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  • 1 min read

People are still doing groupware startups, believe it or not!

Being a veteran of the groupware movement (worked at Lotus for years, and co- founded eRoom Technology) this item caught my eye:

"Liquid Systems, a venture-funded software company that is focused on enterprise messaging and collaboration, according to sources familiar with the company's plans." (from InfoWorld)

I guess only the InfoWorld headline refers to "groupware" but it's a very 80's term, that even in the 90's we at eRoom avoided like the plague. Technorati Tags: collaboration, groupware, vc

  • 1 min read

Interesting new search engines

There was a recent interesting article in the New York Times describing some new, unusual search engines:

"Search engines are so powerful. And they are so pathetically weak. … When it comes to digging up a specific name, date, phrase or price, search engines are unstoppable. The same is true for details from the previously concealed past. For better and worse, any information about any of us…" (from New York Times)

None of them blows me away, but in case these are useful or of interest:

Technorati Tags: searchengines

  • 2 min read

RSS in the Academic/Research/Scientific community

I recently wondered out loud (on a couple of mailing lists) how much action there is with RSS and Blogging within the Academic/Research/Scientific community. The reason for that question was that I was considering that with those folks refereed, scholarly articles are what counts which seems diametrically opposite to the casual, ad-hoc, first-person rants that are generally associated with blogging. (Ok I am just exaggerating to make a point.) I learned that there's actually lots and lots going on with RSS and Blogging in that world. Here are some interesting from a more or less random collection of serious science and academic pubs all of which have RSS support of some kind. This is, I am sure, nowhere near comprehensive, but it was eye opening to me.,

Pretty cool, eh? Technorati Tags: RSS, science

  • 1 min read

[GEEK] Site Referral Log Mystery: How does this happen?

Can someone explain why my referrer log for this site is full of spamish- looking like urls, none of which actually have a link to it? For example: texasholdemcenteral.com, www.freewebs.com, skate.cyberfreehost.com, google.co.uk/search, www.myspace.com/nyjeter2ox, images.google.ca/imgres, images.google.co.uk/imgres, evilplots.com/texas-holdem, www.texasholdemcenteral.com, online-casino.blest-casino.com/ , www.favorite- casino.com/online-casino, www.sportscribe.com/poker-party, com/texas- holdem.html, favorite-casino.com/casino. And so on? It's got to have something to do with page rank and Google, but I would love to understand HOW and WHY they do it. Technorati Tags: Geeky, google

  • 1 min read

[GEEK] This may be good news for Java, long term

"IBM has announced that it will be joining the Harmony open source Java project. Although right now, IBM's role is limited to providing thoughts and suggestions, it is likely that IBM will be contributing code to the project in the future according to Rod Smith, Vice President of Advanced Technology at IBM.", from JavaLobby.

While Java is great as a language and as a platform, there has been reasonable concern about Sun's stewardship of it, both short and long term. The fact that IBM seems to be throwing their hat into the ring of making an alternative, open source, Java platform, can either be good by itself or because it gives Sun a kick in the pants. Either way, I think it could be good! Technorati Tags: interesting, java, IBM, puppy

  • 1 min read

Scoble, Technorati and Bloglines (and Dow Jones and Nasdaq AGAIN different?! What’s going on?)

Scoble has been really picking on Technorati recently, and I can't figure out why. Given the megaphone that Robert has it has got to be really hurting Technorati. There has been a lot of detailed commentary about this, some of it quite good, for example David Berlind and Dan Farber on ZDNet and Padawan.info. My modest contribution to the debate is this: Why does it shock anyone that the number of links reported by Technorati is different than the number of citations counted by Bloglines? These are statistics for which there are no objective definitions. Both sites are measuring something but are they measuring the same thing? No! Unfortunately (sort of) neither site gives the detailed objective definition of what they are measuring. I say "sort of", because, guaranteed, those definitions would be inaccurate and dated, and no one would read them anyway. (Update : I am pretty sure that my modest contribution is not original but it what is screaming out in my mind each time I read about this topic.) (Update 2: Maybe a better analogy would be feigned surprise that Fox News poll results differ from The New York Times, or that the statistics about how many people have died from AIDS are different depending on who is reporting. I mean, this isn't the speed of light we are talking about here.) Technorati Tags: bloglines, scoble, technorati, truth

  • 1 min read

Here's something I hadn 't seen before: I IM'd a friend of mine at a Big Company and the message got rejected because it included a URL. I have to suppose that it's any URL that gets bounced, but who knows? So the workaround? I sent the text for a Google query that returns the same url. Further details: Discussing it with him, the logic seems to be that someone could send an employee a phishing link in an IM message.