Reluctant Blogger

"The firewall is dead," says Google security specialist Niels Provos.

See also this Infoworld story via Yahoo news

Jason asked for a translation of this French story via his Del.icio.us feed, and I had a few minutes to kill before my flight, so figured I’d take a crack at it.  It’s been approximately 1 million years since I last opened a French textbook;  consider yourself warned… ;-)

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Mahalo, the hand-crafted search engine

Could Mahalo mark the return of the web directories?

by Sebastien Delahaye

Friday June 1, 2007

“We’re here to help.” It’s the slogan of Mahalo, a search engine just launched in Alpha version. Created by Jason Calacanis, founder and ex-chairman of Weblogs Inc (which publishes many blogs, including Engadget, the most popular blog in the world), Mahalo does not play in the same league as Google. Where the American giant uses complex algorithms to provide relevant results, Mahalo provides a hand-picked selection of sites with accompanying notes. To produce these results, Calacanis employs 40 people as “guides” who traverse the Web in the search of relevant information on precise subjects.

For the moment, Mahalo contains 4000 pages of results, only in English, on subjects as various as scientology, Nicolas Sarkozy and the founder of the company. For requests which don’t have results pages yet, Mahalo provides Google’s results. In the long term, Calacanis wants Mahalo to provide results pages for the 10,000 most popular search phrases on the Web. This goal also enables us to guess at Mahalo’s true objective: to appear in the first page of Google results for those same requests, in order to make the company profitable. Seen in this light, Mahalo seems to be taking particular aim at the space currently occupied by the Wikipédia encyclopedia on Google.

In addition, Mahalo, proclaimed the “the world’s first human-powered search engine”, also closely resembles the DMOZ directory. On DMOZ, the role of the paid Mahalo “guides” is held by volunteer “experts.” Created in 1998, DMOZ today provides results for 700,000 subjects and in nearly 80 languages. Also worth noting is that DMOZ, whose contents are freely reusable, is published by AOL, a company for which Jason Calacanis worked until last November.

From NetworkWorld:  You might be digitizing books on the Web without knowing it thanks to this stealthy anti-spam technology

You know those pesky but necessary CAPTCHA boxes whose squiggly letters and digits you need to retype to make use of certain parts of sites such as Yahoo, Wikipedia and PayPal?

A computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon is looking to replace many of those boxes with anti-spam boxes of his own for the purpose of helping to digitize and make searchable the text from books and other printed materials. To boot, the system could help companies better secure their Web sites.

 

For earlier coverage of this concept, see: The Internet is one giant, attractive nuisance - productive gaming & spare cycles

Why does Google Apps for my domain, which I pay for, have fewer features (and screwier authentication) than the free version?

Today’s annoyance - Google docs publish to blog feature apparently doesn’t exist at all in Google Apps…  grrr.

And on a related note, it would be very cool if G added a "watch this page" feature to Google Docs.  I really want to use it more aggressively, but creating another bin that I need to check for updates is a non-starter.

From Tuesday’s Financial Times:

Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

@Blog

There’s a hole in your Twitter  as I’ve said before:  there *is* no indoor/outdoor voice anymore.  Ignore this reality at your own peril.

90% of handset owners believe iphone is superior to anything else on the market.  In other news, 90% of consumers are extraordinarily gullible.  Or sheep for the latest fad.

Who besides Jobs gets away with selling vaporware to this extent anymore?

I personally don’t think I’ll be buying a phone that lacks any tactile feedback.  (Similarly, I won’t buy another portable MP3 player that doesn’t allow me to change my own batteries… )

 This has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I normally write about here except that I thought M might enjoy it.  Great photos from a sandcastle contest in British Columbia.

H/T JDawg’s Delicious feed

I received this via email because of the alerts I signed up for when I was tracking the Menu foods pet food/melamine poisoning crisis.

Diethylene glycol, a poison, has been found in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste in Panama, and customs officials there said Friday that the product appeared to have originated in China…

…Diethylene glycol is the same poison that the Panamanian government inadvertently mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. Records show that in that incident the poison, falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup, also originated in China.

There is no evidence that the tainted toothpaste is in the United States, according to U.S. government officials.

From the International Herald Tribune

Bookmarking for now, more complete write up to follow when I have time.  For now, it seems worth observing that the thesis:  “global markets without global governance are unsustainable” looks truer all the time, at least if we value niceties like safe food and consumables.

For the few people who are regular readers of this blog - - just FYI, I’m back.

From email:

What did you do for your birthday, Paul?

Hauled cinderblock through the Central Valley, actually.  Thanks for asking!  :)

Some further explanation may be required….

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