The Internet Examiner

As more and more mobile phones are equipped with Internet access, there will be an increasing amount of money to be made from the advertising on mobile phone search engines.

The GSM [Groupe Spéciale Mobile] Association, founded in 1987, is an international trade association with almost 700 members (mobile phone service providers) and nearly 200 associate members (mobile phone manufacturers). The 3GSM World Congress, with 60,000 participants and 1,300 exhibitors, will be held in Barcelona from February 12 to 15. (The fourth annual 3GSM World Congress Asia will be held in Macau in November.)

This year’s congress will include closed-door discussions about the creation of a mobile phone search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo. To remain competitive, mobile phone service providers continue to reduce the cost of calls, which of course means declining revenues. Google and Yahoo have been making deals with mobile phones manufacturers and service providers, but those companies want a significant share of the search advertising revenue.

Google hasn’t started selling sponsored links on its mobile phone service, but that will change later this year. It’s possible, of course, that the discussions in Barcelona will lead to joint negotiations with Google or Yahoo, but it’s also possible that they will decide to create their own mobile phone search.

Juliette Garside of the Sunday Telegraph reported in yesterday’s paper that

Mobile internet will be given a further boost at Barcelona when Far Eastern manufacturer LG Electronics is announced as the winner of a competition to produce an affordable, mass-market handset capable of accessing the web.

Twelve of the leading mobile operators spanning six continents and more than 620m subscribers have agreed to sell the 3G (third generation) phone to their customers. This will allow economies of scale sufficient to bring its price in well below existing 3G handsets.

The deal will also be a massive boost for LG, allowing it to challenge the dominance of the four largest handset makers: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Siemens and Motorola.

In the event that service providers start getting significant revenue from search services, some are starting to wonder if the cost of mobile phone service will gradually become insignificant. Just as you don’t pay to use Google (their advertisers pay), could competition lead to mobile phone service which is practically free? Stay tuned.

Jeffrey Toobin has an interesting article in The New Yorker (February 5, 2007): “Google’s Moon Shot: The quest for the universal library.”

Toobin writes that “Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com…. No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many.”

Toobin’s article is here, but note that articles on The New Yorker Web site sometimes disappear quickly.

Here are some of the book-scanning projects currently in progress:

1. Google Book Search

Shortly after Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page established Google in 1998, they also participated in Stanford’s Digital Library Technologies Project, which began in 1999 and ended in 2004. “The goal of this Project was to design and implement the infrastructure and services needed for collaboratively creating, disseminating, sharing and managing information in a digital library context.”

Google Book Search is a considerably more ambitious project, to say the least. Think about it: they intend to scan every book ever published.

2. Amazon.com’s “Search Inside!” Project

amazon.com tells publishers that “When customers search for books on Amazon.com, we use the actual words from inside participating books–not just the author, title, and keywords supplied by the publisher–to return the best possible selection of books. With this powerful new search feature, customers can discover books that may never have surfaced in previous search results! With Search Inside!, customers can also browse sample pages and do additional searches inside a particular book to confirm that the title is just what they’re looking for. All of this helps publishers and authors like you sell more books.”

See Gary Wolf: “The Great Library of Amazonia” (Wired, December 2003).

3. WorldCat [OCLC Online Computer Library Center]

“WorldCat is the world’s largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information…. WorldCat.org lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world. WorldCat grows every day thanks to the efforts of librarians and other information professionals…. You can search for popular books, music CDs and videos—all of the physical items you’re used to getting from libraries. You can also discover many new kinds of digital content, such as downloadable audiobooks. You may also find article abstracts and their full text; authoritative research materials, such as documents and photos of local or historic significance; and digital versions of rare items that aren’t available to the public. Because WorldCat libraries serve diverse communities in dozens of countries, resources are available in many languages.”

4. Univeral Library [Carnegie Mellon University]

“The mission is to create a Universal Library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, primarily in the English language, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is our expectation that the collection will grow to 10 Million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24×7, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background.”

