Dare Obasanjo's WebLog

This Blog is Dead...

DareObasanjo — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:43:00 GMT

I stopped posting to this blog a few weeks ago.

If you want to keep reading my thoughts on various topics you can either catch my blog at http://spaces.msn.com/members/carnage4life for various opinions on current goings on in MSN land or read http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog for my opinions about work, life, and the pursuit of hapiness.

The Universal Inbox

DareObasanjo — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 16:46:00 GMT

Bloglines just published a new press release entitled Bloglines is First to Go Beyond the Blog with Unique-to-Me Info Updates which is excerpted below

Oakland, CA -- March 30, 2005 -- Ask Jeeves®, Inc. (Nasdaq: ASKJ), today announced that Bloglines™ (www.bloglines.com), the world’s most popular free online service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content has released the first of a wave of new capabilities that help consumers monitor customized kinds of dynamic web information. With these new capabilities, Bloglines is the first web service to move beyond aggregating general-audience blogs and RSS news feeds to enable individuals to receive updates that are personal to their daily lives.

Starting today, people can track the shipping progress of package deliveries from some of the world’s largest parcel shipping companies—FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Servicewithin their Bloglines MyFeeds page. Package tracking in Bloglines encompasses international shipments, in English. Bloglines readers can look forward to collecting more kinds of unique-to-me information on Bloglines in the near future, such as neighborhood weather updates and stock portfolio tracking.

“Bloglines is a Universal Inbox that captures all kinds of dynamic information that helps busy individuals be more productive throughout the day—at the office, at school, or on the go,” said Mark Fletcher, vice president and general manager of Bloglines at Ask Jeeves. “With an index of more than 370 million blog and news feed articles in seven languages, we’re already one of the largest wells of dynamic web information. With unique-to-me news updates we’re aiming to be the most comprehensive and useful personalized information resource on the web.”

So it looks like Bloglines is evolving into MyYahoo! or MyMSN which already provide a way to get customized personal information from local news and weather reports to RSS feeds and email inboxes.

I've been pitching the concept of the digital information hub to folks at work but I think the term 'universal inbox" is a more attractive term. As a user spends more and more time in front of an information consumption tool be it an email reader, RSS reader or online portal, the more data sources the user wants supported by the tool. Online portals are now supporting RSS. Web-based RSS readers are now supporting content that would traditionally show up in a personalized view at an online portal.

At MSN, specifically with http://www.start.com/2/, we are exploring what would happen if you completely blurred the lines between a web-based RSS reader and the traditional personalized dashboard provided by an online portal. It is inevitable that both mechanisms of consuming information online will eventually be merged in some way. I suspect the result will look more like what Steve Rider's team is building than MyYahoo! or Bloglines do today.

As I mentioned before we'd love feedback about all the stuff we are doing at start.com. Don't be shy send your feedback.

Passport Renaming: Changing the email address associated with an MSN Space or MSN Messenger account

DareObasanjo — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 13:49:00 GMT

MSN services such as MSN Spaces and MSN Messenger require one to create a Passport account to use them. Passport requires the use of an email address which is used as the login name of the user. However as time progresses people often have to change email addresses for one reason or the other. On such occassions I've seen a couple of requests internally asking for the ability to change the Passport account an MSN Spaces or MSN Messenger account is associated with.

Doing this is actually quite straightforward in the general case. All one has to do is go to the Passport.net website and click on the 'View or edit your profile' link which should have an option for changing the email address associated with the Passport. And that's it.

Thanks to a recent changes made by some of the devs on our team, the renaming process now works seamlessly in MSN Messenger. You don't have to import your existing contact list to the new account nor do your contacts have to add the new email address to their contact list. Instead the change to your email address propagates across the MSN network in about an hour or so.

The are some caveats. The first is that renaming a Passport to a Hotmail account isn't supported at the current time. Another is that you may be prevented from changing your display name from the new email address in MSN Messenger for some time. This means that your friends will see you in their contact list as yourname@example.com (if that is your email address).

