<#joiito> <Dossy> You are all witness, tonight I am dubbing the Blogosphere the Splinternet.
[#joiito] <jetx> i actually like nimoy’s hobbit song
[#joiito] * NickDouglas shudders quiveringly and tom-swiftly under the adverbs jetx skillfully, swiftly, purple-prosishly slung
<#joiito> <Dossy> Splinternet(R)(tm).
<#joiito> <Dossy> thank you.
[#joiito] <NickDouglas> splinternet!
[#joiito] <NickDouglas> that ROCKS
[#joiito] <adamhill> he also channels beat poetry – “Common People” with Ben Folds Five
[#joiito] <NickDouglas> dossy++
[#joiito] <seraph_> Dossy: “You are all witnesses. Tonight I dub the Blogosphere the Splinternet.”
[#joiito] <NickDouglas> adamhill: bet poetry?
<#joiito> seraph: Thank you for notarizing that statement. :)
[#joiito] * jeanniecool sighs and wishes NickD were ten years older.
[#joiito] <seraph_> :)
[12:19AM] Signoff: skadz (“Leaving”)
<#joiito> <Dossy> Of course, this IRC channel isn’t being logged anywhere, is it.

It has been, now. :-)

UPDATE: My friend, Rich DiMartino, pointed out that there wasn’t enough context to explain the relevance of this chat log and why I’m using the name “splinternet” — so, let me clarify: With the rise of user-friendly personal web publishing software packages, we will continue to see the increase of “many small islands of content” — effectively, the splintering of the Internet from big thick sites into many tiny little sites, or splinters. I think the analogy is especially apropos because splinters get under your skin and cause irritation and discomfort.

While AOL hasn’t been the dot-com darling lately with its sagging stock price, it hasn’t been complacently riding a downward spiral like many doom-sayers like to claim.

Mark Jen (of “fired by Google for blogging” fame) blogs about AOL being a possible dark horse. Maybe his working for Plaxo (a contact management service and more) and their recent partnership with AOL has given him a reason to take a closer look at AOL than everyone else, and it’s great to see what he’s found: AOL making serious strides in their product offerings, both for paid AOL members and for the web audience at large. On the things Mark found alone lead him to suggest that AOL might be a giant sleeper, just waiting for the opportunity to cut loose and take the lead in the latest phase of the Internet. Let me pick up where Mark left off …

• VoIP? AOL has come to the Internet telephony party with their own AOL Internet Phone Service, their enhanced VoIP service, in April 2005 (Press Release).
• Broadband connectivity? Everyone cites declining dial-up subscriber counts as “the beginning of the end of AOL,” yet if that were really the case, would AOL be working so hard to move folks from dial-up to broadband? How? By partnering with Time Warner Cable to create a customized broadband offering for AOL and Road Runner subscribers, in January 2005 (Press Release). Or, by offering a discounted AOL Over Broadband offering, so folks can continue to enjoy the network of AOL properties at broadband speeds.
• Music? If AOL’s recent participation in AOL Music: Live 8 wasn’t proof enough, what about AOL Radio featuring XM Satellite content (Press Release). On top of all that, AOL has MusicNet@AOL offering legal music downloads for a fixed monthly fee: a great way for parents to let their children enjoy music affordably and legally. If that wasn’t enough, AOL’s now starting to offer select free MP3 downloads in AOL Music Downloads. This is a very well-rounded product offering: member-only, a-la-carte subscription, and free to the web. There’s something for everyone.

The AOL of yesteryear helped create the Internet phenomenon we know of today by helping millions of people overcome the technical difficulties of getting online and offering nearly ubiquitous dial-up capability for its members and bundling easy-to-use software that offered a rich and vibrant online experience while everyone else was trying to figure out how to standardize around HTML and create web browsers. AOL was a company focused on building a community — an online community — by getting people online, giving them the tools to communicate with each other, and that’s made the world a better place, in my opinion. AOL spent the better part of the last 20 years achieving this, and it was definitely no small task.

The AOL of today is again tackling the hard problems: how to bring the best online experience to everyone, not just paying AOL members, keeping people’s always-on connections and constantly-connected computers safe and secure, and protecting children while they explore this new online world. It’s never easy being the pioneer in a space, and undoubtedly in five years when other companies follow AOL’s lead and do a better job having learned from AOL’s mistakes, AOL’s continued existance will be called into question again. But, one thing is certain: AOL will be spending the next 20 years working towards these new accomplishments.

Today’s doom-sayers will flip a complete 180 wanting to sound enlightened by saying that they knew AOL would succeed all along, and there will be new doom-sayers who will proclaim that the beginning of the end of AOL is imminent. But, in the end, we know who really gets it and who doesn’t.

