Look at Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook. All of them created a massive amount of value -- and all have become phenomenally successful companies -- but all of them did so by also letting others monetize large portions of the value they created. It's how you build a more long-lasting ecosystem from which you can continue to profit from over time. If you seek to capture all of the value yourself, you don't last very long.

The skirmish over how we talk when we talk about copyright has a long history.

Since the paper was published, a project to do just this has been attracting investors, Google among them. This week, the Department of the Interior announced that it took the first step toward approving an early stage of the offshore connector. The venture is looking to put a high-voltage, direct-current line in federal waters between northern New Jersey and Virginia. The DOI has recognized that no other company is planning to do so, and has given the project the go ahead to seek an environmental review. The approval came despite the fact that there are no offshore wind farms in place at the moment. As it turns out, the project makes a degree of financial sense on its own, and could be a key enabler of wind farm installation.

DuckDuckGo and Ixquick take a tiny bite out of Google.

by Jim Hightower

Search Engine Land author and Ontologica semantic services provider Barbara Starr said, “It’s inevitable that lots of verified structured data will give rise to the ability of search engines to become answer engines.” And that’s happening now. Google wants to better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of entities on people, places and things that the company has been collecting over the last two years, while focusing more on structured data.

Hard drives that provide prime material for identity theft are more likely to come from a company for which you are an employee or client than from your own computer, according to a study released by the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK on Thursday.

A statistical analysis of 36 years of monthly, inflation-adjusted gasoline prices and U.S. domestic oil production by The Associated Press shows no statistical correlation between how much oil comes out of U.S. wells and the price at the pump.

Google is a fundamentally different company than it has been in the past. Its culture and direction have changed radically in the past 18 months. It is trying to maneuver into position to operate in a post-pc, post-Web world, reacting to what it perceives as threats, and moving to where it thinks the puck will be.

With file sharing site Hotfile facing an attempt by film studios to shut it down, Google has argued in an amicus brief that Hotfile should be eligible for the same type of legal protection that allowed the Google-owned YouTube to fend off the famous copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom.

If a law of nature is not patentable, then neither is a process reciting a law of nature, unless that process has additional features that provide practical assurance that the process is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the law of nature itself.

One hundred fifty years of research proves that shorter work hours actually raise productivity and profits -- and overtime destroys them. So why do we still do this?

Republicans have morality upside down. Santorum, Gingrich and even Romney are barnstorming across the land condemning gay marriage, abortion, out-of-wedlock births, access to contraception and the wall separating church and state.

But America’s problem isn’t a breakdown in private morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us.

©opyright math

What Google's going to do is basically trying to interpret a user's query as a fact-seeking question, and then surfacing context-sensitive answers to the top of the results page rather than a mere list of links. The semantic aspect is about using smart algorithms to try to divine a user's meaning, rather than simply a hunt for words that match the query text. Apparently Google's been busy for a couple of years putting together a database that'll power this system--a list of facts about people, places, and so on that is "hundreds of millions" entries in size. The idea is to deliver better content to a user early in the search . . . And ultimately all this PR bluster is about a different Google search rival. It's really about Apple's Siri . . . Statistics also show Siri now makes up over 25% of queries to Wolfram Alpha, the semantic-powered, context-aware intelligent answer engine. This is because Siri's a filter on your voice searches, and it's aware that some facts are best served by looking at a weather database, others will be solved by WA, and others by a websearch on Google.

What is new is that Google's Amit Singhal and team are bringing semantic understanding to search queries. Instead of just parsing keywords in a query like a dictionary, Google will use machine intelligence to interpret the meaning of the query and use that to find the most pertinent results.

Your guide to searching, search engine marketing and the social web.

Articles and news about Web searching and Internet use. Includes search tools, online news, email, current awareness tools, and general use

Instead, I felt OK con­tin­u­ing with the use of an app for the Ama­zon Kin­dle, or one for the Ama­zon MP3 player, or one for Google Cur­rents, or Drop­box, Ever­note, Face­book, Flickr, Foursquare, etc… I felt OK with get­ting only lit­tle bits of the web pack­aged in small digestable expe­ri­ences on my mobile. I didn’t ask those same sites to develop an open web ver­sion that would just run on a browser so I could choose which device I would use to access the con­tent and not have to worry whether an app was avail­able for the device. . . I opted for more frag­men­ta­tion in what was avail­able to every­one because I had to have the lat­est shiny toy instead of demand­ing that every­one do the hard thing and work together.

