LSQHA Blog Reviews

In the next few weeks, the ReadWriteWeb events guide will take you from New York City, to San Francisco, to Portland, Oregon. Along the way you'll find a conference on search engine strategies, a showcase for startups, an in-depth look at the freemium business model, and a day filled with of social media case studies. How do you like your events calendar? As a world map ? As an iCal (and Google Calendar-importable) file? You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. Know of something cool taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us . Sponsor 22 – 26 March 2010: New York City Search Engine Strategies New York Conference & Expo Go beyond search at Search Engine Strategies New York . Learn the newest trends, strategic action plans, and technology that industry leaders are employing today. Our experts will trace the natural evolution of search exploring topics such as: digital asset optimization, mobile application development, transition from search to discovery and more.Book your pass today. Enter RWW15 to save 15% off the registration. Sessions include: Digital Asset Optimization Deep Dive Into Analytics Augmented Reality: It's a Brave New World Bringing SEO In-House: The Pros and Cons Advanced B2B Search Marketing Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues 23 March 2010: San Francisco, California S.F. Beta 4.0 After a long winter's hiatus, S.F. Beta is back, for its forth year straight! Join hundreds of founders, investors, developers, and technologists for a lively evening of demos, drinks, conversation, and new connections. Early bird tickets are available, and they're going fast. Register now for discounted admission. As always, we feature startup demos all night. This time around, the theme is Search & Discovery. If you're building the next Google (or the next Google acquisition), we want you here! Email cperry@sfbeta.com for more info. 26 March 2010: San Francisco, California Freemium Summit The first Freemium Summit is a one day event focused on exploring what it takes to succeed under the freemium business model. Across all segments of the media landscape, entrepreneurs and executives are pioneering models that combine a free offering with a premium, paid offering. This hybrid business model is one of the most exciting areas of business model innovation impacting the world of media and the Freemium Summit will explore the most important topics on the minds of leading practitioners. Confirmed Speakers: Toni Schneider, Automattic (WordPress); Matt Brezina, Xobni; Aaron Levie, Box.net; Phil Libin, Evernote; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Drew Houston, Dropbox; Ranjith Kumaran, YouSendIt; Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp; Lance Walley, Chargify; Isaac Hall, Recurly; and Lincoln Murphy, Sixteen Ventures. March 29, 2010: Portland, Oregon Social Fresh Portland The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. Over the course of the day, you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Intel, Ford, Comcast, Nike and many more, as well as keynote Peter Shankman. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off. 4 April 2010: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania ConnectNow TEDx CMU is an independently organized TEDx event that will be held on April 4th, 2010 at Carnegie Mellon University and will feature a full day of talks by prominent speakers as well as recorded videos from past TEDTalks. Confirmed speakers include Jonathan Fields (author, blogger and entrepreneur), Stacey Monk (founder of Epic Change, a startup nonprofit), Chase Jarvis (photographer, director and social artist) and Nathan Martin (CEO of Deeplocal, an innovation studio in Pittsburgh). The theme of the event is "Fearless", and we are inviting speakers from cross-disciplinary backgrounds to talk about their experiences, and tell us a little about what inspires them to be fearless in the pursuit of goals. We hope to spark discussions and foster connections between participants, encouraging aspiring individuals to follow their dreams and make a difference. The event is free to attend, and the application deadline is March 21, 2010. For more information about the event, visit tedxcmu.com or email info@tedxcmu.com. You can also find TEDx CMU on Facebook or follow us on Twitter . 7 – 9 April 2010: Sydney, Australia ConnectNow ConnectNow brings together international specialists and thought leaders in social media, emerging technologies and their intersection with business. Learn how the realtime web, location based services, augmented reality, ubiquitous computing and personalised services are changing marketing and communications. Understand the importance of trust in relationship marketing and what is "social currency". For more info email info@connectnow.net.au . 13 – 15 April 2010: Dallas, Texas PubCon South PubCon , the premier search and social media conference, features the industry's biggest names and key players shaping the future of the Web. PubCon South will include cutting-edge panel sessions exploring tracks dedicated to search, social media and affiliate marketing, an intensive professional search and social media training program, and some of the world's top keynote speakers. PubCon South at Dallas will also hold a one-day, two-track slate of intensive educational training programs led by some of the industry's most respected search professionals. The event takes place at the Richardson Conference and Civic Center. Register here . 