Scripting News for 3/7/2006

New idea: Ray Ozzie’s clipboard for the web. “Let’s say you have two sites both of which understand calendar data. I want to move an appointment from one site to another.” 

Danny Sullivan: “Having your page be described, sometimes inaccurately, by a third party, with no recourse, isn’t acceptable.” 

Look at this, grokking is happening. Lisa, I call it the World Outline, analog of The World Wide Web. del.icio.us is on the path to the World Outline, so is tagging. DMOZ and Yahoo are single instances of the technology that’s about the burst forth, in an open way, around OPML 2.0. 

A nice spike in traffic on my WordPress essay blog in the last day or so. Most of the flow is the Unconferences piece which has been widely linked to. 

Another picture from a conventional conference. Look closely. See the empty seats? Where did all the people go? Here’s a full room. 

An interesting discussion about DMOZ has started in the comments on yesterday’s Scripting News. 

The March 19 CyberSalon in Berkeley is about elitism in the blogosphere. Should be quite interesting, as the elite of print publishing apply their standards to the brightest lights in the blogging world.  

Notes on icon bitmaps for nodetypes on the Mac.  

A delayed (positive) reaction to my post about mothers as the paragon of cluelessness. 

One year ago today I went to see the Mets play in spring training in Port St Lucie, FL. 

 

Here’s a free idea 

Want to make a million dollars?

Implement a search engine that accumulates all the stories pointed to by the top meme–engines over time. That way if I think of something I saw on Tailrank or Memeorandum a year ago, I just go to the universal meme search engine, type in the phrase, and get back the hits.

I always wondered what would come next after the meme-engines, and now I think this may be it. It’s one level more concentrated than the meme-engines. Sure most of the nutrients are lost (to pick up on a Scoble analogy), but that’s where the fun is. One pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small.

Make it run off their RSS feeds. You’d have to build it quickly (get there first) and build it to scale, because it would be pretty popular and would grow fast. If Gabe or Kevin moves quickly maybe they could do it themselves.

Postscript: Gabe Rivera of Memeorandum says an RSS search engine could do this for him, and Paul Montgomery says that Tailrank already has a search engine.

About G-drive and box.net 

I really liked many of the young entrepreneurs I met at Under the Radar last week, esp the two box.net guys, so very young and directed and smart. But Under the Radar is hardly what they are, how about caught in the cross-hairs, in the middle of the next big thing, and destined to be swamped in all the hype over Google’s G-drive. Can they emerge with an intact business, or will they get washed up on shore? I’m pretty sure they’re going to have to find a nice hill to camp out on, that the market they’re in right now is too big for a company that’s so small and two guys that are so young (even though they are really smart and high energy).

My thought for them is Go Vertical. Find an app, preferably a new one, that works much better with integrated net storage. Really get creative. Pick something wild and wacky, something that a BigCo like Google would never shoot for. Look at how bland all their new products are. There’s a reason for that. Once a company gets really big, they are always second-guessing themselves. Only very ordinary ideas survive that process. So Google isn’t likely to copy you until it’s way too late, only if your idea is truly unusual.

I gave Young Aaron a few ideas, but ultimately it’s going to depend on the quality of his thinking, if they’re going to make it past the next few months. From now-on the Google cloud will be darkening the market they’re in now. They’re going to come to hate that cloud (unless Google or someone else buys them first).

BTW, Mike Arrington has an excelent summary of what we know about G-Drive, and box.net has their own thoughts on their blog. Yeah Beating Google ain’t gonna happen. Find that hill and set up camp.