Archive: February, 2007

(or, how to save the world by thinking long-term)

Anyone growing up around environmentally aware adults between 1968 and 1998 will have seen a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog. Published by San Francisco eco-activist, Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog was huge, both physically and philosophically. Printed on tabloid sized 11×14 inch paper, some editions were over an inch thick.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs credits the Whole Earth Catalog as a conceptual forerunner of the search engine. Indeed, it was Brand’s desire to help people find any information they might find useful to themselves that inspired him to publish the massive catalog. Jobs’ comment fits well with a more famous one attributed to Brand, “Information wants to be free.” Unfortunately, the cost of publishing the Whole Earth Catalog forced him to charge $4 per issue, a significant sum of money at the time.

Stewart Brand has always found himself slightly ahead of his peers in his thinking and in the products of his work. As a magazine publisher in the mid-1970’s, Brand fostered or introduced many of the most respected voices in modern American literature including, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gary Snyder, Lewis Mumford, Karl Hess, and the future editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly.

Google made an apsassination attempt on Microsoft last week with the release of a premium word processing and spreadsheet software suite. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a server-side set of software applications designed to offer a low-cost option to Microsoft Office. (This article is being written in the free version of Google Docs)

On Friday, Google announced the release of Google Apps Premier Edition.

According to a press release issued by Google,

“Google Apps Premier Edition is available for $50 per user account per year, and includes phone support, additional storage, and a new set of administration and business integration capabilities.

“Google Appsâ„¢, launched as a free service in August 2006, is a suite of applications that includes Gmailâ„¢ webmail services, Google Calendarâ„¢ shared calendaring, Google Talkâ„¢ instant messaging and voice-over-IP, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain. More than 100,000 small businesses and hundreds of universities now use the service. Google Apps Premier Edition now joins Google Apps Standard Edition and Google Apps Education Edition, both of which will continue to be offered for free to organizations.”

The great meeting of Metamend’s minds did not happen as scheduled last Friday afternoon. We were going to hold a staff think-in about Google Personalization but too many people were in too many different places Friday so we rescheduled the meeting until Friday March 9th.

That was unfortunate because I had hoped to have a number of things to share about our brainstorming on Google’s personalization of search results in this post. A positive aspect to postponing the event is that more facts are starting to emerge about personalization. On Friday, Gord Hotchkiss released an excellent interview with Google’s Marissa Mayers. The day before, Bill Slawski offered his take on a series of Google patents pertaining to personalization.

Another week of reading, learning and thinking is not going to hurt, especially when one considers that Google has spent the better part of three years developing their innovations on personalization. Besides which, there are other interesting things Google is doing this week.

February 26, 1991 was the day the first web browser was used on the World Wide Web. That’s sixteen years ago today for those who are counting.

Invented by Tim Berners-Lee to take advantage of another of his inventions (the Web itself), the first browser was unimaginatively named, Worldwideweb. The browser, soon renamed Nexus, was the first to use yet another of Berners-Lee’s inventions, the hypertext transfer protocol (http).

(source: Wired News)