January 2007 Archives
IBM and Yahoo! have teamed up to produce a new search engine dubbed IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. This entry-level enterprise search engine is offered for free, with optional paid support delivered by IBM. The Flash demo looks promising, as is the "open source mash" done by the developers. I already knew Lucene, but this is the best looking package built around it I've ever seen so far.
I need to give it a try, it looks like a serious contender to the Google Mini (except that here you have to provide the server, which isn't downloadable for free from IBM.com ;-)).
Via Parisist I found this hilarious list of ten tourist tips for the Métro.
It's obviously been written by someone who know the parisians and their subway very well. I stopped counting how many times I was just about to kill someone for one of those reasons (and numerous others, like someone taking freaking ages for entering the car while all the empty seats get snapped before your eyes). Now I'm much, much happier on my bike though.
One useful, handy, serious tip I can share: to calculate how much time you need between two subway stations, count 1 min 30 s per station (or count the number of stations and add 50%) and add 5 min for each interconnection between two lines if any (more if you don't run walk as fast as a parisian ;-) ). It's been working just perfectly for me for years.
Recently I've received several requests from acquaintances asking me to endorse their work on social network services such as LinkedIn or Xing. Those are from people that I've met in person, but I've never worked with them! Writing a business recommendation for someone I've never worked directly with would be the equivalent of accepting a direct connection on those services with someone I don't know, which is diluting the worth of those social networks. I'm absolutely amazed to see, right in my own network, people with more than 500 connections (LinkedIn subtly stopped showing the exact number, but I remember that a guy like Loic had something like a thousand in no time!) and I really wonder 1) if they really know all those people, 2) if all those contacts are valuable, 3) isn't their network size becoming a burden at some point?
I really don't blame those who have contacted me, firstly because they thought I could help, secondly because the social network services make it way to easy to send out all sorts of requests with the click of a button. But sometimes I think those services are shooting themselves in the foot. How can I trust network connection and endorsements if they're that easy to request and are distributed like candies?
My policy on social network services is to accept connections with people that I know (that doesn't necessarily mean that I've met them in meatspace, because my notion of "real life" is slightly larger than its normal conception ;-) and to give endorsements to people I've worked with directly.
Corporate blogs are popularizing a new trend in corporate communications: washing business dirty laundry in public. The latest story in case is Mark Chandler, Cisco's SVP and General Counsel, calling after Apple for the infringement of Cisco's iPhone Trademark on Cisco's blog.
Putting aside, for a moment, any commentary on the merits or base of such action, the communication tactic chosen by Cisco might be a good move, for it is exactly the opposite of the habits of Apple and Steve Jobs, whose secrecy and tightfisted, carefully planned communication methods are well known. It will be very interesting to watch this story unfold, just in terms of corporate communication management. My only guess at the moment is that no Apple exec will reply via their own blog ;-).
Somehow it reminds me of Sun's Jonathan Schwartz moking HP on his blog (evidence), to which HP reacted by sending a legal reply by snail mail. From my perspective, Sun won the battle (and poked some more blog fun that made some wonder about a new kind of war). I'm not sure this is going to be a trend, although execs bloggers seem to be testing the waters here.
On an aside note, my personal feeling is that this isn't going to be a piece of cake for Cisco. IANAL but I have been close enough to IP matters to sniff a few stumbling blocks along the road. It's not enough to register a brand to protect it, you have to exploit it commercially within 5 years and show that you defend it against dilution. In the former case, from what I read in Cisco's defense, it seems there's a big gap (2000-2006) between their acquisition of the brand and the release of a commercial product (and the brand might have been inactive before 2000). For the later issue, the iPhone name has been widely (and wildly) used in public to describe the future Apple phone, to which Cisco didn't object as far as I know and therefore will have a hard time proving that they took proper measures to protect their brand (that requirement of IP laws is frequently misunderstood by open source zealots each time a company makes a necessary defensive move about trademark infringement, in order to have a record of action for future legal cases against its brand). Add to that the iphone.com domain owned by the Internet Phone Company (registered in 1995, I just noticed they changed their whois information recently), and the iphone.org domain owned by Apple (registered in 1999 and which has been redirecting to Apple.com for quite a while). As a consequence, on the contrary, it will be a piece of cake for Apple to demonstrate that for most people the iPhone name is linked to Apple, not Cisco (to which Cisco can argue about brand confusion, then Apple about dilution, etc. Not an easy pick, I'd love an IP-specialist's take on that case). And as for the purpose of the lawsuit, for knowing a little bit Cisco inside, it's a purely financial results-driven company so it's totally about business, i.e. money.
