The Software Abstractions Blog

Could You Survive For A Day - Without Google?

Can you spend a whole day without using Google? - that's the challenge issued by my friend Charles Knight over on the Alt Search Engines blog (see also ReadWriteWeb's coverage). To help you out, he's going to publish the latest version of his popular Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list tomorrow.

I think this is a great idea! We have all become addicted to the power (and limitations) of Google search - just like television before the age of the Internet, we cannot imagine life without it. And yet, as Charles' list shows, there are plenty of alternative search engines out there, innovating Search in a variety of different ways.

Personally, I'm going to use this opportunity to learn the latest features of Quintura, an innovative search engine we've covered before on this blog (here and here ). Quintura has jumped on board this idea by creating a special destination page for discovering the best hoaxes, pranks, jokes and tricks for April fool's day. [Rest assured, this is no joke!]

So how about you - can you do it? Why not give it a shot and try out an alternative search engine? Or two, or five, or all hundred on Charles' list? Can you last a day, an hour, even five minutes? Try it and the results may surprise you!

Tim O'Reilly and Sir Tim Berners-Lee concur: Semantic Web Likely to be Top-Down

In a previous post, I asked the question: Where are the Meaning-Enabled Authoring Tools?, arguing that publishers who regularly post similar content (especially content that conforms to common formats) would get a big advantage from using Semantic Authoring tools for creating new content. By using semantic tools, not only can you get SEO benefits and improve findability , the content can more easily be re-purposed for other uses such as web applications and services.

This is essentially a bottom-up approach to the semantic web: adding semantic notation to the content itself. However, as the post went on to say, the prevailing view is definitely a top-down one, viz. that semantic meaning will have to be extracted by applications from perfectly ordinary web pages, and that the adding of semantic knowledge to the content itself is unlikely (aside from very limited contexts, such as Microformats).

Two recent podcasts with two of the leading voices in this space further confirm this view.

Two Emerging Memes: Freenomics and Crowdsourcing

Silicon Valley has always been fascinated by new technology memes, radical new ideas and business models that take off and capture the popular imagination - often changing the world of technology in the process. Valley memes quickly become the jargon of leading-edge VCs. For example, the phrase "it's a Freemium model, based on UGC and Wisdom of Crowds" requires no explanation in certain circles; it's as meaningful to these players as the phrase "it's a RESTful Web Service based on a 3-tier J2EE architecture" is to a Web Applications Architect.

(For the uninitiated: Freemium is a term popularized by VC Fred Wilson to mean a free service with an upsell to paid premium subscriptions; UGC stands for User-generated content, a relatively new concept in which the audience or readership helps to craft creative or original content; and Wisdom of Crowds is a term popularized by James Surowiecki's book of the same name.)

How does a technology meme start? When does an interesting new idea or concept tip over into a meme?

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Rumors of the Death of Indian Outsourcing - Are Greatly Exaggerated

I've long been a fan of Sramana Mitra - she has a terrific blog and has her own deep definition and framework for Web 3.0 . Forbes.com carries a fascinating article by her this morning: The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing , in which she talks about the new challenges facing Indian Outsourcing Companies.

As usual, Mitra's basic analysis is spot-on, although one can certainly take issue with her conclusions. There is no question that Indian OCs (Outsourcing Companies)  now face unprecedented challenges, and cannot carry on with a "Business As Usual" approach for much longer.

This should not come as a surprise; competing on the basis of price alone is never a sustainable business strategy. In a price war between brands (or countries!), no supplier wins. And this price advantage is rapidly eroding, with the steep rise in software development labor costs and the deteriorating strength of the dollar.