UPDATE: Looks like Russell Beattie gets it, too.

In the beginning of this month I wrote about AOL launching the latest version of their Video Search product. In the beginning of this week, I wrote about Nielsen/Netratings showing AOL Search trending up, and MSN Search trending down. Yesterday, Reuters ran an article that echoes what I said at the beginning of the week in an article titled “AOL, AskJeeves search growth outpace leaders.” Quoting from that article:

Between the first and second quarters of this year, the number of searches made on AOL, the online division of Time Warner Inc. (TWX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Ask Jeeves grew 15 percent and 16 percent respectively, according to a Nielsen/Netratings study released on Thursday.

By comparison, the number of searches on Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) grew 6 percent and 9 percent respectively over the same period. The number of searches on Microsoft’s (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) MSN fell 4 percent.

The article goes on to make clear that AOL is in no way a threat to the search market leader, Google, but it does show that AOL is making real progress in moving itself forward in the Internet space. These kinds of positive reports, along with announcements from Time Warner, paying a $0.05/share quarterly dividend, may help restore investor confidence that AOL is both a company and a brand that will continue to improve over time.

Robert Scoble, cheerleading for his MSN Search team, discovered today that MSN Search now has another AOL Search feature, the sports stats widget. He says:

Oh, my, and are we seeing MSN beat Google for the first time at
something? I was just doing some searches on Ichirio Suzuki. Look at Google’s result. Look at Yahoo’s results. Then look at MSN’s.
MSN now includes a neat little chart. Oh, I want this for myself!
Searching for “Robert Scoble” doesn’t have a cool chart like that.

Don’t forget to look at AOL’s. AOL even puts the Snapshot widget above the Sponsored Links, while MSN doesn’t.

I realize that AOL Search is trailing even MSN Search according to Nielsen//NetRatings (via SearchEngineWatch.com), but if you look at the “Share Of Searches Trend” data over the last few months, MSN has been trending down while AOL has been trending up. If the AOL Search team can keep it up by launching best-in-class search products like AOL Video Search, there might be reason for the MSN Search guys to take a much closer look at what AOL’s doing that MSN isn’t.

Click to enlarge.

I’d nearly forgotten all about this game, Sudoku, until I saw Joe Grossberg blog about one that’s freely available to play on the web at www.websudoku.com. The screenshot to the right shows the result of my lunch hour, today.

Update: If you’re looking for another online place to play, check out Iron Sudoku, where a new puzzle is posted daily and you can chat in realtime with other people who are playing the same puzzle. It’s very nicely done, although the interface might be a little awkward at first, you do get used to it and it’s very playable.

Plaxo announces integration with AOL/AIM today. (via Mark Jen)

From the press release:

[…] The net result for all will be a universal and up-to-date address book that can be used at home, at work, and on the road, and which provides the accurate contact and presence information necessary for all digital communications. […]

…

Pricing and Availability

Both AOL and Plaxo will make the integrated features available at no additional charge to their subscribers and registered users. A public beta of the joint technology will be available from America Online, Inc. later this year.

Ooh! Does this really mean that AOL members can now get Plaxo for free? Or, does this mean “if you’re an AOL member AND a Plaxo subscriber, you get this new feature at no additional charge” — which is still nice, but not nearly as cool as a cross-sell partnership between AOL and Plaxo.

AOL launched its latest version of AOL Video Search this past Wednesday (via InformationWeek). It has certainly come a long way in the last two years, since it’s original launch in November 2003, but, no surprise — since it’s AOL — you still can’t find any real porn with it (as opposed to, say, Yahoo! Video Search where you can find some porn) To be fair, you can’t find any real porn using Google Video Search, either, and Microsoft’s MSN doesn’t even seem to have a video search, yet.

Certainly, this strategy appeals to a mostly family-friendly subscription audience, but it’s tough to admit that it is also the limiting factor that will keep AOL from becoming a top contender in the online search space. It’s tough to admit that the reason why they’re only one-third the audience of Yahoo is because that other two-thirds of Yahoo’s audience are mature adults, not children. AOL is still clinging to an outmoded strategy that undesirably constrains the potential audience it can capture. Google knows this, so they offer SafeSearch to filter out adult content from search results. If AOL wants to really grow its web audience, it’s going to need to consider a similar strategy, or resign itself to remaining less popular than services that do offer value to mature audiences.

