Jeff Jarvis puts the case for the Link Economy.

Technorati Tags: internet

The UK Cabinet Office has launched a site aimed at encouraging budding entrepreneurs to suggest cool things to do with public data – and it’s offering a prize fund of £20k to grease the wheels…

Technorati Tags: Government

Robert Scoble, ex-Microsoft Blogger, now Fast Company TV host/producer and still a blogger, writes an interesting piece illustrating the difference between old fashioned magazine journalism (complete with fact checkers and editors) and blogging. Despite the benefits of all those people now watching his back, his verdict: better a blogger.

Technorati Tags: blogs, media

Mobile Internet World is suggesting that Nokia and Google may be about to do a deal to converge the Symbian and Android platforms to create one near-universal platform for the mobile phone. This, they argue, could create conditions to those sparked by Microsoft’s Windows platform play for PCs.

LinkedIn continues its run of innovations with news of a tie up with the New York Times which will see customised news delivered to users based on their interests (i.e. which industry they are in). This is a nice idea – I wonder if our B2B titles shouldn’t be offering something similar, given the fact that our content is already niched (and a lot deeper than the generalist NYT)?

Technorati Tags: newspapers, online, syndication

Jeff Jarvis has started an interactive spreadsheet where he is challenging readers to reduce the headcount of a large news organisation by 30%. He has started the ball rolling by showing where he would cut (national news, for instance) and where he would increase (local blogger reward programme). Not only is it an interesting exercise in rethinking modern news priorities, but it also showcases Google Doc’s spreadsheet application really effectively.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, productivity

A provocative piece by Jeff Jarvis suggesting that newspapers should outsource their web platforms – and perhaps their ad sales business – to Google. The idea came from a breakfast discussion with Edward Roussel, head of digital at the Telegraph, apparently.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, online, outsourcing

Mike Arrington of Techcrunch gives a clear video demo of the new social search functionality which Google is testing quietly on random people who are using its search engine.

Technorati Tags: Google, search, social media

Hubdub is a news prediction site which aims to use crowdsourcing to predict the outcome of events. The site uses Hubdub dollars (every registered user starts with H$1,000) to reward those who are correct and penalise those who aren’t and this mechanism is meant to mimic the actions of a real marketplace. Nice Web 2.0 implementation.

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, predictions, tools

Interesting moves by Yahoo! to crowdsource (definition) search. This from the announcement on the site:

So what is BOSS?
BOSS is a new, open platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. BOSS allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!’s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences. While search APIs have been available for some time, BOSS removes many of the usage restrictions that have prevented other companies from using them to build innovative new search engines.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s available today:

* Ability to re-rank and blend results — BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
* Total flexibility on presentation — Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
* BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
* Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
* Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

Given the supremacy of Google, and the company’s woes this is probably not that revolutionary…. but still, a great move.

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, search, yahoo