16 April 2010: Mountain View, California Under the Radar: Cloud Under the Radar: Cloud is must-attend event for dealmakers and heads of IT from large enterprises, SMBs, service providers, carriers and media companies who are responsible for helping their companies leverage new technology and innovation in the fast-evolving IT ecosystem. Join us for the 15th Under the Radar conference, featuring a hand-picked selection of the world's most innovative cloud startups among 350 top tech, media, telcom and finance executives. For ticket and more information, visit http://undertheradarblog.com . 16 – 17 April 2010: Royal Oak, Michigan FutureMidwest FutureMidwest is the region's largest technology and knowledge conference. Founded by Adrian Pittman, Jordan Wolfe and Zach Lipson, FutureMidwest is the fusion of two successful conferences held in Michigan in 2009 - the Module Midwest Digital Conference and TechNow. Both conferences highlighted how technology and digital tools have dramatically changed the way we do business and the effect this transition has had on companies. FutureMidwest kicks things up a notch with presentations, group breakout sessions, relationship-building opportunities and influencers who are taking action to redefine business in the digital age. Register here . April 19, 2010: St. Louis Missouri Social Fresh St. Louis The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. Over the course of the day you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Ford, Best Buy, Scottrade, Hardees, CMT and many more. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off. 19 – 21 April 2010: San Francisco, California DrupalCon DrupalCon is the premier conference focused on Drupal, the award-winning open source content management framework that is galvanizing social publishing and web development today. For a registration fee of $195, attendees get three full days of sessions led by the best and brightest Drupal experts. Drupal has been downloaded over 2 million times since its inception, and project growth has doubled annually for several years. Drupal is used to deliver a wide variety of application types including blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and web content publishing and management. 26 April 2010: San Francisco, California Future of Money and Technology Summit The Future of Money & Technology Summit will bring together the best and brightest thinkers around money, including visionaries, entrepreneurial business people, developers, press, investors, authors, solution/service providers, and organizations who work where cash and commerce collide. We meet to discuss the evolving ecosystem around money in a proactive, conducive to dealmaking environment. Featured speakers include Jolie O'Dell from ReadWriteWeb, as well as representatives from Wells Fargo Bank, Kiva, SharesPost, Jambool, Founders Fund, Outright.com, SoftTech VC, and many more. Use discount code "rww" to get 10% off registration . 7 May 2010: Mountain View, California ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 will be an exploration of the latest Mobile development trends - both the technology and the emerging business applications. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of Mobile with the brightest in the industry, your peers! As in our last Summit, The Real-Time Web, the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit is an unconference. An unconference is a participant driven conference where the agenda is created on the day, in real-time and discussions are lead by conference participants. Read about the history of unconferences . We will have two main tracks at this Summit - Development and Business - so the Summit will be of interest to managers, marketers, developers, innovators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders alike. Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks. Geo-location services - what can you do using location as a platform ? Commerce & Marketing - as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel? Content, Publishing & Recommendations - the technologies and best practices. Mobile Social Networking - how to tap into communities on mobile devices. Internet of Things - the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data. Augmented Reality - the technology and business applications of AR. Native App vs. Browser Based - Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Click here to register now , or to become a sponsor , or to help shape the conference . 11 May 2010: San Francisco, California FinovateSpring FinovateSpring 2010 will again showcase the most cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations to Silicon Valley and the world. With Finovate's signature mix of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) from handpicked companies and intimate networking time with their executives, this conference packs a ton of unique value into a single day. Come see the cutting edge of banking and financial technology and network with hundreds of the leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers and fintech entrepreneurs. Early bird registration rates are available. May 17 2010: San Francisco, California SF MusicTech Summit The SF MusicTech Summit will bring together 700-plus visionaries in the music/technology space - the best and brightest entrepreneurs, developers, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce. We meet to discuss the evolving music, business and technology ecosystem in a proactive, conducive-to-dealmaking environment. Enter the discount code "rww" to get 10% off . 