Category: Personal

Techbiz 1) YHOO will remain an independent entity, and will not merge with either AOL or MSFT 2) Yahoo! Search will close most of the search monetization gap with Google 3) In May 2007, journalistic coverage of Yahoo! will be more positive than negative 4) At the end of 2007, the search engines ranked by… Continue reading 2007 predictions →

Renkoo.com, my absolute favorite social-networking service 🙂 is done with the friends-and-family-only beta phase, and is now out in public for anyone to try. Check it out, and invite that friend you haven't seen for a while out for a coffee, or maybe a playdate. Congrats to Joyce, Adam, the Renkoo crew, and the Fembot… Continue reading Renkoo launches public beta! →

In an earlier posting I whinged about a conference that had wifi internet available only in certain areas, and implicitly assumed that this was either about cost or logistics. A follow-up comment pointed out that speakers might actually prefer that the audience didn't have their noses in their notebooks all the time, and the policy… Continue reading Continuous partial attention and notebooks →

I love the tabbed browsing in Firefox. But if you're like me, you launch your browser and notice a couple of hours later that you've got 17 browser windows open, each of which has somewhere between 3 and 11 tabs. So how do you go back to a particular page you were looking at before?… Continue reading Firefox annoyances →

As of today, myspace.com is ranked #6 in Alexa's Traffic Rank system, behind Google and Yahoo!, but not behind by a lot. Do you think this will last? There's a lock-in/winner-take-all/positive-returns view, which says that there was a furious race for the social-networking allegiance of the young, and that that race is over now, and… Continue reading MySpace: first-winner advantage, or this year’s model? →

Here's something that I suspect is happening at a number of bigcorps across the U.S.: o Bigcorp decides that it wants to be in a whole bunch of Web2.0-ish consumer businesses. o Bigcorp knows itself and decides, intelligently, that it doesn't have the technical bench strength to build Web2.0-ish products in all these niches (or,… Continue reading Perils of the web roll-up strategy →

A very close friend of mine from college is a newspaper guy - he's been a reporter at a number of papers, including the Wall Street Journal, and is now an editor at a major metropolitan paper (that will remain nameless). We spent last weekend hanging out in San Francisco (yes - on a "man… Continue reading Print vs. online newspapers →

An esteemed colleague at Yahoo! Search is retiring this year, at the age of 65. He started working in the tech business in the early 70's, and over the last 30-odd years has worked in different sub-industries in several different well-known companies. Yet during that entire time, he has never once quit, or been fired,… Continue reading Tech career puzzle →

I've been a TiVo user for a year or so, and I'm realizing that it's really changed my expectations of other media. My car radio: I've recently become a stereotypical NPR-listening liberal (before, I was just a stereotypical liberal), and it annoys me that getting out of the car to pump gas or run my… Continue reading Whaddaya mean, no rewind?! →