I probably don’t say it often enough, but Jason Calacanis is one of the role models I look up to when it comes to entrepreneurship. He’s also a great person and a great friend when I really needed it most. Let this serve as a disclaimer that any perceived hate in this blog entry is entirely unintentional.

I was reading his latest update about Mahalo and something really made me ask WTF? Here’s the key sentence:

[Jason Hines] pointed out all the salient issues, answered the burning questions, and come to the same conclusions we have over the past eight months since launch: social search has great potential.

“… social search has great potential.”

I thought I understood what Mahalo’s feature set currently is. I thought I understood what social software is. I thought I understood what social search is. But, that quote leads me to understand that Jason is suggesting that he thinks Mahalo is social search. Am I right, Jason?

Mahalo isn’t social search, in my mind. It isn’t even “Web 2.0” in my book because for me, Web 2.0 applications increase in value the more users perform the primary function of the application (i.e., network effect). Mahalo is a blend of yesteryear’s Yahoo! directory-oriented web categorization, presented in a manner that’s friendly to a generation of users who have been trained on how to better craft search queries to find what they’re looking for.

Perhaps I can quickly describe, at a low level of detail, what I consider to be a “social search” product, see if you agree, and then decide if Mahalo fits. Or, any other currently existing web product out there, for that matter.

Social search, in a nutshell, means:

• Users create profiles, identify themselves to the system.
• Users describe their relationships to other users in the system.
• Users perform web searches using the system. The system tracks what results they click through to, and of those, users describe whether the result was useful in satisfying their search or not.
• When users perform web searches, results their friends indicated were useful rank higher in results.
• The more people search and provide feedback, the better the results will be for their friends when they search.
• When users feel they have found the best result for their search, they can communicate their search query and the best result to their friends through the system.

This is social software because it creates an environment where people can define relationships that are meaningful to the application. The reason this fits my definition of Web 2.0 is that it continues to improve in quality (thus, increase in value) the more it gets used.

There’s plenty of social networking sites across many verticals already. There’s plenty of search engines already, and I’m sure they track all sorts of things including click-throughs. There’s plenty of sites where people can vote on links to pages and comment on them. There’s plenty of sites where people can bookmark links and share them with their friends.

Is there a product out there that combines all this data and uses it to enrich search results in realtime? I could see this as being done as a browser plugin … you authenticate to the social search service through it, then allow it to track your web surfing activity–which is probably the reason why Jason pushes Mahalo Follow really hard–and you then vote on pages that you like/dislike the way StumbleUpon lets you, with a quick yes/no. The plugin would handle actions on certain sites with special code, like when a user saves a page to their del.icio.us bookmarks or when they Digg it, letting the system know that they think the page is particularly valuable. This could even work for improving image search, when users search for images, in addition to presenting the images as results, there were some way to indicate “yes, when I searched for [xyz], these images from the result set were what I was looking for.” Expert systems in AI haven’t really gotten us very far, but this seems like a really good way to fake it.

Ultimately, the challenge would be to build a search index where pages users have expressed explicit preference for would be ranked higher in search results for that user and their friends. Right now, Mahalo either sends you to their very limited set of manually-created result pages or to one of various other search engines–but, it’s not clear if and how any of the Mahalo-collected data on its users is used to influence the order of the search results as returned by these other search engines. I don’t know if that would violate whatever agreement Mahalo has with them, or the ToS of these search services in general.

Look, I realize people are probably asking themselves, “why do we care what you think, Dossy? Jason’s the one with the millions of dollars from his self-made success, and you’re just picking nits here,” but doesn’t it seem odd that after 10 years, the search space ought to be mature enough that such a product would emerge and give all the old “Web 1.0” search engines a real run for their money, don’t you think?

Have I got this all wrong? Is there already a startup or product out there that I just haven’t heard about? I know several incomplete efforts have come and gone in the past, but I think the reason none of those have really taken a huge lead is because they need all these attributes I described in order to truly win. Just implementing one or two parts may be useful in a particular area, but it’s the whole package that will really change the way we use the web.

