SOMEWHAT FRANK

Google To Unleash Classified Ad Product

According to articles on NewMedia Report, CNet.com News and PaidContent.org Google is about to unleash a classified product. A company called Oodle has been creating some buzz recently for their classified aggregating capabilities and offers. Also Recycler.com, a Tribune product, has also been introduced in several cities. All of these products are similar to Craig Newmark's craiglist which offers free classified advertising which has helped to plummet the paid classified advertising market in both online and in newspapers. So we will probably soon see what Google has to offer.

For the blogosphere voice on a Google classified product check out TP Wire Service, Breaking The Media Code, Mark Maunder's blog, and ReadUponIt.

Are $100 Laptops A Reality?

A group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are trying to get computers into the hands of every kid. They feel children and students should not be held back by the financial burdens a computer may bring and are working to come up with an affordable option by creating $100 laptops.

Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT lab leader came up with the $100 laptop idea after visiting a Cambodian village and seeing how kids could benefit by having a notebook computer that kids could bring to school and tote home. He and his wife have started a non-profit foundation called One Laptop Per Child and in hopes of being able to get 5 to 15 million machines in the hands of children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa. Also in a year Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney hopes to buy a laptop of all 500,000 middle and high-school students in the state.

The blueprints for the machines were unveiled at the Technology Review magazine’s Emerging Technologies conference at MIT. The machines will be extremely durable to withstand the rigor of a child’s life and experiences as well as energy efficient, with a hand crank that allows the users to create more energy when the batteries run out. The laptop is equipped with a 500-megahertz processor by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) which is about the same swiftness of many handheld devices today and flash memory instead of a hard drive (like the new iPod Nano and other handheld music players).  The machines will have 4 USB ports for data storage and multimedia use, as well as Wi-Fi wireless network capabilities. To help save on software costs the laptops will use the free version of Linux operating system rather then the more popular Microsoft products that are available.

Negroponte, worries of these machines being stolen from children and therefore wants to market them solely for kids in hopes of causing a negative social ripple to anyone that has one that in his mind should not. I see what Negroponte is trying to do however feel that inexpensive laptops are something everyone could use, not just students and children. Therefore, I do not think the effort should be so narrowly marketed. However, I really like the idea since I believe it is an excellent one.

Click the images in this post for an enlarged image of the laptop. For more information on the $100 laptop project go to the MIT $100 Laptop Website. Check out what the rest of the blogosphere is saying about the $100 laptop project by visiting The Barrel, All Things RSS, PCIN, Nishi’s Blogosphere, Treehuggers, Laptopical, and geekBlue. Additionally, check out the articles on washingtonpost.com and MSNBC.

Special thanks to KB for editing this post on Somewhat Frank.

Google Adsense Keyword Value Site Created

The Coonen has started a Google Adsense keyword value tracker website written in PHP that tells you what letters what keywords are worth the most. Check out the Top Paying Adsense Keywords site however please keep in mind it is still a work in progress and only has the following letters completed thus far: A, C, D, E, F, G, and H. Be sure to check back on the Coonen blog for updates.

I think this site will come in handy, especially if you are passing Google Adsense a keyword or hints rather then using the conventional page URL scanning method. Special thanks to Lee Odden and his toprank del.icio.us entry for pointing this new online tool out to me.

Google and NASA Teaming Up In Cali

I was not to surprised this morning to read the news of Google and NASA joining forces in Silicon Valley at a new NASA facility. I have written a couple of posts recently that mentioned this reoccurring theme by Google to get involved in space information management. The first signs were shown with their Google Moon Map as showing in Google To The Moon (07/20/2005) and I even half hearted stated "The next thing you know they (Google) will be offering trips to the moon!" in Happy 7th Birthday Google (9/27/05).

So what does the Google/NASA alliance really mean? NASA is going to build a new base in Silicon Valley and share it with Google and they will work on research together. This new partnership comes at a time when the American people are less enthusiastic of the space program due to recent NASA disasters. US congresswoman Anna Eshoo hopes the partnership will, "enhance the future exploration of space". According to Google's CIO Eric Schmidt:

"Google and NASA share a common desire to bring a universe of information to people around the world."

So it sounds like we can expect to see more space imagery available at our fingertips via Google. I cannot wait to see what they plan to offer. Google Space perhaps?

To find out what the blogosphere is saying about Google/NASA alliance check out The Huffington Post, Shooting the Messenger, Slashdot, PC Doctor, odrakir, and Googlecrumbs. Also check out these articles on the Silicon.com, washingtonpost.com, MSNBC from Reuters and MSNBC from the AP.

How Influential Is The Blogosphere?

