Wow… the power of blogs. So I post a somewhat snarky comment in the Nokia 6800 post about Robert blowing me off after saying he’d give me his old TiVo, and I get a response the same day.

Now, I’m pretty sure I don’t have the world’s most popular blog, and I’m not the most frequent writer nor do I even stay on relevant topics to most people. And I can imagine there are plenty of sites that filter things so that Robert can see them, not to mention just plain ol’ email that may have been sent by the original comment author.

What’s cool is how fast a random comment on a random post can become visible. This is frickin’ amazing. You’re starting to see some interesting synergies around systems such as search and routing (the IR kind, not the Cisco kind). Very cool.

I’d also like to thank Robert for his kind words… yup, we’re steadily improving MSN Search as well as Desktop Search. MSN Search still isn’t where I want it, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist and my own harshest critic. Well, second harshest… tech support calls from your mom is nature’s way of subtly telling you that you haven’t got it quite right for everyone yet. But, much as people like to say Microsoft can’t ship software, I gotta say that the Search group at MSN is shipping software like clockwork. It’s an awesome group, and you’re going to be amazed at what you see in the next couple of years. We’ve only just begun.

Making its way around the blogosphere is the story of a blogger pulling down over $10K per month by having a couple blogs and putting up a ton of Google ads. Sweet, eh? So there are interesting things happening… but don’t quit your day job just yet.

A couple of things are happening here that’s going to make the next 5+ years very interesting, and there are some very, very cool opportunities about.

First, people are figuring out how to monetize traffic. A former CEO of mine many lives past once had the following analogy about traffic: Imagine if you had a football stadium full of people, every day. Surely, you could do something or provide something that these people wanted and make a living. But you wouldn’t have to spend anything on marketing and customer acquistion — they’re all right there! So that’s just more profit to you / lower prices to your customer.

Granted, he couldn’t quite monetize traffic all that well, so the company got bought. But the sentiment was right — if you have traffic, you’re already providing something of value to (at least most of) these people. Presumably, you could do more. The hard part is figuring out what more is, but lots of people, such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google (with Google clearly in the lead) are going down the ad route — a tried and true venue for monetizing eyeballs.

Second, you’re seeing the Web slowly migrate from a self-help world to that vision of everyone, or at least millions of people, being an author. You’ll always have things like Amazon.com as a place to browse and buy, and maybe look at useful reviews. You’ll always have sites that provide great technical support because they’ve migrated their entire live call-center support to India. You’ll always be able to Turn Off the Internet (at least if you use IE… FireFox users, pranksters the entire lot, are thankfully prevented from pushing the Big Red Button).

But now, you’re getting people discovering things and posting them. News is a great example… you’re seeing lots of international news and political news coming through blogs very quickly. You’re also seeing product news, game hints, and nearly everything else coming out through blogs. It’s rather amazing.

So, you put together monetizing content + tons of authors and you start to get an interesting ecosystem. You’re starting to see a world where some solid entrepreneurs can actually write all day and make a good living doing it. Right now, it’s mostly an ad-based thing done by a few key people. But imagine the possibilities…

Something else to consider… and this is just a trick I use to help trend lines. Imagine who has time to do a ton of blogging, and could make use of the money, esp. at this stage of the game.

Seniors. Stay-at-home parents. Children.

There’s a lot of people out there with time on their hands, and often disposable income. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

So, we found out the hard way that the Nokia 6800 isn’t water repellant. Oops. Anyway, I broke down and got the Scoblephone — the AudioVox 5600 SmartPhone chock full o’ features using Windows Mobile. The main reason is I wanted a phone that would sync automagically with Outlook so I would know what meeting I was blowing off at any given time. Syncing with mail was also nice.

So far, it’s been pretty good, although it’s getting all mail, not just mail I leave unfiltered in my inbox (I have a mostly bi-modal mail filtering system… about 4-5 “b-list” folders and everything else in my main inbox). And the vibration seems week. But it does sync with my calendar, so I’m happy!

Sadly, it’s not compatible with the ton of Nokia stuff we have. Alas. And I still really, really want the N90… maybe next year.

There’s been a ton of talk in the blogosphere about Microsoft censoring certain terms in spaces.msn.com.cn, the Chinese version of Spaces, MSN’s blog service. Shelley of Burningbird has the best writeup of posts and her thoughts I’ve seen so far, and I think her points are dead on. Read the post, it’s worth it.

While I’m at it, while I agree with Microsoft for reasons that Shelley outlines much clearer than I, I’d also like to make a point about language that I’ve observed from the search world. But first, a brief digression.

At one point in MSN Search’s history, searches for adult terms brought up a page that said something like, “This is an adult term, we aren’t providing any results for it you naughty person!” Actually, it was probably a bit more customer-friendly and polished, but you get my meaning. The list was just a text file of a number of naughty terms that had been editorially found or in some cases automatically mined. The problem with this is that people are very, very creative when it comes to smut.

