Google Answers Closing

Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.

Official Google Blog: Adieu to Google Answers

Greg Linden had this to add:

Another interesting comparison is with the fledgling Askville and NowNow question answering services from Amazon. Those services appear to be trying to blend Google Answers (tens of dollars for answers from experts) with Yahoo Answers (free for answers from idiots); Askville and NowNow use Mechanical Turk and will charge under a dollar for answers. I am curious to see if these Amazon Q&A services succeed, or if the lesson from Google Answers is that people are not willing to pay for answers regardless of quality.

Google Reader (100+)

technorati tags:HelpShare, Google, Yahoo

Scott Berkun on How to Improve Your Pitch

At MindCamp, Scott Berkun did an excellent "lightning talk" on improving your ability to sell ideas to others.

From his blog:

Coming up with good ideas is hard enough, but convincing others to do something with them is even harder.

How to pitch an idea - scottberkun.com

This is an area where I need to improve. In Scott's talk, he rattled off these 5 points:

1. No play by play - Don't waste time on the the back story or context for your idea. Get to the chase.
2. No tech - don't bore your audience or try to sell them on the "how", hit them with the "why" and "what".
3. What problem are you solving? Who does it help? How is it better?
4. Why should your listener care? How are you going to make their life better?
5. What do you want from your listener. If you don't extend a call to action - how can they take you up on it?
   

Lastly, Scott advised practicing in front of a video camera. Smart. Painful, but smart.

technorati tags:mindcamp, scottberkun, bizphil, pitch, selfhelp

Don't Preload that iPod

It seems like preloading iPods with legal music could be a fun eBay business. You can buy the complete works of Mozart on Amazon for $135. If you could find a cheap iPod supplier, you could rip the box set once, and then sell preloaded iPods along with unopened boxed sets. Something tells me nobody would be willing to pay the extra $135 for the music, though. Somebody tried this with video and got into trouble:

"The MPAA has launched yet another 'defensive attack,' this time on a small business that is pre-loading movie DVDs onto iPods and reselling them. The original DVDs of the movies that are loaded are also given to the customer. The MPAA is claiming that the service Load 'N Go Video offers is completely illegal because ripping a DVD is against the DMCA. The MPAA is also suing the company for copyright violation."

- via Slashdot

Friday Snippets

I've been capturing snippets using Flock this week. Here's what I grabbed.

1.  A new catchy j-pop band:

Stylistically, Love Psychedelico is highly reminiscent of the British Invasion of the late 60s, both members having cited The Beatles and Led Zeppelin as influences, though the influence of American folk and blues are also present (Kumi having claimed Janis Joplin and Sheryl Crow, and Sato Bob Dylan, as influences). To pay tribute to their influences, Love Psychedelico sometimes borrow song titles from the bands that influence them.

Love Psychedelico - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2. I'm sure the tone of this survey will be funny to bloggers. I like the way they make it sound like they had to call some bloggers on the phone to figure out what they were and where they were writing:

A telephone survey of a nationally-representative sample of bloggers, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, has found that blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world.

The Pew Charitable Trusts: Informing the Public: Society and the Internet

3. Is Ville Virtanen not good enough :)?

Darude is the name used by Ville Virtanen

Artist Wiki: Darude – Last.fm

4. This would make a good widgetoon data feed for the chumby:

Comics made from WikipediaJohn sez, "Greg Williams takes Wikipedia text and then makes funny, sharing-enabled comics out of them. The skunk one's my favorite." Link (Thanks, John!)

Boing Boing: Comics made from Wikipedia

technorati tags:music, snippets, flock

Blogged with Flock

Last.FM - purchase my favorite tracks

OK, here's another one. Why doesn't Last.FM link to any online stores? Presumably because they are based in London, and have many international users. It would be really easy to create a "buy my favorite tracks for this month" feature.

I am thinking of taking my Last.FM recent favorites feed and mashing it up with the Rhapsody API. I would actually use this to purchase a CD of my favorite music every couple of months. I used to use Napster to do this, but Napster isn't providing me with worthwhile recommendations.

technorati tags:last.fm, freedback, rhapsody, mashup

Blogged with Flock

Simple Javascript Namespaces

Javascript doesn't have to the capacity to define namespaces. When you've got snippets of javascript spread all over there is the possiblity for name collisions. The commonly practiced work around is to create a graph of class objects and properties so that you can have a hierarchical naming structure. I've copied what YUI does, and made my own implementation. I thought I would share what I've learned.


1. MyCo.js provides a helper function to create a namespace that all our javascript should use:

MyCo.namespace("MyCo.Product.App"); // or whatever you want your namespace to be

This will create the namespace if it doesn't already exist.


2. Create a "class" definition:


MyCo.Product.App.MyControl = function() { // constructor};

YUI also makes frequent use of hashtable syntax here:

MyCo.Product.App.MyControl = { name: "Jack B. Nimble", 'goto': 'Jail', grade: 'A', level: 3};


3. Assign functions to that class object:

MyCo.Product.App.MyControl.DoSomething = function() { // do something }


4. Reference your function using your class:

MyCo.Product.App.MyControl.DoSomething();

Last.FM feature request

I love last.FM. Tagging and "Neighbor Radio" are my two favorite features. I wish there was a feature where last.FM would take the average geographic position of me and all my neighbors (people with similar taste), and interpolate where where my taste lies on the map. Alternately, the interpolation could be based on the location of the artists that I like.

In either case, I think I'd probably be in the middle of the Atlantic. Of course taking Australia into consideration, and the fact that the earth is a sphere...?

WPF XBAP WTF?

A Windows Presentation Foundation application that runs in the browser with no installation and no security prompt.

From ZDNet:

WPF XBAP runs in the browser, and is clearly meant to compete with the other "web application" solutions including Ajax and Flex 2. It doesn’t seem to be cross platform, although those with Vista can run it without any upgrade, and IE 7 users will have a smooth upgrade process similar to what Adobe is doing with the Flash 8 to 9 upgrade (from what I can tell).

I’m still trying to get information on a possible release date and where this fits into the .NET 3.0 world, but I think this may be a very good option for people developing web applications in a Microsoft environment. If you’re looking for something more lightweight than regular WPF, this could be your option. And if Microsoft can release a plug-in for the Mac that runs WPF XBAP, then all of a sudden we have a ball game. How does the Expression delay play into this? We’ll have to wait and see.

- Ryan Stewart @ ZDNet

See also, this WPF XBAP on channel9.

Update: XBAP is just markup for referencing a full blown WPF application. WPF/E is a crowse browser portable subset of WPF funcionality.

From wikipedia:

Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere is a cross platform extension to WPF to provide a subset of WPF features, such as hardware accelerated video, vector graphics, and animations to platforms other than Windows Vista. Specifically, WPF/E will be provided as a plug-in for Windows XP, Windows 2000, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and mobile devices.

These extensions will allow the browsers and other applications to use WPF/E graphical capabilities. The browser extensions will be in the line of Macromedia Flash, a highly popular graphic plug-in available for most browsers. Internet Explorer will have native support for WPF in Windows Vista, and will support WPF/E in older versions.

WPF/E will work in concert with XAML and will be scriptable with Javascript, it will also contain a version of the Common Language Runtime so it can execute VB.Net and C# code.

WPF is included with .NET 3.0, WPF/E will be released later.

.NET 3.0 Released

Just when I got to grips with 2.0, .NET Framework 3.0 has been released!