Slashdot Mirror
Google buys Pyra Labs
Argyle writes "SiliconValley.com reports that Google has bought Pyra Labs. Pyra Labs is the creator of the Blogger software and runs the blogger.com and blogspot.com services. In weblog fashion, founder Evan Williams reported the news on his weblog in the middle of the Live from the Blogosphere event."
First Post?
any fucking day
learn to swim
see you down in
arizona bay.
yeah, fp, whatever.
This has the potential to be huge... Google Blogs..
Not only could you search the Internet, but you could refine your searches just to other people's thoughts, etc.
Mark another one up for Google being one of the best tech companies in the business world.
On slashdot.org, there will roughly 100 posts per day claiming that Google is "the evil empire." It's a rule. Commercial success and non-Open-Source-itude (I'm allowed to make up words here.) are considered evil on the /. boards. So before you guys go all crazy about how Google's assimilating every company are being evil and all (and undoubtedly citing the Scientology debacle, no less), just remember this: ultimately, the quality of the product matters.
So as if my searches weren't already becoming diluted with Blog drivel they definitely will now!
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e_\_______|_/_______/__\\\___--___\\_______:____e
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g____\______\_________.--------.______\|___|____g
o______\_____\______//_________(_(__>__\___|____o
a_______\___.__C____)_________(_(____>__|__/____a
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s______/_/\|___C_____)_______|__(___>___/__\____s
e_____|___(____C_____)\______/__//__/_/_____\___e
x_____|____\__|_____\\_________//_(__/_______|__x
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o___|______________/____|_____|__\____________|_o
a___|_____________|____/_______\__\___________|_a
t___|__________/_/____|_________|__\___________|t
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e__|_________/_/________|____|_______|_________|e
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Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account.
Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensi
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Google has never done anything that hasn't redefined what went before it.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I am the plaintiff in this lawsuit against Jon Katz. I was born on May 5, 1978 and I am 25 years old. I am currently unemployed without any marketable job skills. I first met Jon Katz when I was five years old at a restaurant that my mother, stepfather and I often went to.
In about May of 2000 I met Jon Katz again at my stepfather's car rental business, Rent-a-Wreck. My stepfather called me and told me that Jon Katz was at Rent-a-Wreck and that I should come down and see him. Later I learned from my stepfather that Jon Katz's car had broken down and that he was at Rent-a-Wreck to get another car while his was being repaired.
After I met Jon Katz at Rent-a-Wreck he began calling me on the telephone. From about May of 2000 until about February 2001 (when I first spent the weekend with Jon Katz at VA Linux), I received many telephone calls from Jon Katz. For at least part of this time Jon Katz was on tour and he would be calling me from various places throughout the world. On occasion these telephone conversations lasted as long as three hours. Jon Katz and I talked about open source, HTML, browser wars, and famous people that he knew.
In about February 2001, my mother, Kathleen Fent (my fiancee), and I went to VA Linux at the invitation of Jon Katz. The three of us stayed together in the guest area. I did not spend the night with Jon Katz. This was a weekend trip.
I spent the entire weekend with Jon Katz. We went on jet skis in a small lake he had, saw the penguins that he kept at VA Linux, programmed shell scripts under the GNU public license and went on golf cart rides. One evening he took Kathleen Fent and me to Fry's and we were allowed to get anything we wanted. Although the store was closed, it was opened just for our visit.
In late March 2001, my mother, Kathleen Fent and I went to E3 in Las Vegas as a guest of Jon Katz. We flew on a private airplane. We stayed at a large suite at the Mirage Hotel. My mother and Kathleen Fent shared a bedroom. We stayed at the Mirage Hotel about a week. One night Jon Katz and I watched the Exorcist in Jon Katz's bedroom. When the movie was over, I was scared. Jon Katz suggested that I spend the night with him, which I did. Although we slept in the same bed there was no physical contact.
From that time, whenever Jon Katz and I were together we slept in the same bed. We spent two or three additional nights in the same bed at Las Vegas. Again, there was no physical contact.