P.S. 1: Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for HP Eric Kintz chimes in to remind me that HP later joined the blog-bandwagon, leveling the game. My expressed feeling that Sun won the battle was due, at a point in time, to their execs being first to start using blogs to push corporate communication to a whole new level while HP had resorted to good old snail mail in reaction.
P.S. 2: I discovered those articles after writing this post: Cisco on brink of losing iPhone name in Europe and Did Cisco lose its right to iPhone trademark last year? which comfort me in thinking that the legal risk is more on Cisco than on Apple.
Back from Cuba with a friend, which is better than nothing, the eyes full of images and the skin better prepared for its futur cancer.
Comments moderation is back to normal, now I'll pause while I readapt to the parisian life...
Off to Cuba for ten days, in love, without a computer. My second internet detox in two years. Be nice.
P.S. For the first time in the history of this blog I'm activating an a priori moderation for all comments while I'm away. Be nice anyway please ;-).
While discussing various rights and fair use of images online with Michel V yesterday*, I wished that the major search engines (aka GYM) would provide us with a way to sign any image (via steganography) then a simple feature allowing to search for signed images published online. This would allow anyone to easily track reuse, fair or not, of their works.
May be it already exists, I don't know. This would be the graphical equivalent of the link: feature in Google (ex. links to this blog home page), and I'm sure it'd be very popular.
Michel pointed out that people could possibly alter the signature if the encode/decode algorythm is know. I don't know this one either, though if we can safely encrypt stuff via public/private keys via open algorithms, this might not be an issue. He also pointed out that different means exist to sign an image, to which I responded that once a prominent actor such as Google comes out with such a feature and a very simple tutorial for webmasters, it would set an industry standard.
(*) we talk notably about the interesting case of images of oneself taken by others and published on Flickr and other online image banks. Questions discussed: in French law, one can object to the publication of any picture of themselves (where recognizable without any doubt) does this promises Flickr and consorts a flurry of legal cases soon? Can I reuse a picture of myself taken by someone else, without their authorization, when it's been published without my consent? Case in point: I've not taken or published any of those images (and I haven't got a clue who "The Shrine of Dr. No" is!)
Opquast is a popular online tool for quality assessment of web sites. Until recently it was only available in French, but the team behind it (Temesis, headed by Elie Sloïm) has localized ;-) it in English, including its useful online evaluation tool: My-Opquast which allows you to benchmark a site against 153 best practices that were elaborated with the community (more info over here).
Disclaimer: I know Elie personally and I briefly participated in the community effort during the launch phase. This said, if you're serious about quality testing, you should give Opquast a try, it's free for up to three sites and cheap for the benefits it brings to larger design projects.
Germany and France split on Google-beater:
German officials told The Guardian co-operating with the French government had been tricky and they were not convinced it would ever compete effectively with the likes of Google and Yahoo!.Germany will now develop its own search engine called Theseus while France is expected to continue with the Quaero project.
Why am I not astonished for a second, especially about co-operating with the French government? Let's hope we (France) bury this public-money-wasting-monster after we get rid of his originator later this year.
P.S. and reading between the lines in this article, it's clear that this is just a disguised public founding for Exalead and Thomson, administered by yet another French administration (Aii - pronounce "aïe", i.e. "ouch!" in french) for yet another layer of red tape and politics. No mystery why the Germans withdrew.
It looks like Apple is cooking some big things for 2007.
What's shining behind the Apple logo, in your opinion?
Happy New Year of the Pig!*
May it be full of love for you and around you. Me, I'm working on it :-).
