When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · April
· · · · 13 (3 entries)
In Science, Beauty · This is delightful: the UBC Botanical Garden’s Botany Photo of the Day, to which I’ve subscribed. My favorites are the first entry and, from this week, the Akebia (we have one at home).
Bay Area Dining and Death · Dinner on successive nights in the City and the Valley: Monday with Dervala at Fringale, Tuesday with Lauren at La Strada in Palo Alto. The differences are instructive, and the distance can be deadly ...
Talking to Yahoo · I had a good talk yesterday with Jeff Weiner, Senior VP of Search and Marketplace over at Yahoo! I shouldn’t pass on what Jeff said; anyhow if he wants to talk to the world, he has a blog. But I can talk about what I said: first, Y! should be watching the Atom protocol work like a hawk, because they have two choices: either they try to beat everyone else out there and build the world’s greatest authoring tool, or they get behind a standardized protocol and let the cellphone guys and PDA people and let everyone compete to do it. Second, we were talking about improving search in general; near as I can tell, there isn’t a huge quality gap between Y!, Google, and MSN, and it’s hard to believe that any of them can sustainably get much ahead of the rest. On the other hand, I think Y! has a good chance to take on Google in the advertising space, both AdSense and AdWords, and maybe win. They know a whole lot of stuff about a whole lot of people; for example, they know my stock-market portfolio and what weather forecasts and maps I look up; they probably have more information about more individuals than anyone else in the business. On behalf of all those advertising sellers and buyers: it would sure be nice to see some competition. Maybe even some transparency.
