Very interesting thoughts from Robert Scoble about Google's new WiFi network. The concept of using the "last yard" as a mean to collect information about users' behaviour makes a lot of sense.

Having here Marc and his family is always a funny, exciting and a little unpredictable plasure.

I have been calling Marc on his new cellphone for the whole morning without getting any answer, I was starting to get a little worried. He has just called, he's okay and we're having lunch together here in Gradisca in less than an hour. But his cellphone had a little accident in Venice. :-)

I don't think I will ever stop being amazed by RyanAir prices. This morning I booked my flight to Paris in December for Les Blogs 2.0 and the price for each of the two legs of the trip was EUR 0.05 (yes, FIVE CENTS).

Funny coincidence: Matt today is looking for a compass. Last weekend I found my compass at home and dropped it in my backpack thinking that it might turn more useful anywhere outside my home, and yesterday I did use it in Milano to find my way home. Not exactly high thech but cheaper than satnav :-)

Dave unsubscribed from the Boing Boing feed because he couldn't stand ads in the RSS feed anymore and wonders how users like RSS even if crappy readers and and increasing amount of advertising is making their experience far from good.

A partner of mine has been working on and off for the last week in order to get his PC back in shape after it got infected with some nasty bug visiting a web site. Not being his main computer this is not a big deal, but it would be for a regular user.

For some strange reason most 16/9 TV screens seem to default on a "squeezed mode", distorting a 4/3 image to a 16/9 ratio, making everybody look fat. Even if changing this default behaviour should be easy, almost every flat TV screen I see in public spaces and in homes is working in this weird mode and nobody seem to complain or to bother at all.

High-tech user experience is of course much better today than it was only a few years ago, we don't have command line, we can communicate like we never did and watch hundreds of TV channels, but hi-tech products also have a much broader user base which is made of a majority who thinks that it's natural having to get advertising in their news, having to completely reformat their hard drives every few months and look at movies where every cars seem to be 2 feet tall and everybody is overweight.

Is there a way out? Will users learn that what they are getting is not good enough and ask for better quality? Will developers get sloppier just because anyway nobody seem to care?

Quality in application design and development should be the next big deal. Not sure if they'll call it Web2.1 or Web3.0 :-)

Joël Céré and many others are speculating about Google removing weblogs from their main search facility since weblogs now have their own corner with the new RSS based Blogsearch.

I think that it's quite unlikely: weblogs are part of the web, you cannot ignore them. When google started Froogle, an e-commerce search engine, they didn't stop indexing e-commerce sites on their main archive.

It's true that weblogs generate a pretty large number of links and that all these links might somehow disrupt search results according to some users (or provide better and unbiased results, according to others), often showing on the same page official corporate web sites right next to blogs claiming that those same companies products suck, but this is part of the new communication era, it's not something that can be avoided.

Besides, sooner or later those same companies will be using weblogs and other forms of social software to hold conversations with their customers, and they will want google to index them.

While I don't see blogs removal from google main indexes anytime soon, a positive outcome from the new RSS based indexing could be less aggressive scanning of regular blog pages by googlebots. Once they know almost instantly (via weblogs.com) when I update my blog, once they know that this is a blog... well, they could stop scanning all other pages every day for changes that will never happen and save some bandwidth.

So far Googlebot has read my rss feed 3 times today. At:

• 05:30:22
• 11:42:09
• 11:49:09

Meaning that it read my feed twice right after I started writing this morning. Since when I update my blog I'm only pinging weblogs.com and Technorati, they might be pulling updated blogs info from one of the two (I'd guess weblogs.com). It could be a coincidence, but the two scans in 7 minutes are kinda weird. I'll check my logs again later.

Update: they are reading weblogs.com output (and giving credit).

In my logfiles there are two new entries from googlebot, triggered by this last post:

• 12:40:46
• 12:54:58
  

From the about page:

Which blogs are included in Blog Search?

The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.

Meaning that google is acutually indexing RSS feeds? The advanced search page does have a "search by author" which could hardly work reading html.

Updates:

Search results are published also as RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds (look at the bottom of the results page). Now that they have aknowledged RSS, I wonder how long will it take before they will offer this feature for regular search.

Curiously you can't get a "posts that link to" result from the advanced search page. Weird considering that the feature is available on regular html advanced search. One of Technorati's most important features (at least imho) is safe so far. PS: actually the feature is there simply using the link:http://URL syntax, there's simply no GUI for it.

What is the blogosphere writing about google search? Compare Technorati and Google results (so far Technorati has 143 results vs. 99 on Google).

The father of a friend is in hospital in these days, yesterday I heard a some horror stories about a local hospital.

This morning (this morning!) I was thinking about a web site were people could tell their good or bad experiences about health services.

Later today (today!) I found out that my friends at Heashift have announced today Patient Opinion:

a new service that tells you what other people are saying about your local health services and lets you share your story with others

In this post Matt is discussing about Technorati and what's wrong with it and how it could be fixed.

I started wondering: what do I really want from Technorati?

First: I want to know who is linking me. This is the feature I use most (actually it's the feature I would use if it worked, but most of the time I don't get a reply and when I do it's not always relevant - I know that they know that it's broken, I'm patiently waiting :-).

Second: I want to know who is talking about me, my company, my products. This should be the real killer app: in a world full of blogs companies want to have a good control of their on-line reputation. From this POV the fact that Technorati is trying to index every single post out there is very important.

Third: Technorati is in the position to better understand what's going on in the blogosphere, from their privileged observation point they can provide interesting data. David Sifry's State of the Blogosphere reports are quite interesting, maybe all this information could also be used by others for research purposes.

Now am I not expecting from Technorati?

Top 100s list are cool, but since I'm not in any of them they are bad for my ego ;-). I do understand that ranking system could be good for the advertising business but maybe others could concentrate on this.

I'm not expecting Technorati to find stuff for me. I don't believe much in this whole thing about suggesting readings that I wouldn't otherwise have found. Matt writes:

I don't read most of the "top 100" because they're not interesting to me. I want a heads up on new blogs which are interesting to me, i.e. the other end of the spectrum from the 'boing boing's of this world. Why do I only come across them by chance?

Hmm... do we really come across interesting stuff by chance? In most cases I come across interesting stuff trough my network of "informants" in my aggregator. That's the great thing about the blogosphere: having access to this huge network of eyes and brains. How can Technorati tap into this process? I would rather expect features in this game from a centralized aggregator such as Bloglines.

Oh, and then there's the tagging thing. I like tagging, we have a groupware product that is based on tagging. What work on personal or group level doesn't always work globally. While wild social tagging works on Flickr, I have not started to see the advantages as far as blogging is concerned. Anyway Technorati gave huge visibility to tagging and this will definitely help all of us getting to a better web sooner.

A pretty large chunk of my email archives disappeard from my hard disk this morning. I was cleaning up some old directories when sunddenly half of my mail was gone. I didn't delete it and even if I did now I want it back!

I'm looking for data recovery apps for MacOS X. If you have any suggestion let me know.


PS: so far it looks like deleted files on OSX are DELETED.

Robert Scoble has an interesting point of view about Christian Lindholm joining Yahoo!

In the same aggregator scan I found this bit of news on Adverblog about smartphones scanning barcodes with their builtin camera.

The day when we will be able to point a product in any shop and have instant feedback on a cellphone, maybe to find out that the same product can be found cheaper two blocks away, is not that far away.

Such an application, able to join mapping, store searching and opinions while on the go (I'm linking google services simply beacuse I don't have the Yahoo equivalents at hand) , would be the final step to overthrow marketing as we know it.

It's going to be fun.