Ian Murdock’s Weblog

Dave Winer: “By some calculations, in three years, 27 percent of the NY Times hits will originate from their RSS feeds. The BBC is aiming for 10 percent by the end of the year. Neither company puts ads in their feeds because: The feeds themselves are ads for the stories they link to, which are revenue-generators. Anything that keeps people from clicking, that confuses them, takes them off course, is going to drop the click-through rate.”

While I agree with the above logic, it only holds true if readers are happy with the current state of affairs in which RSS feeds only contain summaries, and readers have to click through to a web site to read the full story.

Me, I’m actually getting fed up with having to do this. I’d much rather have the full story embedded in the feed, so I can read the story right there in the RSS reader without having to go to a separate browser window. Plus, that allows me to read feeds while I’m offline. Right now, I have two groups: Full feeds, which I can read offline; and summary feeds, which I have to flag if I’m offline for later reading, and that disrupts my workflow. I’d be perfectly happy to see advertising in the RSS if the full story came along with it.

I suppose I could find an RSS reader that prefetches pages or something, but I’ve never seen a reader that does that outside of Mozilla Thunderbird, and it seems like overkill to use Thunderbird for RSS since I use Evolution for email etc. Anyway, this seems like unnecessary work when all the technologies are there to just put everything in the RSS feed for me. (Personally, I’m looking for a nice reader that lives inside Firefox, since that seems to me to be the logical place for such a thing. Recommendations welcome.)

I was just getting ready to write something about Google’s new search history feature (which allows you to automatically keep track of Google searches you have done and even limit subsequent searches to the pages you clicked on as the result of those searches, helping you find pages you remember finding via Google but can’t find again when you need them) when, lo and behold, Yahoo! one-ups Google with Yahoo! My Web within the span of a single week. (Note that, from now on, I’m going to drop the exclamation point from Yahoo! since it makes me want to put an exclamation point after! every! word!)

Despite having a really corny name, My Web is great, and it even has a toolbar for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to save a page with a single click–finally, the days are starting to arrive when those of us who use Linux on the desktop aren’t second class citizens.

Note that this move is sheer brilliance–we Linux desktop users are still second class citizens in Google’s eyes, as they don’t offer a Firefox version of their toolbar yet. It’s brilliance because installing the toolbar asked me if I wanted to change my default search engine to Yahoo. Sure, what the heck. And, you know what? I’m finding it gives me results that are just as good as Google. Moreover, it’s not just apples for apples: the searches I type into the Firefox search box are reflected in the Yahoo toolbar (so I now have ready access to a history of my searches), saved in My Search History (a similar feature to Google’s new one), etc. In other words, there’s better integration with the rest of my online stuff. Google has the raw materials to match Yahoo in the integration department, though their identity story is less consistent and much weaker than Yahoo’s. By embracing Linux through their Firefox toolbar, Yahoo has won the chance to win me over from Google. Smart move, Yahoo. It’s all about integration.

Probably the most interesting aspect of My Web is that it has an API. They’re even experimenting with attention.xml support. I can’t wait to see what independent developers do with this. They show remarkable wisdom with this statement: “As is often the case with brand new ideas, we haven’t really figured out how exactly this should work, but there’s only one way to find out.” What? You don’t know everything, Yahoo? That makes two of us. Given that, it’s smarter to focus on building a platform, then see what others dream up–just make sure to keep it open, or it won’t be a particularly good platform.

Oh, and as if this wasn’t enough, Yahoo also revamped its news site last week.

There are a couple of features I’d like to see, such as better integration with Yahoo Bookmarks, so I can save pages and get to my saved pages in the same way I’ve been doing for years; and del.icio.us like tagging and sharing features, about which I don’t have much to say because I haven’t tried del.icio.us yet (though one thing I do know a priori is that I want tagging etc. to integrate with the rest of my stuff).

With three giants (Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo) battling it out to win over folks like me, and others (Microsoft, Apple, and the various Linux companies) working to integrate the edge nodes with the core services in new and innovative ways (made possible through the availability of APIs), the Internet operating system is shaping up to be very, very good indeed. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.

The guys over at Google have come up with yet another amazing hack: Google Maps, incredible in its own right, can now do satellite images, and at an amazingly high resolution too.

Of course, as with any new search technology, my first search was for myself–in this case, for my house–and sure enough, there it is, plain as day. You can even see my car parked in the driveway–very cool but a bit scary too.

For obvious reasons, I’m not including a link to that image here, but here’s Progeny (the building at center, just south of the trees).

