When
· Naughties
· · 2003
· · · November
· · · · 13 (3 entries)
What Japan Looks Like · Flying to the weekend meeting in Yokohama the sun lays a huge gold stripe down the middle of the Bering Strait, and on the headphones Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons sing Sleepless Nights, fruit of Napster-that-was (I paid for the LP in 1975, and I still have it, OK?); the 767 has laptop power so I don’t care where in iTunes’ 347 songs, one day, 1.47 GB I am, I just let it play. Russia from the air looks different from any part of North America. The music has segued into Fleming and John’s I’m Not Afraid (ripped from my own CD, thank you). I have a ton of fine (some little-known) music on this box, and I bet lots of you do too; wouldn’t it be great if we could post some samples of it and maybe drive a few new listeners to some deserving artists? Instead I’ll share travel pictures ...
On Search: Result Ranking · If you’re searching a big database, unless you’re lucky you’re usually going to get a lot more matches to any given query than you want to look through. So it really matters what order that result list is in. Google got to be famous in large part because they do a good job on this; the stuff near the top of their list is usually about what you want, and if you don’t see what you need near the top of the list, it may not be out there. Herewith some remarks on how to go about sorting result lists. In general, the news is not very good; however, there are some promising techniques that are under-explored ...
Move On From the Web · My title is taken from a recent Scoble post. To be fair to Robert, he really means “move on from the browser” since the RSS/aggregator technology that’s replaced surfing for him is in and of the Web top to bottom. He also draws comfort from the fact that a mere 50% or so of my readers have moved on from IE, noting heartlessly that nobody but a geek would read ongoing (sob). Fortunately, we don’t have to do the dueling-prognosticators thing about that, all we have to do is watch the browser stats over the next few years between now and whenever Longhorn comes out; I’ll keep posting mine. So, what about “moving on from the Web”? Maybe; could happen. But I’d bet against Microsoft doing the leading. The next big thing always comes out of the weeds where nobody’s looking.
