Monthly Archives: April 2006

Ask Jeeves boss recruited by Microsoft

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According to today’s New York Times,

Microsoft has hired Steven Berkowitz, the chief executive of Ask Jeeves, to run its floundering Internet division, Microsoft said yesterday.

Mr. Berkowitz became president of Ask Jeeves in 2001 and chief executive in 2003. He helped transform the service, which was introduced to answer questions posed in English phrases, into a search engine to compete with Google. Mr. Berkowitz continued to run the company after it was acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp last July.

Microsoft has been struggling to redefine its online strategy and build an advertising-based business to confront competition from Google, Yahoo and others. The company’s MSN service, which dates from 1994, has gone through a series of sharp strategy shifts as Microsoft has wrestled with whether it is a media company as well as a software vendor.

Most recently, the company decided to revive its effort to build advertising-based businesses as it sees Google give away free software, supported by advertising.

Despite a large investment to develop and promote its new search engine, Microsoft’s share of the search market in the United States has plummeted. In March, it had 13 percent of the search market, down from 16 percent a year earlier, according to comScore Networks. Ask Jeeves held its share constant at 6 percent over the same period.

Digg.com: in a hole?

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Digg.com has had a lot of adulatory coverage in the last few months, with people hailing it as the New Slashdot. Only it was supposed to be better because Slashdot has a group of editors who wield arbitrary power — in that they decide what gets featured and what doesn’t. Digg.com, in contrast, supposedly operated on a totally impartial principle — the position of an individual posting was determined solely by the votes (diggs) of readers.

So far, so interesting. But then an observant chap at ForeverGeek noticed some funny business which suggested that Digg’s editors were apparently moving postings up the list. He posted news of this discovery on his Blog, only to discover shortly afterwards that the blog was now barred from Digg.com.

Curiouser and curiouser. Here’s his account of the whole murky business.

As usual, power corrupts.

Posted in Web

Even right-wingers hate the DMCA

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The ultra-conservative Washington think-tank, the Cato Institute, has come out with an astonishingly perceptive critique of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Here’s an excerpt from the summary:

The result has been a legal regime that reduces options and competition in how consumers enjoy media and entertainment. Today, the copyright industry is exerting increasing control over playback devices, cable media offerings, and even Internet streaming. Some firms have used the DMCA to thwart competition by preventing research and reverse engineering. Others have brought the weight of criminal sanctions to bear against critics, competitors, and researchers.

The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders—and the technology companies that distribute their content—the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates…

Wow! Full report here. (pdf)

Thanks to Owen Barder for the link.

Rent a mug

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Here’s a story from today’s Irish Times which restores one’s faith in human nature. Or human nature as viewed by H.L. Mencken anyway…

Prospective tenants arrived at an apartment in the Sweepstakes in Ballsbridge [a high-status residential area on the south side of Dublin] on Tuesday, Wednesday and yesterday with keys to the two-bedroomed apartment they had been given by a man who claimed to be the landlord. They discovered that the keys did not fit.

The tenants had responded to an advert on popular accommodation website Daft.ie offering the apartment for a rent of €1,150 a month. A man calling himself Alan Grogan invited them to view the fully furnished apartment on Good Friday.

A large number of people attended the open viewing. Those who were interested were told to contact Mr Grogan on his mobile phone.

He offered each prospective tenant the apartment and arranged to meet each of them at a different location. He asked for a cash deposit of €1,150 plus a month’s rent in advance. He provided each tenant with a set of keys, a lease agreement, which he signed, and a receipt for the money paid out.

It is understood that some 15 couples arrived over three days to move into the accommodation.

Er, daft, isn’t it?

Quote of the day

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From a Technology Review interview with David Allen, author of Getting Things Done…

Technology Review: Computers and the Internet let us do more things, but can they really help us get more things done? How does technology fit into a good time-management system?

David Allen: First of all, you don’t manage time. Time is time, and it can’t be managed. What you manage are commitments. The calendar will let you manage, at a maximum, three or four percent of what you have to do. What you really need is a way to keep track of your commitments. Then you start to get a sense of the huge volume of commitments you’ve made, and you are able to review those commitments.

Which reminds me… I bought a copy of Getting Things Done a while back, but I’ve been too busy to get around to reading it yet.

Iran: war by October?

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Paul Rogers, writing in OpenDemocracy.net says:

The US political leadership, especially in the form of the office of the vice-president, may consider that a concerted US military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities is likely to be highly effective in the short term (in a similar way to the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime, with George W Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech following three weeks later).

Iran certainly does have a wide variety of opportunities to retaliate – in Iraq, the Gulf and Afghanistan for a start – but these would take weeks and months, rather than days, to develop. It follows that the most likely period for US military action would be in late October, just before the mid-term elections. The scenario would be of US attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, declarations of success, plenty of TV footage of destroyed nuclear plant, and a “mission accomplished” speech -all in the space of a week or so, culminating in the elections. It is, in (Republican) political terms, a seductive prospect.

The prospect of war with Iran happening at the moment when it is least expected cannot be discounted. Yet if any rational calculation can be made about the likely trigger-point for a major conflict between the United States and Iran, late October 2006 is the prime candidate. It also follows that if such a conflict can be avoided throughout 2006 and the early part of 2007, there is more chance of sanity prevailing and more positive relations developing between Washington and Tehran. For the present, however, that is the less probable outcome.

The decision to put Karl Rove in charge of the Republicans’ mid-term election campaign seems to me to make war more rather than less likely. That guy would do anything to gain a short-term electoral advantage.

Timelessness

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My colleagues and I were working today on revising one of our most successful courses. It’s amazing how quickly stuff begins to look dated, especially if it relates to the Web. Afterwards, I mused about how satisfying it would be to write something that didn’t date, and we fell to wondering what works would pass that test. One of my colleagues had just been to see the centenary production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Barbican, and said that it struck him as being just as powerful now as it was when it was first performed. So perhaps that is the test of great art — that it never dates.