25 – 27 May 2010: Denver, Colorado Glue Glue is the only conference devoted solely to exploring the problem-sets facing architects, developers and IT professionals in a "post-cloud" world. Glue focuses on the APIs and protocols (Twitter, Facebook, Websockets, PubSubHubBub, XMPP), formats and standards (RDF/Linked Data, JSON, Microformats, HTML5), platforms and providers (Amazon, Rackspace, Google App Engine, Salesforce.com, Eucalyptus), Identity Protocols (OAuth/WRAP, SAML, OpenID, SPML) emerging NoSQL data models (Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, HBase), and other mechanisms that are building the post-cloud world. ReadWriteCloud will be blogging live from Gluecon and CloudCamp, and ReadWriteWeb's Alex Williams will be moderating the "Managing Complexity in the Cloud" session. Please join us May 25-27 in Denver, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb readers can receive 10% off of registration by using the code "RWW12". 15 – 16 June 2010: New York City Corporate Social Media Summit The Corporate Social Media Summit is a two day conference focused exclusively on how big businesses can take advantage of social media to enhance their marketing/comms strategy. Featuring: Practical and relevant insights from peers who have already used social media successfully 20-plus corporate speakers (including PepsiCo, Whole Foods, Dell, McDonald's, General Motors, Citi, Johnson & Johnson), Best practice, benchmarks and practical next steps you can use to take advantage of social media in your business A tightly-focused agenda with 14 in-depth, practical workshops giving you knowledge on only the most critical business issues surrounding corporate use of social media Save $400 if you quote RWW400 when booking. Book here . 29 – 30 June 2010: London Cloud Computing World Forum The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum is the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud computing and SaaS. Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud and SaaS industry. Show highlights include: Co-located with CloudCamp London Co-located with Green IT conference Free-to-attend exhibition with seminar and scenario theatre Free-to-attend evening awards presentation Hear from leading case studies on how they have integrated cloud computing and SaaS into their working practices Learn from the key players offering cloud and SaaS services Evening networking party for all attendees 5 October 2010: New York City FinovateFall FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology from established leaders and hot young companies. The Fall event is the original and largest Finovate and features a single day packed with our special blend of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) and intimate networking time with top executives from the innovative demoing companies. FinovateFall is a unique chance to see the future of finance and banking before your competition and find the edge you need in today's market. Early bird registration rates are available. Download this entire events calendar in iCal format. Discuss

Read more from the original source:
ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, 20 March 2010

When hundreds of clueless commenters decided mid-February that ReadWriteWeb was the place to log in to Facebook, alerts went off in my personal network like alarms at a fire station. For the past few years I've been doing research on misunderstandings online; since it's the subject of my doctoral thesis, all my friends know I eat, sleep, and breathe this topic, and was likely to be so buried in it that I'd miss new developments. It's a good thing they woke me from doctoral sluggishness; with thousands of comments, this is the biggest such thread I've seen. The ReadWriteWeb/Facebook thread looks a lot like previous threads, but it has some interesting new developments. Sponsor Guest author Gillian Andrews is finishing Gumbaby.com . She channels her Internet literacy energies into the hacker radio show The Media Show on YouTube, an irreverent, puppet-fueled stab at mass education. As ReadWriteWeb readers have learned, misunderstandings like these never fail to entertain and astound. They've been a repeat topic of interest on community blogs; MetaFilter, for example, has scratched its collective head about this many a time. Accusations always fly: these "strangers" (as I've come to call them) are idiots, illiterates, came from AOL, shouldn't be allowed out on the Internet without someone to hold their hand. Less often, a few voices speak up from the development community and say, Wait a minute, we build the software the Internet runs on - isn't this partly our fault? The ReadWriteWeb thread lays the blame to some extent on search engines, as ReadWriteWeb writer Mike Melanson has already written. But it also points to the rise of social networking services as a culprit. Social Networking Software Changed the Landscape Examples of misunderstandings abound in listservs, blog comment threads, newspaper article comment sections and even Wikipedia. Blogs where people ask to get an account canceled are pretty common. The login fiasco on