According to a report titled "Firms in the dark over blog threat" by Guardian Media two-thirds of the businesses are totally in the dark of the power and influence of the blogosphere and its possible negative affects on their brand. They do not realize that bloggers could cause their business harm by planting seeds in blog posts which could send ripples through the blogging community of over 18 million bloggers.  Hugh Fraser, the co-author of the report and a former journalist for the BBC World Service said:

"Public relations companies have long experience in dealing with appeasing journalists, but with bloggers they're often not sure how to react."

I think that this could be said for the media industry as well due in part to the denial to accept bloggers and citizen journalists as another part of the media industry who are in some cases becoming just as popular as professional writer. Political figures also should realize the strength of the blogosphere and in some cases they have. This recent "Beltway vs. the Blogosphere" article explains how political bloggers could sway the opinion of the blogosphere.  I would have to agree because I cannot tell you how many times I have seen "Impeach Bush" and "Bush Indictment" as top Technorati searches in the last month which due to editorial standards would have trouble making a top media outlet's main headline.  So how influential is the blogosphere?

To read some recent posts in blogosphere check out the post on Web of Influence which dissects a recent Kathy Gill paper titled "How Can We Measure The Influence Of The Blogosphere?".  Also check out this post on the The Editor's Blog as it highlights how companies should measure the influence of the blogosphere.

Ask Jeeves Has Dropped Jeeves

The summer sale of Ask Jeeves to InterActiveCorp for $2.3 billion dollars has spurred some changes to the search engine company. IAC Chairman Barry Diller has announced that the bald chubby butler named Jeeves will no longer be used. Also the name Jeeves has been dropped from the name, making it only Ask. IAC plans to make some back-end changes to improve the search engine functionality and believes that dropping Jeeves will help shake the search engine's old reputation which employed a search method which had users actually typing in questions into rather then the keywords. Since keyword searching has risen to prominence and the question asking method is long since dead I would agree IAC has a good point but we will see if the changes can help Ask any ground in the extremely crowded and competitive web search engine war.

For the blogosphere perspective check out Doctorvee, Ad Jab, Tech Blog, Search Engine News and No Geek Is An Island. Also check out Ask.com to see the changes for yourself.

Feedburner Offers PingShot Publicity Feature

Feedburner, the privately held and headquartered company in downtown Chicago, Illinois, last Thursday (09/22/05) started offering a new feature to its already extensive line of feed publicity tools with the addition of  PingShot. PingShot is a service that automatically pings services for you every time you update your Feedburner RSS feed. They offer about a dozen choices to ping (i.e. Technorati, MyYahoo and PubSub just to name a few). This should help in enabling these services to have the most up to date Feedburner feed.

I think this will be extremely helpful in attacking a lag problem I have experienced with MyYahoo and a couple other RSS feed aggregators. I noticed my feeds would not update as soon as I updated Somewhat Frank blog and Feedburner RSS feed. I am hoping PingShot will remedy the problem. They are also asking users to submit additional services to extend PingShot's ping service offerings; I would recommend Pingoat by Kailash Nadh.

To find our more about this new feed publicity feature check out this post on Burning Questions the Feedburner blog. Also check out these blog posts on Qumana, Nuhuati, iThink's blog, and Ping-o-Matic's blog to see what others in the blogosphere are saying about the new Feedburner PingShot feature. 

Google Video Debuts With Chris Rock

Google is now using its brand to cross promote television online with the release of Google Video an apparent Flash video player which is debuting the new UPN comedy “Everybody Hates Chris” featuring Chris Rock. What a nice seventh birthday surprise from Google. The video will be available for 4 days by going to: http://video.google.com/chris.html to view the entire first episode of the new television show.

The Google announcement further emphasizes the trend to cross promote television with online video as AOL and Yahoo have done in the past. I am sure we will see a lot more from Google Video in the months to come. Google Video already appears to be trying to go head-to-head with online viral video industry leader iFilm. They have released 20 random videos already where you can view random video and just reload the page and 20 fresh videos appear. Google could even go after NetFlix the by mail DVD rental service who is supposed to have online on-demand video technology in the works. Is this the beginning of a new channel called Google TV? It will be interesting to see where Google will ultimately take this one. Oh and I nearly forgot to mention, Google Video offers a video search too...surprised?

Check out Marketer Today, Techno Rant I, Rice Cooker, Today's Top Opinion and Boing Boing for the blogosphere perspective on Google Video.

Who’s Is Bigger…Google’s or Yahoo’s?