5. The Open Content Alliance

Funded by Microsoft, Yahoo, Adobe Systems, HP, O’Reilly Media, Xerox, and other corporations and major libraries, “The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA was conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo! in early 2005 as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture.”

Google and others are being sued by authors and publishers in federal court, but Toobin thinks that Google will settle out of court and be the big winner, along with all of us who love books.

Music lovers increasingly turn to YouTube and its competitors to get what they want. Finding music videos on YouTube is not difficult: you just use the search box at the top of the page.

But you can also go to a site called Cyber-Knowledge.net, which has a long list of YouTube music videos in alphabetical order by artist name. There’s also a handy YouTube video screen that stays with you as you scroll down the page — just click on the “Play” button next to any listing and start watching.

Cyber-Knowledge.net can sometimes be a quicker way to find what you want. If you search YouTube for “Tiny Dancer,” for example, you’ll get almost 300 results, many of them definitely not what you’re looking for (including awkward covers by both professional and amateur musicians).

But Cyber-Knowledge.net links you to a video of 24-year-old Elton John playing “Tiny Dancer” on TV in 1971. You can watch it on that handy video screen — just Elton, his hair, and his piano. But if you click on that screen after the video plays, you’ll go to the YouTube site, where you’ll find a list of related videos, including these:

1. You can watch Tim McGraw and Elton John perform “Tiny Dancer” during the 2002 American Music Awards. McGraw’s singing pales in comparison to Elton’s, but it’s fun to watch the two of them perform together.

2. You can watch the best scene in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous: the scene on the tour bus, where serious tension melts during a “Tiny Dancer” sing-along.

3. Then you can watch a 19-year-old kid in the UK (YouTube ID: chrisel10) sing and play “Tiny Dancer” on the keyboard in his bedroom. chrisel10’s version is worth a listen, and it’s considerably less awkward than some of the professional covers (including the unfortunate versions by Dave Grohl and John Frusciante).

A final word on the ever-increasing value of Wikipedia: the article on “Tiny Dancer” has pretty much everything most people will want to know about the song.

Now that I have your attention, I’ll report that Harvard’s Lamont Library is named for Thomas W. Lamont, Jr. (1870-1948), Harvard Class of 1892, partner and eventually chairman of J.P. Morgan & Co. He was, by the way, great-grandfather of Ted Lamont, who was the 2006 Democratic nominee to be U.S. senator from Connecticut.

The Harvard library website, describing the Lamont Library, says that the “traditional large reading rooms on three levels were complemented by the alcove seating and by a supply of comfortable armchairs for extended sessions of reading in the great books.”

From that alcove seating and those comfortable armchairs, Harvard students can now post anonymously to boredatlamont.com, a social networking site new this year.

Sometimes called b@l, the site is part of a small network of sites which was started in February 2006 by students at Columbia University.

The key concept is that all postings are anonymous: you can say anything, and others can respond, as the originators say, “just to see what happens.” Their mantra is “Anonymity Liberates.”

From the Help page:

Q: What are the rules of boredatlamont.com?

A: There is only one rule of boredatlamont.com… keep it anonymous. To clarify what we mean by anonymous:

1. Do not mention your name.
2. Do not mention someone else’s name.
3. Do not post e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or Facebook profile links.
4. Do not post anything that could identify yourself or someone else.

Q: Is this really anonymous?

A: Yes! We do not track any information that can be used by us to identify you. We do not store e-mail addresses that are used to access the Web site from off campus. It is not possible for anyone who uses this Web site to find out who you are or where you are located through logging on or through e-mail verification.

boredatlamont.com is restricted to Harvard students who access the site from the Harvard campus, or who have a current Harvard email address which can be validated.

