Googlizer

One Year Later

2005-10-31T07:37:00.000-08:00

Poking around my feeds, I found this really great blog from Adam Bosworth, currently VP of Engineering at Google, who has developed several really well known applications at some other really well-known companies. BEA Web Logic, Internet Explorer, MS Access, Borland Quattro. He is also known as one of the pioneers of XML. His blog seems to catalog his life since starting at Google a little over a year ago. Adam doesn't post very frequently, but when he does it is worthwhile reading even months later.

For example, in a post written exactly one year ago today, Adam defines and defends the idea of web services. His main argument is that web services will prove to be superior to desktop applications in the future. This is because of their ability to allow "much faster evolution in response to the natural selection of market needs, much cheaper and easier and more simple user interface, and much better ability to know what can be done better for the customer." With the vantage point of one year, his argument is increasingly becoming more believable, more mainstream, more evidence of evolution in action.

What I find so compelling is his remark that the power of web services cease when you are offline. His formula for solving this problem is as follows: "a local cache, a smart template model, and a synchronization protocol are required to build applications that run equally well connected and disconnected..." He followed up on this idea in a later post this past summer, where he lists the limits of AJAX - the most popular contender for powering web services. Even for the AJAX-ian approach, being offline is an extreme showstopper, especially if you believe, like Adam does, that the real tipping point in favor of web services over windows apps is mobile computing.

On this Hallow's Eve, that is last word from Adam on the subject of offline web services. As far as I'm concerned, this is one area that is wide-open and looking for a good solution. Not rocket science, but not anywhere near a good, working solution either.

Postscript: Adam is invested in the development of the postchild of web services, Salesforce.com. Unlike, Adam, I am not a trained historian, but perhaps because of his association with Marc Benioff, these posts of his may well be the historial record that proves Adam to be a pioneer in web services as well. Only time will tell.

Enterprise Search

2005-10-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

Now that Google and IBM have teamed up on Enterprise Search, I wonder what is going to happen to X1's deal with IBM. Like most deals in a three-way situation, a diad will form that will clearly lead to a single winner. Too bad we can't wager this on Google's predictive market tool. Regardless, the water that will feed the growth in this case is the Google Economy, which is simply Google's uncanny ability to create a trusted eco-system inside of its marketplace. Since Google is already the best productivity tool in the workplace since the word processor, it follows that Google should come up as the winner in this deal. One day, Bill Gross is going to build a Google disrupter, but I now have my doubts about X-1 being the one. Is there still hope for Snap?

Apollo and Dionysius

2005-10-27T21:53:00.000-07:00

If I don't really care about the underlying structure of the web (just give me the candy!), then am I being amoral? After thinking about this since my last post, I would have to say yes. But after seeing Episode III, I now know how the dark side can be so appealing. It is the quick and easy way. The guardians of the good side are out there watching us play and they are concerned. We, the celebrators, are not thinking about noble causes - we are dancing on graves.

Reveling in my amorality, I happened upon a series of articles from Bio-IT World about the Semantic Web and it's role in the Life Sciences. It was like the rays of dawn peeking through the curtains after a late night of heavy surfing. There is the noble cause - saving people's lives through curing and preventing disease. There are the knights (literally in the case of Tim Berners-Lee) who say, "we...will save this land from chaos!" Finally, there is the bioscience/medical industry like a network of castles closed off from the rest of the world, unable to communicate with each without serious bloodshed and in-breeding.

What is most intriguing to me about this whole attempt to make the Semantic Web come alive through this most vexing of enterprises - is the possibility that this rebirth of the web may be twins or even a multiple birth. One of the Bio-IT World article's quotes Eric Miller of the W3C who says "what the physicists were to the original web, the life science community is going to be to the Semantic Web." That may be, but the web started to really matter once the scientists and utopians stepped aside for people like John Doerr, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gross.

Speaking of Bill Gross - check out his latest creation - it's an enterprise desktop search company based in Pasadena, CA, that doesn't seem to care about Web 2.0 or Semantic Web. It just wants to beat the pancakes off Google.

Kid in a Candy Store

2005-10-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

Everthing on the web is happening so fast now - the websites, the tools, the APIs, the features, the secret betas, the buzz. Inevitably, there are going to be bumps and backlashings. Some people want to see the next big thing in big lights already, others are having trouble seeing the news guns forcing the old order to fade away. Me? I am going to keep playing with the toys. Simply finding them is most of the fun, and through this discovery process something truly earth-shattering is bound to reveal itself. In good time.

