Internet

Good News on the pretend Patent Front

This entry was posted in Economics Intellectual Property Internet Patents on by

The key here is not that M$ may be off a $521 million hook. No, it is simply that the patent office invalidated the Eolas patent (also known as the 906 patent):

A system allowing a user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia system to access and execute an embedded program object.

This patent should not have been awarded in the first place. Not only is there substantial prior art but this type of software process patent should not qualify for a patent. Yea, I know the patent office has been granting these types of patents but, come on, let’s restrict patents to things that take, say, a bit of originality and genius. Not things that your average programmer or system analyst knocks out routinely.
Via mozillaZine.

Now Get More When you Google

This entry was posted in Information Internet on by

From a Google press release:

Google Inc.today announced it expanded the breadth of its web index to more than 6 billion items. …
…
Google’s collection of 6 billion items comprises 4.28 billion web pages, 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of book-related information pages.

Will moves like this be enough to keep Google on top?

To be sure, the search game is still anyone’s to win, despite popular opinion that Google is the locked-in leader. The most concrete evidence of a tenuous perch is the transfer of the search crown from Yahoo to Google over the past few years.

Via beSpacific.

Search Wars

This entry was posted in Capitalism Economics Information Internet Libertarianism Marketing on by

Buried deep in this NYT article is this:

And Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google.

This is really good stuff but, since copyright protection has lapsed on these books, I wonder why they would be available exclusievely via Google.
Will Wilkenson is ‘jacked’ about this and also notes that:

This is, by the way, what Microsoft is really good for. It puts the fear of Jesus in the Googles of the world, and makes ’em hustle to make us happy. So what I’m really hoping for is that Microsoft comes close in the search war, and succeeds in creating a superfast integrated search in Windows that allows me to search my own measly 30gb hard drive at something close to the speed that Google manages to search the whole goddam internet, but falls short in the end because of all the glorious innovations the Google geniuses lay at our feet in order to keep us from straying.

Things should be pretty exciting in this space over the next several years.
Via Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution.

Food for Thought

This entry was posted in dean Democrats Election 2004 Internet on by

One possible reason Dean looked so good and then fell so hard in Iowa and New Hampshire:

Given the relentless hammering he took from the media, Dean was lucky to get 26% of the New Hampshire vote. Even so, Dean may be done for. Or, more to the point, done in. Some will say that he strung his own rope, but it looked more like a media lynching to me. Assuming I’m right about this, why did television want to hang Howard Dean?
I may have an answer. It may be that, once again, we have met the enemy and he is us. By pre-announcing the possibility that this might be The Internet Election, we issued fair warning both to the traditional media and the big money politicos that a threat was at hand.
If Dean could actually raise enough money online to match in aggregate the much larger and fewer donations Bush has bought from the plutocrats with his tax cuts, it would shake the system to its rotten core. Worse, if information from the Web and the Blogosphere were to start defining enough personal realities to contest the great mass of tube-zombies at the polls, the gazillions presently spent on television campaign ads would start to wither. An enormous amount of power and money might be at stake.

Of course, anything this short must be out of context, or incomplete, if it was written by Barlow. So, read the rest.
The Barlow link is via David Isen who is concerned about the implications of Dean’s new campaign manager:

Howard Dean, the erstwhile “Internet candidate,” urgently needs to explain to his core Nethead constituency why Joe “Nethead” Trippi is out and Roy “Bellhead” Neel is in. Neel was president of the US Telecom Association (USTA) in the late 1990s….
But now, unless the Dean campaign does something immediate and heroic to shore up its Nethead core, it is time to “Move On.”

I think that it is pretty clear that a candidate who tries to rely only on ‘netheads’ will not be viable. ‘Netheads’ do not encompass a large enough part of the voting population yet. But watch 2012 and beyond.
The Isen link is via Lawrence Lessig.

Not for my Sherriff

This entry was posted in Culture Election 2004 Internet Marketing on by

The opponent telling him to drop out looks right on:

A candidate for Denton County sheriff who posted faked pictures of “friends and supporters” on his campaign Web site has replaced them with pictures of animals.
The original series of pictures on John Dupree’s site showed people in various settings holding signs supporting the Republican candidate. They were taken from Web sites that offer generic photos of people holding up blank signs, Dupree said.
Dupree said his webmaster told him the fake pictures were being used as placeholders until they could be replaced with pictures of real supporters. The webmaster didn’t think to include a disclaimer, he said.

If this wasn’t just an ‘innocent’ mistake this guy doesn’t have the sense or the ethics to be anyone’s sheriff. And, his webmaster(s) should get a permanent note in their resume that they screwed up royally as well.
Via Charles Kuffner.