The above information also applies if you've been asked to change your MSN Messenger email address because your employer is deploying Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 with Public IM Connectivity (PIC).

SOA, AJAX and REST: The Software Industry Devolves into the Fashion Industry

DareObasanjo — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:46:00 GMT

Ever since the article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications unleashed itself on the Web I've seen the cacophony of hype surrounding Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (aka AJAX reach thunderous levels. The introduction to the essay already should make one wary about the article, it begins

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
and JavaScript binding everything together.

So AJAX is using Javascript and XML with the ~~old~~ new twist being that one communicates with a server using Microsoft's proprietary XmlHttpRequest object. AJAX joins SOA in ignominy as yet another buzzword created by renaming existing technologies which becomes a way for some vendors to sell more products without doing anything new. I agree with Ian Hixie's rant Call an apple an apple where he wrote

Several years ago, HTML was invented, and a few years later, JavaScript (then LiveScript, later officially named ECMAScript) and the DOM were invented, and later CSS. After people had been happily using those technologies for a while, people decided to call the combination of HTML, scripting and CSS by a new name: DHTML. DHTML wasn't a new technology — it was just a new label for what people were already doing.

Several years ago, HTTP was invented, and the Web came to be. HTTP was designed so that it could be used for several related tasks, including:

Obtaining a representation of a resource from a remote host using that resource's identifier (GET requests).
Executing a procedure call on a remote host using a structured set of arguments (POST requests).
Uploading a resource to a remote host (PUT requests).
Deleting a resource from a remote host (DELETE requests).

People used this for many years, and then suddenly XML-RPC and SOAP were invented. XML-RPC and SOAP are complicated ways of executing remote procedure calls on remote hosts using a structured set of arguments, all performed over HTTP.

Of course you'll notice HTTP can already do that on its own, it didn't need a new language. Other people noticed this too, but instead of saying "hey everyone, HTTP already does all this, just use HTTP", they said, "hey everyone, you should use REST!". REST is just a name that was coined for the kind of architecture on which HTTP is based, and, on the Web, simply refers to using HTTP requests.

Several years ago, Microsoft invented XMLHttpRequest. People used it, along with JavaScript and XML. Google famously used it in some of their Web pages, for instance GMail. All was well, another day saved... then someone invented a new name for it: Ajax.
...
So I have a request: could people please stop making up new names for existing technologies? Just call things by their real name! If the real name is too long (the name Ajax was apparently coined because "HTTP+XML+HTML+XMLHttpRequest+JavaScript+CSS" was too long) then just mention the important bits. For example, instead of REST, just "HTTP"; instead of DHTML just "HTML and script", and instead of Ajax, "XML and script".

What I find particularly disappointing about the AJAX hype is that it has little to do with the technology and more to do with the quality of developers building apps at Google. If Google builds their next UI without the use of XML but only Javascript and HTML will we be inundiated with hype about the new JUDO approach (Javascript and Unspecified DOm methods) because it uses proprietary DOM extensions not in the W3C standard?

The software industry perplexes me. One minute people are complaining about standards compliance in various websites and browsers but the next minute Google ships websites built on proprietary Microsoft APIs and it births a new buzzword. I doubt that even the fashion industry is this fickle and inconsistent.

Postscript: I wasn't motivated to post about this topic until I saw the comments to the post Outlook Web Access should be noted as AJAX pioneer by Robert Scoble. It seems some people felt that Outlook Web Access did not live up to the spirit of AJAX. Considering that the distinguishing characteristic of the AJAX buzzword is using XmlHttpRequest and Outlook Web Access is the reason it exists (the first version was written by the Exchange team) I find this highly disingenious. Others have pointed this out as well, such as Robert Sayre in his post Ever Wonder Why It's Called "XMLHTTPRequest"?

