Month: March 2007

The end of federated search?

Google’s move away from federated search is particularly intriguing given that Udi Manber, former CEO of A9, is now at Google and leading Google’s search team. A9, started and built by Udi with substantial funding from Amazon.com, was a federated web search engine. It supported queries out to multiple search engines using the OpenSearch API format they invented and promoted. A9 had not yet solved the hard problems with federated search — they made no effort to route queries to the most relevant data sources or do any sophisticated merging of results — but A9 was a real attempt to do large scale federated web search.

is opensearch in trouble?

Virtual World Web Integration

This would include video integration, and begin to draw in the television and film industries as well. But as I’ve mentioned before w/r/t Kaneva, I don’t see why there needs to be a separate Web-based storage space for your various media. Why not just let your virtual world interact with your Flickr account, your MySpace, account, etc.? This would actually reduce the load on the developer, rather than having to recreate these functions in a closed system.

musing on convergence. et tu, google earth? 🙂

Second Life Proselytizing

The establishment of virtual churches and congregations of avatars would seem to raise some knotty theological questions, which I’m not sure the LifeChurch.tv pastors have fully thought through. In creating virtual worlds, aren’t we usurping God’s role – and hence committing a heresy? Are avatars created in God’s image or our own? Can they be saved? Can they be damned? Does sin even exist in a virtual world? Is there a Second Afterlife?

after the suits, now the religious nutcases are moving in

Freebase enjoyment

Early indications are that Freebase is going to be a whole lot of fun. In his walkthrough Tim O’Reilly calls it addictive, and explains why. Because the system thinks in terms of relationships among types of items, a single act of data entry can produce multiple outcomes. Tim’s writeup gives a couple of examples of what that’s like. Here’s mine. I found a record for myself in the system, sourced from Wikipedia. I updated it to say that I’m the author of the book Practical Internet Groupware. Then I added that Tim O’Reilly was the editor of my book. That single edit altered the records on both ends of the author/editor relationship. My book’s record now showed Tim O’Reilly as its editor, and Tim’s record sprouted a Books Edited list that contained my book as its first item. Nice. This is just a Hello World example, of course, but it has the feel of something that people will be able to understand, will want to use, and will enjoy in a social way.

wow, if we can trick people into enjoying metadata creation, the sky is the limit. but beware metacrap