August 11, 2003

Personalizing PageRank

An article on CNet about a new search startup out of Stanford (link via Anil)

Kaltrix — “A stealth start-up out of Stanford University is hoping to raise the heat on one of the toughest problems in Web search–and possibly out-Google Google in the process.”

“Without discussing Kaltix’s plans publicly, the company’s founders have published research that claims to offer a way to compute search results nearly 1,000 times faster than what’s possible using current methods.”

August 9, 2003

Reviving A Dead Hard Drive

Detailed write up of swapping logic boards on a dead hard drive to recover data. (via Slashdot)

August 7, 2003

Visual Enterprise Search Tool

John sent me a link to KartOO Technology’s search engine and visualization UI that was “developed in Flash to present a friendly and clear visual interface while integrating the graphic charter of your company.”

You can see here what I think is a demo of the search and flash-based UI that’s actually meta-search engine of sorts that visually maps result-sets in the UI.

I wonder what their pricing mode is for these tools.

August 6, 2003

File Sync Tool for Unix and Windows

Unison seems to be a file-system agnostic replacement for the Robocopy tool found in the NT Resource Kit and others…

“Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.”
(via decafbad)

August 5, 2003

NewsGator 1.3 Released

Greg Reinacker has just released NewsGator 1.3, which includes initial support for Pie/EchoAtom feeds, among many other great new features!

Congratulations (again) Greg!

August 4, 2003

SMTP in a Spam-ridden world

CNET News.com has a well researched article on whether this is the End of the road for SMTP in a world that is deluged with Spam.

Some interesting quotes…

“The flaws are so severe, some now believe, that the protocol that gave rise to the most significant explosion in written communication since Gutenberg may no longer be capable of serving its purpose in a world of con artists, pornographers, virus authors and unscrupulous spammers.”

July 30, 2003

PageRank within the Enterprise

Tim Bray’s latest On Search essay alludes to the effectiveness of Google’s PageRank within the Enterprise:

“…even if it turns out that popularity [PageRank] is the key thing for Internet search, the Internet is a very special place, and itÂ’s quite unlikely that popularity is the killer metadatum for the whole universe of search applications.”

However, I suspect that part of what’s in works with Google’s acquisition and integration of Blogger is to augment PageRank in the enterprise. Yet, utilizing blogs internally to enhance the PageRank-ing of documents and resources indexed with the Google Search Appliance will require some ramp-up time to become useful.

July 29, 2003

Spam Blocking Email Addresses

Need a quick throw-away email address for an online registration? Give Mailinator a try.

Interesting idea to combat spam.

July 28, 2003

End of a great Tour de France

Well, as I’m sure most know, Lance made it to number five.

Congratulations on joining the Five-Timers-Club

Congratulations also to the awesome Postal Team!

Speaking of Lance, here’s a great quote from the recent Washington Post article by Sally Jenkins who co-author of the Lance Armstrong book, “It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life”

July 25, 2003

Focus on the Process not the Feature

I alluded to this the other day, but the following from Jupiter Research sums up MSFTÂ’s marketing positioning strategy for the new Office System, which will also include Longhorn and I suspect enterprise search.

Basically, they are not selling features or services, but “solutions” to very specific business processes.

“Microsoft is putting less emphasis on individual applications and product features and more emphasis on what people can do with Office System. The strategy also synchs with other products, such as development of Windows Longhorn. Earlier, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates discussed “scenarios” the company is using to develop Longhorn. One scenario might be a teenager interested in listening to music. Microsoft has taken a similar approach to Office System, looking at information scenarios Office users confront daily.”