MSN Messenger Buddy List Limit Doubled

DareObasanjo — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:07:00 GMT

Last night, we put the finishing touches on an upgrade to the server-side of MSN Messenger. The maximum size of a buddy list has been increased from 150 to 300. Enjoy.

Find Out More About MSN's Web-based RSS Aggregator at Start.com

DareObasanjo — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 04:09:00 GMT

Steve Rider, one of the great folks behind start.com, has started a category on his blog devoted to the site. His first post discusses some of the changes they've made to the site in the past week. He writes

As soon as I finish this post I'll be digging in my heels for the afternoon and working on OPML import support and increasing the number of headlines per feed. Hey, what are rainy Sunday afternoons for?

Here are some of the improvements we've made since we were "discovered" a week and a half ago:

Start.com/1

Full Firefox support
Migrated from cookie-based solution to back-end store for feeds and preferences
Removed the restriction on the number of feeds that can be added
Added ability to delete items from My Feeds and Recent Searches
Title of module is now hyperlinked (oops) and also gets updated if the title in the RSS feed is different
Show search history in correct order
Lots of fit and finish and minor cosmetic changes

Start.com/2

Fixed a few problems with the ActiveX control that were causing boomarks not to be imported (there are still a couple of issues affecting some users)
Added OPML import support
Increased performance when fetching from server by making more async calls

One of the features I asked Steve for was OPML import so it's good to see that it's already being added to the site. I didn't realize how fast they'd be turning around on feature requests. Looks like I should dust off my list of feature requests for online aggregators and swing by Steve's office sometime this week. Sweet.

ETech 2005 Trip Report: Odeo -- Podcasting for Everyone

DareObasanjo — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 21:25:00 GMT

These are my notes from the Odeo -- Podcasting for Everyone session by Evan Williams.

Evan Williams was the founder of Blogger and Odeo is his new venture. Just as in his post How Odeo Happened Evan likens podcasting to audioblogging and jokingly states that he and Noah Glass invented podcasting with AudioBlogger. Of course, the audience knew he was joking and laughed accordingly. I do wonder though, how many people think that podcasting is simply audioblogging instead of realizing that the true innovation is the time shifting of digital media to the user's player of choice.

The Odeo interface has three buttons across the top; Listen, Sync and Create. Users can choose to listen to a podcast from a directory of podcasts on the site directly from the Web page. They can choose to sync podcasts from the directory down to their iPod using a Web download tool which also creates Odeo specific playlists in iTunes.

The Odeo directory also contains podcasts that were not created on the site so they can be streamed to users. If third parties would rather not have their podcasts hosted on Odeo they can ask for them to be taken down.

The Create feature was most interesting. The website allows users to record audio directly on the website without needing any desktop software. This functionality seems to be built with Flash. Users can also save audio or upload MP3s from their hard drive which can then be spliced into their audio recordings. However one cannot mix multiple audio tracks at once (i.e. I can't create an audio post then add in background music later, I can only append new audio).

The revenue model for the site will most likely be by providing hosting and creating services that allow people to charge for access to their podcasts. There was some discussion on hosting music but Evan pointed out that there were already several music sites on the Web andd they didn't want to be yet another one.

Odeo will likely be launching in a few weeks but will be invitation-only at first.

ETech 2005 Trip Report: Introducing Google Code

DareObasanjo — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 20:08:00 GMT

This was a late breaking session that was announced shortly after The Long Tail: Conversation with Chris Anderson and Joe Kraus. Unfortunately, I didn't take my tablet PC with me to the long tail session so I don't have any notes from it. Anyway, back to Google Code.

The Google Code session was hosted by Chris DiBona. The Google Code homepage is is similar to YSDN in that it tries to put all the Google APIs under a single roof. The site consists of three main parts; information on Google APIs, links to projects Open Sourced by Google that are hosted on SourceForge and highlighted projects created by third parties that use Google's APIs.