Entries are found on the front page of the site in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posting at the top. The site updates itself as new entries are posted. The menu in the left sidebar has these links:

• today’s script — today’s posts in chronological order
• yesterday’s script — yesterday’s posts in chronological order
• week’s best
• week’s worst
• daily news — posts voted “newsworthy”
• weekly news — most newsworthy of the week
• trash can — posts voted “unsuitable”

Harvard’s “bored” site is fairly active; some others not so much. Here’s the list; note that, as the title of this post suggests, these sites are not suitable for minors:

Columbia

Cornell

Dartmouth

Harvard

NYU

Princeton

Stanford

University of Pennsylvania

Yale

When Windows Vista is released on January 30, 2007, it will be the first new version of the operating system since October 25, 2001, when Windows XP was released. Vista was released to hardware manufacturers and to some business customers in November.

Copywriters at Microsoft are enthusiastic:

Windows Vista introduces a breakthrough user experience and is designed to help you feel confident in your ability to view, find, and organize information and to control your computing experience.

The visual sophistication of Windows Vista helps streamline your computing experience by refining common window elements so you can better focus on the content on the screen rather than on how to access it. The desktop experience is more informative, intuitive, and helpful. And new tools bring better clarity to the information on your computer, so you can see what your files contain without opening them, find applications and files instantly, navigate efficiently among open windows, and use wizards and dialog boxes more confidently.

Although early adoption will not be a good idea for most users, it’s not too early to start reading what the experts are saying.

Here are four articles — three on the new operating system, and one on Microsoft Office 2007 — which will get you started.

1. “Rather Rough Rollout for Redmond” in Ed Foster’s InfoWorld Gripeline, December 12, 2006.

Foster reports that “it would appear Microsoft was not really all that well prepared even to help customers buy the software.” Problems include questions about exactly where to download the new operating system after you’ve paid for it and how to redeem upgrade coupons using a surprisingly defective Microsoft website.

2. “Microsoft’s new identity: secure OS vendor? The impressive security improvements in Vista make it a tough OS to hack,” by Roger A. Grimes in InfoWorld, December 8, 2006.

Will Vista be hacked? Sure, anything super-popular gets hacked. IE 7 is the most likely target, of course, followed by Windows Mail (the Outlook Express replacement), because these applications have the highest visibility and hacker interest. . . .

I will go out on a limb and say that I believe Windows Vista, and the forthcoming Longhorn server, will be tough to hack. . . . I believe it will be secure enough to ensure that Microsoft becomes known as a vendor of choice for a secure operating system. And that’s a far cry from where it was five years ago.

If you don’t believe me, talk to the many professional hackers that Microsoft has invited to test and strengthen Vista. Hundreds of internal and external hackers gave it their best whacks. A few succeeded in finding new exploits (or in re-finding old exploits). But ask any of them what they think of Microsoft’s new OS, and all will tell you it’s a lot harder to hack than its predecessor.

3. “As Microsoft looks ahead, will Vista be the end of an era?” by Rhys Blakely in The Times (London), December 9, 2006.

Blakely says that “the knives are out for Vista, a system that Microsoft executives admit will be the last of its kind, as their company finally gets to grips with the internet age . . . . The fear is that rivals will use the web to kill Windows. Google, a child of the online era, is the No 1 threat.”

4. “Microsoft Office 2007,” a review by Edward Mendelson in PC Magazine, November 6, 2006.

Microsoft Office 2007 packs more improvements into the world’s leading application suite than any previous upgrade. For most users, the big question isn’t whether to upgrade but when. Experts, beginners, and corporate users all get major benefits from the upgrade . . . .

The new interface doesn’t force you to rethink the underlying logic of your work, because Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Access, Project, InfoPath, Visio, and OneNote all work basically as they did before—only more easily. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook are the only programs to get the full interface upgrade. Actually, Outlook gets the new interface upgrade only in its content-creation screens.

Updates

“Vista Wins on Looks. As for Lacks …” by David Pogue, NY Times, December 14, 2006