Yahoo! has divested itself of Blo.gs and is shuttering GeoCities. Would this have happened in a good economy? No. Did it need to happen anyway? Yes. Yes. Yes. And for the love of god, yes.

I like Yahoo!. I really hope the shareholders decline Microsoft’s offer. Blech, MS has wanted a piece of Yahoo! for a while.

Ars notes that Yahoo! supports OpenID. Yeah, that OpenID.

Once upon a time Microsoft was the gorilla to beat. Once upon a time we thought Google could do it.

Perhaps not any more. Amazon has dropped Google’s search results from their A9 search aggregator in favor of Microsoft’s Live search, and while Yahoo!’s on again, off again partnership talks with Microsoft appear dead after Y!’s announcement Thursday of a partnership with eBay, Microsoft still hasn’t given up on the notion.

The Yahoo! news may dull my argument, but look how quickly the board changed, how easily these companies switched allegiances or considered partnering with Microsoft, a company known for swallowing its partners.

Google may or may not truly depend on the goodwill of its customers, but the moment its image turns from all-knowing and happy to big and evil could rearrange the chess board.

allegiance, competition, ebay, google, gorilla, microsoft, partnership, yahoo, yahoo!

It’s good to know Hard to Find 800 Numbers.com is there when you need it. Here are the top five:

800 numbers, hard to find 800 numbers, customers service, customer support, support line, amazon, microsoft, yahoo!, ebay, paypal, contacting amazon, contacting microsoft, contacting yahoo!, contacting ebay, contacting paypal

No, I don’t mean that they’re disrupting it, I mean they’re getting it. And in saying that, I don’t mean they’re figured it our first, but they they’re making some damn good acquisitions to get it right.

Mostly, I’m speaking of they’re purchase of Flickr last year and their acquisition of del.icio.us Friday. But in a somewhat lesser way I’m also speaking of their announcement Monday that they’ll be offering blogs as well.

Yeah, Google rocked this picture a good long while ago with their purchase of Blogger long before most people could understand what value it offered, and even Microsoft beat Yahoo! to this. But the better way to read this is as the final piece to a rather impressive array of social software.

And where perhaps only ten percent of internet users will likely ever be regular bloggers, it’s a safe assumption that nearly 100 percent of internet users will create bookmarks and almost as many will have reason to post a photo online. And with Yahoo! controlling the leading services for both, it sort of rearranges the picture.

flickr, delicious, del.icio.us, yahoo!, social software, social web, web 2.0 web20, yahoo, internet, social network, social networks

Nial Kennedy threw down some of the first coverage of Yahoo!’s acquisition of del.icio.us last week.

Del.icio.us will most likely be integrated with existing Yahoo! Search property My Web. My Web allows Yahoo! members to tag search results for discovery through a defined social network (Y!360) or all Yahoo! users. Yahoo! will use del.icio.us bookmarks to better inform personalized search results throughout its services. Its ability to combine signals of relevance from search result click-throughs to a listing of sites bookmarked and classified will lead to increased use of Yahoo! Search and its related services while driving more targeted advertising, demanding higher advertising rates.

Om Malik followed up with some guesses at the sale price (among other things):

[in an earlier round of financing] the company had raised $1.3 million, and if that got the VCs around 25% of the company, my guess is the final price is between – $10 and $15 million. I am speculating here, and have no information. So treat it like that… simple speculation.

delicious, del.icio.us, yahoo, yahoo!, acquisition, buy, purchase, buyout

Sometimes the answer isn’t as interesting as the question. Consider this note from Yahoo Buzz:

On Sunday, the day before the nomination became official, [searches for] Alito sprang up a sudden 320%.

Did searches for Alito spike on tips White House staffers, or were White House Staffers vetting their nominee via the search engines?

tags: buzz, google, judge alito, nomination, nominee, samuel alito, search, search engines, spike, supreme court, supreme court nominee, web search, white house, white house staffers, yahoo, yahoo search

The news is that Yahoo! announced they’ve formed the Open Content Alliance. Though that certainly fits the Google versus Yahoo! story that newsmen want to report on now, it’s somewhat disingenuous to the Internet Archive, which has been beating the Open Content drum for a while. But Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive doesn’t seem to care. He was talking about it on the Yahoo! Search Blog yesterday:

Is Open Content the next step in the traditions of Open Source and an Open Network? Many people seem to think so (and wouldn’t it be great?). Working with libraries, government institutions, archives, technology companies, web companies– and we all are saying the same thing– it is time to have more great material available on the Internet and to be able to have it be open and free.