After I returned from the Las Vegas trip, my friendship with Jon Katz became much closer. My mother, Kathleen Fent and I started making frequent trips to VA Linux. At VA Linux I would always sleep in bed with Jon Katz. I also slept in bed with Jon Katz at my house and at hotels in New York, Florida and Europe. We were together until our relationship ended in July 2001. During our relationship Jon Katz had sexual contact with me on many occasions.
Physical contact between Jon Katz and myself increased gradually. The first step was simply Jon Katz hugging me. The next step was for him to give me a brief kiss on the cheek. He then started kissing me on the lips, first briefly and then for a longer period of time. He would kiss me while we were in bed together.
The next step was when Jon Katz put his tongue in my mouth. I told him I did not like that. Jon Katz started crying. He said there was nothing wrong iwth it. He said that just because most people believe something is wrong, doesn't make it so.
Jon Katz told me that another of his open source friends would kiss him with an open mouth and would let Jon Katz put his tongue in his mouth. Jon Katz said that I did not love him as much as this other friend.
The next step was when Jon Katz rubbed up against me in bed. The next step was when we would lie on top of each other with erections.
During May of 2001, my mother, Kathleen Fent and I went with Jon Katz to Monaco in Europe. Jon Katz and I both had diarrhea so we stayed in the room all day while my mother and Kathleen Fent were out. That's when the whole thing really got out of hand. We took a bath together. This was the first time that we had seen each other naked. Jon Katz named some of his open source friends that masturbated in front of him.
Jon Katz then masturbated in front of me. He told me that when I was ready, he would do it for me. While we were in bed, Jon Katz put his hand underneath my underpants. He then masturbated me to a climax. After that Jon Katz masturbated me many times both with his hand and with his mouth.
Jon Katz had me suck one nipple and twist the other nipple while Jon Katz masturbated. On one occasion when Jon Katz and I were in bed together Jon Katz grabbed my buttock and kissed me while he put his tongue in my ear. I told him I didn't like that. Jon Katz started to cry.
Jon Katz told me that I should not tell anyone what happened. He said this was a secret.
My relationship with Jon Katz ended when Eric Raymond obtained custody of me in July 2001 and I started living permanently at Eric Raymond's house.
I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.
Executed on February 15, 2003, at Holland, Michigan.
6 billion people, 6 billion blogs? Who's gonna read this stuff, and who wants to? Count me out.
I think Google is the perfect Pyra buyer because their user-driven mentality is right in line with Evan's mentality. Google Labs is full of cool ideas that three-person Google teams come up with, and the ones that get a lot of user attention and use get funded further and get ramped up for mainstream use. It makes perfect sense to me that Google would be attracted to the best extra-googliar example of this mentality: Blogger, the first large-scale hosted blog application.
Curiosities I have are how Google will deal with it's first for-pay service, and what, if any, value-adds Google will give to Blogger blogs: Higher rankings in search results? Possibly. Live posting into Google's search index? Probably. I'm sure there are ideas that haven't even been thought of yet.
I can't wait to see where this goes! I just wish I was a part of it.
Kevin Fox
It is not a big news actually, as people wanted it to be. Searching and Blogging are different things. Webblogging will reach its limits soon, since not everyone is eager to put something out there. It is a personal choice, and blogging, although still with growth potential, will not become the next big thing. Google's decision is in some way a very good decision, since we need a tool to search blogs, separately, just like Google News. Google is right again on the issue. Blogging will be important.
There could be many reasons why google bought pyra. But i can't stop thinking about the possibilty that google may use the technology to start a blooging style news website pretty much like slashdot!!
reSisTanCe iS fUtILe
You get flogged for running a blog.
Is it just me or does it seem that Google is trying to become the number 1 information portal?
http://www.hektik.org/various/various/goatse/
It would be nice if the overall impact of this is
more even more people participating because of the
google tie-in. It would be very very nice if it got
so big that all kinds of news that our mostly
corporate influenced media didn't report on got out
and about and all around. I hope this turns into
one very huge good thing.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Internet connection ......... $30.00
Getting a blog .............. $10.00
Highest Google rating ....... $250.00
The whole word seeing my daily rants about how my life sucks and how the world is out to get me ...................... Priceless
I know that sometimes a buyout or merger is just a nice way to cover up the layoffs to the investors.
