Paul Lomax - Two Point Oh

TIME WARNER’S AOL AND GOOGLE TO EXPAND STRATEGIC ALLIANCE

America Online (AOL) and Google are expanding their current strategic alliance to create a global online advertising partnership. The deal will make AOL content more accessible to Google web crawlers, expand display advertising through the Google network, enable Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, and allow for collaboration on online video offering. It includes a $1 billion investment in AOL by Google for an effective 5% equity stake.

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The Register reports that Google have snatched AOL from Microsoft, paying $1 billion (£570m) to take a 5 per cent stake.

One word: Phew. Very glad it was Google and not Microsoft…

Interestingly for us (IPC), the deal means that “AOL’s sales team gets access to the Google Network, and Google will also give Time Warner’s media properties preferential treatment.”. Cool - we should therefore get preferential treatment as a Time Warner property

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/17/google_wins_aol/

December 14, 2005

Dear valued partner:

We are very pleased to inform you that PriceGrabber.com has become a part of Experian Interactive, a division of Experian, Inc, the global leader in information solutions. Experian operates in 28 countries with clients in over 60 countries and revenues of over $2.5 billion. Experian Interactive is a market leader in online lead generation and consumer marketing and accounts for nearly 20% of global Experian sales. Experian Interactive is comprised of key online marketing companies including LowerMyBills.com, Experian Consumer Direct, and ClassesUSA.com. As evidenced by the acquisition of PriceGrabber.com, continued expansion of Experian Interactive is a core part of Experian’s global growth strategy. We believe that as a result of this acquisition we will be in a better position to service our users, customers and partners.

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Time announced Tuesday that it would lay off 105 employees, including several longtime high-ranking publishing executives.

The departing executives include Richard Atkinson, an executive vice president in charge of the news and information group and former chief financial officer; Jack Haire, an executive vice president heading corporate advertising sales; and Eileen Naughton, the president of Time magazine. Fewer than 20 of the departing employees are from the editorial side of the company.

D’oh, I think our CEO reports to Richard Atkinson - nice bloke apparently, British chap.

Google have just announced the release of an API for Google Homepage

I swear by the google homepage these days to keep on top of the dozens of blogs and news sources I read. Annoyingly quite a few have been saying ‘information unavailable’ of late, but I’m wondering if that’s just for people who do RSS through feedburner. So I may have to look into this API further. Google have built a couple of examples to show what it can do.

Amazon have announced the (public beta) launch of Alexa Web Search Platform - a service which lets developers pretty much create their own search engines using Alexa’s computing and storage resources.

The quick tour gives more information.

It works by you defining the pages you want to access from Alexa’s archive (”100 Terabytes of Web content spanning 4 billion pages and 8 million sites”), developing an application to run queries on that data and then downloading or publishing the results via a web service.

The pricing structure is quite interesting and probably quite difficult to predict for any given application:
- $1 per cpu hour
- $1 per GB/year of user storage (up to 13 TB…)
- $1 per 50 GB processed
- $1 per GB uploaded/downloaded
- $1 for every 4,000 user-published web service requests

Find our more from their user guide or try their sample application

It looks like the start point is always Alexa’s web archive - you can’t influence what they’re actually crawling/archiving or how often. If they allowed you to direct their crawler as well, then it could well take on the Google Search Appliance solution - which personally I think is prohibitively expensive.

When I’m not doing my Sys Admin “thing” at IPC, I’m part of the open source Blastwave project, packaging up various products for Solaris. One of the packages I maintain (the Nessus security scanner) recently had a new release - offering a whole host of enhancements including a very funky looking RSS feed for plugin updating, and major performance improvements to name just two. Except this time, I’m not doing my usual w00t-dance, and I won’t be packaging it, or even running it, for that matter.