Tags: Jason Calacanis, Mahalo, social search

Last March, I had nothing but great things to say about BlogJet 2.0. It’s still a great blogging tool for the Windows platform–that is, if it were still March 2007. It’s January 2008 now, ten months later, and the fact that there hasn’t been any real bug fixes or improvements in all that time, really sucks.

Today, I finally narrowed down the simplest test case for a HTML generation bug in BlogJet that has been annoying me since I bought this software. I just posted a message about it in the “troubleshooting” forum, but in case you don’t check the forum, I’m repeating it here.

I’m using BlogJet 2.0.0.10 on WinXP Home SP2 and IE6. (No, I haven’t upgraded to IE7, yet.) Here are the steps to reproduce:

1. Start a new blog post.
2. In the post body, type:
   

   This is “a simple test.”

3. Select the words “a simple test” (not including the double quotes).
4. Press Ctrl-K to turn the selection into a hyperlink. Enter the following URL in the “Address” field. Click “OK”.
   

   http://test/?foo=bar&baz=bing

5. View the generated HTML source by pressing Ctrl-Tab.

What you get is:

This is "<A href="http://test/?foo="bar&amp;baz=bing"">a simple test</a>".

That is wrong. What it should have been is:

This is "<A href="http://test/?foo=bar&amp;baz=bing">a simple test</a>".

Where did the extra pair of double quotes come from? (e.g., around “bar&amp;baz=bing“)?

This might not seem like a big deal, but if you find yourself linking to phrases within double quotes and the link destination contains query parameters, this bug is going to bite you.

Please, someone, develop an open source replacement to BlogJet in 2008 and let me know about it. Hell, I’ll even help develop it …

Tags: BlogJet, bugs

Two days ago, widespread announcement was made that all of the consumer NewsGator products are now available for free. I’m not surprised that it happened, just that it took so long to happen.

One of my requirements for a desktop feed reader is that it sync. and integrate with a web-based reader, which FeedDemon does thanks to NewsGator Online. Since the price is right (free, as in beer!) I decided to give FeedDemon 2.6 another look.

Right off the bat, the use of MSIE for rendering HTML inside the application makes me very uneasy: there’s a reason why I haven’t used IE in over a year, in favor of Firefox 2. I’m sure it won’t be long before someone figures out how to exploit the embedded IE inside FeedDemon through a specially crafted feed entry. Perhaps it’ll involve a prefetched link or malicious image file enclosure. Now that it’s free, and a lot more people start using it, it’ll eventually become a target.

Importing my current feed subscriptions OPML from Google Reader into FeedDemon worked perfectly. All the items I’d already read in Google Reader showed up as unread in FeedDemon, naturally, and I dreaded having to go through and mark them all read again. However, one awesome feature of FeedDemon is the Panic Button: it lets you mark things as read in bulk across all your subscriptions. It’s not very flexible–after all, it is a panic button–but it’s convenient. Nice job, Nick.

As far as feed reading goes, FeedDemon does an adequate job. The newspaper styles that ship with it aren’t going to wow you, but they work. I’m glad that the typical vi-style keyboard shortcuts are mapped (e.g., “j” and “k” for next and previous item, respectively). It’s great that Ctrl-K brings up a dialogue that lets you customize your keyboard shortcuts. However, I would make a usability improvement change and add the keyboard shortcut to the tooltip in the newspaper view:

Sure, I can hit Ctrl-K and see that the keyboard shortcut is “c” to clip an item. I might even be brave enough to guess at it and mash a few buttons. Or, it could just display it in the tooltip, like: “Add to clippings folder [c]”–there, no guesswork and it saves me a step from having to look for it in the keyboard shortcut list. Of course, this assumes you can find it in the keyboard shortcut list–in this particular case, “Add to clippings folder” doesn’t even appear in the list, while “Clip item” and “Clip item to default clippings folder” do. Want to take a guess as to which one the “Add to clippings folder” button invokes? Heh. (It happens to invoke the “Cliip item” function. Would you have known that without experimenting?)

Another nice feature of FeedDemon is the “Dinosaurs” report, which gives you a list of your subscribed feeds that haven’t updated in “X” days, where X is either 10, 30, 60 or 120. This is really handy for feed management when you have lots of subscriptions like I do.

