This is a really neat application of AJAX — an ingenious way of speeding up Wikipedia searches. It’s become my preferred method of accessing the encyclopedia.
Category Archives: Technology
The importance of Search
From the latest survey of the Pew Internet and American Life project…
Search engines have become an increasingly important part of the online experience of American internet users. The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day.
These results from September 2005 represent a sharp increase from mid-2004. Pew Internet Project data from June 2004 show that use of search engines on a typical day has risen from 30% to 41% of the internet-using population, which itself has grown in the past year. This means that the number of those using search engines on an average day jumped from roughly 38 million in June 2004 to about 59 million in September 2005 – an increase of about 55%. comScore data, which are derived from a different methodology, show that from September 2004 to September 2005 the average daily use of search engines jumped from 49.3 million users to 60.7 million users – an increase of 23%.
This means that the use of search engines is edging up on email as a primary internet activity on any given day. The Pew Internet Project data show that on a typical day, email use is still the top internet activity. On any given day, about 52% of American internet users are sending and receiving email, up from 45% in June of 2004.
Richard Stallman detained by UN Security
Wonderful story on Bruce Perens’s Blog…
Richard Stallman, Mark Shuttleworth, and I are in Tunis, Tunisia for the UN World Summit on the information society. We’ve had an interesting day :-)
Richard is opposed to RF ID, because of the many privacy violations that are possible. It’s a real problem, and one worth lobbying about. At the 2003 WSIS in Geneva, there was objection to the RF ID cards that were used, resulting in a promise that they would not be used in 2005. That promise, it turns out, was not kept. In addition, Richard was given a hastily-produced ID with a visible RF ID strip. Mine was made on a longer schedule, it seems, and had an RF ID strip that wasn’t visible. I knew it was there because they clearly had us put our cards to a reader at the entrance gate.
You can’t give Richard a visible RF ID strip without expecting him to protest. Richard acquired an entire roll of aluminum foil and wore his foil-shielded pass prominently. He willingly unwrapped it to go through any of the visible check-points, he simply objected to the potential that people might be reading the RF ID without his knowledge and tracking him around the grounds. This, again, is a legitimate gripe, handled with Richard’s usual highly-visible, guile-less and absolutely un-subtle style of non-violent protest.
During his keynote speech at our panel today, Richard gave a moment’s talk about the RF ID issue, and passed his roll of aluminum foil around the room for others to use. A number of people in the overcrowded-to-the-max standing-room-only meeting room obligingly shielded their own passes. UN Security was in the room, not only to protect us but because of the crowd issue, and was bound to notice. Richard and I delivered our keynotes, followed by shorter talks by the rest of the panel and then open discussion.
At the end of the panel, I went out in the hall to be interviewed by various press entities including Al Jazeera. Another item for my CIA dossier, but I’m sure my association with Richard would have caused more notes to be taken today. I was busy with the press for two solid hours. So, I didn’t see what happened with Richard. But a whole lot of the people in the room did, and stayed with Richard for the entire process.
Apparently, UN Security would not allow Richard to leave the room.
Richard and I are actually here representing the United Nations, and are carrying UN Development Program IDs. I would otherwise merit a “business entity” ID, but I guess because of our keynote-speaker status our UN Development Program hosts ordered us better treatment. Richard and I also have some limited immunity as delegates to this conference. So, this was no doubt an interesting problem for the security folks, who had no real idea who Richard was except that he was someone reasonably distinguished who was visibly violating their security measure….
[From Bruce’s entry for November 18. Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.]
What America looks like to an air-traffic controller
Wonderful movie based on location data from airliners. You need a QuickTime (or equivalent) plug-in to see it.
Professor Negroponte’s Laptop
Andy Carvin has done an interesting — and revealing — interview with the CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project. She’s refreshingly open and honest about the difficulties and possibilities of the project. Confirms my hunch that it will have as much impact on the West as it has on the developing world because it will effectively commoditise computing. And it runs Linux!
To what Google Base uses may we return, Horatio!
