My Google Knol Club

Yahoo! today announced the launch of their new women’s site Shine. While the site looks great, and as a Yahoo! employee I probably care more about Yahoo! news than most people, I didn’t think it’d really make much of a splash in the tech blog world and the feeds I normally read. Well, Jason Calacanis stirred up a controversy by claiming that Yahoo! was competing with it’s advertising publisher partners by creating a site that competes with them. Normally, I tend to think Jason is on the ball w

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Jason Calacanis has an interesting take on Yahoo’s latest launch, an online women’s magazine dubbed “Shine” that we covered earlier today. In Calacanis’ opinion, Shine competes directly with the some of the same web sites that Yahoo partners with in its Yahoo Publisher Network, the company’s competitor to Google AdSense. The summation of his argument: “If I was running a women’s site today I would make a point of puling everything I have off of Yahoo and building a voting block of women’s s

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JasonCalacanis: @andybeard: do you think Knol will be released? i think that is huge mistake by google to compete with wikipedia/publisher. thoughts?

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Yahoo made a huge critical blunder today: they decided to compete with their customers. Today they launched a content site called Shine dedicated to women. It looks really slick, and they make a point of talking about all the great editors they have working on it from Jane and the Wall Street Journal. Ummm….. hello!?!?!? isn’t Yahoo’s business to PARTNER with sites like Jane and the WSJ? Isn’t the point of the Yahoo Publisher Network to support and grow publishers and newspapers!??! What next

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The value of Google’s stock has taken a bit of a beating recently from their high of $747 last year to yesterday’s close at $438. After doing my weekly news review, I saw a lot of articles questioning many actions Google has been doing lately. Is this pervasive critiquing of Google having an impact of investors’ confidence? The articles I read this week came from a wide range of sources - not just limited to the search industry specific ones we all know within the industry. (I was at a offlin

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Another juicy tidbit from iMedia: “According to Hitwise, 10 percent of Wikipedia’s users went straight to Google for an additional search. That’s a sizeable number both in terms of total volume and with respect to behavior, since 51 percent of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google, meaning that many users bounce between searching some version of answers and back again to searching. While Wikipedia doesn’t monetize its site, the exit traffic underscores a larger interest in the reference spa

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Tech~Surf~Blog posts a letter from Larry Page included in Google’s Annual Report for 2007. Some interesting excerpts with my emphasis: Search is a really hard problem. To do a perfect job, you would need to understand all the world’s information, and the precise meaning of every query. With all that understanding, you would then have to produce the perfect answer instantly. We are making significant progress, but remain a long way from perfection. We’re so serious about improving search that mor

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Knut is a polar bear who was raised by humans at the Berlin Zoo. As a cub, Knut was immensely popular. Now, no longer a cute cub, Knut is being called “an animal psychopath” and a “publicity addicted psycho”: “…Markus Roebke said Berlin Zoo’s celebrity animal was obsessed with the limelight and howled with rage when denied an audience. “Knut must go and the sooner the better,” he said, insisting that the bear should be sent to an animal park where he received less attention.” link: Knut the

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Algorithms Are Terrific. But to Search Smarter, Find a Person. By Brendan I. Koerner, Wired (Mar 24) It’s the overload problem - how to deal with rss feeds and screenfuls of search results? Have people intermediate. + Brijit - 8 employees sift through 100 sources to select the stories and produce 100-word abstracts of both online and offline content and then score them for importance. + Mahalo - volunteers create the information capsules + Google’s Knol - “In December, Google announced tha

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ComputerWorld reports that Google intends to integrate its language translation service in Gmail and Google Talk. There are already bots that could facilitate an IM conversation with a person that speaks a language you don’t know, but it would be much better to have the feature built in. Even if the translation is far from perfect and often incoherent, you’ll understand the main ideas. “What you need for real-time automated machine translation is large amounts of compute power, which we have,

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