this website is the first time I've seen a firestorm of misunderstanding sparked specifically by people trying to log on to an unrelated website. But then, the ability to log into a service from an unrelated website is only a few years old. Is it any surprise that people are thrown by it? These commenters arrived from a search engine, looking for Facebook. At the bottom of the page where they landed, ReadWriteWeb offered them the opportunity to "Sign in with Facebook." They did - many comments link directly to a Facebook profile. What happened when they signed in? They were dropped right back on the ReadWriteWeb page where they started, with no indication of what had happened save for the line "Thanks for signing in, X. Now you can comment." Text Boxes: They're Confusing When commenters signed in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, it rewarded them with a text box labeled "Comments (You may use HTML tags for style)." Where do these comments go? It doesn't say. It's down at the bottom of a huge window, which means when you're looking at it, you can't see most of the page's identifying information at the top of the page. (Except for the URL, but I'll get to that in a minute.) Many text boxes around the Web are woefully under-labeled. When I was beginning my research, a guy who worked at Blogger said to me, "People will put just anything in a text box," and it seems to be true. Evidence abounds that people interpret comment boxes in any number of ways. Some think they are sending private email. Some think they're sending a chat message, and get belligerent when nobody responds right away. A few seem to think it's a word processor, and "Submit" means the same thing as "save." A comment which really blew my mind was posted to a blog by a woman who appeared to confuse comments on a blog with "online prayer" - an Internet activity which is probably unfamiliar to most denizens of high-tech blogs. Google it, though, and you'll find numerous pages, with Pat Robertson's organization ranking among the top ones . Online prayer sites provide a form that lets you include your name, contact information, and a comment about what prayers you need - a form which looks startlingly like a blog comment form. The idea is that your message will be sent to Robertson or other church staff, and they will pray for you. Sometimes the form includes a promise that your message will be kept confidential; other times, there is no such promise, but it seems to matter little to those who don't understand where a comment form goes anyway. Online prayer may be new to you. Logging in to Facebook through another site is new to most of us. It's worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of people alive today were never taught to read a webpage in school, the way they were taught to read the title, author information and pages of a book. This brings us to another theme in the ReadWriteWeb thread which is repeated across most other misunderstandings of this type. Literacy is Not the Problem - New Kinds of Literacy Are ReadWriteWeb readers and other "natives" call errant commenters any number of nasty names (and use an upsetting amount of eugenic language, suggesting these "idiot" commenters should be "weeded out of the gene pool.") One favorite insult is "illiterate." As stated, this is a little unfair when most of these people never had a chance to learn Internet skills in school, where skills might be broken down into simple elements that most of us don't even remember learning. (When you learn to read a book, for example, you learn which way to hold the book, how to turn pages, reading left to right, chunking letters into phonemes and words into sentences.) But beyond being unfair, it's not wholly correct to call them illiterate. They do read and write. They just don't always do so in ways that are considered appropriate by the technologically skilled (and the code they write). Literacy has never been a single monolithic skill. It involves both reading and writing, and these two skills are independent of each other. More to the point, literacy involves reading and writing differently in a range of situations. You may consider yourself literate because you have read Shakespeare, or because you can write a coherent quarterly report. But you don't write your quarterly report as a sonnet. Different forms of literacy apply at different times, and people can be good at some kinds of literacy while needing assistance in others. Basic decoding (reading) and writing are rarely the problem in these misunderstandings. While many comments left by strangers on the threads I have studied are misspelled, use bad grammar, or are written in all-caps (or, even more confusingly, All Initial Caps), plenty can't be distinguished from the comments left by tech-savvy commenters when it comes to writing skill. In fact, "strangers" are more likely than natives to write their comments in ways we all learned in school. In most of the threads I have studied, they make it clear who they are addressing ("Dear Facebook,") who is writing ("Thanks, Linda") and even how to understand where they are coming from geographically. They do this to the point of redundancy, sometimes entering this information into more than one comment field. One stranger, trying to reach Maury Povich on a classic thread dug up by MetaFilter, writes a spellchecked-perfect traditional letter, right down to the