My Own Pirate Radio

This post is about two experiments.

(1) The Search Engine Experiment is a web page for comparing relevance of various search engines. Try it; you might be surprised.

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In a post last Friday I mentioned Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”. This Monday, his book won the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. (Apparently first reported in Pravda, of all places; how ironic.)

I finally finished reading it this morning. Interesting, and good work, but what a rambler. It’s as if he took speed and babbled into a microphone for three days, directly transcribing his soliloquy into print. I’d love to hear him talk sometime.

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In his book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman explains how many IT businesses are shifting slices of their operations “offshore” to get work done for lower cost. For instance, the straightforward bits of your tax return might well be done overnight in Bangalore, India instead of Bangor, Maine. Cheap computing capability, cheap network bandwidth, and millions of well-educated people in developing countries are greasing the skids. (There, I just saved you a 469 page ramble.)

Amazon has put a new twist on this trend. They’ve just released a beta service called Mechanical Turk that acts as a job marketmaker for people willing to do bite-sized “human intelligence tasks” (HITs). You sign up, do a task, and get paid for it. InfoWorld’s David L. Margulius calls it “webshoring”. Here’s how Amazon describes it:

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Google made a smart move in acquiring Urchin, the web analytics company, earlier this year. They made a smarter move by opening up the analytics services for free a few days ago.

Why make a $200 analytics product free to all? (1) Build goodwill and stickiness with web site owners; (2) Create an upsell path to AdWords, Google’s main revenue engine; (3) Derive strategic insight by mining the data. No-brainer.

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Bill really is a remarkable guy. Sean commented it would be great to hear more of his views on the future of books and reading, so I did some more digging:

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Bill Hill is a researcher at Microsoft that I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago. He’s the person I keep quoting when I say that paper won’t be going away anytime soon. Bill thinks a lot about reading… how we as humans read, what’s involved in a great reading experience, and where we ought to go with the whole thing. He recently did a wonderful little three minute video interview on this topic, and on humanity in general. Check it out.

I’ve moved the “My Own Pirate Radio” blog from www.ozzykat.com to a new domain, www.myownpirateradio.com.

New blog posts will show up here, on the new domain, from now on.

In the near future I’ll be shutting down ozzykat.com. If you have favorites or web links pointing at ozzykat.com, or if you’ve subscribed to the syndication feed, please use www.myownpirateradio.com instead. For syndication help, click here.

Cheers,
osh