Associated Press has reported that the administrative law judge who sued a dry cleaner for $54 million over a lost… Read More »A Stubborn Litigant

Frank’s post about Social Search reminds me of some work going on in artificial intelligence right now. On the down side, this area is being called Web 3.0. Other than that unfortunate moniker, as the NY Times reported last November, the growth in using AI to build a semantic Web — that is “a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: ‘I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.'” — may displace how we search the Web. The article details the difference in data mining techniques and “more organic fashion, from technologies that systematically extract meaning from the existing Web” of Flickr and Digg are early examples. If these new approaches occur and some service displaces Google (which I believe will happen), they will do so because of a new way of approaching search (as one commentator noted).

Google will likely try to hang on as Frank suggests, but the killer will come from an unseen mover. “Bridging the Gap Between Stewards and Creators,” a recent paper by Robert Austin and Richard Nolan (a good discussion of the ideas in the paper is here), tries to explain how an established company will have stewards who are managers and creators who are the tech geeks who create high value and the gaps between them. More on the tensions between risk takers and managers and the impact for technology businesses is below the fold.

Read More »A Little More On Searches and Getting Rid of Google

Having just listened to Mike’s podcast on social software (highly recommended!), I’ve serendipitously come across two articles on “social search” that may lead me to rethink my views on the search engine market.  I’ve long been a skeptic of the possibility that Google has any potent competitors (at least in the US) on the horizon.  The recent failure of the Quaero project in Europe hardened those views.  But it appears that some products that re-introduce the “human touch” to search may change that market.Read More »Social Search

In Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End one of the main characters, Robert Gu, searches Google for information about someone. The results… Read More »Reputation Defenders Go Overboard

The NYT’s senior book reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, has given a generous review to Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur.  As… Read More »Kakutani on Keen’s Kakistocracy