Investor "Oh why did you scale back? I thought you said we needed all these workers to make product!"
CEO "Nevermind those bums, we just aquired another company and all their intellectual property! Because of the merger we now own 20 patents in blogging technology that are good for another 20 years! Since we already have the R&D for these patents completed, we can fire the new guys too! That's going to make our stock worth more!"
Investor "I'll buy that for a dollar!"
I really don't know if google is a good/bad company, I can't really say the above skit is anything more than fiction in regards to google, but I have seen similiar things happen in the business world. I just hope in another 15 years google doesn't go after all the people using their own open source blogging software claiming royaltee's on an idiotic patent.
Damn, I'm sounding a bit too YRO slashdotish today.
This isn't about Google pumping up Blogger, or BlogSpot. This is about them acquiring direct access to blog data.
--
Jordan
Bloogle? Gooblogs?
And all the trends they can presumedly spot and all the private emails they can nab as part of all the drivel...I mean data. Gotta be painful having to wade thru all that whining. This isn't fb. My point is to agree with the parent that the back end is the driver.
Anyone thinking this is so google can be a better neighbor isn't paying attention.
Your blogs belong to google. Hand 'em over.
The new wave is starting. Millions, billions of dollars will be created on blogging. I am a wealthy American venture capitalist willing to invest in the next-generation blogging enterprise capable of creating synergy and streamlining existing infrastructure.
Please lay out your business plan in reply to this posting. Business plans with expense prognoses of less than $100M per year will not be considered.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered CowboyNeal fan cult when USDA confirmed that CowboyNeal's waist line has jumped yet again, now up to over 12 parsecs. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that CowboyNeal has disgusted 1.2 million women, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Cowboyneal is collapsing as a black hole, as fittingly exemplified by Saddam Hussain enjoying taking an ICBM indabutt You don't need to be a doctor to predict CowboyNeal's future. The hand writing is on the wall: CowboyNeal faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for CowboyNeal because CowboyNeal is dying. Things are looking very bad for CowboyNeal. As many of us are already aware, CowboyNeal continues to have heart attacks every day. His urine flows like a river of blood.
CowboyNeal is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of his organs. The sudden and unpleasant anal probe of CowboyNeal can only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: CowboyNeal is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
CowboyNeal doctor Theo states that there are 7000 pounds of CowboyNeal. How many pounds of CowboyNeal would it take to feed an army? Let's see. The number of CowboyNeal versus Army Reserve posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 pounds of CowboyNeal per soldier. A recent article put CowboyNeal's artery blockage at about 80%. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 seconds left for CowboyNeal to live. This is consistent with the number of CowboyNeal Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Slashdot, abysmal business plan, and so on, CowboyNeal went bankrupt and was taken over by Kuro5hin who have another shitty website. Now Kuro5hin is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that CowboyNeal has steadily declined in life expectancy. Cowboyneal is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If CowboyNeal is to survive at all it will be starving in bally's total fitness health club. CowboyNeal continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save him at this point in time. For all practical purposes, CowboyNeal is dead.
Fact: CowboyNeal is dying
Repeal the DMCA!
I already use livejournal, but I could see blogging at google considering 80% of the time I am going to google.com and then looking up other stuff.
If you are going to be at google to look up other site, pictures, catalogs, etc. might as well get your daily blogging needs taken care of as well.
"blog" is the worst name for anything since "pween".
Please don't say that word again, ok?
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I hope they buy ebay soon. I'd love for google to own ebay, paypal, half.com and all the other parts of the ebay empire.
Maybe some day in the not so distant future, google will be big enough to buy microsoft.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already anal-raped CowboyNeal fan cult when USDA confirmed that CowboyNeal's waist line has jumped yet again, now up to over 12 parsecs. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that CowboyNeal has disgusted 1.2 million women, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Cowboyneal is collapsing as a black hole, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a doctor to predict CowboyNeal's future. The hand writing is on the wall: CowboyNeal faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for CowboyNeal because CowboyNeal is dying. Things are looking very bad for CowboyNeal. As many of us are already aware, CowboyNeal continues to have heart attacks every day. His urine flows like a river of blood.
