Everything about Nothing

Ranker

2010-08-23T12:43:00.001-07:00

Great new site Ranker about Lists, Rankings, Top Tens, Best Ofs – list making for all sorts of categories. You can find or make a Top 10 list or Top 100 list of just about anything. It’s a great place to see how anything you are interested ranks. For examples check out all kinds of best movies lists or top 10 music lists. You can also find more practical lists like college rankings

Widget Testing

2010-08-19T14:34:00.001-07:00

List of Best Heavy Metal Albums You've Never Heard

Interesting Reads

2008-10-02T09:51:00.002-07:00

Ill update with my comments about these later...hopefuly :)

Sociocast Unveils Personalization Platform
Sociocast Networks introduced this week its personalization and discovery technology, which will blossom first in a fashion site to be privately tested in October. Based on a combination of artificial intelligence and social network dynamics, the content delivery platform aims to leverage “associative memories” and “influencer networks” to help users find the information they want without having to create filters to encapsulate their desires.
http://www.semanticweb.com//article.php/3774951

An Open-Source Trip into the Semantic Web - TripBlox
The idea is that users can publish trip information on their own blogs, using XHTML or hAtom microformats and some semantic web markups, so that TripBlox can become aware of the existence of the formatted data. It will consume that information and pull it together with related information to become something of a search engine for trip ideas.
http://www.semanticweb.com//article.php/3756701

Been too long!!

2008-08-28T16:51:00.000-07:00

Sorry havnt had time to write in a long while! I promise ill be back soon when i have a chance to breathe!

Cheers!

Semantic Technology Conference

2008-05-22T08:41:00.000-07:00

The Semantic Technology Conference was this past week in San Jose, CA. Unfortunately i was unable to attend this year but a few of my co-workers where able to attend. Gathering a crowd of 1000 plus people ( up from 600 last year) I expect this year's conference to generate a significant buzz around the big players as well as some new up and coming ones.

Stay tuned for more once i can sync up with my colleages.

Google's Punch to the Gut?

2008-05-19T07:40:00.000-07:00

First Facebook's Slap in the face and now this? Definitely seems like MS is gathering up some resources doesnt it?Scobleizer makes some interesting points around all this.

Even though MS is trailing behind Yahoo and Google in search if MicroHoo goes through then MS's vested interest in Facebook becomes VERY interesting. I read another article recently ( ill try to dig up the link later) that proposed away for a company like MircoHoo or some variant of to oust Google as the search King.

Remember that search is first and foremost about relevance. If the users stop finding what they want on your search engine... it wont be long before you become AltaVista of the search grave yard. The article pointed out that if another search giant decided to poach the top 1% of search results for the top 25% of keyword searches things can change quite drastically. By offering these publishers some sort of an incentive to remove themselves from Google's indexing ( and assuming they bite..which they wouldnt have much reason to not right?), Google would take a significant hit on revenue alone.

Of course this is all here say and only someone like MicroHoo could possibly pull it off but it definitely plays into the hands of Microsofts buy everything mentality doesnt it?

If mircosoft were to either purchase or create some joint venture with yahoo search and then subsequently buy facebook the hand down a similar path. If google cannot access information within the Facebook network but MicrHoo could relavence for search all of sudden becomes VERY important.

Atleast at face value this doesnt seem like an entirely new concept to me. Think AOL back in the early 90s. Basically a walled garden that everyone couldnt wait to break out of because there was SO much more to the net than the pretty little world AOL showed us. What MS is trying to do here is create that same walled garden but claim the entire web.

The last decade was search and we have already started on the next big thing which is social networks. Combining the two is definitely where everyone knows we need to go ( case in point: myspace data portability, google friend connect, facebook connect, yahoo search monkey). Everyone is gearing up for the war... fast forward 5 years and i guarantee you will be surprised by the causalities.

Semantic Targeting 4.0

2008-04-01T12:42:00.001-07:00

Search 4.0 Search Ads and Behavioral Targeting

From: jonathanmendez, 4 weeks ago

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SMX West Presentation 2008

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Death to Adwords..whats next?

2008-03-14T22:28:00.000-07:00

I was chatting with a friend today thats in the early stages of startup. Though his company's original idea was totally not focused on this he was asking me about ad networks because he was interested in building one for his product. Seems like everyone is starting to see the value here even though King Google is current reigning champ in this space.
Google revolutionized the online advertisement model with its Adwords product. Before they came around online advertising was difficult to quantify, track and monetize on. Advertisers could approach individual publishers and purchase/place their adds on their site based on relevant content. With millions of sites and probably an equal number of advertisers this became a networking nightmare let alone the fact that most publishers ( independent ones specifically) do not want to deal with advertisers.
Publishers want to do what the do best.. produce content. Their job is to bring traffic through the site and having advertisements put some money in their pockets. This is why Adwords was a gold mine. Now advertisers can create campaigns for their ads and produce a different classes of adds to be displayed. The adwords dashboard shows you a whole slew of statistics so that you can customize your campaign to your needs and ensure that its as efficient as possible.
For a long time this worked well, publishers started adding adwords advertisement to their site to drive some revenue and advertisers where able to ensure their adds where being targeted to a specific demographic based on the content of the publishers site. Now we are starting to see this model abused by the creator itself.
Dell and google got into bed together a while back and came up with a VERY interesting way to exploit adwords. By "cybersquatting" dell comps would reroute miss spelled URLs through a Adwords service to display to the user advertisements. No more 404 pages, a utility detected this error page and sent off a query to google. HELLO! How many dells are out there doing this?