The projects Open Sourced by Google are primarily test tools and data structures used internally. They are hosted on SourceForge although there seemed to be some dislike for the features of the site both from Chris and members of the audience. Chris did feel that among the various Open Source project hosting sites existing today, SourceForge was the one most likely to be around in 10 years. He mentioned that Google was ready to devote some resources to helping the SourceForge team improve their service.

ETech 2005 Trip Report: Introduction to Yahoo! Search Web Services

DareObasanjo — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 19:41:00 GMT

These are my notes on Introduction to Yahoo! Search Web Services session by Jeremy D. Zawodny

The Yahoo! Search web services are available on the Yahoo! Search Developer Network(YSDN) site. YSDN launched by providing web services that allow applications to interact with local, news, Web, image and video search. Web services for interacting with Y!Q contextual search was launched during ETech.

Jeremy stated that the design goal for their web services was for them to be simple and have a low barrier to entry. It was hoped that this would help foster a community and create two-way communication between the Yahoo! Search team and developers. To help foster this communication with developers YSDN provides documentation, an SDK, a blog, mailing lists and a wiki.

Requests coming in from client applications are processed by an XML proxy which then sends the queries to the internal Yahoo! servers and returns the results to developers. The XML proxy is written in PHP and is indicative of the trend to move all new development at Yahoo! to PHP.

Some of the challenges in building YSDN were deciding what communications features (wiki vs. mailing list), figuring licencing issues, and quotas on methods calls (currently 5,000 calls per day per IP address). In talking to Jeremy after the talk I pointed out that rate limiting by IP penalizes applications used behind a proxy server that make several requests a day such as RSS Bandit being used by Microsoft employees at work. There was a brief discussion about alternate approaches to identifying applications such as cookies or using a machine's MAC address but these all seemed to have issues.

Speaking of RSS, Jeremy mentioned that after they had implemented their Web services which returned a custom document format he realized that many people would want to be able to transform those results to RSS and subscribe to them. So he spoke to the developer responsible and he had RSS output working within 30 minutes. When asked why they didn't just use RSS as their output format instead of coming up with a new format, he responded that they didn't want to extend RSS but instead came up with their own format. Adam Bosworth mentioned afterwards that he thought that it was more disruptive to create a new format instead of reusing RSS and adding one or two extensions to meet their needs.

Then there was the inevitable REST vs. SOAP discussion. Yahoo! picked REST for their APIs because of its simplicity and low barrier to entry for developers on any platform. Jeremy said that the tipping point for him was when he attended a previous O'Reilly conference and Jeff Barr from Amazon stated that 20% of their API traffic was from SOAP requests but they accounted for 80% of their support calls.

Jeremy ended the talk by showing some sample applications that had been built on the Yahoo! Search web services and suggesting some ideas for members of the audience to try out on their own.

ETech 2005 Trip Report: "Just" Use HTTP

DareObasanjo — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 19:19:00 GMT

These are my notes from the "Just" Use HTTP session by Sam Ruby

The slides for this presentation are available. No summary can do proper justice to this presentation so I'd suggest viewing the slides.

Sam's talk focuses on the various gotchas facing developers building applications using REST or Plain old XML over HTTP (POX). The top issues include unicode (both in URIs and XML), escaped HTML in XML content and QNames in XML content. A lot of these gotchas are due to specs containing inconsistencies with other specs or in some cases flat out contradictions. Sam felt that there is an onus on spec writers to accept the responsibility that they are responsible for interop and act accordingly.

At the end of the talk Sam suggested that people doing REST/POX would probably be better of using SOAP since toolkits took care of such issues for them. I found this amusing given that the previous talk was by Nelson Minar saying the exact opposite and suggesting that some people using SOAP should probably look at REST.

The one thing I did get out of both talks is that there currently isn't any good guidance on when to use SOAP+WSDL vs. when to use REST or POX in the industry. I see that Joshua Allen has a post entitled The War is Over (WS-* vs. POX/HTTP) which is a good start but needs fleshing out. I'll probably look at putting pen to paper about this in a few months.

