On Christmas Eve, Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.10 kernel fondly known as Woozy Numbat. It's been two months since the 2.6.9 kernel Zonked Quokka came out. Linus described Numbat as "Mostly a lot of small fixes since 2.6.10-rc3, with the biggest thing being probably the CIFS update and the switchover to the new DVB front-end driver world order. Some MMC and USB work too, and ARM updates as usual." ... (more)

Google is destroying the web and you don't even know it

Google is good. Too good. Every day, 10 hundred million billion searches are conducted on the website google.com. So many searches are conducted, it’s the main gate to the internet for almost everyone on the planet. The problem is that even though Google is very very good, Google is and always will be an imperfect guardian of their gateway. Google, by their own admission, requires sites on the internet to follow certain rules they set if you wish to be listed in their search result pages. In the old days of many search engines, optimization of your web pages was a fairly organic process. You listed keywords that matched what your site was about, you made sure the different search bots could access all your pages, you tried to keep things clean and simple and hoped for the best. Today, everyone searches on Google. This means that you ought to be spending a lot of time... (more)

Build a Search Engine with 10 Open Source Software Projects

How 10 different open source projects can help handle everything from information retrieval to indexing to serving up the search results to the user. ... (more)

Google Makes Up 88 Percent Of Mozilla’s Revenues, Threatens Its Non-Profit Status

Today, the (for-now) non-profit Mozilla Foundation released its financial statements for 2007 (embedded below). Revenues for the organization behind the open-source Firefox browser were up 12 percent to $75 million, with search-related royalties from Google accounting for 88 percent of the total, or $66 million. (Another $2 million or so came from other search engines). Those revenues come from Mozilla’s portion of the search advertising revenues generated by the default Google search box in the Firefox browser. Google’s overall percentage of Mozilla’s revenues is even bigger than it was in 2006, when it accounted for 85 percent. And that proportion may continue to grow over the next three years, as Google just extended its contract with Mozilla. But buried in the financial statements is the fact that the Mozilla Foundation is being audited by the IRS and its non-p... (more)

Announcing Adylitica

I mentioned Adylitica earlier in my blog as the new project I’m working on with my partner in crime: Marc Wandschneider. So what is it? One thing I’ve noticed working at my last job is that Search Engine marketing is the future of advertising, but hard to do right. Old media marketing is dying and for good reason. Not because it only offers fuzzy targeting, or that it’s expensive, or that you can’t make small buys and scale up. There’s a thousand reasons online marketing is better, but number one is volume. It’s easy to get a hundred thousand people to look at your stuff online, but for print that’s a real challenge, especially if you care about demographics or intent to buy. Well I say it’s easy, but it’s only easy if you know what you are doing. The thing about the web is that it’s chaos, and everyone is equal. Your “viral video” will be on even ground with a million... (more)

SWiK needs a reboot

It’s been over a year and a half now since I quit working on swik.net. Working on SWiK was a weird experience. It was a total experiment, can we build a community of people to help other people get into open source software, or figure out how to actually use open source software. Fortunately or unfortunately, SWiK started to pull in Google referrals by the truckload. This did not translate into dollars however, while I worked at SourceLabs we did not have advertisements on the site. Instead of advertising, I tried to develop ways to incent all the people coming in from Google to help develop the content of the site, to write about open source software and develop the wiki. The concept of the site was to let users do the content generation and me and another developer would work on the wiki software, which we wrote from scratch. We tried a lot of things, but people com... (more)

Open source search result clustering

Remember Northern Light? That was the search engine that did an amazing job of dynamically clustering search results into folders based on their topic or area. That same type of functionality is now open sourced at Carrot2. Jon Lehto, of Monster.com, who pointed this out to me, notes that Carrot2 ” builds categories from search results (configurable number), and the user doesn’t need to ‘own’ the search data.” BTW, Northern Light is still around, although not for public Web searching. Instead “Northern Light provides strategic research portals to global organizations.” [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous search carrot2 northern_light ] ... (more)

The Environmental Impact of Cloud Computing

Interesting new report titled "Pervasive monitoring of the environmental footprint of network activity" by Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist which examines the environmental impact of computing. According to Wissner-Gross' research, a typical Google search generates about 7g of CO2 compared to boiling a kettle which generates about 15g. If true, the ramifications could be major. The next time your twitter or update your facebook status could be the same as driving to the office. In a recent blog post I also looked into the concept of "Carbon Friendly Cloud Computing". More recently a new term has emerged to describe a programmatic ability to monitor, manage and control your carbon footprint which has been referred to as Carbon Information Management. So I had a crazy idea, why not combine both the ability to monitor your energy consumption levels (a... (more)

Black Duck Software Gets $9.5 Million To Help You Ship Better Software More Quickly

Black Duck Software, a company specialized in helping software developers ship products based on open source software more rapidly, also known for its acquisition of open source code search engine Koders.com completed in April 2008, has announced a $9.5 million capital raise today. The company received $4.5 million of venture debt financing from Gold Hill Capital in addition to $5 million in equity investment from its current investors General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Focus Ventures, Intel Capital, SAP Ventures and Red Hat. This is their fourth round of funding; the company has now raised a total of $38.5 million in financing. Black Duck was founded in 2002 and initially focused on selling software that helped companies deduce licensing obligations that may arise as they develop or buy open-source software (there are over 1,400 differ... (more)

RE: XSTL stylesheet workarounds for exceptions

How are you running the transformation?   Michael Kay http://www.saxonica.com/ From: Jack Bush [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 05 February 2009 19:23 To: Michael Kay Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: XSTL stylesheet workarounds for exceptions Hi Michael,   Your are right and I have reverted the XML version in the stylesheet to 1.0. However, I am back to where I started from by getting the can find empty() again.   Below is the detail of my CLASSPATH:   E:\Software Development\XML\tagsoup-1.2.jar;E:\Software Development\XML\JDOM\jdom-1.1\build\jdom.jar;E:\Software Development\XML\JDOM\jdom-1.1\lib\jaxen-jdom.jar;E:\Software Development\XML\JDOM\jdom-1.1\lib\jaxen-core.jar;E:\Software Development\XML\JDOM\jdom-1.1\lib\xalan.jar;E:\Software Development\XML\Saxon\9.1\saxon9-jdom.jar;E:\Software Development\XML\Saxon\9.1\saxon9-xpath.jar;E:\Software Development\XML\Saxon\9.... (more)

Could Google Open Source Their Rankings?

Google has been asked if they could open source their search engine algorithms before, and have pretty solidly said that they can’t because it would lead to even heavier gaming once everyone knew what really drives Google rankings. Of course there’s probably a business reason there too, it’s likely Google thinks that if their competitors could see their code, they would have a leg up on improving their own search engines. I personally think that even though it might be tricky, it’s possible to do an open source ranking algorithm, or at least partially open. However, it would depend on reworking the way that the web works, the basic problem is that the anonymity of the web makes knowing what pages can be trusted a very difficult problem. Currently Google solves this issue through a lot of hacks that get around the anonymity problem: looking at trusted pages and wher... (more)