CowboyNeal is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of his organs. The sudden and unpleasant anal probe of CowboyNeal can only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: CowboyNeal is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
CowboyNeal doctor Theo states that there are 7000 pounds of CowboyNeal. How many pounds of CowboyNeal would it take to feed an army? Let's see. The number of CowboyNeal versus Army Reserve posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 pounds of CowboyNeal per soldier. A recent article put CowboyNeal's artery blockage at about 80%. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 seconds left for CowboyNeal to live. This is consistent with the number of CowboyNeal Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Slashdot, abysmal business plan, and so on, CowboyNeal went bankrupt and was taken over by Kuro5hin who have another shitty website. Now Kuro5hin is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that CowboyNeal has steadily declined in life expectancy. Cowboyneal is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If CowboyNeal is to survive at all it will be starving in bally's total fitness health club. CowboyNeal continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save him at this point in time. For all practical purposes, CowboyNeal is dead.
Fact: CowboyNeal is dying
Repeal the DMCA!
Lets say for whatever reason Id like to run a little blog action. Ive never really gotten into any blogs and I dont visit a single one on any kind of basis. However, Id like an easy way to basically journal. Some basic requirements:
Drop in a working apache server
Be able to simply add pictures, links, etc. Cant be too complicated tho
Option to keep a post private
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Slashdot? In ten years? Won't Microsoft have bought VA software by then?
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
I think this is bad for Google. I see this as a trend akin to the famous "until it can read email" expansion trend for software. Google has won over users by being a search engine rather than the "portal" that everyone else was pimping at the time. I worry that they are turning into a portal themselves.
i wanted to post anonymously but what the heck.
a related thing came up recently in our research group chitchat that google is actually sucking up quite a few of the top notch CS folks - rob pike anyone?:)
and it so happens that a couple of weeks back a bunch of lets say "highly talented" folks left the company i work for to google....:)
this acquisition seems to revalidate that they sure seem to be quite active and healthy and i am darn proud because the founders are our alumni......
I don't like Google.
What are the alternatives? Is it only livejournal?
Do they all require cookies? JavaScript? Do any have well designed, useful, efficient interfaces?
Slashdot is about "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters"; it's not exactly for mass majority. That's why people like you and I love this site and post number of messages. It's focused; it targets a certain type of population. This will not affect Slashdot.
Having said that, this Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs is pretty interesting because Google (until today) targets mass majority and Pyra Labs, if I understand correctly, does not target mass majority. Blogging is only for a certain type of population. How would Google transform that into stuff for mass majority if they plan to do so? Interesting to see what they are going to do with Pyra Labs's technologies.
So far they have entirely been "search engine / cache" whether you are searching (or viewing cached versions of) websites, images, newsgroups, news sites, or catalogues.
I don't know what they will do with blogs though.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
They bought Deja News, or whatever it was called, giving them direct access to the wisdom of the masses, as encoded in newsgroups. Except that newsgroups seem to be a fading concept, supplanted by mailing lists and blogs. Well, Google can't very well buy mailing lists (from whom would you buy them?) but they just bought most of the blogs. Note that they haven't bought or apparently even tried to buy any traditional mass-media company (CNN, NY Times, Knight-Ridder, etc). In the business world, nobody has placed much value so far on the collected, shared knowledge of the masses, so Google can buy Deja and Pyra for cheap.
The big question is what owning the major information conduits of the masses gets Google. Google didn't just buy Atrios or Dave Barry, they bought the medium everyone is using to blog.
This kind of gets me back to an idea I blogged about a little while back--that you could probably make a business out of aggregating blogs into an ersatz net magazine and selling advertising space on the result. Google presents the advertisers with the combined traffic of the top 20 blogs, shows them a prototype of a salon-style magazine and asks how much they'd pay for ad space, then goes to those top 20 blogs and asks them whether they'd agree to publish regularly in exchange for some (smallish) cut of the ad revenue.
Makes me wonder how long we have until Google buys LiveJournal...
adeu,
Mateu
"And we're happy here, but we live in fear, we've seen a lot of temples crumble..." - Concrete Blonde
Daypop.com shows the most intersting news by searching weblogs. news.google.com shows the most interesting news by searching special news sites. Is there a connex?
