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Oh and about Evernote, yeah Robert...how *did* you miss that one for so long...? :)
And 2, firefox - as a productivity tool - it blows any app I have every used out of the water (thanks to the extensions out there though - so thank you addon developers).
All the mindless press on Cuil really pained me particularly since several flaws were so glaring. My The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Software/Service Launches post on the random image association to search results never saw the light of day, but I figured that would happen. It is indeed interesting to see how the press got lured so easily into this Cuil vs Google story.
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/anthony/2008/0...
For the record, I wasn't briefed either. ;)
There was once a brief Interview with Sergey Brin's mother.
What would be fascinating is reading about the reactions of these parents to their children's extreme success in life
Consider the parents of these (if you can get an interview)
Bill Gates
Sergey Brin
Larry Page
Jerry Yang
Kevin Rose
YouTube Co-founders Founders
Carlos Slim
Micheal Dell
Madonna
It must be an amazing experience watching your kid become so successful beyond your wildest dreams
Rather than talking about not wanting to be part of the whole game, just move on. The rest of us don't care.
However, the fact that you Robert and a few others are conscious of it happening and the new obstacles that come with it (e.g. the disproportionate amount of importance place on being first rather than interesting/accurate/original, recycled content, etc.) is very encouraging
"I also find that I’m getting back to reading my Google Reader feeds".
Robert, there seems to be place for all this hype to fuel competition and new ideas- but we don't have to pay attention to it!
I would rather ready about your coverage of technology ebbs and flows rather than a search engine who directs you to porn at work on the front page. (Cuil)
However, when I perform identical searches in Google and Cuil, Google returns results that really matter to me. Unless Cuil gets a much better algorithm, I will be sticking to Google. I was hoping for a good competitor though... As you say, competition adds excitement!
It would be nicer if all these blogs talked more about the technology behind Cuil and not just how it is going to beat Google or not beat Google. For me that doesn't matter.
I love how you always end your posts with a good question.
Actually, I was surprised that most of the initial posts I read were fairly muted and critical of the claims. Even before we could actually try Cuil, most of what I read were people saying "looks interesting but we'll see...."
http://danblank.com/blog/2008/07/18/facebook-ch...
Thanks Robert - great posts recently about the value of passion and real connections.
At least the blogosphere is so fragmented that it offers the opportunity for a whole multitude of opinions, and that's before you even get the to comments :)
Chris Bailey
www.EjaculationSupremacy.com
Come to think of it, does anyone know a Firefox plugin that marks a page and reminds me to re-check it the next day?
I stick to the people who are really passionate about something they are working on.
Remains me one question. how do you go the Long Tail? How do you find the interesting stuff which gets never to Digg or Techmeme? There's a lot of interesting information on the internet, but how are you (we) able to notice this?
To the second part of your post, I completely prefer face-to-face interactions of any kind rather than over phone or webex for meetings and especially introductions. That's why while I was in San Francisco last week I popped down to your tweetup/dinner and attended the TechCrunch party (met you ever so briefly). Just doing those things allowed me to meet people and have real conversations (even if they were brief) that were far more valuable than any press release or email from me that probably would have been ignored. As I am newcomer on the scene coming from another industry. I am essentially a nobody right now in this industry and I know it. It's especially hard if you aren't in the valley (we're based in Atlanta), but there are things you can do. You've got to start somewhere and we are in it for the long haul. :)
Otherwise there is not much in technology that gets me excited. Who cares who makes the next gazillion dollars when their company goes public?
What WOULD get me excited is something (tech or otherwise) that can change some of the major problems that still exist in our world - the poverty gap, environment, etc...
cheers!
Robert -sorry about the blatant plug - I generally don't like doing it, but I think/hope it was relevant to the discussion and your readers
But, I'm wondering if this is not a sign that the web economy is maturing? The power of PR and marketing makes the success of "real economy" products for decades... even bad products: take the Phone as an example. I'm not saying it's a bad product, I'm just saying that the Apple marketing is amazing to create a huge hype around it.
I also think that this increased power of marketing on the Web came with Web 2.0 and the User Generated Content: the value of a website is determined by the contribution of the users: it starts with very limited content/value so it needs PR to initiate the UGC pump.
Thankfully, compared to the "normal" economy, the web is full of very passionate and critical voices that minimize the power of marketing. This post is a prime example. Thanks again!
I would love to meet with all the people in the world who have stories to tell in the face of supreme opposition and teach them how to get the word out, like http://www.aliveinbaghdad.org/ or a blogger in China or Africa....
What have you funded that has succeeded in Arizona in the social media space??
This PR guy keeps trying to get you to notice that, yes, there are interesting tech companies NOT in Silicon Valley. Come East my friend, come East!
How come you never write ;-) Keep the passionate posts coming, don't follow the crowd, don't follow ANYONE.
Mike Lizun
http://www.gregoryfca.com
I've got the perfect compromise. How about a PR Tech Startup to blog about? http://pitchengine.com DM me @pitchengine and I'll send you an Alpha Invite!
I've really liked your videos with people outside the industry. With congressmen, FCC, etc. I'd love to see you do more about education and science too. I know it's something you are passionate about (you'd mentioned it in Almaden a few times). It would be really interesting to see what some of the visionaries are thinking about education, technology and science. What are the smartest people in the world (in education, gov't, private industry, etc.) saying about education, science and related issues.
It seems like a natural extensions of where you are taking your blog.
