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Aaron Worsham

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Sazbean's Wordle

Jonathan Feinberg, Senior Software Researcher at IBM’s Watson Research Center has made an interesting contribution to the landscape of visual folksonomy: wordle.net.  Wordle is an impressive and expressive twist on the ‘tag cloud’ idea popularized by web 2.0 sites as a quick visual tool for identifying patterns in frequency and distribution of tagged items like blog posts, songs, pictures, etc.

Of course, Jonathan wasn’t alone in his work.  Still, it sparks the fires of creativity to see something this cool released to the public and I want to thank all involved.  Projects like Wordle remind us that the persuit of a technical vocations need not prohibit us from the very human desire to contribute beauty to the world.

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ANA cautions against Google, Yahoo deal

The WSJ is reporting on a letter, sent from the Association of National Advertisers to the Department of Justice, cautioning against the proposed deal between Google and Yahoo.  The ANA is citing the usual suspects when objections to mergers, acquisitions and partnerships.  The letter is short, so Ill post the pertinent half.

The letter, authorized by the ANA Board, notes that a Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90 percent of search advertising inventory and states ANA’s concerns that the partnership will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising.

It is the last line that really rings true to the heart of the ANA’s issue with the deal.  The ANA is worried that Google and Yahoo will be able to raise prices on the large percentage of online advertising inventory they control.  It is a serious issue for the association, who represents institutional advertisers and who has a board made up of power brokers

ANA’s board, made up of well-known marketing executives including Brian Perkins, Johnson & Johnson‘s vice president of corporate affairs; Stephen Quinn, chief marketing officer at Wal-Mart Stores Inc; and Betsy Lazar, executive director of media and advertising for General Motors Corp., approved the group’s move. ~ WJS

I’m not a large Google or Yahoo advertiser and so I don’t have a good grasp on the merits of this raised objection.  Clearly, when customers of a service speak out against something like this, especially one as well organized and connected as the ANA, the DOJ is likely to listen intently.  In truth, there is the case to be made that Yahoo is threatened by the possibility of going out of business if this deal is not made.  This would surely hurt competition and concentrate control within Google more than a partnership does.  Microsoft has made similar arguments against the deal that the ANA is making.  Those pleas have been largely ignored in the media as the cries of a competitor in the online ad market.

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Google cannot see the future

Yesterday morning, Google made a little announcement.  You may have heard of it already.  Tuesday’s blog reader was like a million tiny voices all calling out the same word.  That cacophony continued on through today and I suspect it will remain as such throughout the month, or at least until Apple releases something shiny.  So much has been made of this small release, that I have vowed not to refer to it by name in this post.

The internets chattier apologists are already manuvering into position to hand Google the gold-painted plastic trophy of ‘Best Browser Ever‘ despite its current 0% adoption share, buggy Javascript, or total lack of support for my fruit-themed notebook.  I think this is a mistake.

Remember how quick we were to jump over to Microsoft’s camp when they announced IE would free us from paying for a browser?  Or when Firefox shook us out of that complacent stupor, slapped our faces and told us we didn’t need 10 windows open at once and that hey, we might like these super useful user created plugins?

Google isn’t putting out this reflective metallic bauble because it want’s to convert the masses.  They know they cannot see into the future, so any effort to corner the browser market is likely effort in vain.  Overlooked in the hype was a message that I heard loud and clear – and it was coming from Google.  Somewhere around the discussion of open sourcing the software, they made a very strange statement.  ‘We want others to copy our ideas, improve them, do it better, and reinvent the internet for us all’.

If that is true, why make their own browser?  Why not simply put their mental might behind Firefox, which is fully open sourced and free to fork off?  I truly don’t know, though I suspect that is what they did.  Looking under the hood (or more accurately read under the press releases), much of the plumbing is changed.  Multi-process based instead of single process with rewritten javascript JIT compiler makes the app different from firefox as steam locomotion is from gas combustion.  Still, there are pieces that are coming from Mozilla and WebKit which makes this more of a reinterpretation than a reinvention.  WebKit is the JavaScript renderer used in Safari and iPhone, so I would suspect to see this also be adopted in Google’s mobile OS, Android, as well.

I can’t say that Google will not come out ahead of the pact with this mirror-like offering.  Once they get their sea legs they will have their half-tillion dollar geek cred behind them.  Even so, I can say is that no one should be calling this race over.  The brower wars are heating up again and only the gentle sob of your company’s web designer is heard above the blogging din to mark the occasion.  Hell, that ‘Best Browser Ever’ trophy was stolen anyway, years ago, by the Opera fanatics.  Rumor says it is buried somewhere in Norway.