Web 2.0 Workgroup

2005-10-25T20:37:00.000-07:00

Here is a collection of some of the best sites out there on the whole Web 2.0 thing. I loaded them into my Google Reader and it has given the tool a whole new life. This is probably how things are going to go mainstream - all of this crazy cool stuff out there and somehow a few disparate things connected together make the sum greater than the parts.

Firefox Widgets

2005-10-24T18:01:00.000-07:00

POV from Andrew Peaker, developer of Firefoxit: "Firefox and the whole concept of widgets and web apps is part of the future of desktop computing. Firefox is a kind of OS. Firefoxit could be like part of the shell. Online services and a horde of local webservices could act as the backend. An interface that's available from many OS and any place."

POW from the average user: "I don't care what or where my OS is. Desktop, Browser, Server. Who cares? I just want a nice interface that works. " Users don't care about the foundation, the pipes, or even the building materials - they care about the layout, the view, and the furniture.

But "where the OS is" matters because it can shift the functionality of the layout, view and furniture. For example, if you add to your home you change the use of the previously existing space. Similiarly, if you add a widget to a browser that allows application-like functionality, you get more that just an online email client. You get an email client that can interact with all of your online habits.

This is what Google has in mind by lending it's search functionality to Gmail, but with a widget you can now surf the web while you simultaneously connect with others. This makes emailing and surfing both open up to more interesting uses.

My POV on the OS: I don't care what or where my OS is. It can exist in several places as long as I get to keep adding to my house, moving around all my layout, view and furniture to accomodate several new possibilities of usage. Keep em coming!

(Suggestion for Andrew: change the name to Fidget!)

Posting Live From the Frontlines!

2005-10-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

Posted this from Flock's Blog Topbar. Dragged the quote below from the page into a blog area and the link showed up automatically along with some HTML. I had to add this text from Blogger, so either I have some learning to do, or as stated by the Flock team, there are some glitches to work out on their product. Overall, though I give Flock an A+ on their first day of school. It is a sweet tool! BTW, I found the juicy little tidbit on XBox 360 using the StumbleUpon Extension, which I have also loaded in my 1.5 Firefox under a different username. The StumbleUpon website doesn't seem to let you login as regular user. Who cares though - it's also a sweet tool!

Does your local Wal-Mart have playable Xbox 360s?

Xbox 360s playable at Wal-Mart today? Confirmed. - Joystiq - www.joystiq.com

Browser Wars 2.0

2005-10-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

Downloaded the 1.5 Firefox Beta at work and so far no catastrophes. I selected the Developer tool so that I can call upon the Dom Inspector whenever I get into trouble with a web page. Also, thanks to my increasingly sophisticated feed network, I discovered that Flock - the formerly beta invite-only social browser - has been released tonight. I heard TechCrunch even had trouble getting in on the beta. No matter - let the browser wars 2.0 begin!

BTW, my feed network is growing fast thanks to the following: Findory, del.ioci.us, Wink, and of course, Google. We will see how much more Flock adds to this mix.

Life Made Simpler

2005-10-19T07:37:00.000-07:00

Couple of things I downloaded yesterday make it easier for me to search and blog. The first thing is the Google Sidebar. I have been using the original Desktop at work and have no idea why I haven't tried the Sidebar until now. The default features are excellent and the available plugins to download are many. My current favorite is the webclips feature which pulls out individual entries from the various blogs I use - including this one - and posts the header of each with an option to view the entire contents. For the del.icio.us tags, I simply get an URL that I can chose to click on. There is also an SDK that I would like to check out when I have some time. The other thing I have installed is the ScrapBook extension for Firefox. Very nice for grabbing pieces of different articles and pages which searching and discovering for later use in reporting and blogging. This might the tool that finally forces me to download Firefox at work.

On Top of the World, Ma!