This is the headline on a lovely story. Some time ago, Paul Ford created an amusing cartoon about Google and world domination on his Blog. When Google Base launched, B2Day, the official blog of the magazine Business 2.0, put up a piece about the news and included a link to Paul’s cartoon — without consulting him, or even bothering to copy the image (which meant that the browser of anyone clicking on the B2Day story would be collecting the image from the link and thereby eating into Paul’s bandwidth). Instead of getting mad, however, he decided to get even, and replaced the image with other ones, while keeping the filename (and therefore the link) unchanged. Now read on…
PIN 2 PIN
Quentin alerted me to an interesting facility of the BlackBerry — direct handset-to-handset messaging. In the event of a catastrophic loss of network, email, or back-end infrastructure, BlackBerry users can take advantage of PIN-to-PIN messaging to communicate directly with similarly-equipped folks over the wireless network. Unlike email, PIN messages travel within RIM’s messaging network and are not routed through your organisation’s (or network’s) email servers. This provides greater speed of interaction and communications fault tolerance. BlackBerry PIN messaging will continue to work when email servers are down or when their connection to the Internet is disrupted. That’s one reason why BlackBerries are increasingly popular with governments and security services. Paradoxically, it’s also why they have become problematic for US banks and financial institutions in a post-Enron age. Many financial firms are bound by SEC and NASD regulations to archive and monitor all forms of communications between their employees and customers — and to avoid the liability of non-compliance, many have chosen to disable PIN messaging, thus reducing the communication flexibility provided by the BlackBerry device. Verily technology giveth and the law taketh away.
Publish and be downloaded
This morning’s Observer column.
While the internet has been rampaging through the business models of the music, newspaper and movie industries, book publishers have been quietly hoping that if they keep their heads down the monster will go away. After all, print is rather low-tech and unsexy, and teenagers aren’t much interested in it, so the dangers of being ripped off wholesale by online text-sharing seemed remote…
That leaked Microsoft memo
From Bill Gates to his troops. Once more into the breach etc… Dave Winer’s Blog was one of the sites carrying it today. Key passage reads:
The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a “services wave” of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users. Advertising has emerged as a powerful new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services along with subscriptions and license fees. Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses.
We will build our strategies around Internet services and we will provide a broad set of service APIs and use them in all of our key applications.
This coming “services wave” will be very disruptive. We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us – still, the opportunity for us to lead is very clear. More than any other company, we have the vision, assets, experience, and aspirations to deliver experiences and solutions across the entire range of digital workstyle & digital lifestyle scenarios, and to do so at scale, reaching users, developers and businesses across all markets.
But in order to execute on this opportunity, as we’ve done before we must act quickly and decisively. This next generation of the internet is being shaped by its “grassroots” adoption and popularization model, and the cost-effective “seamless experiences” delivered through the intentional fusion of services, software and sometimes hardware. We must reflect upon what and for whom we are building, how best to deliver new functionality given the internet services model, what kind of a platform in this new context might enable partners to build great profitable businesses, and how our applications might be reshaped to create service-enabled experiences uniquely compelling to both users and businesses alike.
Steve and I recently expanded Ray Ozzie’s role as CTO to include leading our services strategy across all three divisions. We did this because we believe our services challenges and opportunities will impact most everything we do. Ray has long demonstrated his passion for software, and through his work at Groove he also came to realize the transformative potential for combining software and services. I’ve attached a memo from Ray which I feel sure we will look back on as being as critical as The Internet Tidal Wave memo was when it came out. Ray outlines the great things we and our partners can do using the Internet Services approach.
The next sea change is upon us. We must recognize this change as an opportunity to take our offerings to the next level, compete in a manner commensurate with our industry responsibilities, and utilize our assets and our broad reach to reshape our business for the benefit of the users of our products, our customers, our partners and ourselves.
57% of US teenage Net users create, remix or share content online
From the latest Pew Internet and American Life survey…
WASHINGTON, November 2, 2005- American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.