Marc Canter

“the integrated DLA platform wars have begun!”

Sitting in my chiropractor’s office the other day I read a fascinating article in the offline version of Businessweek: Math will Rock Your World.

In addition to finding out that using a laptop 12-14 hours a day can affect my spine, I also found out about the amazing rise of math in business, from analyzing clickstreams to tracking blog conversations. It seems Google and Yahoo already have next year’s math grads lined up for jobs. They simply cannot get enough brain power to do what they want to do.

Continue Reading: Mining the Two Types of User-Supplied Content

First, the podcast: Microsoft, Google, and the DOJ Privacy Case (7.21 MB mp3 )

During a meeting today at the Microsoft Search Champs Conference in Redmond, WA, Yusuf Mehdi, Senior VP of MSN Information Services, discussed the recent blowup involving the U.S. Government’s subpoena of personal information from major Search Engines including MSN, Yahoo, Google, and AOL. This was not the first time that the U.S. Government has requested information from corporations in this manner. It was, however, one of the most talked about, spurred on by a press release from Google, who announced that they had turned down the request. Soon after, it was revealed that both Yahoo and MSN has complied with it, casting an instant shadow over those companies. In response, Ken Moss, general manager of MSN web search, provided a few relevant details of the case on the MSN Search Blog.

Continue Reading: Microsoft Didn’t Give User Data to DOJ in Privacy Case (podcast)

Here’s part 1 of a list of trends I saw gaining momentum in 2005 that I see growing even more important in 2006. Part 2: Synchronization and Local Store

This started out as a list of technological trends, with RSS, Ajax, and Ruby on Rails being the headlines, as all three had huge years in terms of implementation and being squacked about. But these things, while interesting, aren’t really trends in the way that people are using the Web. Instead, they’re trends in building. Nothing illustrates the disparity between technology and usage more than the what Yahoo had to say in their October whitepaper: RSS-Crossing into the Mainstream. They claim that while over 1/4 of all Web users consume RSS in one way or another, only 4% know it.

So, in the spirit of usage I offer the following trends, focused on the way that those in the curve use the Web. Those ahead of the curve are probably on to whatever will get mainstream next year…

Continue Reading: Trends to Watch in 2006

Thomas Vander Wal is one happy man. Wouldn’t you be if you had been written up by Daniel Pink in the New York Times? Vander Wal, as many of you know, coined the term “Folksonomy”. He used it to describe what was happening on two up-and-coming web sites: Flickr and Del.icio.us. Now those two sites […]

Continue Reading: Folksonomy Has a Big Year

Update: Added slide deck. Ok, this is scary. I’m posting a podcast of me giving a talk on Web 2.0. (also posted on Brain Sparks, the supremely interesting UIE blog). My wife assures me that my voice does indeed sound like that, (much to my dismay). I was asked to speak at an NEASIST event […]

Continue Reading: Podcast of Web 2.0 Talk

PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf on the new Yahoo Maps API (via Jeremy Zawodny):

“There is of course the fancy new maps.yahoo.com/beta site which is fun, but as far as I am concerned the killer app here is the geocoding platform that drives this. And it is completely accessible for anyone to use. It’s also a sane API that anybody can figure out in minutes. Here are a few tips for using this API from PHP 5.”

This demonstrates why simplicity on the Web as Platform is a big deal. The guy who created PHP just helped thousands of developers build their own Geo applications, and it wasn’t because he had a great amount of time on his hands. It was because the API was simple, approachable, and fast.

The simplest, most useful API wins.

Update: Closely on the heels of Yahoo’s new API comes this: Clone the Google API. This is about the Search API, but it deals specifically with ease-of-use for developers…

The following bit emerged out of the Mash-ups 2.0: Where’s the Business Model? session at the Web 2.0 Conference. Despite it’s name, there was only one salient point about business models to emerge from this session, in my opinion. The point came from Paul Rademacher, the creator of the most interesting mash-up we’ve seen so […]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: Remixing/Mash-up Apps and Competitive Advantage

Tim O’Reilly writes an interesting post about the latest Yahoo story in the NYTimes, about Yahoo as an increasingly big player in new media, taking on a similar role of a network, but grounding their strategy on the web, of course. Yahoo is definitely different than the rest of the big Web 2.0 Companies. They’re […]

Continue Reading: Yahoo! and Open Sourcing Innovation