I’m going to try to use FeedDemon exclusively for a week and see if it doesn’t drive me crazy. I might have to hack on my own newspaper style (which seem to be pre-processed XSLT files in the FeedDemon\Data\Styles directory, yay!) because all of the out-of-the-box styles really suck, IMHO. I’m so glad that Nick implemented the newspaper styles this way; not being able to customize the dispaly style would really suck, unless they were incredibly good to begin with.

Are you a FeedDemon user? Got any tips or tricks to share with a newbie like me? I’d love to hear about them. Help me get through this week!

Tags: NewsGator, FeedDemon, free, feeds

I wrote about my feelings towards the American reaction to Ahmadinejad’s trip to New York City this week. Dave Winer wrote about the 60 Minutes interview by Scott Pelley and unless I’m misreading Dave, I think he and I might be in agreement about it.

One thing is clear from the interview: Ahmadinejad is far smarter than Pelley. After seeing this interview, I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody accepts another interview request from him. His questions were just fishing for sound-bites. Where was the journalism?

The best part of Dave’s reaction was captured in this Twitter update of his, though:

Dave, I totally feel you on this one.

Tags: Dave Winer, 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley, interview, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran, politics

I’ve been very busy lately and haven’t been keeping up on my feed reading. Matter of fact, just the other day I declared war on the 5,500+ messages sitting in my inbox, some messages dating back to 2002–which yes, I actually ended up replying to a bunch of as part of my cleanup crusade.

If I haven’t been reading and/or commenting on your blog lately, this is why. I’ve got so many unread articles in my feed reader that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to catch up–I’m tempted to mark them all as “read” and declare feed reading bankruptcy and start fresh. I also need to start pruning back my subscriptions and unsubscribing from feeds I just don’t read to begin with.

A lot of them I stay subscribed to out of fear that there might be an interesting article that I just don’t want to miss, but I think I’ll just have to rely on someone else to find it and link to it. Like today, Andrew linked to the They Might Be Giants Podcast.

I guess I need to become more selective in what I subscribe to and more aggressive about unsubscribing from feeds I just don’t read.

sixteenbynine posted this meme in his LJ:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4-7 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest (unless it’s too troublesome to reach and is really heavy. Then go back to step 1).
6. Tag five people. (You want it, take it!)

The book that happened to be on my desk right now:

Lutheranism (ISBN 0-8006-1246-9)
Eric W. Gritsch and Robert W. Jenson

On p. 123, sentences 5-8:

“[…] This mutual dependence of the gatherings will find organizational expression in some form or other; as it does, some ministers will acquire responsibilities that transcend the separate congregations. A chart of the ministers’ organization will look like a pyramid: there will be a “hierarchy.” Occasionally various branches of Protestantism have tried to deny these necessities, in the name of spiritual equality before God, but never with success in practice. Again, the sort of hierarchy the ministry has is historically variable; and Lutheranism affirms the variation.”

I’m not a big propagator of Internet memes, but this one was interesting to me–not because of its outcome, but because of what it was asking participants to do. Essentially, it’s asking people to tread the fine line between copyright infringement and fair use. This is a clever meme to make a whole bunch of copyright-protected literature appear in search engine results as people begin to post fragments of books in places that are likely to get spidered by search engines. Is this truly considered fair use?

My limited understanding of copyright law and fair use suggests that it’s not–but, I’m not so sure. The four factors serve as a guide to identify when it may be necessary for one to copy another’s copyrighted work as part of one’s original work for the purpose of illustration or parody. The reproduction of copyrighted material suggested by this meme doesn’t serve this purpose. Granted, if a work is over 122 pages long, a few sentences from the 123rd page cannot be considered a substantial portion of the work and should have a negligible effect on the work’s potential market.

I’d love to hear opinions of what actual lawyers and others knowledgeable about this subject think of this, like Lawrence Lessig or Cory Doctorow, or one of the Copyfight bloggers. Are participants of this meme exercising fair use, or are they violating copyright law?

Tags: copyright law, fair use, meme