Will the bloggers be a part of a new news algorithm?
Back in the day, only people with something important to say had websites. Then, with the mass influx of the common idiot, everyone had a stupid webpage filled with blink tags and pictures of their fscking cat.
Thankfully, it's no longer 'trendy' to have a website. And for those that do, search engines have progressed to the point where their pathetic little sites can be safely ignored.
Weblogging is going the same way. First, only people with something important to say had them. We've reached stage two - every idiot thinks the world cares about his or her boring little life.
Free clue: No one gives a damn about you, or your thoughts. Thank you, drive through.
Anyway, Google will likely throw their newfound stash of mediocre whining into a seperate category on the search engine. Thus, assuring that the majority of Internet users never have to stumble across it.
I salute Google for aiding the progress of the Internet.
I have actually been thinking lately of this very idea (Google + Blogging ++) and am very impressed that Google is taking this step.
...
Amongst other things, I imagine users of Google being able to "gab" through Google blogs about anything on the Internet and have Google keep track of all of the references. Brilliant!
Search for: Cowboy Neal
Result 1: How does cowboy neal scrub his shoes..
Blogs associated with this topic: bla bla
Result 2: bla bla...
Could be very interesting...
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
a. Google News
Dan Gillmor, who broke this story, mentioned in an update the possibility, that the weblog links can be used to improve Google News.
But Google doesn't need to buy Pyra for that. Google can spider any leading weblog they want. Yes, there was this problem of interlinked weblogs resulting in a high PR (PageRank) for certain logs, but Google fixed that problem by giving more value to outgoing links then incoming links. They don't need to buy Blogger for indexing of weblogs.
b. Portal
Another suggestion that has been made: Google is moving to a portal.
I refuse to believe that Google is getting megalomanic. Besides, we all know what happened to AltaVista.
c. Direct access
Jshare suggested Google bought Blogger to get direct access to blog data.
But crawling the 200.000 active Blogs doesn't cost much resources. It's only a few gig of data. Why bother to buy a whole firm for that?
d. Journal with ads
Mateub suggests that Google could make a magazine out of the blogs, complete with ads.
But they can do that already. Have a close look at news.google.com. Search for, hmm, Google At the right side, there's enough space for ads. Google could index just the weblogs, like Daypop, and make a new product out of it (without buying Pyra).
Whatever the reason is behind the buy, it will have a huge impact. The simple fact that one of the hottest internet companies buys Pyra's Blogger will make the product main stream in months.
Henk van Ess editor of Voelspriet
TIP: Check Ovidiu Predescu site now and then. He started working at Google's on January 22 and writes about it in his ...weblog.
Sixty years ago,I worked in what was once my Grandfather's Greenhouses. Gramps had died a year earlier and Grandma, now in her seventies had been forced to sell to the competition. I got a job with the new owners and mostly worked the range by myself. That summer, they hired a man to help me get the benches ready for the fall planting.
Ike always looked like he was three days from a shave and his whiskers were dirty white, shaded by the brim of his battered felt fedora.
He did not chew tobacco but the corners of his mouth turned down in a way that, at any moment, I expected a trickle of thin, brown juice to creep down his chin. His bushy, brown eyebrows shaded pale, gray eyes.
Old Ike, he extended his hand, lifted his leg like a dog about to mark a bush and let go the loudest fart I ever heard. The old man winked at me, "Ike Thomas is the name and playing pecker's my game."
I thought he said, "Checkers." I was nineteen, green as grass. I said, "I was never much good at that game."
"Now me," said Ike, "I just love jumping men . . ."
"I'll bet you do."
". . . and grabbing on to their peckers," said Ike.
"I though we were talking about . . ."
"You like jumping old men's peckers?"
I shook my head.
"I reckon we'll have to remedy that." Ike lifted his right leg and let go another tremendous fart. "He said, "We best be getting to work."
That summer of 1941 was a more innocent time. I learned most of the sex I knew from those little eight pager cartoon booklets of comic-page characters going at it. Young men read them in the privacy of an outside john, played with themselves, by themselves and didn't brag about it. Sometimes, we got off with a trusted friend and helped each other out.
