With desktop search Google now has an application that makes it much more likely that you will continue to use their search engine.
They have created a switching cost - after spending several hours indexing your drive, you are less likely to switch to a different service.
Although there is a lot of hoo hah about desktop search, its still amazing that it took till 2004 for searching your own machine to become a mainstream app, when you have been able to search thousands of other computers around the world, within an instant, since the last millennium.
Expect Microsoft to counter aggressively, their business is built around owning the command line or desktop and they will likely build in indexing out of the box, meaning that Google desktop users will end up with two or more indexes.
Whatever Microsoft do, Google have shown the way forward, their desktop search makes your desktop just one more search tab. It brings your desktop to the web rather than the web to the desktop and this seems like a much more logical UI experience.
Backed by Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal, Yelp! is a service that allows you to find, share and manage recommendations for local services from people that you know.
Most online local services sites are not that useful, basically just an online version of the Yellow Pages. In fact, until this year, Dex, one of the major suppliers of local listings, did not even have search.
Google and Yahoo have embryonic local services sites but Yelp adds persistence and reach to the word of mouth process, which is the way most people find local businesses. It's a marketplace worth more than the entire online advertising market at $14Bn in the US and $40Bn worldwide and so is starting to attract a great deal of interest.
Add Yelp to Yahoo and Google local, Citysearch and Craigslist and an interesting space is shaping up.
Disclaimer - I worked on Yelp.
The real growth in blogging and syndication is amongst Xanga and Livejournal users and these systems are walled gardens. RSS and syndication are an anathema.
Good lowdown on Zephoria:
"[young people] use the Profiles in IM to find out if their friends updated their LJs or Xangas, even though they are subscribed by email as well. The only feed they use is the LJ friends list and hyper LJ users have figured out how to syndicate Xangas into LJ."
apophenia: a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture
Arguably the first music video ever, and possibly the first Powerpoint presentation, in "Don't Look Back," Bob Dylan holds up cue cards with words from the song Subterranean Homesick Blues on them and flips them, while staring at the camera, as the song plays:
'Johnny's in the basement
Mixin' up the medicine...'
Slideshow presentations went downhill from then on:
Times Roman font, meaningless bullet points, a blue blend background, droning presenters wearing company polo shirts and pleated khaki pants. Powerpoint is an art crime.
Because of this, I rarely pay much attention to conference presentations. However, one of the best things I saw at at Web 2.0 was how Larry Lessig has perfected his trademark slideshow.
Like in Subterranean Homesick Blues, the slides flow along nicely with the lyrics. A lawyer defending the right for people to create digital collages produces a presentation that is an art form in itself, his mash up being a pretty good example of the type of creativity that he defends so well.
What makes a Lessig presentation different?
Style: Lessig uses a cracked courier typewriter font. It is a perfectly ironic use of something intrinsically analogue, used in a digital medium.
Structure: Each slide in a Lessig presentation is a piece of microcontent, it can be a word a symbol or an entire movie clip. There is no notion of a page.
Timing: As Lessig raps to the slide presentation, the rhythm of the slides has a non-linear flow i.e. a slide may emphasize a point 'so and so: slide 1 - did this: slide 2 - which resulted in this: slide3" where each slide is punched out subliminally to the rhythm of him talking.
So, all you fathead music industry types, if you want to prevent people from making collages, all your slideshows are going to suck, and nobody will listen.
I've heard three people refer to the 'RSS space' at Web 2.0. This is dangerous hype. RSS is not a space, its a description of a way to transport links with clean titles.
Advertising in RSS feeds will probably be worth $100 - $150 million within the next 18 months, and RSS readers will eventually be baked into all browsers as a fancy bookmarking feature - and that's it.
If people wanted to get excited about a piece of geekery that weblogs have helped drive then ping servers would be a better thing to look at. If you become the king of all ping servers then you have something that is a real threat to the core business of search engines.
When quantitative information such as price appears in RSS product feeds, then ping servers are hugely valuable and search engines based on crawling are fundamentally broken.
When I arrived in the US from bad teeth land one of the first things I asked my dentist for was a set of American teeth.
Unfortunately I was told there was nothing that could be done. However at dinner with friends last night I was introduced to 'Rota Points', the best toothpick in the world.
The bits in between my teeth are gone now, even if I'm still on page 27 of the Great Book of British Smiles.
At Web 2.0 and Jeff Bezos is presenting, showing his Amazon homepage. In the top right corner is 'Jeff's Gold Box'.
Presumably Jeff's Gold Box contains, well, gold bars.
Gawker launches 3 new blogs:
Screenhead a funny-stuff compilation.
Jalopnik a cool-cars blog.
Kotaku a video games blog.
My car is crapped out and I have to avoid video games, because I will play them till my eyes bleed, but I'll be a regular reader of Screenhead.