Cuil, I know you are having some trouble finding me... can you see me now?

Cuil's index is three times the size of Google's:

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. ( cuil.com/info )

And its User Interface looks awesome:



However, it won't stand a chance against Google until it learns about the most important aspect of the web:



Now, I am not joking here. I am not famous but I do have an online presence, and if Google picks me up, I would expect Cuil ( who's index is supposedly 3 times as big ) to do it as well.

My guess is that this famous index is big but has a huge latency as well, and perhaps mailing lists and social media, which have low latency, are not being correctly handled yet ( which is where I have most activity ). Bottomline: I won't give up Google that easy.

Recent Social media is very valuable to me.

This will most probably change in the next few weeks... I can only imagine the pressure these guys might have been under. With all that funding on the table and the whole world looking at you!

Ahh... I can relate to that .
Yep.


Definitely.

Richard, I know you read this blog every now and then.

I have an idea: Give me some cash to fund some high tech holographic research, buy the Barbarian Group, team them up with Banksy and we will come up with the ultimate real life experience... Massive Projections in the Sky, Holographic Interventions, etc.

Why take the subjects to outer space when all we need is to stimulate a pair of nerves?

Ahh, I need to focus.

I leave you with these beautiful creations from one of the original Barbarians, mr Robert Hodgin:



Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo.



Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

After reading this hype-filled and buzzword compliant blog post by Google:

I set off to gain some perspective by reading the big trackbacks. And, to my surprise, TechCrunch is raising serious FUD in a frontal reply:

Google says “But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”

TechCrunch says "That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today."

Ok. I am definitely checking TC back next week!

C'mon Volcanoes.
Hummm.... Global Warming? Hello? Don't you read the news?

( This one is called LLaima )

We all suffer from ID proliferation these days ( facebook, hotmail, banking, gmail, etc ad infinitum )... and we are all counting on OpenID et Al to come to the rescue.

Now, there is a specific part of this problem regarding Google Accounts that is driving me mad and I think it can/should be solved through a different mechanism.

I currently have 4 Google IDs: My personal email ( aldo.bucchi@gmail.com ) and three accounts on companies using Google Apps. Of course I have already setup the necessary forwarding rules so I can live on one inbox.

But what about docs, sites, and the zillions of other Google Services?

I still need to try all four IDs to access the complete set of resources that are entitled to me but have been assigned to my different accounts for reasons that are often out of my control.

In order to solve this, Google Accounts should provide a way for me to assert that aldo.bucchi@gmail.com is the same individual as aldo.bucchi@foo.com.

Unfortunately, this is not possible today.

Well, I can't really blame it on them. Having implemented smushing on top of several legacy systems I am aware that creating and implementing the necessary indirection layer at a later point in time is not trivial and, in some cases, even impossible. In the end, it depends on the assumptions that existed when the identity framework was designed in the first place.

Hopefully Google has enough resources to pull something like this together, someday.

( I bet you they already have some account smushing working for internal and non-transactional stuff like reporting and data mining )

Google Gods: please, please... smush me!

If you ever need to briefly explain the semweb to your colleagues / employees / VCs, etc, then this diagram might be useful. I just found it in an old powerpoint presentation I used to deliver an introduction course to the Semantic Web, and it also made its way to a couple of VC presentations.



This is evidently for a tech savvy audience. In fact, it draws upon their understanding of the relation between different technological elements and their abstraction levels.

The interesting thing here is that it uses a simple and symmetric geometry to convey rythm and evolution. Therefore it makes it easy 1) for you to come up with a concise, ordered narrative and 2) for your audience to follow you and visually connect the semantic web to what they already know.

computers, files, resources
internet, www, ggg
physical location, filesystem, database
...

It is not perfect but it goes a long way very quickly and avoids overload. That's the whole point. You can then go into details if you wish.

Hopefully you will find it useful.
Feel free to use it, modify it, etc.

Well, I had the uneasy feeling that I might be pushing it a little by using the Flash "f" in this logo:




Unfortunately, I was right.

OK Adobe, you win.
The "f" is gone :(

The new one will make a nicer t-shirt though...