formatting of the date and greetings. (When was the last time you spellchecked a hastily written comment?) Other errant commenters are published authors, or even have advanced degrees. Again, their problem is not traditional literacy; the problem is that the Internet demands new kinds of literacy, and they haven't had the training yet. Mocking them in a comment thread doesn't improve their skills. Reading-wise, there are plenty of indications in my data that strangers have read other parts of the page. There seems to be a general trend that they are less likely to directly address a celebrity (for example) when the comments right above their own come from natives who say "ommfg, this is not Maury Povich's website!" My favorite example of a stranger demonstrating her reading skills is a commenter on a thread where a blogger wrote about his joy at learning that all kinds of things - M&Ms, ketchup bottles, soda, etc - could now be customized. The blogger titled his post "Ketchup of the People." The commenter wrote: I found the order for custom printed m & m's in the coupon section of the providence journal sunday paper. It said nothing about ordering ketchup first or anything about the blog. All I wanted was to surprise my 80 year old aunt who loves m & m's with this special custom order. What is this a scam or something? If it is, it's pretty cruel? Please respond. Through some referral-log forensics, the blogger and his readers determined that this commenter had, in fact, entered the URL provided by her newspaper. The problem was, the offer had expired, and the only remaining reference to this URL was on the blogger's page, where she landed. So she set about trying to make sense of what she found in the best way she could. Would she have to order ketchup first? Was the blog somehow a gatekeeper to the order? This all sounded fishy - was it a scam? Presented with apparent nonsense, all of us do our best to make sense of it; that's just what the human brain does. On the Web, people don't always have the information they need to understand what's going on. Next page: What is a URL? What is a URL? One of the most important elements errant commenters aren't using, which the tech-savvy have at their command, is a page's URL. Internet-illiterate commenters generally don't know what "URL" means, or what one does. Check the URLs attached to their names in blog comments; you will often find they have entered an email address, subject line, their name, or something to the effect of "I don't know what this is" in the URL field that went with their comment.The fact that many errant commenters seem to enter "Facebook" into Google's search field to get to the page also suggests that URLs aren't a part of their Internet literacy skills. Interface designers aren't helping. Most URL bars now resolve into search results. This may seem like a good UI solution, but it is a catastrophic mistake from a literacy perspective. URLs aren't just how we get to a page; they are involved in how we judge its content, accuracy, point of view, and most importantly who owns it. Obscuring or drawing attention away from URLs keeps people from understanding how to judge the quality of material on the Internet. Considering that most people have not had schooling to help them understand the Internet - and it's unlikely that even kids in school today have formal opportunities to learn about URLs, considering the number of schools which limit Internet access - these steps taken by UI designers simply compound the problem. Which leads me to my final point: They're Not Illiterate - You Are As crazy as it sounds, Melanson makes a certain amount of sense when he lays the blame for the Facebook flap at Google's feet . Google is the best search engine going right now, but it's not perfect. The shift to real-time results and its underlying popularity-contest mechanic make it ineffective in specific settings. ("Specific" being key; the other problem with search engines, and the subject of extensive research in schools of information, is their inability to respond to a given user's context. But that's a topic for another article.) Facebook - and even ReadWriteWeb - are also somewhat to blame, considering how the cross-site login service is presented to users; as I noted, the messages sent to those signing in are unclear (thanks for signing in to what? Now you can comment where? What does it mean to sign in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, anyway? Is this a scam?) Literacy is a two-way street. They may be dumb for not reading the pages right, but some of the code, search algorithms, and interfaces involved aren't perfect, either. Not to mention the way "savvy" commenters and other bloggers write. The more people linked to the original ReadWriteWeb thread with the words "Facebook login" in the link, the more the ReadWriteWeb thread appeared to Google to be relevant to Facebook login. As has been noted, blog posts with "Facebook" in the title were likely to see more unwanted traffic as well. This even spread the problem to other blogs linking to ReadWriteWeb, some of whom also started to see login requests in their comment threads. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has noted bad titling among a number of we see what you did there ) is not the same thing as a solution to the problem. Photo by Miguel Ugalde Discuss

Read more:
Web Illiteracy: How Much Is Your Fault?

