Oh dear, poor old Sputnik. How you are neglected. Only some links this time around – I’m doing more literary stuff over at reeling and writhing these days, and the tech reading has fallen off quite a lot: most of my news comes from ReadWriteWeb, which means most of you have already read it.
I intend to keep an eye on this: Librarians who Library Thing (from the groups on Library Thing). (And keep an eye on that link as well – it is down at the moment, so I will go back there and check it soon.)
ReadWriteWeb reports that apparently NASA is close to stabilising a semantic browser and presented on it at the 2007 Semantic Technology Conference.
As everyone knows by now, Google has purchased Feedburner for around $100 million, confirming what Chris Sherman said last year at WebSearchPacific workshops, that advertising is increasingly important to the G. Over at ReadWriteWeb, Josh Catone reported that:
In a blog post, Google’s VP of Product Management Susan Wojcicki said that Google aims “to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users” and spoke glowingly of Feedburner’s current RSS feed advertising platform. As we said last week, this marriage seems like a match made in heaven. Google already controls the mostprofitable text ad network on the Internet and will now have the opportunity to expand it into a large number of RSS feeds, giving them even more reach. They also gain access to a lot of statistical data about how people consume content.
Maybe it also explains why, when I went through my notes on Sherman and Mary Ellen Bates’s workshops recently and was exploring the analytics site Blogniscient, I was redirected to Google to subscribe to a feed on a search. I went back to Blogniscient and entered another search, only to be returned to a page of Google search results. Try as I might, it was impossible to get the original interface to resume activity. Incredibly annoying, and I didn’t bother exploring the cause as it was clear that in the space of six months, Google had been out shopping and just hadn’t bothered to tell anyone who visited this site what was going down. On a subsequent visit I noted that the most recent articles and headlines on Blogniscient were dated March 2007 – so that must have been the date of the takeover, yet the site is still up and there is no information on it about what has happened.
There is a report in this morning’s paper that Google and Microsoft are elbowing each other over Google Desktop being blocked by Vista software. Bigger isn’t always better, is it.