Interestingly, AOL Search for “new aol video search” didn’t make finding this announcement easy — matter of fact, what it displayed at the top of the page before the search results were two video links to the recent news about three children in New Jersey that went missing and then were found dead in the trunk of a car — yikes. Compare this to Google’s search for “new aol video search” which had a link to the launch announcement (the InformationWeek link I provided earlier) at the top of the page, before the regular search results. See the following screenshots (click either image to see the full-sized version):

AOL Search

Google

All this aside, AOL’s Video Search product is still a very high quality offering, and stands a good chance of being #1 in the audio/video search vertical. This is good news for AOL and could be a winning strategy. We’ll see.

One more thought: it’s rumored that various audio/video search products are using or will use voice recognition software on the assets to build more relevant search results. I can’t wait to see a search product that lets me search podcasts and videoblogs using search terms and return me audio/video where those words were spoken, or where the dialog is relevant to my search terms. Killer app. potential.

Tags:
video search,
porn,
news,
new media,
AOL,
AOL Search,
Google,
Yahoo,
MSN

Inspired tonight by my desire to have a decent offline RSS aggregator, but wholly enamored by the Bloglines service, I sent them the following message via their “Contact Us” page:

It would be incredible if Bloglines would implement this feature:

Bloglines runs some IMAP/SSL servers. I can then add an account to my Thunderbird mail client for Bloglines, using my Bloglines username/password as auth credentials. What would be in my IMAP mailbox? All the entries from all my Bloglines feeds for my account, each entry as a separate email message. I can then instruct Thunderbird to use Offline Folders to download all the messages to my local machine. When I read a “message,” and mark it as read, Bloglines IMAP knows to mark the entry as read — this way, if I also use the Bloglines web interface, it knows which entries I’ve already read.

This way I can read Bloglines via web interface, or take it offline using Thunderbird.

Killer app. for Bloglines. Please implement. Need help implementing? I’ll hack on the code — lets work something out. I use Bloglines daily, but being able to go mobile/offline would be killer. Maybe I’ll hack on my own IMAP server that scrapes Bloglines HTML in the background as proof-of-concept, anyway.

Thanks for building such an amazing, and currently still free, service. You guys are awesome.

Stay tuned. I think this idea is sufficiently good that I’ll likely implement it in the next week or two, unless the Bloglines folks beat me to it. Anyone else interested in something like this?

Update: Apparently the Blogstreet.com guys had this same idea back in mid-2003, but it doesn’t seem to be working any more. It is still listed on their site called the Info Aggregator but on June 30, 2005, the DNS for rss.blogstreet.com doesn’t resolve for me. If they really did shut this feature down, I suspect it was a victim of “right idea, wrong time” and I think now might be the right time.

Update: First, I forgot to credit the previous update — John Sequeira sent me an email telling me about Blogstreet’s Info Aggregator service. When I emailed him back saying the DNS was busted, he discovered that they’d sent out an email announcing that the service would be shut down on December 19, 2004. Good to know. Thanks, John!

Tags: Bloglines, Thunderbird, RSS, innovation

I just tried to leave a comment in Mark Jen‘s blog. Upon submitting the comment, I got this friendly message:

Spam Karma: Your comment looks suspiciously like spam and has been moderated. It will be displayed once the admin approves it.

Here’s the link to his entry about his invite to Odeo, and below is the comment I tried to leave. Does it look spammy to you?

[…] the most intriguing part was the “Create” button. It claims that they are creating something called “Odeo Studio” which will be a browser-based tool to help you create podcasts. Browser-based?! This could be hot!

Uh, you mean they’re going to create a DHTML page with AJAX that has some form input fields and spits out RSS with enclosures for people to cut-and-paste into a file then upload to their server? Yes, I’ve been thinking about creating such a page but the folks at Red Square have already created Podifier which fills this niche, although it’s not browser-based — it’s a Win32 app.

I’ve been thinking about podcasting, and making it more accessible by lowering the barrier to entry lately, too. New product idea:

1. Instruct podcaster to upload digital media to Ourmedia.
2. DHTML page with form inputs to gather metadata about podcast.
3. Publish podcast feed with URL pointing at the asset now hosted by Ourmedia/Internet Archive.

Result? Free podcasting — at least, free to the podcaster. Ourmedia picks up the bandwidth tab, and podcasters are presented a simple interface for publishing their podcasts. They only need to learn how to upload their content to Ourmedia and use web form.

Sad: there’s probably VC money earmarked for a company that’ll do just this. Ridiculous. Who said the dot-com bubble had burst? Ha.

Bob Parsons, the CEO and founder of GoDaddy.com, shares his 16 rules, informally titled “They Can’t Eat You”. I see Bob as one of my role models and this list is a concise demonstration why.

Mike Duffy shares a list from Bill Swanson, CEO of Raytheon, called “Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management”. Apparently he’s giving the commencement speech at Cal Poly for 2005 — I wonder if his speech will be published like Steve Jobs’ was.