2005-10-18T21:52:00.000-07:00

My del.icio.us feeds have been good to me. But now I am really starting to dig into Wink. Because the Wink service is so new, my 100+ Google tags made it to the top of the Top Search Set section. Probably also because of this, my handle is third on the list of top users. I even received an email from the top user - Michele - with congrats on my invitation. (Thanks for stopping by the blog!) Michele also happens to work for Wink, so I asked her about the ranking system and she told me that since they are in Private Beta, it is fairly easy to make the top ranking - for now. She also told me there are 800 people on the waiting list for an invitation. So I do feel special afterall - but a lot of these people are from the sign-ups at the Web 2.0 conference so I am pretty sure my ranking will soon begin to fade.

For now, I will bath in the glory.

Roll Your Own

2005-10-17T20:46:00.000-07:00

This link showed up at the top of my del.icio.us feed for the word "tag" tonite and I am just blown away by the ingeniuty of it. This guy thought of the limitations of a site like Rollyo and then thought out his improvements. Nice job. Then he goes on to code up a working prototype that really does the job. Excellent! Finally, he posts the benefits of using it - most of which I am still trying to get my head around but the thing really does something unique with tags and keywords and that totally blows me away! Then the worst thing happens to this guy - his blog gets completed deleted - and he decides to start his blog again from scratch. Crazy. It's like being on that planet Volgon from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where every original idea gets you a smack in the face. Don't Panic.

Globalization 3.0 and Web 2.0

2005-10-16T00:17:00.000-07:00

Thomas Friedman's book "The World is Flat" has been out since May but I am finally getting around to it since I have plane trip coming up and I haven't figured out how to compress my own "Datbase of Interests" onto my laptop yet...

Anyway, I found a nice link to a talk Tom gave to MIT to explain his ideas. Here is his definition of Flat World or Globalization 3.0 from that talk: "a global, web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work irrespective of time, distance, geography, or even increasingly, language." Because Tom applies his thesis to every aspect of globalization, he is getting the usual flak from pessimists who just don't see how you can digitize social interactions.

But when I think about contextual search, social networking, and the web as application platform, I have to say that Tom is dead on. What I find interesting is that Tom believes that this massive disruption in global affairs revolves around frictionless digitized collaboration, and this is what Web 2.0 is all about.

As Tom says, we are just now beginning to figure new ways of using this new Globalization 3.0 platform and if you look at Web 2.0 from this perspective, you have to admit that we are not just looking at another industry buzzword here. We are looking at the latest iteration in one of most exponentially explosive changes to our global economy.

Travel Days

2005-10-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

No posts for the next few days since I will be on the road and on a tight schedule. I am going to Charlotte for business, but if I were going to NYC for any reason, I would definitely be using this nice little Mashup. Thanks to two simple del.icio.us feeds, I'm finding so much cool stuff out there that I am beginning to feel a little behind the curve:

TechCrunch
Rashmi Sinha
O'Reilly's Blog
Y.o.m.b.a.r.
Solution Watch
Yahoo News Tag Soup

Wink Wink

2005-10-07T19:26:00.000-07:00

I just got my Wink Invite! Here is a snippet of what I have done with it so far. There is a Search History feature they have promised to roll out which I looking forword to seeing. Notice my tags? I added something like 100 of them from my Google Personalized Page, but it wasn't simple - I had to strip out the tags from the HTML and then clean it up with regular expressions inside of a nice little text editor I have called TextPad.

And then I also tried out the Google Reader and added the Technocrati subscription since they seem to be so popular - so we will see what happens. Then I found a link to the exhausted Google Product Manger who is now probably passed out on his couch. The guy seems to embrace the new Web 2.0 paradigm: release often and release for free. So it's a little disappointing to hear people already grumbling about this nice new offering.

BTW, I have already found a nice site through Wink called Google Rumors and have added it to my growing tag list...

Tags and Feeds

2005-10-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

Taking matters into my own hands, I have posted an XML feed from del.icio.us on the word tag and have added it to my Google Personalized Homepage. I am sure this will produce some interesting results in the coming days. The problem is that I am just not aggressive enough to tag enough sites to make an impact on the results. Here are today's top 9 results:

LiveMarks
HomePage - Kwiki

TagCampers - Kwiki

extisp.icio.us - scattering del.icio.us tags - now with images

ROLLYO - Custom Search and Tags

Wired News: Tips From Top Taggers

acts_as_taggable RDoc Documentation

Travel Journals Travel Blogs Travel Experiences – RealTravel

RubyForge: TagTools: Project Info

Search Industry Score Card

2005-10-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

Crib Sheet for the web industry's current approach to contextual search:

Microsoft: we will contextual search into our windows/office products
Yahoo: we will thread contextual search through our portal/web offerings
Amazon: we will use contextual search to recommend new products to sell
Newbies: we will innovate contextual search on our unknown platform
Google: we will leverage contextual search into our engine for every use imaginable

Guess who is going to win?