It seems like in the past few months Google has relentlessly released new applications, some of which perhaps could have used some more baking in the oven before they were unleashed on the general public. To some it's becoming a tiresome exercise simply to try to keep up with everything that Google is doing week in and week out. But there is a method to the madness, and it has a lot more to do with Google's bottom line than you may think. We all know that the way the search engine giant makes money is through advertising - over $23 billion in 2009 - but what may surprise you is that its advertising-based revenue comes almost exclusively from sites that are owned by Google. Sponsor Guest author Daniel Cawrey is a freelance writer and tech enthusiast, among other things. You can check out his latest musings in blog form at thechromesource , where he writes about Chrome browser, Chrome OS and just plain Google in general. Take a look at this graph from the Silicon Valley Insider that depicts the location of advertising and the dollars associated with it: Ever increasingly, Google is relying on itself to make money through its own real estate - places where it can position the ads that advertisers purchase. This is a concern for publishers that rely on Google for revenue through Adsense because there has to be a point at which this is no longer a profitable exercise for the company. If it reaches that point, Google will essentially be subsidizing publishers. And it may not have a choice but to keep doing so. Because without fresh content creation, what is there for users to search for on the Internet that is of value? The main tenet of the search business is to provide quality results, and while that may be the case now, if publisher's Adsense revenues were affected, one can wonder what kind of effect that would have on content. So although Google may have made some mistakes with applications like Buzz, along with the half-hearted emergence and now slow death of features like Gears, expect them to continue to increasing space for content to grow, even if that means one of several strategies: Become an ISP An experimental program has been announced whereby Google will provide gigabit service via fiber directly to homes in select markets. Interested municipalities and community organizations are encouraged to submit a proposal for this right . At the World Mobile Congress, CEO Eric Schmidt talked about the goal of this program being purely experimental, which means showing infrastructure operators such as cable companies that this is possible, rather than Google becoming a full fledged ISP. But once the fiber has been rolled out, it doesn't roll back in, does it? How long does the "experiment" last? Trounce the Competition in the Browser Wars Google's Chrome browser is getting a lucky break over the next few weeks. That's because Windows users in Europe who use Internet Explorer will be getting an update to their machines notifying them about browser choices that they have . This is in response to the European Union's ruling that Microsoft's practice of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows restricts competition. While the update offers many browser choices, the result will be a boost to market share for Chrome. It has steadily grown in popularity and already has roughly 5% of the market since emerging in 2008. Offer Computing Architecture to Device Manufacturers Completely Free We've seen this already with Android, and it appears that the no-cost operating system has basically saved Motorola from a fall to obscurity with its release of the Droid. Expect to see more of these developments as 2010 unfolds with Chrome OS attempting to break into not only the netbook market, but also tablets and smartbooks, which fill the gap between a high end mobile phone and a netbook. So when you hear these new announcements of applications and services that Google rolls out, think of content. Think of how they can better deliver information to users. They want it to be as easy and as seamless as possible. While sometimes these initiatives don't always work out, they aren't going to stop trying. Discuss

See the rest here:
Why Google Releases New Apps: They're Desperate for Content

The Web is huge. And growing. Faster everyday. It's almost like an ocean where there's no evaporation (the data on the Web stays there virtually forever), but yet, it's always raining in it. The rain is the new content that's added into the ocean. Every tweet is a drop, every blog post is a drop, every check-in is a drop that falls into the ocean. This ocean is almost constantly under a tropical storm in some places, like Twitter or Facebook. Sponsor Guest author Julien Genestoux is the founder and CEO of Superfeedr , a company dedicated at making RSS and Atom feeds realtime. It has implemented PubSubHubbub from day one and now host several hubs, including ReadWriteWeb, Tumblr, Posterous and Gawker. Follow Julien on Twitter . When you're a search engine, you obviously have an exhaustivity requirement. You can't