Thursday, December 08, 2005

Washington Post: "This site offers an RSS feed for every current member of Congress, so you can get notified each time your elected officials vote." 

New Flickr set: Just before leaving for good, I took a walk-through of my old house in Woodside, with a camera. The house is gone now, this is all that's left of it. 

BetterBadNews: "You will be surprised..." 

Here's the idea that could change the way the search business works, that could turn it into a real developer platform, fuel ten years of innovation, and make life difficult for Google (so they would have to spend more time making search better and have less time to raid the book industry, for example). Take an existing search engine, like Yahoo, and split it into two pieces, a back-end and a front-end. Spin the back-end out into a separate company, and set a date, maybe a year from now, when the front-end (which stays inside Yahoo) has to pay the back-end for search services. However it is also free to contract with Microsoft or someone else for those back-end services. It's a competitive market. That would force the back-end company to come up with an economic deal that makes sense for developers, because their business would depend on such a deal. The back-end company could compete with their customers if they want to, but the biggest customer, Yahoo, would have a huge lead, as would Google of course. They probably wouldn't compete, largely because they couldn't. But the most important thing is that while Yahoo gets to keep delivering its enormously profitable search service to their users, we also get a chance for a competitive market for search, all of that driving more business to the back-end company, and more growth for the share holders. Seems like a risky, but very practical way to change the search game. Now the "experts" are going to tell you why it can't be done, and that's the subject for another strategy piece.  

More on the back-channel at Les Blogs from Le Marquis. This ought to be a major clue that it's time to delete the audience once and for all. It's an obsolete concept. End the madness, begin the discourse. Scoble wants to try the HyperCamp in the week between Christmas and New Year's in San Francisco or San Jose. I'd like to do it in the East Bay of course. We just need a big space that's got good wifi (or even just broadband) and then we need about 20 companies or people to stand up and talk for 20 minutes each. Or as many as 40 people. A big table in the middle and some refreshments coming in all day long, and we can re-invent the conference business in one day.  

Scoble sends a pointer to this RSS toilet paper printer from Taiwan. I bet this makes it onto Rocketboom, which by the way just did a deal with TiVo. Yaha!  

Chris Pirillo's conection is down and he got da blues. 

Rogers Cadenhead: "It's hard to fairly judge the situation without seeing the events that led up to it, but that's never stopped me before." 

Video of my Gnomedex keynote, June 2005.