The News – 08/03/01

Attack of the Blogdex!

MIT’s Media Lab has released Blogdex , and index of, what else, blogs. Blogs are random musings published by those who think the world will care, like me . Basically, blogs make it easy to publish Web pages to any site you have FTP access to. The idea behind Blogdex is that most blogs have hyperlinks in them, and thus blog authors represent a good sampling of what people are interested in on the Net. Blogdex visits 9,000 blogs a day, and extracts the links. It then ranks the links by popularity.

The service is still getting off the ground. The number one link on today’s Blogdex was mentioned in only eight blogs. Number two is pseudonymous commentator Robert X. Cringely’s article on TCP/IP. The number 10 link was www.iwantanewgirlfriend.com , which is itself a blog, and which is sponsored by a sex toy I’ve never heard of: the world’s only oral vibrator, Tongue Joy. Others on the list concern the 20th anniversary of the PC, the fatness of Americans, and the poor guy who got nailed, literally, in the eye.

It’s pretty easy, at this point, to manipulate rankings based on such a small sample. Since Blogdex users can link back to the original blogs, being on the list means your blog can be exposed to more people. In a shameless display of oneupsmanship, I’ve added the top 10 sites to my Stratlets blog. Let’s see if I end up on the list. BTW, as yet another lesson of how important it is to have your own important business marks turned into domains, www.blogdex.com is not registered to MIT, but to an enterprising entrepreneur hoping to make a buck.

I’m having a hard time seeing this as representative of where ordinary mortals are going on the Web. A far better pulse can be gotten at Google’s Zeitgeist , which is a ranking of the most popular search terms on one of the Web’s busiest search engines. Here’s today’s top ten with my glosses:

Now this is more like it: more sex, some rock and roll, some mayhem, and something for the geeks.

Those wanting a second opinion can check Lycos’ Top 50 , which includes with each listing an explanation of why they’re popular. Whichever list you look at, it behooves business people to realize that the Internet has become a mass market phenomenon, and there’s all kinds of people using it for non-business uses. No matter how popular your business site is, it’s not likely to appear in one of these lists.
Blogdex

Briefly Noted

• Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.: I’ll be speaking at the Minnesota Entrepreneurs Club pre-meeting workshop at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 7th in St. Paul, MN. The meeting is at the Minnesota Business Academy . My topic is "Will You Have to Have It? What You Need to Know About Future Tech and Your Business."
  MN Entrepreneurs
• Sunrise Period for .info Domain: From now until August 27th, registered US and EU trademark owners can register their .info domains. BulkRegister is charging a registration fee for $5 per name, with a discount for volume. Registrations must be for a minimum of 5 years. Like all registrars, BulkRegister does not guarantee that the trademark owner will actually get the domain name. But there’s a better chance now than in the next phase, called Landrush, when names will go to any registrant. I have no idea how trademark ownership will be determined during the Sunrise phase. I’d be very surprised if the process can be completed by the deadline.
  BulkRegister.com
• Open Services Coming? Gene Kan, ex-Gnutella, ex-InfraSearch, current JXTASearch leader, writes about an evolving technology trend akin to Open Source, which brought us most of the tools that the Internet runs on. An outgrowth of the peer-to-peer (P2P) movement, Open Services involve the sharing of idle resources, which, due to Moore’s Law , have become extremely abundant. As Kan puts it:

The price of performance is decreasing constantly while the performance itself is increasing ridiculously. That means I’m pretty happy to share my Pentium 8 50gHz with you because I only need all that horsepower while Windows boots. After that, the CPU is hardly utilized because I can’t hit 50 billion keys in a second. Between keys, my computer could be cracking RC5 or musing on colon cancer.

Nice dig at Microsoft there, BTW. Anyway, what Kan and others are proposing is a codified way to share your computing resources a la current P2P schemes like SETI@Home , Parabon, AllCast , and Envive .
OpenP2P

Can’t Get Enough of ME?

In the unlikely event that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP access, and the free software from www.blogger.com . This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts to your Weblog.

I’ve dubbed my Weblog entries “Stratlets”, and they are available at www.stratvantage.com/stratlets/ . Let me know what you think. Also check out the TrendSpot for ranking of the latest emerging trends.

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