ETech 2005 Trip Report: Building a New Web Service at Google

DareObasanjo — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 15:57:00 GMT

These are my notes on the Building a New Web Service at Google session by Nelson Minar

Nelson Minar gave a talk about the issues he encountered while shipping the Adwords API. The slides for the talk are available online. I found this talk the most useful of the conference given that within the next year or so I'll be going through the same thing at MSN.

The purpose of the Adwords API was to enable Google customers manage their adwords campaigns. In cases where users have large numbers of keywords, it begins to be difficult to manage an ad campaign using the Web interface that Google provides. The API exposes endpoints for campaign management, traffic estimation and reporting. Users have a quota on how many API calls they can make a month which is related to the size of their campaign. There are also some complex authentication requirements since certain customers give permission to third parties to manage their ad campaigns for them. Although the API has only been available for a couple of weeks there are already developers selling tools that built on the API.

The technologies used are SOAP, WSDL and SSL. The reason for using SOAP+WSDL was so that XML Web Service toolkits which perform object<->XML data binding could be used by client developers. Ideally developers would write code like

adwords = adwordsSvc.MakeProxy(...) adwords.setMaxKeywordCPC(53843, "flowers", "$8.43")

without needing to know or understand a lick of XML. Another benefit of SOAP were that it has a standard mechanism for sending metadata (SOAP headers) and errors (SOAP faults).

The two primary ways of using SOAP are rpc/encoded and document/literal. The former treats SOAP as a protocol for transporting programming language method calls just like XML-RPC while the latter treats SOAP as a protocol for sending typed XML documents. According to Nelson, the industry had finally gotten around to figuring out how to interop using rpc/encoded due to the efforts of the SOAP Builders list only for rpc/encoded to fall out of favor and document/literal to become the new hotness.

The problem with document/literal uses of SOAP is that it encourages using the full expressivity of W3C XML Schema Definition (XSD) language. This is in direct contradiction with trying to use SOAP+WSDL for object<->XML mapping since XSD has a large number of concepts that have no analog in object oriented programming.

Languages like Python and PHP have poor to non-existent support for either WSDL or document/literal encoding in SOAP. His scorecard for various toolkits in this regard was

Good: .NET, Java (Axis)
OK: C++ (gSOAP), PERL (SOAP::Lite)
Poor: Python (SOAPpy, ZSI), PHP (many options)

He also gave an example that showed how even things that seemed fundamentally simple such as specifying that an integer element had no value could cause interoperability problems in various SOAP toolkits. Given the following choices

<foo xsi:nil="true"/>
<foo/>
nothing
<foo>-1</foo>

The first fails in current version of the .NET framework since it maps ints to System.Int32 which is value type meaning it can't be null. The second is invalid according to the rules of XSD since an integer cannot be empty string. The third works in general. The fourth is ghetto but is the least likely to cause problems if your application is coded to treat -1 as meaning the value is non-existent.

There are a number of other issues Nelson encountered with SOAP toolkits including

Nested complex types cause problems
Polymorphic objects cause problems
Optional fields cause problems
Overloaded methods are forbidden.
xsi:type can cause breakage. Favor sending untyped documents instead.
WS-* is all over the map.
Document/literal support is weak in many languages.

Then came the REST vs. SOAP part of the discussion. To begin he defined what he called 'low REST' (i.e. Plain Old XML over HTTP or POX) and 'high REST'. Low REST implies using HTTP GETs for all API accesses but remembering that GET requests should not have side effects. High REST involves using the four main HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE) to manipulate resource representations, using XML documents as message payloads, putting metadata in HTTP headers and using URLs meaningfully.

Nelson also pointed out some limitations of REST from his perspective.