This was highlighted while perusing some of our customer feedback. We were treated to the quote: “How come I can’t get any results for ‘hentai‘, but ‘cocksucking felchers‘ works just fine?” Yeah, um… huh.

You see, the problem with a censorship list based on words is that this just causes people to get very creative about what words they use. “Hentai” which means “perverted” in Japanese typically refers to Japanese porn comics. OK, that’s easy to censor. Well, what about “Hachi?” Hachi is the way Japanese say the letter “H.” It’s also an abbreviation for hentai and in the vernacular means sex. But it’s not like you can easily censor hachi, as it does have some other meaning.

We routinely see this phenomenon in every language. Back last November, a clothing company ran a fun campaign on New York busses — “Read books. Get brain.” The Metro Transit Authority thought it was just a fun play on the “Got milk?” ads, so they ran it. Turns out that “get brain” is NY high-school slang for oral sex. And of course once they started ripping down the ads, the local news promptly made sure everyone knew what was going on.

The point of it is that censoring words doesn’t really do much. Yeah, it’s annoying, and it goes against one of the Big Things this country stands for. But it tends not to stop anything…. people will just pick different words, and once the powers that be discover that, they’ll pick different words again. “Freedom” and “democracy” being blocked? OK… how about “clean water” and “community cleanup.” There… we can now talk about how in China they don’t have nearly as much clean water as they should, and what’s needed is for a movement for a community cleanup to really ensure that everyone has a lifetime supply of clean water. How’s that?

Now, if only we could get a little bit more clean water around here…

Well, the conference ended today without much fanfare… mostly as most
people (myself included) took off before the last session. The
highlight today was Rob Glaser’s keynote. Rob is the
Founder & CEO of RealNetworks, where I spent about 2.5 years and MK a
year before me. I was hoping for a good talk… and it was OK, if pretty
devoid of content. The problem with it, and frankly with lots of
keynotes, is that they lack one of the four required (IMHO) components
for a useful keynote. They are:

1. A real problem. The speaker should describe what problem is being
talked about here.

2. Issues with solving the problem. Presumably, if the problem is worth
talking about, there are some issues with solving it.

3. Relevant technology. Presumably, the relevant technology at the
conference is helping in some way. How?

4. Call to action. Finally, the audience should be able to understand
what they can do, if they so choose, to help solve the issues being faced.

Rob’s speech was a classic Industry Product Line speech. He describe a
bunch of products and why they were interesting, but didn’t touch on why
technology being developed within the WWW community was helpful, nor did
he present any avenues for people at the conference to do some work in
the area. Granted, he’s probably used to pitching to businesses to work
together vs a research audience, but still.

Anyway, at least he gave a decent talk and said RealNetworks would
rejoin the W3C after lapsing their membership… although I wonder if
somebody will get around to filling out the form by next year.

Jin, Frank McSherry and I trucked into Shinjuku after the conference. The
rough part was hauling my luggage through the Shinjuku station… the
place is huge! And I thought wandering through the Tokyo station at
night on Wednesday was bad. Basically, from where we got off the train
at Shinjuku to the hotel, it’s one subway stop on one of the lines —
so it’s a bit. What is surprising is how much is underground or built
over. Anyway, we walked for maybe 30 minutes, and then had to go up a
couple decent flights of stairs with the baggage. That’s the only thing
that really sucked. Jin and I then went over to Yodabashi Camera - a
huge electronics outfit - to get a zoom lens for the camera. After the
baseball game, I figured I’d need a telephoto for any kind of
interesting shots at sumo on Sunday. This was relatively painless, but
it’s nice to have someone who speaks the language!

Frank & I then had some OK sushi at a place next door. The building was
a triangular tube — down the middle, it was open. We ate on the 50th
floor, so it was somewhat interesting looking down at a 50 story drop on
the inside! But it was all glass covered, so no way to accidentally fall
in. Still, it’s a bit weird to have random restaurants and such on the
upper floors of a building… I’m too used to having them either on the
top floor or bottom floor!

We had the first day of the WWW conference today. As always, there’s a
lot more time spent catching up with people that you haven’t seen in a
while early on, which is always great. Saw lots of folks from various
walks at Microsoft, a couple UW folks, some Google folks, and even a
couple people from InfoSpace. All in all a good crowd.

The talks were good today… decent amount of interesting things.

OK… so, you’d think that maybe a 1971 Plymouth Satellite Sebring Plus might not run as well as a 4-year-old PC. Welp… no.

So over the weekend, my new 60G drive on my main Windows box failed. I haven’t ripped it out to see what the failure is, or if the disk is under warranty (I suspect not), but what a drag. Luckily, no real data was lost — just a ton of installed apps that I’ll now have to install _again_. Bah.

Also, my work notebook decided to randomly lose the taskbar for most of today when the battery died and the thing shut down. Why? I don’t know. But then it suddenly fixed itself. Bah.

Just to show that Linux isn’t immune, I foolishly upgraded something on my storage server, and suddenly KDE (the Windows of Linux) and LDAP (used for authentication) weren’t working. They’re fixed now, but man what a pain to troubleshoot.

Grump.