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Thursday 2 August 2007

Bytes · Right on Miss America - MS tortoise/Google hare - Wikipedia Story


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NYT: Microsoft Offers a Web-Based Strategy

“We’re not moving toward a world of thin computing,” said Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, referring to systems in which simple processing takes place on a PC, but more complex processing is moved to a centralized computer through a network connection. “We’re moving toward a world of software plus services.” Nearly every Microsoft software application will be transformed with the addition of a Web-services component within 3 to 10 years, he said.

SEL take:
Even as Microsoft says it's defending its home turf, the company is of course trying to aggressively compete in the world of search and online advertising, which is Google's core franchise. Recent purchases of aQuantive/Atlas (for $6 billion) and AdECN, as well as high profile deals with Facebook and Digg, show how serious Microsoft is about being a major player in both arenas ... my guess is that "3 to 10 years" is too long for Microsoft to wait to web-enable its critical applications; because by then the free, online options will be much better.

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If you missed it, Clive Anderson's great take on The Wikipedia Story is still on Radio 4's website

The NeoConservative Oliver Kamm responded on his blog and distilled the objectors - to them, Wikipedia represents "an anti-intellectual exercise".

(Gawd knows what's going on with the BBC at the moment. Withdrawn digital services + the complicated sounding iplayer. And have you used their website search lately? Whenever I've used it it consistently fails the same comparison test against Google that DirectGov does)

Search Wikia is Jimmy Wales' latest.

Our Four Organizing Principles (TCQP) - the future of Internet Search must be based on:

  • 1. Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
  • 2. Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
  • 3. Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
  • 4. Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

Active areas of focus:

  • Social Lab - sources for URL social reputation, experiments in wiki-style social ranking.
  • Distributed Lab - projects focused on distributed computing, crawling, and indexing. Grub!
  • Semantic Lab - Natural Language Processing, Text Categorization.
  • Standards Lab - formats and protocols to build interoperable search technologies.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing all of this. The real question is are we protecting children from the internet, or protecting the internet from children?

    ReplyDelete