Deb and I spent a good hour poking in various addresses and looking down from the bird’s eye view. In addition to the obvious places, such as the World Trade Center and the White House (the Washington Monument is just south of the White House, with the National Mall extending to the west and east, the Lincoln Memorial at the far west end of the Mall, the Capitol at the east, and the Pentagon just off the screen to the southwest across the Potomac River), we had a look at our old house in Tucson. Sure enough, they built a fire station across the road in the back, just like our former neighbors complained about last time we saw them.

Related link: Google Sightseeing. “Why bother seeing the world for real?”

Jon Udell: “Individuals and corporations should be the authoritative sources of basic information about themselves. That way, if an application needs my name, address, and phone number, I can refer it to a source that I control and guarantee to be correct.” Related reading: Orkutified.

I’ve made a couple of fairly significant changes to the organization of my weblog over the past few days. First of all, I’ve replaced the smattering of categories I used to have with only two: Progeny and Intervues. RSS feeds for both, containing both brief excerpts and full HTML of each post, are at left. The Progeny category holds everything related to my work at Progeny, which generally used to fall into the categories “commoditization of software”, “emerging platforms”, and “linux and open source”. In the future, I’ll be blogging more about my work on Componentized Linux here, as well as my work on the related projects hosted at http://platform.progeny.com/.

I’ll leave the Intervues category unexplained for now. Suffice to say, for now, I’ve spent an enormous amount of time thinking about the personal knowledge management problem over the past several years (mostly as a result of personal, and painful, experience), and I’ve long had designs for a software system to tackle this problem sketched out on scraps of paper, and have even implemented bits and pieces in fits and starts. (Hint: This was originally part of an executive summary I was writing for a business plan.) I figured the best way to spur myself into action on this front would be to let the cat out of the bag here. After all, that strategy worked out pretty well last time.

According to CNET News.com, Google will soon offer you the ability to do just this:

“The idea is that your mail can stay in there forever,” said Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google. “You can always index it, always search it, and always find things from the past. […] The way we’d like to say it is that part of our mission is to organize and present all the world’s information, and e-mail’s part of that information that currently is not well organized. That is the rubric under which we offer this.”

Great idea. The catch is, you have to get your email through them. Wouldn’t it be great if you could google your email from any email account, without having to lock yourself into an email provider?

eWEEK reports that Yahoo is combining content from its hundreds of news partners with thousands of additional sources from the web in its Yahoo News Search. Previously, the two had been separated.

This is a great step, but unfortunately, Yahoo Alerts can still only match stories from the news partners. That’s a shame, because Google News Alerts feels like bubble gum and bailing wire by comparison.

George Colony: “I like Google. But the hype, silliness, and rumored $15 billion-plus market cap of the company’s impending IPO beckons. Is Google’s search good? Yes. Is the company worth tens of billions? No–and here’s my thinking: […]”

Excellent piece. I’ve thought a lot about this as well, particularly Google’s lack of barriers to entry (Factor Two). Google has a strong brand, and perhaps marginally better technology (for now), but that’s about it. (Of course, a few billion dollars cash can buy some pretty good barriers..)

I’m a big fan of Google too and have been for many years, but I find myself hoping that Yahoo! Search gives Google a run for its money. I’ve always liked Yahoo! for the personalized, integrated experience it offers, and I’d very much like to see search neatly integrated with the rest of what Yahoo! gives me. I suspect I’m not alone, and for this reason, I think Yahoo! is well-positioned to compete with Google–as I’ve argued before, it’s all about integration.

Microsoft, as always, is the wildcard.

CNET News.com: Researchers at U.C. Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems estimate that the world stored 5 quintillion bytes of information in 2002, doubling 1999’s total. The study is available here. I cited the 1999 study in It’s time to evolve Personal Information Management.

Incremental Blogger, eBook publishing with a twist: I’ve been wondering about a twist on the eBook concept–that may better be characterized as “Book Apps” where the application appears to be more of a book than a software program. […] Microsoft’s Visual Studio is kind of going this way with its plugins, extensible help system, and the like. There are even online training materials and demos. But it’s interesting to think of what the environment might be like if you take the “reading” infrastructure even further. Imagine the reading infrastructure more tightly coupled within the framework. I’m thinking about the book being king. When you start Visual Studio for the first time, for instance, it would look more like a book than an IDE. It’s focused more on helping you decide what you want to do and getting you going. How many times have you picked up heavy workhorse applications like Visual Studio for the first time and asked yourself: “OK, now what do I do?”

Very intriguing idea.