpensive than a night out.

10) Fast Company Will be a Fast Stay for Robert Scoble

After joining FastCompany in early 2008, Robert Scoble will be at first jubilant, have initial success, and then plateau. While he will remain tremendously popular, there will already be discussions by the end of 2008 as to where he will end up in 2009, giving ValleyWag and Uncov, among others, plenty to gossip about.

Other 2008 predictions:
Jeremy Toeman: Technology Predictions for 2008
Paris Lemon: The Year Ahead 2008: 17 Predictions
The Economist: Technology in 2008
Mahalo: 2008 Technology Predictions
Center Networks: 2008 Predictions from CenterNetworks

Millions and Millions of Search Results... Ignored

When you put a common term into a search engine, you're likely to get hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of search results, whether you use Google, Yahoo!, or any other leading engine.

In fact, to some, the vast number of search results is used to see which search engine crawler has done the most thorough job at indexing the Web - and it's assumed that with the most results has the superior algorithm.

But did you know that regardless of how many results there might actually be for a query, both Google and Yahoo! will only let you see the first 1,000?


Sorry, can't go past page 100. You've reached the end.
This artificial limit is excused as saying the limit has been put in place to reduce software and hardware resources, and that 1,000 results is good enough for most people. So you'll never, ever, get past page 100 on Google or Yahoo!, even if a search for "Google" on either engine shows more than 1 billion results.


But it's retrieving that data somewhere, right? If Google has a mountain of results available for a term, and only delivers the top 1,000, then some database somewhere knows what are the results for positions 1,001 to 9,999 and beyond, to the tens of millions. Yet users have no recourse if they want to peer into that index. There's no option to "Show all results" or "Display the top 10,000 results". Google and Yahoo! have arbitrarily decided that 1,000 is good enough for you, and that's that.

Do you feel lucky? Some have said Google overwhelmingly optimizes for the first results, and as the company writes, "We try to make your search experience so efficient that it's not necessary to scroll past the first ten listings."

But isn't it likely that there are projects out there where it would be helpful to analyze the top 5,000 results? Or 20,000? If you were an SEO firm, there are obvious benefits to this, or if you're doing any kind of artificial intelligence research, Google would be one of the best data pools out there.

So why are they doing this? It looks like even Google, who is assumed to have one of the most redundant, robust systems known to man, is trying to save money and resources. They write, in an explanation, "It would heavily tax our system to provide these results for everyone."

While that's understood, then what data is propping up Yahoo! or Google's claims that they have the most thorough results? Could the last step from Google's algorithm state (multiply results x 2), solely to have the biggest number available? After all, if you could only see the first 1,000, why not report you got eleventy trillion? There's got to be a way to get to the rest of the data.

(Also see: Search Engine Roundtable, Instant Fundas and FirstStop WebSearch for more...)

Web 2.0 Logos Celebrate Halloween - You Scared?

It's October 31st, which can only mean that while the kids go door to door to get candy, we're going from Web site to Web site to find out which Web companies are embracing Halloween in the true tradition of logo modification!

Google, which has a very long history of this thing, is of course participating. So is Google's subsidiary, YouTube, and Google competitors, Yahoo! and Technorati. Even Friendfeed, started by some ex-Googlers, has debuted a great Halloween logo.

Can you find any notable Halloween themed logos out there that I missed, and hopefully some that have absolutely zero to do with Google? Post them in the comments, and we can update the picture.