And it's not just about upgrades. Let's think about peripherals. When I ponied up for the new iPad yesterday, I had to choose between the AT&T or Verizon model. Imagine for a moment having to choose between, say, Comcast or AT&T when you buy a PC. Nuts, right?

Black silicon does not actually refer to the color of the panels per se. It describes the appearance of a silicon wafer after it has been etched with tiny pores. Researchers have found that the pores enable a silicon solar cell to capture more sunlight throughout the day, including morning and afternoon hours when the sun is not at an optimal angle.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)
– William Poundstone

You are hopelessly gullible. You have no firm idea of what anything should cost, so advertisers, marketers, and salespeople regularly lead you astray. If you're sure that you're too smart for their pricing tricks, that makes you dumber still, because you don't even realize you're being exploited.

– Seth Godin
The economy has changed, probably forever. School hasn't.

Why I left Google

In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound.

Stratfor is temporarily offering their content for free.

In 1912, as Pickens tells it, our country was facing an energy crisis. We were considering crude oil, whale blubber, and coal as possible ways to power our future. We needed something that was cheap, and we didn't care where we bought it. Our society chose crude oil, and to this day oil remains at the center of American energy consumption. The problem, of course, is that crude oil is no longer cheap.
TED: T. Boone Pickens

For years--indeed, for over a decade--I have heard calls from Linux advocates and fans for a viable and useable desktop platform that even Grandma can use. And yet, here we are in 2012 and the one vendor that is trying to give Linux fans--and the rest of the user community--exactly what they want gets smacked around for it.

summer 2008 oil bubble

Independent reports confirm that speculators are driving up the cost of oil, hurting consumers and potentially damaging the economic recovery. Wall Street profiteering, not oil shortages, is the cause of the price spike. In fact, U.S. oil production is at its highest level since 2003, and millions of acres have been cleared for additional development.

The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation. And if we lose the web, well, we lose more than funny cat videos and occasionally brilliant blog posts. We lose a commons, an ecosystem, a “tangled bank” where serendipity, dirt, and iterative trial and error drive open innovation.

A flowering of innovation and communication was ignited by the rise of the PC and the Web and their generative characteristics. Software was installed one machine at a time, a relationship among myriad software makers and users. Sites could appear anywhere on the Web, a relationship among myriad webmasters and surfers. Now activity is clumping around a handful of portals: two or three OS makers that are in a position to manage all apps (and content within them) in an ongoing way, and a diminishing set of cloud hosting providers like Amazon that can provide the denial-of-service resistant places to put up a website or blog.

But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an "appliance". We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is NOT a stripped-down computer – it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box. Because we don't know how to build the general purpose computer that is capable of running any program we can compile except for some program that we don't like, or that we prohibit by law, or that loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware -- a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user's knowledge, over the objection of the computer's owner. And so it is that digital rights management always converges on malware. [Cory Doctorow]

Ad targeting. Google+ is designed to power ad targeting, and for that it only needs you to sign up once.

"Those of us who grew up in the sixties, when we put men on the Moon, now have to watch as every Republican candidate for this year's presidential election denies the science behind climate change and evolution. That is a staggering state of affairs and it is very worrying,"

This year for the first time more ebooks were sold than hardbacks. Publishers have responded by bringing out exquisite new releases and revamps of classics

Last year, versions of the TPP's US-written IP chapter leaked; its provisions went well beyond even ACTA, which was already the new high-water mark for IP enforcement. Where do things stand now? Are the other TPP countries on board with the US approach? Who knows! It's all secret.

What we found is that not only is the sky not falling, as some would have us believe, but it appears that we're living through an incredible period of abundance and opportunity, with more people producing more content and more money being made than ever before.

The movie and music recording industry have gotten away with using statistics that don’t stand up to the most minimal scrutiny, over and over, for years, to hoodwink both Congress and the general public.

c. 1890

uh oh

Let’s put it this way. What feels more like a real news story – Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar for the ten millionth time, or this sizzling item [Montana high court upholds ban on election spending by corporations] that just hit the wires by way of the Montana Supreme Court

The Montana Supreme Court just sent a chill down Corporate America’s spine. The state’s high court restored the century-old ban on direct spending by corporations on political candidates or committees.

It's happening in Iran and the U.S. is only a few steps behind.

Republic, Lost - Lawrence Lessig

Republic, Lost - Lawrence Lessig

Republic, Lost - Lawrence Lessig

bioWAVE is a wave power system, inspired by the swaying motions of kelp plants