The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further– Universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable. Then the question became– is it in the interest of enough people and institutions to get there? Some hang-ups have been around costs, rights, and guidelines for sharing. All of these things were worked out for their domains by Internet folks and open source folks in the last few decades. But how are we going build a system that has everything available to everyone?

I am jazzed to say that a group of organizations is starting an Open Content Alliance to try out answers by joining new and existing collections. We are looking for more contributors and helpers. We are starting with a set of principles.

Google, of course, made news a while ago when they announced a plan to scan the entire collections of a few libraries in the US and Britain. But they’ve run up against some copyright problems lately and the future of that plan is in doubt, at least according to Siva Vaidhyanathan in his interview in last week’s On The Media.

It will be interesting to watch these two internet titans do battle. The competition does them both good, so long as it doesn’t kill them (or leave either one vulnerable to a buyout by Microsoft).

tags: alliance, book scanning, brewster kahle, google print, internet archive, library, library digitization, library of alexandria, open content, open content alliance, yahoo, yahoo open content alliance

I’ve been looking seriously at metasearch/federated search products for libraries recently. After a lot of reading and a few demos I’ve got some complaints.

I’m surprised how vendors, even now, devote so much time demonstrating patron features that are neither used nor appreciated by any patrons without an MLS. Recent lessons (one, two, three) should have made it clear that libraries need to conform to patron expectations of how online resources should work. Our own search statistics show that only 0.0067% (YES, less than a hundredth of a percent!) of the searches on our OPAC get “limited” to specific languages, locations, dates, or material types. What our patrons expect is that a natural language search will yield relevant results in the first page of hits. “Googlization” isn’t about dumbing things down, it’s about making the technology smarter.

And that’s the problem with these vendor’s metasearch products. They don’t do much to improve the quality of the results retrieved from any database. Shovelware, products that pile up junk in an attempt to generate value based on quantity, is poor solution for libraries or researchers. Still, that’s how these products work, and it’s how they’ll continue to work until libraries and their database providers adopt some of the advances in search technology now used on the web (it’s not just Google, but Yahoo, Teoma, Clusty, and others).

At the same time these metasearch products are doing little to improve the results we get, they’re also making the search process slower. Why do they all make us wait while slowly updating a table that shows only the number of hits retrieved from each database? A9 can teach all these vendors quite a few lessons on that point. A9 reports results in resizable columns, and fills in the details from various databases as they become available. The biggest lesson A9 can teach these vendors, however, is that metasearch should be free. They’re pushing OpenSearch as a public standard based on RSS/XML and already they’ve got access to 236 databases. That’s not bad compared to z39.50 (which we all still respect as the elder parent of current search standards), but remember that the standard was only announced in March 2005.

We need to pressure database vendors to improve their search engines and give better results. Maybe database providers need to rank journal articles by the number of citations they receive? Maybe libraries need to buy Google Search Appliances and do their own indexing of database content. That way, links from university faculty would increase the rank of articles they link to, making search results especially relevant.

Then, we need to ask where our money is going when we buy software like this. We need to demand standards-based products with outstanding ease of use. Go try out A9 and compare it to anything in your library. Yeah, don’t you wish you could offer that to your patrons?

tags: a9, clusty, federated search, google, libraries, library, library systems, metasearch, natural language search, opac, patron, patrons, search technology, teoma, yahoo

We don’t need to hack Google Maps anymore. Now that Google has released a public maps API, we can make more reliable map-dependent apps (which will now have better browser compatibility, thank you). Within a few minutes of signing up for a maps API key I had put together the following of the Nevada Test Site Tour.

Yeah, click the satellite button, scroll, zoom… It’s real.

The API is all JavaScript, but I use a bit of PHP to iterate through an array of points and generate the code that puts the lines and pins on the map.

The most frustrating development with the Google Maps API is that each developer key is limited to a certain hostname and directory. It’s sensitive to things like “www.maisonbisson.com” instead of “maisonbisson.com” or “maisonbisson.com/blog/post/10594” instead of “maisonbisson.com/blog/” . That’s why this is loading in an iframe.

Thanks to The Unofficial Google Weblog for the tip that the API was released yesterday. As a minor coincidence, Yahoo! also released their maps API this week. Damn.

tags: api, google maps, google maps api, map api, mapping, maps api, nevada test site, yahoo, yahoo maps, yahoo!, yahoo! maps