Monday, January 09, 2006

Peter Burrows interviews Harvard's Clayton Christensen on Apple's Innovator's Dilemma.  

Kevin Burton reports that Yahoo has bought WebJay and Lucas Gonze will join Yahoo in Santa Monica. 

There's some confusion about my suggestion for search engines, below. Suppose I have a blog about cars. That's all I write about. When I go to Google to look up upholstery, it shows me pages about car upholstery first, not living room furniture. Why? Because they know I am especially interested in cars. It would be different for an interior designer with a blog. Another example. A guitar player who looked up instrument would get pages about guitars. A chemist would get lab equipment. 

Paul Thurrott on Google Pack: "This bizarre collection of applications, each with its own distinct user interface, level of quality, and method of updating, actually does more to credit Microsoft's integration strategy than it does to prove the notion that Google knows anything about creating software." 

A remembrance from Paul Andrews of the great moments in his career as a tech columnist at the Seattle Times, which apparently has come to an end. He says some very nice things about me and this blog, which is appreciated. Paul has had an incredible career which is worth a summation.  

According to his blog, Paul is joining GreenForGood. 

At the Cheescake Factory dinner in Palo Alto on 12/30, Jacob Levy said that every link on Scripting News points to something about me. I laughed and asked Jacob if a programmer could debug a program with that kind of logic. Sometimes I point to things that don't mention me.  

Jeremy Zawodny says Feedster will die in 2006, which leads to the inevitable question. WTF happened at Feedster? Why did Scott Johnson leave? In the comments on Zawodny's post, the new President, Chris Redlitz, responds. Now there's the web working as it should. Except it would have been better if the questions had not been raised by an employee of Yahoo, a much bigger company that competes with Feedster. Should they really be the ones asking about the death of a small company? How would you feel if a giant company started raising questions about your own survivability? And will Jeremy be able to resist flaming me for raising these questions? 

A very simple idea for improving Google search and getting rid of spam problems all in one swoop, and it's not the first time the idea has appeared here. Let me tell you where my weblog is. Then it knows what my interests are. Give me search results relevant to who I am.  

Three years ago today: "I've been offered a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and have, of course, accepted." 

Five years ago today: "A human being has integrity if he or she is what he or she appears to be. That's why integrity commands us to disclose conflicts, so that what we say, and who we appear to be, are in synch."