According to report from Google the no longer are going to boast the size of their search index on Google’s homepage. As of Monday (9/26/05), Google’s homepage displayed 8.17 billion web pages indexed. However, this number is a little hard to quantity since the industry does not have an agreement on what constitutes an indexed page. Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer products has helped shed light on the index size by saying the index is three times larger then it’s rivals and 1,000 times larger then when Google started seven years ago. This all comes in wake of Google announcing that it has tripled its search scope by tripling the number of Web pages that its system can search in an effort to upstage a claim that Yahoo has a bigger you know what web search index. So the search battle of “who’s is bigger” rages on and I find it is sort of comical since it transcends humankind's competitive “bigger is better” attitude when really having the biggest does not necessarily mean having the best. Search relevancy is extremely important and whoever can best blend relevancy with an extremely abundant amount of results will win the “Best Web Search” battle, though I have to admit brand recognition and loyalty might also play into the war.

Happy 7th Birthday Google

Google is 7 years old today. Wow, Google has come a long way since its creation by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a Menlo Park, California garage. Google is the most prominent brands today and has now started to flex its muscles into any area of people’s lives that it can think of in offering, maps, instant messaging, email, wi-fi, and online video products. The next thing you know they will be offering trips to the moon!

In the meantime, I am going to ponder life as I strategically plan the next placement of Google Adsense ads on Tribune's network of website while remaining hopeful one day I will come up an innovative idea like Larry and Serg did seven years ago today. Be sure to check out Google's Corporate Information page for more information on Google’s start.

MSN Toolbar Offers Watson 2.0 Add-In

Intellext a small search company based in Chicago, released a new version of its Watson product, called Watson 2.0, earlier this summer. Watson 2.0 offers web search results based on the content of your office files, like Microsoft Word, Office and PowerPoint. The “personal research assistant” by Intellext is now available as an add-in to the MSN search toolbar. So users can now have the same sidebar search assistance action by simply downloading the add-in for the MSN toolbar. The Watson 2.0 add-in download is currently available for a 30 day trial and after that it costs $10 a month or $99 for a year.

I could see this functionality being extremely advantageous to students and researchers that write lots of reports and white-papers since it appears the Watson could save users time in searching for supporting materials. I have no measurement of the relevancy or quality of these links and would have to do further research to quantify those points. However, here is the website to obtain additional information on Watson 2.0. Also check out these articles discussing Watson on PC Magazine and CNet News which considers Watson a competitor to Google's sidebar.

Searching For iFilm

iFilm is currently the number one search term on Technorati which made me wonder what is everyone searching for? I really could not put my finger on it. Steve Rubel recently pointed out this iPod Nano commercial spoof. I looked at the top 100 iFilm videos by popularity and saw the number one video to be one that played off of the recent Kanye West rant in regard to President Bush (348,750 views). Besides those few I saw music, comical and mature videos and a few were anti-climatic. Check out the top 100 iFilm videos and see for yourself what all the noise is about. Also if you go to the iFilm About page you will see the heavy film industry hitters behind this privately held company.

The Internet Is Tired?

According to imood a Internet mood sensing website "Right now the Internet is feeling tired". Check out the screen shot above. imood a social networking website registers users and asks them a number of profile questions but most importantly imood asks youusers to keep updating their mood on their profile. imood then compiles the results and gives the mood of the Internet. imood also can help you keep in touch with how you and your friends are feeling by saving a buddy list of other imood users.  imood keeps track of your mood two ways, 1.) base mood and 2.) personal mood which can be a sentence that describe your exact feelings. I find social networking sites pretty fascinating so I thought I would highlight one I just recently stumbled upon.

SearchFox RSS Reader Uses Machine Learning Technology

I took a chance to get a beta account for the new SearchFox RSS reader. Since it is in beta there are some features that are still not completed. However the new aggregator uses machine learning technology to automatically rank and personalize incoming feeds to reflect each reader’s unique interests. So this RSS reader is smart and presents you with extra feeds based on the feeds that you already have read or pulled in. SearchFox is also totally web based and free. To give it a test drive there are still a few thousand beta accounts available by emailing [email protected] few and mentioning the reference code xb17. Then go to the SearchFox Beta page and login. Let me know what you think of the new RSS reader that learns.

Googlebombing President Bush Explained

Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products at Google recently made a post on the Google's corporate blog explaining  Googlebombing. This was spurred by search results that point to President George Bush's White House biography when searching on the terms "failure" and "miserable failure" on Google. Ironically, Micheal Moore's website is the second search result for both of those search terms. Marissa says "determined pranksters" are responsible for influencing these terms search result and not Google. She explains how linking to the George Bush biography page while using the terms "miserable failure" as the text associated with that link repeated several times on different websites could cause search results to be affected.

A Consuming Experience wonders if Google is biased but brings up some good points on why they probably are not. While Connected Internet questions why Google has not yet fixed the problem since they have identified the cause and I agree that is a good question. However, I presume that if the problem was easy to fix without changing the backbone of Google's indexing algorithm they would have fixed the situation by now. 

Check out Marissa Mayer's post. Also to find out more Marissa's Google career check out these articles on Business Week and Red Herring.  Additionally, check out Googlebomb on Wikipedia.