By the way, click on the image below to see what the newbies are up to these days. After all the huffing and puffing I did in my previous posts, I feeling a little less alone...

Wikipedia L'enciclopedia Libera

2005-10-03T22:31:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia is a mind-bender when you are trying to discover something. I starting thinking about the kind of coding that would be necessary to match up private and public keywords, thinking something like Ajax might help speed up the phrase matching dynamically filling out your SERP as you search - sort of like an extended version of Google Suggest. Instead, because Ajax is so intertwined with a bunch of different technologies and protocols, I spent the evening browsing through all of the latest W3C recommendations and standards. What a trip!

All those standards on how documents and data should communicate with each other got me thinking. How cool would it be if you could opt into a tool where all of your keywords were collected into a single document and parsed into a markup language so that your identity on the web could be located via a URL. Your description would look like one of those photo montages where a thousand little pictures are arranged into a single recognizable image. This would be one approach to creating a semantic web because when people start networking with each other and with all of the rest of the documents on the web through the keywords that makeup each person's identity then everything we know and touch and feel becomes recognizable on the web. Would this shadowy world then become inhabitable? Would it resemble a puzzle in the shape of a globe? Maybe this is how the Architect created the Matrix...

Contextual Search

2005-10-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

Y!Q is one major approach to contextual search. It's developer is calling it distruptive distribution, and Yahoo is starting to thread it through their products. Like much of Yahoo's approach to searching and the web, Y!Q's implmentation relies more upon people distributing it across the web rather than having a pure algorithm doing all the heavy lifting like most of Google's products. If Microsoft had a viable approach they would probably side with Google on the pure algorithm approach, but then they don't give away their products for free and would therefore have a tough time catching up to either Yahoo or Google in this space.

Keyword Vs. Keyword

2005-10-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

It's always fun to take a seemingly mundane problem - finding a cheap and easy way to web surf in the air for example - and then end up with a solution that is more interesting that the problem. Even more fun is taking apart your ideas in the days following the frenzied problem solving to see where you can plug up the holes in your thesis before anyone starts doing that for you, which, as we all know, is the most fun of all!

The main issue that comes to mind about my idea (outlined in previous editorial post) is the amount of processing that must take place just to get a few GBs of mashed up SERPs compressed to your hard drive when you click the Variance Button. I am sure there are some serious trade-offs to make on the provider side, but on the user side, you might not notice anything if the collecting and processing runs in the backgroud of my regular searching while you are jacked into the grid.

Where you might start to notice a lag in performance as a user is if we start running this puppy in real-time. Bouncing MBs worth of keywords against GBs worth of keywords and then filtering out the 80% of uninteresting matches absolutely must return instantenous results as you search. But if we could make the right trade-offs between the crunching and the data we could bring the performance level back up to an acceptable level. And then what?

Because of a feedback loop created by the interplay of your keywords, the resulting pages, and the public's keywords, your SERPs would start looking more and more interesting to you at an ever increasing rate. The more you use the web and the more the web is used by others, the more relevant the results become to you and your interests.

This is just one approach to contextual search - everyone has an idea about how this might work, and I think the field is so wide open that it's hard to sort out the different camps. I plan to explore the current thinking on this topic in my next post.

But Wait, There's More!

2005-10-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

If you act right now, we will also send you a copy of your very own personalized and compact "Database of Interest"!!!

The Search

2005-09-29T19:49:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading John Battelle's great new book on search. He describes some pretty incredible search scenarios, which as you can tell from my previous posts, has got me thinking about a scenario of my own. Namely, how to enjoy the discovery process of web searching when not plugged into the web. Kind of crazy, I know, but in an era where Google partners with NASA, aren't we mere mortals allowed to dream a little?