Under the greenhouse glass, the temperature some times climbed over the hundred degree mark. I had worked stripped to the waist since April and was as brown as a berry. On only his second day on the job and in the middle of August, Ike wore old fashioned overalls. Those and socks in his high-top work shoes was every stitch he wore. When he bent forward, the bib front billowed out and I could see the white curly hairs on his chest and belly.
"Me? I just love to eat pussy!" Ike licked his lips from corner to corner then sticking his tongue out far enough that the tip could touch the end of his nose. He said, A man's not a man till he knows first hand, the flavor of a lady's pussy."
"People do that?"
He winked. "Of course the taste of a hard cock ain't to be sneezed at neither. Now you answer me, yes or no. Does a man's cock taste salty or not?"
"I never . . ."
"Well, old Ike's willing to let you find out."
"No way."
"Just teasing," said Ike. "But don't give me no sass or I'll show you my ass." He winked. "Might show it to you anyway, if you was to ask."
"Why would I do that?"
"Curiosity, maybe. I'm guessing you never had a good piece of man ass."
"I'm no queer."
"Now don't be getting judgmental. Enjoying what's at hand ain't being queer. It's taking pleasure where you find it with anybody willing." Ike slipped a hand into the side slit of his overalls and I could tell he was fondling and straightening out his cock. "Now I admit I got me a hole that satisfied a few guys."
I swallowed, hard.
Ike winked. "Care to be asshole buddies?"
***
We worked steadily until noon. Ike drew a worn pocket watch from the bib pocket of his loose overalls and croaked, "Bean time. But first its time to reel out our limber hoses and make with the golden arches before lunch."
I followed Ike to the end of the greenhouse where he stopped at the outside wall of the potting shed. He opened his fly, fished inside, and finger-hooked a soft white penis with a pouting foreskin puckered half an inch past the hidden head.
"Yes sir," breathed Ike, "this old peter needs some draining." He exhaled a sigh as a strong, yellow stream splattered against the boards and ran down to soak into the earthen floor.
He caught me looking down at him. He winked. "Like what you're viewing, Boy?"
I looked away.
"You taking a serious interest in old Ike's pecker?"
I shook my head.
"Well you just haul out yourn and let old Ike return the compliment."
Feeling trapped and really having to go, I fumbled at my fly, turned away slightly, withdrew my penis and strained to start.
"Take your time boy. Let it all hang out. Old Ike's the first to admit that he likes looking at another man's pecker." He flicked away the last drop of urine and shook his limp penis vigorously.
I tried not to look interested.
"Yes sir, this old peepee feels so good out, I just might leave it out." He turned to give me a better view.
"What if somebody walks in?"
Ike shrugged. He looked at my strong yellow stream beating against the boards and moved a step closer. "You got a nice one,boy."
I glanced over at him. His cock was definitely larger and beginning to stick straight out. I nodded toward his crotch. "Don't you think you should put that away?"
"I got me strictly a parlor prick," said Ike. "Barely measures six inches." He grinned. "Of course it's big enough around to make a mouthful." He ran a thumb and forefinger along its length and drawing his foreskin back enough to expose the tip of the pink head. "Yersiree." He grinned, revealing nicotine stained teeth. "It sure feels good, letting the old boy breathe."
I knew I should button up and move away. I watched his fingers moving up and down the thickening column.
"You like checking out this old man's cock?"
I nodded. In spite of myself, my cock began to swell.
"Maybe we should have ourselves a little pecker pulling party." Ike slid his fingers back and forth on his expanding shaft and winked. "I may be old but I'm not against doing some little pud pulling with a friend."
I shook my head.
"Maybe I'll give my balls some air. Would you like a viewing of old Ike's hairy balls?"
I swallowed hard and moistened my dry lips.
He opened another button on his fly and pulled out his scrotum. "Good God, It feels good to set 'em free. Now let's see yours."
"Why?"
"Just to show you're neighborly," said Ike.
"I don't think so." I buttoned up and moved into the potting shed.
Ike followed, his cock and balls protruding from the front of his overalls. "Overlook my informality." Ike grinned. "As you can see I ain't bashful."
