all talk and no action

This seems like a strange thing for Yahoo! to say: "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview at seattlepi.com.

As Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com says in the same article: "It kind of makes you wonder about how serious they are about search. It really ought to be their goal" [to be No. 1]. "Whether it's realistic or not."

EDIT: Qi Lu and Eckart Walther at Yahoo! have written a response on the Yahoo! Search Blog, saying that Yahoo!'s "commitment to being the best should be crystal clear from our investments in talented people, research, innovation and new products. Believe it or not, we are still in the early days of search. As all of us at Yahoo! agree, we're in it for the long haul, and we're in it to win."

This is a really interesting idea. According to the O'Reilly Radar weblog, Rael Dornfest, Chief Technology Officer at O'Reilly Media, wanted a "Web 2.0-style" way of creating the Hacks books it publishes. In other words, he wanted a system that would allow a group of people to participate in the process of researching, writing and editing the books, so he came up with a collaborative editing tool called Aardvark.

The result of this is that you can now buy four in-progress Hacks books as Rough Cuts, where you can get access to the work-in-progress, and send comments on the book to writers and editors to help shape the final product.

Here's a bit more info from the O'Reilly site:

Rough Cuts titles live up to their name - they haven't been fully edited, subjected to final technical review, or formatted for print. In other words, they'll be very current, but they won't be pretty.

Anti-virus firm Sophos has just published its report identifying the top twelve spam-relaying countries over the last quarter of 2005 -- and this year the UK isn't in the list.

Here's the dirty dozen:

1. United States -- 24.5%
2. China (inc Hong Kong) -- 22.3%
3. South Korea -- 9.7%
4. France -- 5.0%
5. Canada -- 3.0%
6. Brazil -- 2.6%
7. Spain -- 2.5%
8. Austria -- 2.4%
9. Taiwan -- 2.1%
10. Poland -- 2.0%
10. Japan -- 2.0%
12. Germany -- 1.8%

Others -- 20.3%

October to December 2005

The UK is responsible for relaying 1.6% of spam, which puts it in 14th position, down from number 10 in the April-September 2005 charts. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, reckons the drop is due to UK computer users becoming more savvy about security: "Computer users in the UK are putting the squeeze on spammers by better protecting their computers from being turned into spam-relaying zombies. It's encouraging to see that the UK no longer occupies one of the top twelve positions."

This is why I hate IntelliTXT: it has all the intelligence of a parsnip.

Here's a recipe at cooksrecipes.com:



The green links, you might assume, point you towards something useful and related. So the 'tomato' link is going to link to more tomato recipes or a site where you can buy tomatoes.



They don't. This one is an Amazon link offering "all the best sellers in one place" instead. Great - I can get myself some organic, vine-ripened Italian tomatoes!

But click the link and instead Amazon informs me that I may be interested in a book called I Will Not Ever Eat A Tomato. Well, not at this rate, I won't.

From the magazine's site:

ID3 Podcast Magazine, named after the data tag embedded in all podcasts, is an international trade magazine dedicated to serving podcasters with extensive editorial coverage about all things podcasting. Starting with the first May/June 2006 issue, a full-color print edition of ID3 Podcast Magazine will be delivered bimonthly.

Inside the pages of ID3 Podcast Magazine, subscribers will find feature stories, trend articles, podcast profiles, tips and tricks, podcaster Q&As, podcast reviews, equipment and software reviews, industry lists, news analysis, sector updates, reader polls, podcast excerpts, business solutions, trend stories, expert commentary and much more.

[via PaidContent.org]

Sorry for the lack of posts, but I'm currently at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. We're covering it at CESuncovered.com, if you want to find out what's going on out here.