The screenshot below shows what the Dell-branded Google search results page looks like when you make a typo in your address bar. You can’t even see the search results in the picture (800×600 resolution) because the entire top of the page and right side are plastered with ads.

This page isn’t being shown to Dell owners just because they have the Google Toolbar. In fact, uninstalling the Google Toolbar won’t get rid of it. Dell and Google are now installing a second program on computers that intercepts all sorts of queries that the browser would normally try to resolve. This program has no clear name and is very hard to uninstall. In some circles, people would call this spyware.

So the funny thing about adwords and their success is that its actually fairly difficult to compare them to how effective banner ads were prior to Adwords. I mean undoubtedly they are better but taking into account things like this Dell/Google issue and presumably countless others how much is Google really milking it?

My Story - Part II ( Park Tours Inc)

2008-03-13T12:23:00.001-07:00

Near the end of my tenure at UCSD I started working on websites. Pretty much entirely front end development, no web services , nothing complicated. Though it made me some dough, which is EXTREMELY appreciated when you are a poor college student, I learned quickly that i HATE front end development.

Its not that i wasn't good at it ( not that i was exceptionally great either) , it's just that I'm not an innately creative person which in my opinion makes it difficult to design a website. For the most part the gigs I landed either already had a site that needed some modification or had a good idea what the needed and how they wanted it to look.

During my last year at UCSD I stumbled upon a lady that work on websites as well but more on the up front design side rather than the actual implementation. We quickly became a great tandem since she was able to mock up wire diagrams and story board sites while i could focus on literally translating the mock ups into an actual site.

After quickly proving my worth she introduced me Rob Baronowski founder of Park Tours. This small start up located out in Rancho Penasquitos quickly became my new home and I eventually started working there full time as i attend UCSD part time finishing of my minor.

Bright eyed and bushy tailed I completely bought into the Kool-Aid. Park Tours idea was basically providing location based information for enclosed venues as well as a navigation and scheduling component. Walking around a place like the San Diego Zoo can get quite tiring if you dont know where you are going or in what order.

Venues like the Zoo has TONS of information online about each exhibit ranging from videos and audio clips to an infinite amount of research but none of it is accessible to the park goer while they are AT the park. They are limited to the information thats on the little sign that you can almost never see properly and is sometimes quite outdated. Past that you have shows and attractions that a venue may provide and all of a sudden making the best use of your time becomes a serious challenge.

Kids want to see the polar bears and make it to the elphant feeding. Parents want to make sure they dont miss out on the tram tour but have no idea when the best time to go and stand in line. Its literally a scheduling nightmare and most people just make their best effort to see and do what they can while they are there and usually leave the park having wished they had more time!!

The park tours app provided all of the above for its park goers. Using some slick triangulation with towers we were able to show you on a digital map where you where and routes to selected locations. You could even choose all the attractions and shows you wanted to see and let the reservation engine plan and plot out your whole trip taking into count things like:

- walking distance
- location crowds ( long lines )
- show times

Providing a system for the park to use themselves to enable a reservation system for shows and help do load balancing for crowds this product was a great idea in my opinion. I think in the end it was too early for its time and lacked proper funding to really make it out the door properly. Disney has a similar concept with its Pal Mickey.

Either way this was where it all began for me. The team was small and there was a ton of work to be done. Back then i didnt worry myself with much about the product and the decisions the company made...mad if i could go back with what i know now... :) Hopefully one day they will be able to surface the product back up and get properly funded. I think a location aware system can be exteremely valuable for any enclosed venue and if these guys dont do it im sure some one else will...

My story - Part I (UCSD)

2008-03-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

I have had quite an interesting ride I think at least for me personally its been one. I moved down to San Diego back in 97 to attend to UCSD. I was one of those kids that knew from the start that i wanted to be a "software engineer".

Seems like it would be almost a no brainer these days to choose such a profession but let me tell you I had a little bit of an uphill battle to convince the rents that my desired career could actually be lucrative. Back then desis were either doctor or a lawyer for the most part. I still remember my pops telling me " I don't want you to go through college only to get out and find trouble getting a good job and then blame us". Blame them? LOL why would I blame them?? But i guess i can see their point of view since they didnt quite see the boom we had just entered.

After allot of convincing and some reassurance from their friends they finally caved in and let me pursue of been a programmer ( back then i think i had very short sighted goals... i mean dream of being a coder... come on!!!). I attended UCSD in the fall of 97 and spent 5 years there obtaining my BS in CSE and a minor in management science.

Of all my classes at UCSD related to CS i think compilers was sadly my favorite. Basically you spend 2 quarters living in the lab working all hours of the night building a compiler with a team member. Pretty much the CS equivalent of doing a residency without the blood...or the paycheck for that matter. Looking back now i think the reason why i enjoyed it so much was because of the challenge. So much work to do, so little time and a damn interesting product. This is undoubtedly why i have a fondness for startups.