really skip on indexing the Indian Ocean. Google sends its bo(a)ts all over the ocean where it's raining to update its index. However, the ocean is growing so fast that it will eventually become harder and harder to stay exhaustive. Unfortunately, not only the ocean is growing, but it's also raining more, which means that if a bo(a)t is away from a zone for too long, when it will be back it will have changed tremendously. That's what happens when you see results in a search engine that are 1- or 2-years old, or even older. They're not wrong, they're just often inaccurate, but rank well. It's a real technical problem for search engines to know where to send their bo(a)ts, and at the right time! And when Google says they're going to feed their search index with PubSubHubbub data, that's what they're trying to do: save a little bit on the boats. I strongly disagree with John Battelle when he says this is not a huge deal . My take is that he sees this only as a great technical and infrastructure opportunity for Google, not so much as an immediate benefit for the end user. I strongly disagree - and so do you . You disagreed when you typed "earthquake" into Twitter Search, or even "hudson crash", or "Mickael Jackson". At that point, you knew that Google wasn't able to provide you with the information you were looking for, and this is a massive loss for Google. Google will have a hard time getting this brain share back. The first thing it needs to do is to actually have results that date back from the minute when people look for these things. You may argue that if you search 10 times a day on Google, you go maybe once a week to Twitter search. I'm the same, no worries. Yet, I know that Twitter is much better than Google at contextualization . When I do a search on Google, I expect to find the absolute truth. If I look for earthquake, I'm looking at facts about earthquakes: pictures or maybe historical data. If I look for earthquake on Twitter, I'm looking for context ; I want what is being said about earthquakes now (and here!). As a matter of facts, Google always had a lot of issues about context because they know so little about the people who search there (or maybe they know a lot, but don't want to scare us). Adding PubSubHubbub is a way for them to be able to take the "time dimension" back. They many never have the conversations that Twitter has, but they will have a much bigger ocean of data than Twitter's sea of Tweets Photo by Pam Roth . Discuss

Originally posted here:
Chasing Real-Time Raindrops in an Ocean of Content

Longtime technology innovation investment firm Battery Ventures increased its capital to over $4 billion Thursday as the firm announced the securing of its ninth fund at a value of $750 million. Startups and entrepreneurs may be able to look at 2010 with high hopes as Battery's fund, one of the largest seen in the last year, comes after a period of decline in venture funding. Sponsor Battery Ventures, which operates out of Boston, Silicon Valley, and Israel, has been investing in tech innovation since 1983. The firm has helped several Internet companies launch initial public offerings (IPOs), such as the early search engine Infoseek , the web app platform Akamai , and analytics provider Omniture . In a press release Thursday, Battery partner Tom Crotty expressed his hope that Battery's new fund signals a rebound of floundering investment dollars. "After a slow investment pace industry-wide in 2009, we look forward to rounding out the portfolio of Fund VIII and initiating the investment cycle for our new fund," said Crotty. "With improving market fundamentals, we believe the next few years will be healthy ones to put money to work." This fresh influx of capital for Battery, which equals the amount raised in their previous fund, should excite early stage startups who have been struggling to raise funding in the down market. Battery, which invests in all stages of companies, could be an excellent benchmark for what is to come in 2010. This new fund, along with other early signals this year, could be a precursor to a steady increase of VC funding. Google may be helping this as well, as the Internet behemoth is giving the M&A market a boost by snatching up companies left and right in 2010. So far this year, Google has acquired Aardvark , reMail , Picnik and DocVerse , all within the first 64 days of the year. In 2009, a year with poor M&A performance, Google only acquired 6 companies; at this year's pace they could buy as many as 20, though they have been known to go on quick brief shopping sprees. In the early summer of 2007, they roped in 11 companies in less than three months, but only totaled 16 that year. As the first quarter of 2010 draws to a close in a few weeks, it will be interesting to see numbers on how the M&A and venture capital markets are fairing. If Battery Ventures' fresh cash and Google's acquisitions are any barometer, things should be looking up for the rest of the year. Discuss

Visit link:
Battery Ventures Rakes In $750M, Is VC Funding Over the Hump?