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Google launched version 1.0 of its Desktop Search. It extends searching to the full text of PDFs and the meta-information stored in
music, image and video files. It also supports Firefox and Netscape browsers and the Thunderbird and Netscape e-mail clients.
Tags: Google , Desktop Search
Written by John McCormac on March 7th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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A central resource for the Irish blogosphere is evidently needed. From the discussion on the Connecting The Irish Blogosphere post, determining what is and is not an Irish related blog is going to be difficult but the interconnectedness of blogs is a very useful aspect compared to ordinary business websites. A business website is less likely to have links to other sites. A blog, on the other hand, tends to rely on linking to other blogs.
Over the last week or so, I’ve been doing the preliminary work on building the search engine for the Irish blogosphere. The linkage structure for a blog search engine is quite different to that of an ordinary website search engine. An ordinary search engine links websites - a blogosphere search engine links people. The hierarchical model of links and authority hubs does not work well. Sure you’ve got the star bloggers but to concentrate solely on that aspect is wrong - it is the old model of authoritative hubs and trickle down relevancy. The key aspect of blog sites are the posts rather than the blog site itself. The discussions and referrals generally concern posts and articles rather than websites.
The lifetime of a blog post discussion is brief varying from a few hours to a few weeks. This makes it somewhat different to the ordinary web and triggered (blog ping or monitoring) spidering is necessary. It may be necessary to split the search engine into a historical search and a current search.
The search engine will provide the infrastructure but the resource will also extract topics under active discussion and show the linkages. In some respects it would be a meta-blog but the the topic and post monitoring will be automated. It will effectively provide a single page (or maybe more than one page) insight into what is going on in the Irish blogosphere.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Search Engines, Irish Search Engines
Written by John McCormac on March 7th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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The European Commission today sold out the European software industry and proved how easy it is for big software companies to purchase politicians. Despite the fact that the European Parliament had requested that the software patents agreement be reconsidered, the European Commission bowed to their paymasters in the large “software” companies such as Microsoft and adopted the Software Patents Agreement against the wishes of the people of Europe and their elected representatives.
The draft bill will have to go before the European Parliament and it is unlikely to approve of the anti-democratic activities of the European Commission. While some proponents of the Software Patent Agreement claim that European software patents would protect the investment of companies in developing software, the reality is that the prospect of a discredited US-style software patents system in Europe is disturbing many developers in Europe. The discredited US Patents system allows for patents of the most obvious and pre-existing things to be applied for. While many of these patents would be considered ridiculous by any right thinking person, the aspect that many European developers and companies are worried about is that large companies like Microsoft would use software patents to beat down competition from more inventive and creative companies. The effect on Ireland’s growing software industry of a European software patents system is difficult to assess.
Tags: Software Patents , Open Source , European Commission , IrishBlogs
Written by John McCormac on March 7th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.