I love the process of discovery and search is a huge part of that process. The joy I find in search is the juice behind what John calls the "Database of Intentions." This is a keyword phrase which, by the way, is not something that currently shows up in Google Suggest. Another keyword phrase which doesn't show up in Google Suggest is "Database of Interest." I define this phrase to mean a more private database of personal interest that feeds off the more public database of collective intent. I intend to explore here tonight how one might build a feedback loop of keyword phrases that would create an automated and relevant "Database of Interest."

If you've read my previous 2 editorial posts, you would know that part of my plan includes something I called the statistical variance of interest. Meaning, very broadly, the relevance of any given search results to my own personal interests. Of course, thanks to John, we all now know that Larry and Sergey were not using statistics to get to result relevance - they were using a logical algorithm to weigh references from back links. But as you will see, I end up literally standing on the shoulders of the giagantic PageRank algorithm and a few other Google innovations to complete my plan.

Thanks to Google's Search History tool, you can now collect your own keyword phrases. Any particular keyword phrase in your Search History would have recently resulted into a set of links thanks to PageRank and could easily do so again. For now, let's put your last 100 keyword phrases into a bucket called Private.

Now, when you think about how Google Suggest works you must imagine that they are doing some kind of lookup on a database of keyword phrases. Let's further imagine that some nice person over at Google has figured out how to do a reverse lookup on these keywords - for example, enter a link into the reverse lookup and out pops a bunch of keywords that would return the entered link somewhere in the result set. We could dump all of the links you have ever clicked or set up as an RSS feed into the reverse lookup and get a large group of keyword phrases. Let's put this resulting group of keyword phrases in a bucket called Public.

So on one hand you have all the keyword phrases from the last 100 keyword phrases that you have searched on Google in a bucket called Private and on the other hand you have all the keywords that link to your feeds and clickstream in a bucket called Public. With me so far? Good, this is where it gets interesting...we now would need an indexer program that would match up the phrases from the Private bucket to the phrases in the Public bucket on a sliding scale of Hit Counts. Remember that statistical variance I mentioned above? Hand me that would you? Okay now we assign a weight number to each match - 1 for low match, 2 for medium match, 3 for high match, etc. When we collect enough matches, we find the mean and then apply a statistical variance between the high scoring Hit Counts and the low scoring Hit Counts.

High scores would represent a narrow band of variance of difference between my public and private keywords. Low scores would represent a wide band of variance. If we built an interface for this function - say a button on the Google Toolbar - we can then let the user decide on a narrow or wide variance of difference between her keyword phrases and everyone else's keyword phrases. Narrow down the variance, and when you run these hybrid keywords into a normal Google searchbox, your results will be very similar yet very relevant to your interest. Widen up the variance, and the search results will be very different from your original intent but also very interesting.

Okay, maybe this plan might work, so what do we do with this stuff? You're about to catch a plane from LA to NY, so you jack into the grid and bring up your Personalized Google Homepage, set the variance Button to medium and run it. Within a few seconds - depending on your connection speed - everything I've described above takes place and the results of 100 keywords phrases with a median variance of difference to your interest gets compressed to your hard drive. You disconnect from the web, and board the flight feeling like a first class passenger with your own personal and relevant Database of Interests. Fly on web surfer, fly on.

Postscript: But what if you wanted to run this puppy live so that every keyword you enter is matched against every reverse lookup generated by the links you click as a result of your entered keyword? Can someone say real-time feedback loop? Mind going numb - must not feed the loop...until my next post...

My Workflow

2005-09-29T17:13:00.000-07:00

I came up with this diagram after a feverish brainstorm session this afternoon. In my next editorial post, I will try to explain some of this chicken scratch...

Clickstreams, Feeds and Search History

2005-09-28T23:03:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading two separate posts about the potential limitations of Mashups - Dan Grossman's post, A Venture Forth » Blog Archive » Mashups, and then this post, Scott's "SiteExperts" Place: XMLHttpRequest - Do you trust me? They have got me thinking about about the limits of using clickstreams, feeds, and search history to provide better web services. Technically, a lot is possible with this approach to delivering web data, but not all of it is going to be acceptable to the user without a compelling reason to override their hesitancy.

One potential product that I think might be enjoy some use is a tool that would pull down all of the data from your favorite web pages for you to peruse when you are inconviently unconnected from the web. I will use the example of my previous post - the web dead zone of a cross country flight to illustrate...