Development becomes burdensome if lots of interactivity in application (No one wants to write lots of XML parsing code)
PUT and DELETE are not implemented uniformly on all clients/web servers.
No standard application error mechanism (most REST and POX apps cook up their own XML error document format)
URLs have practical length limitations so one can't pass too muh data in a GET
No WSDL, hence no data binding tools

He noted that for complex data, the XML is what really matters which is the same if you are using REST or SOAP’s document/literal model. In addition he felt that for read-only APIs, REST was a good choice. After the talk I asked if he thought the Google search APIs should have been REST instead of SOAP and he responded that in hindsight that would have been a better decision. However he doesn't think there have been many complaints about the SOAP API for Google search. He definitely felt that there was a need for more REST tools as well as best practices.

He also mentioned things that went right including :

Switch to document/literal
Stateless design
Having a developer reference guide
Developer tokens
Thorough interop testing
Beta period
Batch methods (every method worked with a single item or an array which lead to 25x speed up for some customers in certain cases). Dealing with errors in the middle of a batch operation become problematic though.

There was also a list of things that went wrong

The switch to document/literal cost a lot of time
Lack of a common data model
Dates and timezones (they allowed users to specify a date to perform operations but since dates don't have time zones depending on when the user sent the request the results may look like they came from the previous or next day)
No gzip encoding
Having quotas caused customer confusion and anxiety
No developer sandbox which meant developers had to test against real data
Using SSL meant that debugging SOAP is difficult since XML on the wire is encrypted (perhaps WS-Security is the answer but so far implementations are spotty)
HTTP+SSL is much slower than just HTTP.
Using plain text passwords in methods meant that users couldn't just cut & paste SOAP traces to the forum which led to inadvertent password leaks.

This was an awesome talk and I definitely took home some lessons which I plan to share with others at work.

ETech 2005 Trip Report: From the Labs: Google Labs

DareObasanjo — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 13:02:00 GMT

These are my notes on the From the Labs: Google Labs session by Peter Norvig, Ph.D.

Peter started off by pointing out that since Google hires Ph.D's in their regular developer positions they often end up treating their developers as researchers while treating their researchers as developers.

Google's goal is to organize the world's data. Google researchers aid in this goal by helping Google add more data sources to their search engines. They have grown from just searching HTML pages on the Web to searching video files and even desktop search. They are also pushing the envelop when it comes to improving user interfaces for searching such as with Google Maps.

Google Suggest which provides autocomplete for the Google search box was written by a Google developer (not a researcher) using his 20% time. The Google Personalized site allows users to edit a profile which is used to weight search results when displaying them to the user. The example he showed was searching for the term 'vector' and then moving the slider on the page to showing more personalized results. Since his profile showed an interest in programming, results related to vector classes in C++ and Java were re-sorted to the top of the search results. I've heard Robert Scoble mention that he'd like to see search engines open up APIs that allow users to tweak search parameters in this way. I'm sure he'd like to give this a whirl. Finally he showed Google Sets which was the first project to show up on the Google Labs site. I remember trying this out when it first showed up and thinking it was magic. The coolest thing to try out is to give it three movies starring the same and watch it fill out the rest.

ETech 2005 Trip Report: From the Labs: Yahoo! Research Labs

DareObasanjo — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 05:29:00 GMT

These are my notes on the From the Labs: Yahoo! Research Labs session by
Gary William Flake.

Yahoo! has two research sites, Yahoo! Next and Yahoo! Research Labs. The Yahoo! Next site has links to betas of products that will eventually become products such as Y!Q contextual search, a Firefox version of the Yahoo! toolbar and Yahoo! movie recommendations.

The Yahoo! research team focuses on a number of core research areas areas including machine learning, collective intelligence, and text mining. They publish papers frequently related to these topics.