The reason being that the developers, Tenable solutions, chose to make this version closed source. Now, that’s all well and good and they’re obviously well within their rights to do so. But as with so many closed source products (Zend, I’m looking at you), it’s released for Linux/x86 first (although FreeBSD packages are also available), and everything else takes a back seat until some unspecified time in the future. It it is this ramification of the license change that I find most infuriating. It wouldn’t perhaps be so bad if Tenable could guarantee that all platforms would have binaries available for them - but this means they’re leaving a large section of their userbase out in the cold. And woe betide you if you’re running anything they consider really obscure or not worth supporting. Even something like Solaris/x86 is frequently ignored, and I can’t begin to imagine what people running something like NetBSD on Alpha must have to contend with…

With the open source model (take MySQL as an example), you can get the source code, and can be pretty sure that you can build it on pretty much any platform you want. MySQL runs on most platforms - from Unix to Windows, OpenVMS to Linux/S390. If it doesn’t run on your chosen platform, or the developers don’t have access to the relevant development environment, you can hack it yourself and contribute patches back to the community.

Once the source is closed, that option is gone forever. You’re then totally dependant on the developer to continue supporting your platform. You also, by extension, you have to hope they never go out of business, especially if their product incorporates some sort of time-locked licensing! If they wake up one morning and decide that it’s no longer economically viable to continue building their product for your platform, you’re screwed. Never mind that you may have built your entire infrastructure around a certain technology, and it’s not economically viable for you to jump ship to whatever the flavour of the month is; if you want to continue running closed source product X, you have to dance to the beat of the developers’ drum.

It’s for precisely this reason that I was so glad to see Sun open up Solaris (SPARC has been an open architecture for a long while now, so that’s never been an issue). Yeah, the community Sun has built up around it is fantastic, as is the ability to get a sneak preview of all the latest features and browse the code yourself. But it now means that whatever happens to Sun (although I seriously doubt they’re going anywhere anytime soon), our investment is secure.

So, I’m sorry that Tenable felt they had no other option than to close the source of Nessus - but I for one look forward to the continued development of the forked GPL version…

Dion Hinchcliffe has compiled a list of his favourite Web 2.0 applications of 2005 as way of taking stock in the Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005.

There are a few familar faces such as del.icio.us and Flickr (Yahoo liked those two as well!), and a few interesting ones I haven’t come across before too, such as Central Desktop, Calendar Hub, Voo2do, and Remember The Milk. Base Camp won an award as did it’s two sister products, WriteBoard and Tada List. We tried Base Camp for a while, and it’s easy to use but it’s missing some vital features which just made not very useful in the end - such as being able to tie messages in with to-do items and being able to move items between todo lists.

Greg Yardley writes about the differences between risk in CPM, CPC and CPA in online advertising

Andy Budd, MD of a usability consultancy in Brighton, UK writes about his predictions for web design and development in 2006

With 2006’s focus on web applications, slick user interface and interaction design is going to become even more essential.

This is exactly where we’re going, which ties in with where our funding is coming from. We’re building “software applications with a web based interface next year”, not web sites… And with these apps being heavily used across the business, a slick user interface is going to be key. Unfortunately they’re very easy to get wrong, so fingers crossed.

As resolutions increase in size, big fonts will dominate the first half of the year.

I think our user base will appreciate this - many are silver surfers and really dont like some of exisiting designs with micro fonts. Some of the design led titles go for large fonts. Or they would if they were allowed to use something other than Verdana or Arial. I can’t really sIFR the whole site

2006 is going to see Ruby on Rails development take off in a big way, with Rails developers never short of work.

Probably true, but I’m hoping PHP 5 may reach tipping point, particularly with the launch of the Zend Framework.

Last, but by no means least, we will see the death of IE5.x and the birth of a new, improved Internet Explorer in the shape of IE7. With improved standards support, numerous bug fixes and native PNG transparency, IE7 will hopefully make all our jobs a lot easier.

I bloody hope this happens, but I’m a bit my cynical. I think IE5 is going to be the bain of our lives for quite a bit longer. But we’re going to ‘officially’ drop support, and degrade gracefully, treating IE5 users as if they don’t have javascript at all. I think that IE7 is going to be a nightmare to start off, adding another browser to test on into the mix. I fear quite a few sites will break.