How hard it would be to cobble together a bunch of my favorite stuff on the web on a site like Google's Personalized home page and then have that all of that stuff compressed at the click of a single button for me to take on an airplane? I used to do something like on my PalmPilot Sync when I had a train commute from NYC to White Plains. I subscribed to several feeds like NYtimes and Wired and then downloaded the latest stuff to my PalmPilot because I didn't want to pay for the web access subscription.

Nowadays, it's cheaper to have web access on your cell or wireless access from your laptop. So why not add a button on the Google Toolbar, for example, that would perform this task based on your feeds, clickstream and search history just before you have to unplug yourself from the grid. The application tools and search capabilities have certainly improved since the days of Palm V, so I don't think this tool would be impossible to implement. It may be slightly sluggish but that is a current trade-off for even the Google Personalized Home Page.

Whatever the trade-off, the implementation would have to be elegant because the next question is, would people want to use it? Would anyone feel compelled to use it? You would have to be because it still requires a bit of effort for most people to get online at the airport between getting a full body search at security check and getting a good seat so your overstuffed carry-on will find a nice home.

I would feel compelled to grab that final bit of connectivity if I could then get to my assigned seat and after the captain gave the okay to use all approved electronic devices, for the rest of the ride feel as if I were really surfing the web. As long as I didn't search for anything out my statistical variance of interest and the compression of my feeds, clickstream and search history fit somewhere within this variance, then I would never know the difference. And even I were flying JetBlue, all other entertainment - including the DirectTV - would be background noise.

Next Post: How to theorize and montetize the statistical variance of interest...

Newark Airport

2005-09-28T15:27:00.000-07:00

My son, Ben, waiting to get back home.

Approaches to Technology

2005-09-27T22:19:00.000-07:00

Here is what I am reading right now - literally on my desk in front of me as I type:

Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry by Michael Dell with Catherine Fredman. This is a dot-com era book that still has lots to teach me in 2005 either because Michael Dell is a far-sighted genius or because everything from the dotcom era is new again or both.

Anyway - there is a section where Michael is talking about the Networked PC and how that never took off and probably never will since most people are tied to their PC as an on-demand workhorse. He was talking about innovation and how people, who as the fuel for the engine of an incredibly growing company, must be constantly thinking about the reason for a particular technology. Thinking about the Networked PC, he mused how impractible the idea was in 1997 since at base the structure is simply a rehash of dumb terminals from the early 80's.

Michael was demonstrating how you think about the technology problem statement so that if you see a flaw in someone's approach to it you can tweak your own approach and thereby innovate on the technology. His approach to the technology problem that the Networked PC tried to solve was what he called the Managed PC...basically a platform where your workhorse is managed through a centralized and networked control mechanism. Sound familiar? This is basically what everyone ended up doing for the past 8 years...so Michael was right and his theory for analyzing the technology problem statement seems like a map in perfect relief with the passage of an era.

So what was the technology problem statement that the Networked PC tried to address? It was not that users needed to be tied to one network via a dumb terminal for syncronization - the problem was that users needed an easier way to maintain updates, patches, upgrades and fixes without relenquishing their beloved personal workhorses. Michael gave a good practical example that is still fairly true for the most part to this day: getting access to the network either impossible or impossibly expensive while you are flying in a plane.

With companies like SalesForce.com trying to re-surface the idea of a networked pc through their software-as-a-service mantra, you still have this web access on an airplane problem. If I were a sales guy traveling across the country - I have to enter all of my data into salesforce and make all of my cell phone calls before I get on the plane to go see that next customer. What kind of work can I do on the plane? PPT, XLS or DOC. That's it. Maybe read some report until I am bored with tears and then begrudgingly watch a DVD, read a magazine or listen to music on the iPod I won at a vendor raffle.

I wouldn't pay for web access on the plane and neither would my company - so forget about connectivity - but what about catching up on all the blogs and news and content that I complain that I never have enough time for? After struggling through security - unpacking and repacking my laptop - the last thing I want to do just before boarding is to frantically attempt to wirelessly download anything to my laptop or PDA. Too much of a pain - but if we look at the technology problem statement we have to ask ourselves how else we might be able to surf the web while in the air. There must be a better way. Stay tuned for my next post to read about my approach...

Greetings from the Final Frontier!

2005-09-26T14:48:00.000-07:00