Their current primary research project is the Tech Buzz Game which is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends. This is in the same vein as other fantasy prediction markets such as the Hollywood Stock Exchange and the Iowa Electronics Market. The project is being worked in in collaboration with O'Reilly Publishing. A product's buzz is a function of the volume of search queries for that term. People who constantly predict correctly can win more virtual money which they can use to bet more. The name of this kind of market is a dynamic peri-mutuel market.

The speaker felt Tech Buzz would revolutionize the way auctions were done. This seemed to be a very bold claim given that I'd never heard of it. Then again it isn't like I'm auction geek.

ETech 2005 Trip Report: From the Labs: Microsoft Research

DareObasanjo — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 04:30:00 GMT

These are my notes on the From the Labs: Microsoft Research session by Richard F. Rashid, Ph.D.

Rick decided that in the spirit of ETech, he would focus on Microsoft Research projects that were unlikely to be productized in the conventional sense.

The first project he talked about was SenseCam. This could be considered by some to be the ultimate blogging tool. It records the user's experiences during the day by taking pictures, recording audio and even monitoring the temperature. There are some fancy tricks it has to do involving usage of internal motion detectors to determine when it is appropriate to take a picture so it doesn't end up blurry because the user was moving. There are currently 20 that have been built and clinical trials have begun to see if the SenseCam would be useful as aid to people with severe memory loss.

The second project he discussed was the surface computing project. The core idea around surface computing is turning everyday surfaces such as tabletops or walls into interactive input and/or display devices for computers. Projectors project displays on the surface and cameras detect when objects are placed on the surface which makes the display change accordingly. One video showed a bouncing ball projected on a table which recognized physical barriers such as the human hand when they were placed on the table. Physical objects placed on the table could also become digital objects. For example, placing a magazine on the table would make the computer copy it and when the magazine was removed a projected image of it would remain. This projected image of the magazine could then be interacted with such as by rotating and magnifying the image.

Finally he discussed how Microsoft Research was working with medical researchers looking for a cure for HIV infection. The primary problem with HIV is that it constantly mutates so the immune system and drugs cannot recognize all its forms to neutralize them in the body. This is similar to the spam problem where the rules for determining whether a piece of mail is junk mail keeps changing as spammers change their tactics. Anti-spam techniques have to use a number of pattern matching heuristics to figure out whether a piece of mail is spam or not. MSR is working with AIDS/HIV researchers to see whether such techniques couldn't be used to attack HIV in the human body.

ETech 2005 Trip Report: Vertical Search and A9

DareObasanjo — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 18:26:00 GMT

These are my notes in the Vertical Search and A9 by Jeff Bezos.

The core idea behind this talk was powerful yet simple.

Jeff Bezos started of by talking about vertical search. In certain cases, specialized search engines can provide better results than generic search engines. One example is searching Google for Vioxx and performing the same search on a medical search engine such as PubMed. The former returns results that are mainly about class action lawsuits while the latter returns links to various medical publications about Vioxx. For certain users, the Google results are what they are looking for and for others the PubMed results would be considered more relevant.

Currently at A9.com, they give users the ability to search both generic search engines like Google as well as vertical search engines. The choice of search engines is currently small but they'd like to see users have the choice of building a search homepage that could pull results from thousands of search engines. Users should be able to add any search engine they want to their A9 page and have those results display in A9 alongside Google or Amazon search results. To facilitate this, they now support displaying search results from any search engine that can provide search results as RSS. A number of search engines already do this such as MSN Search and Feedster. There are some extensions they have made to RSS to support providing search results in RSS feeds. From where I was standing some of the extension elements I saw include startIndex, resultsPerPage and totalResults.

Amazon is calling this initiative OpenSearch.

I was totally blown away by this talk when I attended it yesterday. This technology has lots of potential especially since it doesn't seem tied to Amazon in any way so MSN, Yahoo or Google could implement it as well. However there are a number of practical issues to consider. Most search engines make money from ads on their site so creating a mechanism where other sites can repurpose their results would run counter to their business model especially if this was being done by a commercial interest like Amazon.