So I was thinking earlier today about how I can ping all the blog-search sites each time I do a blog post — you know, so people can actually find me here in my little corner of the bloated blogosphere. I’d already been pinging Technorati, manually, each time I did a post. Or at least trying to remember to go get the url and paste it in before I hit “publish.” But I’d been realizing there are many other sites that I really should be pinging in addition to that one. And, I’m thinking, there has to be a way to more easily do this — maybe just pasting in a whole lot of urls at once, at least. Then I go do a Yahoo! search on “pinging blog-search sites” or something like that. And, whoa! Up comes “Ping-O-Matic” — I kid you not! What a cool name (and I say that as someone who’s done a lot of naming work). You just check the boxes for the sites of your choice, click a button, and, blam, you’re done! How easy is that? The developer sounds like he has one popular little service going there, because he’s been busy lately trying to bullet-prooof his servers — which, of course, I read about on his “Ping-O-Matic blog!
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That’s who the producers of the Demo ’06 conference say you’ll be mingling with if you attend their event next week in Phoenix. The way it works is this: they filter through some 300 new upstarts that apply to present, reducing the number down to about 70 — the ones they think are the most promising. 
Those then each get to do the famed six-minute pitch. How do they choose the companies? Who knows — behind some secure curtain, I’m sure. Do VCs lobby hard for their favorites? Ya think so? There sure are a ton of VCs that attend this thing, big names included, based on a partial attendee list I saw a few days ago.
This pitching at Demo is a big deal — hard to get a chance, then even harder to do it well. You talk about pressure. Check it out: watch some Demo presentation videos here — just look on the right side and click on the link “2005 DEMOfall,” for example, then pick a company. There’s a real art to presenting at Demo, according to Guy Kawasaki, a master presenter himself. Guy, of course, is also a VC these days. Wonder how many VCs will be blogging from Demo? I’m told 20-30 more bloggers besides me are part of the press contingent, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see some VCs hammering away on their laptops, too.
Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to do a post on the practice of VCs blogging. There are several of ’em doing it. Hey, they got the money, honey — *and* they got the time! Watch for that soon.
Hope you like the new look, friends. It wasn’t easy. But, somehow, I did it — a content guy doing a custom-designed blog. Are you kidding me? Geez, I even had to get down into CSS coding! Tim O’Reilly woulda been proud. Everyone’s a coder these days, I guess. I had to upgrade to a Pro account to be able to do all this, which gives me some other wrinkles, too. The custom look is a totally different animal than the standard template approach, which enables anyone to just pick a look they like and launch a blog darn-near instantly, for zip (then $4.95 a month after the free trial). Once I got some Photoshop help on the banner, the fun was just beginning. Had to make decisions on every…other…single…little….detail on the site. For one thing, I put together and considered more than a dozen color palettes. Go ahead, ask me about any hex color you want! But in the end, it all worked, thanks to some strategic help from the Typepad support people (all online, via their interface). Another nice thing I can do with a Pro account is “continuation” of my longer posts to another page. Let me know what you think of the new look.
Okay, I’m an Aussie, and a Samba fan, too…what can I say? Catch this geeky piece from ZDNet Australia. You have to love this part: “The hall was packed for one of Australia’s homegrown heroes,” wrote Brisbane-based Joshua Wulf. “The Vampire migration tool (employed to shift users from Windows to Samba) now has ‘longer fangs’ and can take over an Active Directory domain.” Hey, there’s a lot happening down there in Oz….
Or what comes *after* search? Will there be a next big thing soon, or will we just have to settle for incremental improvements in what we have? With all the new wrinkles of Web 2.0 and social networking, like tagging, are we getting anywhere in improving the online experience? In a Wall Street Journal piece today, I note that not enough people are tagging yet for it to be “worth their while” — because, they say, even the most popular tagging sites such as Del.icio.us and Wink.com and Shadows.com get less than 1% of Google’s monthly traffic. It’s mostly geeks so far. Then there’s the growing problem of people abusing the whole system with tag spamming.
How big a need is there for better search? According to Factiva (a Dow Jones and Reuters company), “the cost of not finding relevant information is staggering.” More than half of all web searches are not successful, they say. They even cite a study by Find/SVP that claims searching but not finding relevant information costs U.S. firms $31 billion in wasted time every year! (Granted, they’re in competition with free search, trying to sell you proprietary search technology.) Another figure comes from the Pew Internet & American Life Project: it says that only 17% of Internet users always get what they’re looking for from an online search engine — meaning 83% don’t! Whatever figure you care to believe, the need is huge. And many companies are at work on that “next big thing” in search (or beyond search) — including a lot of startups you haven’t even heard of yet. [See my previous post about some I’ll be reporting on soon.] There are companies focused on search as it relates to the entire, public world wide web, and others on coming up with better technology for searching private data bases, such as those owned by enterprises or governments. Take, for example, your company’s email store, or other types of massive, textual, unstructured databases. Text analysis or linguistics analysis technology is one interesting area I’m following. More soon.
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