Will there be another bubble in 2008? I don’t know but this song by Richter Scales really made me laugh:
Warning: Robert Scoble had Diet Coke coming out of his nose after watching this.
Jochem Prins
Notes from an entrepreneur with a passion for web technology & innovation
Category Archives: Remarkable
Googleabout – use google without advertisements
I’m not sure if Google appreciates this, but their turns out to be a way to use google without advertisements.
How? Very simple, just start your search at http://www.google.com/search?output=googleabout and you will see a nice and clean google.
Now, let’s see what happens when the blogosphere starts encouraging everybody to use this url. I think Google will disable this feature very soon…
Why is netvibes getting that much attention in the blogosphere?
I’m always a bit surprised by the amount of attention that is given to netvibes in the blogosphere. Sure, it’s a great app and they are pretty successful in what they are doing. The same however holds for other personalized homepages like Pageflakes and Protopage. I always assumed that all the buzz was caused by the fact that most early adopters are using netvibes, a recent poll on read/writeweb however proves the opposite. Exactly 1700 people answered the question: which personalized homepage do you use?
The top3:
1. Pageflakes (30%)
2. Google reader (26%)
3. Netvibes (21%)
Now it’s time to compare these numbers with the attention that number 1 (pageflakes) and number 3 (netvibes) are receiving from the blogosphere.
Ads in Captchas
Very interesting idea of JY, why not put advertising in captchas:
Google could even create content-matched captchas for adsense publishers! The big advantage is that every visitor is forced to look at it!
MIT Sketch Understanding System
Great new tool developed at MIT:
This thesis proposal has a detailed explanation.
Google has officially bought YouTube!
It’s official now! Google has bought YouTube for $1.65 billion (in stock)!
This is definitively the biggest and probably the most important acquirement in the (young) history of Google. It is now Googles turn to show how they will make YouTube profitable.
See Google’s press releases here or here.
25 euro additional taxes on MP3-players in the Netherlands
The dutch government is about to approve a proposal of a Dutch copyright foundation which wants to add 25 euro of extra taxes on every MP3 player sold here. This should compensate the missed income caused by illegal MP3s. Well well well, what a great idea!
Besides the fact that it is absolutly ridiculous to let people pay royalties before even playing a song, this will also cause serious problems for the dutch electronics industry.
From january 1st 2007, every MP3 player will rise 25 euro in price. Oh no, let me rephrase that: from january 1st 2007, every MP3 player in the Netherlands will rise 25 euri in price.
So, I guess you don’t have to be a genious to understand what will happen…
Exactly: everybody will buy a MP3 player somewhere else. Belgium and Germany are only a short drive away and offcourse we also have the webshops which will be happy to deliver that new iPod to our home address.
In my opinion, there is only one solution for all the copyright problems we are currently facing: lower the price of the music! I just can’t understand why the record labels still don’t get it. Let’s get rid of the DRM and charge reasonable prices for mp3 files! That’s the only way to boost the online music sales and it will prevent a lot of people from downloading ‘illegal mp3s’.
Phishing sites blacklisted by Google
Interesting post over at Google blogoscoped, people have found a blacklist and a whitelist which is probably used for Google’s ‘safe browsing’ functionality. All that time I was thinking that Google had this ‘smart discovery’ for phishing sites, now it turns out that it is just a good old blacklist!
Oh, but wait, the fact that they also need a whitelist must mean that they do use some auto-discovery. Apparently it works a bit too well occasionaly, so they included a whitelist for sites that are known to be safe. Still interesting though.
Update: more about the lists can be read at the mozilla wiki, might be handy if you plan to use the lists in your own application.
Business sells better than sex
According to australian research, sex and pornography are no longer the most popular search topics on the web. Professor Amanda Spinks from Queensland University of Technology’s says that business and commerce-related topics, including buying and selling on the net, are currently more popular than sex.
The research was performed in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, together they analysed up to 30 million search sessions from search engines including Alta Vista, AlltheWeb.com, Ask.com, Excite and Dogpile. Apparently they didn’t make use of AOL’s logfiles that were are available online.
A few explanations that Prof. Spinks has:
– “More women are searching the web. Back in the 90s, it was probably young male geeks, but now the demographics are changing with mums and dads, kids, grandmas and business people all searching the web.”
– “The general population is searching now compared to the male set in the 90s.”
– “Back in the 90s, there wasn’t as much business information on the web.”
To be honest, I’m not really convinced. I would love to read a more detailed paper about how the research was performed. Looking at the statistics of one of the major Dutch search engines (where I happen to work at), I can only draw the conclusion that sex does still dominate the search topics.
The story of a crocodile hunter
So, you’ve been a crocodile hunter for most of your live. Never afraid, even not for the biggest crocodiles. Then, when you enjoy the beautyfull underwater-world of Great Barriere Reef, you get strucked by a stingray and die. What a story.
A couple of days later, Steve Irwin (the crocodile hunter who we are talking about) is almost dominating the web. His own website can’t deal with the high number of requests and is seriously offline. In all of the major search engines, “Steve Irwin” and “Crocodile Hunter” are among the most executed queries. A tribute to Steve is one of the most viewed videos on youtube. This weeks most popular story on digg is about Steve as well.
It’s also remarkable to see the huge power of consumer generated content. The wikipedia page about Steve Irwin is already completely up-to-date, where MS Encarta doesn’t even seem to know who Steve Irwin is.
So, what lessons can we learn from this?
a) never come too close to a frightened stingray
b) become a crocodile hunter and die tragically if you really (and I mean really) nead a lot of traffic to your website