There are a lot of folks that will cover the latest, most sexy new thing. Not many are trying to think more deeply about the surrounding issues that are affecting lives, business, society, etc.
THAT'S interesting. To me at least.
Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
I am also agree with you, cuil might be the Google killer, it just needs time. You can't get right on the market and propose a solution that could compete with such a powerful algorythm.
About the size of the company, you say that a company with a capital of 30 million has no chances to compete with Google, I understand, but do you think that means that the next competitor of Google will be wether produce by a large company or supported by one (like Warner, Newscorp, or Microsoft)? Do you think we can expect a big company to propose a new search engine service able to compete with Google? That would be interesting.
I like Obama by the way and just want to give constructive criticism.
You've probably already noticed that the content of popular stories tends to be less important than the idea of the story's popularity itself.
Hype is a type of system, it has a structure, patterns and obeys laws like other systems. Few people except the people at the center of hype benefit from the phenomenon and it is too short lived to devote any serious part of your life to.
The better plan is to focus on doing solid work. Hype will always take care of itself.
We're being pushed news because we're early adopters and because we buy stuff. $299.00 stuff. The rest of the world does not care what we're doing.
In the least, this hype is bearable. I see the sports fellows in the office talking about Fantasy Football. Now there's some passion! I just smile while I walk away.
No matter what every body says I think any competition is a good thing. You see Cuil search results may be bad but it will take time to improve. Any body remember Google in its early days?
Google has become a monopoly and it's time they face the music like Microsoft.
And regarding size of the company, well no company starts with $10 billion investment. It's not possible. They key is to increase investment gradually which Google did and which Cuil and every other competitor will do. It's simply not possible to match the size of Google from start.
Give Cuil some time, if it still fails then move on and wait for someone else.
What excites me is the prospect of competing with search engines without launching a search engine.
A user is essentially trying to gain access to relevant information / resources. Submitting search strings and manually inspecting returned results is one way but surely there must be other ways.
The group that figures this out may be able to topple the big guys without the need for half a million servers.
:)
No doubt if huge companies can get effected, like what u said , then we are nothing!
Cuil is awful, I've tried it, the results it returns are pretty damn useless, I find it so hard to process the results because it generates massive previews, rather than simply the name of the result, and the whole thing just smacks of "our-designer-learnt-javascript-last-night-so-now-everything-moves-if-you-mouse-over-it"
It seems like everyone just takes it for granted that all new online technology is bad for newspapers. That's hardly the case.
I'd love to talk to almost anyone at the New York Times about how they are expanding and experimenting with technology. I'm sure there are tons of tech startups who are working on projects that will also help newspapers, and I'd like to see which companies those are and what they're working on.
I feel like it's time to move past the "OMG newspapers are screwed!" stage and move on to the "look at these challenges and how can we solve them?" stage...
BTW -- want to get a blank stare fast? Use the word 'cloud' in a conversation with normal people.
Here's someone I think you'd love interviewing: Harry Webber. (Disclosure: I'm working with him on something called the Institute for the Advanced Practice of Advertising, a nonprofit think tank we're recruiting ad people for.)
Harry is a traditional ad guy -- he's in the Clio Awards Hall of Fame for lines like "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." But he's also a very solid web 2.0 guy, so he sits exactly at the crossroads of old and new communications. Here's a post from his weekly column that shows the contrast between old and new: http://www.madisonavenew.com/mad187.html
Heck yeah you could. These people are lazy and stupid. They happen to be rich too.
"When Page and Brin first moved into the garage, Google had just been incorporated with a bankroll of $1 million raised from a handful of investors."
Smart people post y2000 want security, that's the problem. Cuil isn't going to bankroll your 401k, and that's why you don't see Googles any longer. Period.
Blaine Cooke took the solid paycheck at Yahoo, and I can't blame him.
Talk about the most green resort in the world.
"Anyway, help us all get off the PR bandwagon. What are you passionate about? If you could go anywhere in the world and meet with any geek, executive, or company, who would it be?"
i'd like to hear more about the tech-wizards and geeks who are addressing our ailing broadband infrastructure -- http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/31/the-cons...
kick ass and be still.
~C
The say that "Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else"... and i din't see my websites yet!
So.... i think i'll return to google world again!
eheh
I lost my voice, became like everybody else, and for me, the fun quickly drained out of blogging about tech. When the fun went, the enthusiasm went after it, so I quit the blog, and stopped reading all others in that genre.
A few weeks ago, I came back to yours out of curiosity, just in time to see you go through your latest crisis, and I sympathised, and started reading again to see how you tackled what I'd already been through.
I like the new angle - good luck with it!
"See, if you want to earn links and attention in this world you’ve got to be first, or at least among the first articles to go out. I’ve seen this time and time again. I call it the Techmeme game.
"But it affects Digg and Reddit and FriendFeed, too. The stories that got discussed the most on those were usually among the first crowd."
In a world in which news, and particularly tech news, is distributed globally almost instantaneously, there is a high premium on the first dramatic take or analysis. A more considered view might be better and more accurate but, hey, who's got time for that?
In the UK, this phenomenon - the overwhelming importance of impact - was nailed by Tony Blair, of all people
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Politics/...
... and was more recently discussed by his former PR chief Alastair Campbell:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/alastai...
altsearchengines.com mentioned a new search engine that is supposed to give you exactly what you're looking for (thus the name, UbExact).
Fire Fox web developer tools are pretty cool.