From Search Engine Watch's 2002 April Fool's page: Google Quits Search, Focuses on Waste Management

Google To Become Portal
GoogleMail is to allow anyone to be myname@google.com. New GoogleStocks and GooglePages web building feature also unveiled. "Yeah, we said we'd never become a portal, but that was all part of our master plan," said cofounder Larry Page. Google's other cofounder Sergey Brin also confirmed that the company was launching a hostile takeover of Yahoo.

GooglePages | A Whole Lotta Nothing

The online storage market is evolving fast. In the past, users could expect no more than a simple service where files could be slowly uploaded and downloaded from a mapped virtual drive or a simple web based interface. Little competition (and the bursting of the bubble) led to very high prices for a minimal amount of storage.

Over the last year a slew of new services have launched (some are launching in February) with serious web 2.0 features, reasonable pricing (including free unlimited storage) and, in at least one case (OmniDrive), the ability to read/write directly to the file with local applications like Office, on the remote server. This last feature speeds the process of writing to files significantly by skipping the requirement to download the file to the hard drive first.

TechCrunch � The Online Storage Gang

How do you elminate viral marketing? Put a wall around your content. Times Select shows how its done.

Not at all surprising...

A VC: Times Select and Anti-Viral Marketing

As part of developing a business model for Omnidrive for months (probably years) I have been thinking about the economic model of online storage. When speaking to potential users, investors and reading general feedback it seems that Google have set the bar high for other services with their Gmail offering. Most users now expect at least 2GB of storage for free, afterall, if Google do it then so must you. Mike Arrington from Techcrunch went as far as to ask for 500GB for cheap

Nik Cubrilovic � Blog Archive � The Economics of Online Storage

With apologies to Bruce Eckel, I sat down this afternoon and put together a draft list of the first-order elements of Web 2.0 thinking. It's not that I have the hubris to consider this list official in any way but it should be a serviceable starting point for debate, discourse, and reference. I'd also like to give credit to Jeremy Zawodny for his write-up pointing me to Tom Coat's excellent presentation notes from his Future of Web Apps talk which partially inspired this effort. I think both of them have really solid source material. But they still don't quite capture a complete high-level picture of the ingredients, forces, and decisions that have to go into thinking about, using, and building complete Web 2.0 software experiences.

Thinking in Web 2.0: Sixteen Ways (web2.wsj2.com)

The National Public Radio’s podcasting experiment has local affiliates biting their finger nails. ‘’If you thought that the newspaper people were in the grips of a siege mentality, you should come and see the public radio and TV people,” says Rafat Ali of PaidContent.

NPR podcasts make me happy. They made me finally get into this whole podcasting thing (not that I have a 'pod yet), because this is what I really wanted. I wanted TiVo for radio; not for the music, of course, but for the shows I listen to.

I give very generously to my local NPR station, because it is appropriate for the amount I use it, and because I support the overall mission of NPR. I'd probably split that with the podcast division if that was an option, now. And when I finish installing my wifi mp3 player in my car, even more of that would go toward NPR/podcast. Should my local affiliate be threatened -- yes. For my money, I want the NPR content, and for the local station's demographic/history/moneymaking it is about music. I gave money to WVPR when I could receive it, because in the primetime hours I was driving, they were playing Fresh Air not Jazz. I believe in the NPR model so far as I believe in public support of content... let me be selective and heck yeah the locals are in trouble. Adapt or die, and terrestrial broadcast is a dying industry.

NPR’s Podcast Problems | The Daily Om

When you search on “fred wilson” or “vc” on Yahoo! or Google, this blog is the first result on both for those search terms. I have always thought that was because those keywords appear high up on the front page of my blog (vc is in the title) and because of the large number of inbound and outbound links that this blog has accumulated in the 2 � years that I have been blogging.

But when you search on “fred Wilson” or “vc” on Ask.com, you get a whole bunch of other results. It’s basically what those search terms returned on Google or Yahoo! back in 2003 before I started blogging. So that means to me that Ask.com doesn’t seem to care much about link rank.

I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Because when you are searching for Fred Wilson, there is as good a chance you want the artist, chess master, or rock n roll band, as you want this blog. When you search on “vc” on Google or Yahoo!, your first link is this blog. Is that the best result for vc? I doubt it.

Text search works well enough to be useful, but it doesn’t work well.

A VC: In Search of a Better Algorithm

In getting to know Prototype a little better, I decided to go through the latest version of the Prototype library (1.5.0_pre0) and detail every method and property that was available. In doing so, I got a much better understanding of how the code works. Here are the files in a 1280x960 and a widescreen 1440x900 version.

Prototype Dissected - snook.ca

A Trading Standards officer in a town in the UK contacted the Mozilla foundation to assure it that she'd caught the icky pirates who were copying Firefox without permission. When the Mozzers explained free software and copyleft, the officer lost it -- "I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case? If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted."

Boing Boing: UK anti-piracy officer assures Firefox she'll catch the pirates who copy it

It's so weird how a small black book and a nice pen can change things. Since graduating from college I have increasingly gone "all digital". No more paper, vacuum tubes, tapes etc etc. However, in this process I have tried to cram the needs of my life into a set of rather restrictive tools, at least when compared to paper. While Getting Things Done has really helped me to manage my life using digital tools, I feel that I've arbitrarily limited my own success because I never even allowed myself to consider paper as a tool for helping me. Kind of short sighted looking back.

shahine.com/omar/ - How the Moleskine Rocked My World