I nodded and took my sandwich from the brown paper bag.
"Yessir," said Ike. "I just might have to have myself an old fashioned peter pulling all by my lonesome. He unhooked a shoulder strap and let his overalls drop around his ankles.
I took a bite of my sandwich but my eyes remained on Ike.
"Yessiree," said Ike, "I got a good one if I do say so myself. Gets nearly as hard as when I was eighteen. You know why?"
I shook my head.
"Cause I keep exercising him. When I was younger I was pulling on it three time a day. Still like to do him every day I can."
"Some say you'll go blind if you do that too much."
"Bull-loney!" Don't you believe that shit. I been pulling my pud for close to fifty years and I didn't start till I was fifteen."
I laughed.
"You laughing at my little peter, boy?"
"Your hat." I pointed to the soiled, brown fedora cocked on his head. That and his overalls draped about his ankles were his only items of apparel. In between was a chest full of gray curly hair, two hairy legs. Smack between them stood an erect, pale white cock with a tip of foreskin still hiding the head.
"I am one hairy S.O.B.," said Ike.
"I laughed at you wearing nothing but a hat."
"Covers up my bald spot," said Ike. "I got more hair on my ass than I got on my head. Want to see?"
"Your head?"
"No, Boy, my hairy ass and around my tight, brown asshole." He turned, reached back with both hands and parted his ass cheeks to reveal the small, puckered opening. "There it is, Boy, the entrance lots of good feelings. Tell me, Boy, how would you like to put it up old Ike's ass?"
"I don't think so."
"That'd be the best damned piece you ever got."
"We shouldn't be talking like this."
"C'mon now, confess, don't this make your cock perk up a little bit?"
"I reckon," I confessed.
"You ever seen an old man's hard cock before," asked Ike.
"My grandpa's when I was twelve or thirteen."
"How'd that come about?"
He was out in the barn and didn't know I was around. He dropped his pants. It was real big he did things to it. He saw me and he turned around real fast but I saw it."
"What did your grandpa do?"
"He said I shouldn't be watching him doing that. He said something like grandma wouldn't give him some,' that morning and that I should get out of there and leave a poor man in peace to do what he had to do."
"Did you want to join him."
"I might have if he'd asked. He didn't."
"I like showing off my cock," said Ike. "A hard-on is something I always been proud of. A hard-on proves a man's a man. Makes me feel like a man that can do things." He looked up at me and winked. "You getting a hard-on from all this talk, son?"
I nodded and looked away.
"Then maybe you should pull it out and show old Ike what you got."
"We shouldn't."
"Hey. A man's not a man till he jacked off with a buddy."
I wanted to but I was as nervous as hell.
Ike grinned and fingered his pecker. "C'mon, Boy, between friends, a little cock showing is perfectly fine. Lets see what you got in the cock and balls department."
In spite of my reluctance, I felt the stirring in my crotch. I had curiosity that needed satisfying. It had been a long, long time since I had walked in on my grandfather .
"C'mon let's see it all."
I shook my head.
"You can join the party anytime, said Ike. "Just drop your pants and pump away."
I had the urge. There was a tingling in my crotch. My cock was definitely willing and I had a terrible need to adjust myself down there. But my timidity and the strangeness of it all held me back.
Hope you don't mind if I play out this hand." Ike grinned. "It feels like I got a winner."
I stared at his gnarled hand sliding up and down that pale, white column and I could not look away. I wet my lips and shook my head.
Old Ike's about to spout a geyser." Ike breathed harder as he winked. "Now if I just had a long finger up my ass. You interested, boy?"
I shook my head.
The first, translucent, white glob crested the top of his cock and and arced to the dirt floor. Ike held his cock at the base with thumb and forefinger and tightened noticeably with each throb of ejaculation until he was finished.
I could not believe any man could do what he had done in front of another human being.
Ike sighed with pleasure and licked his fingers. "A man ain't a man till he's tasted his own juices."
He squatted, turned on the faucet and picked up the connected hose. He directed the water between his legs and on to his still dripping prick and milked the few remaining drops of white, sticky stuff into the puddle forming at his feet. "Cool water sure feels good on a cock that just shot its wad," said Ike.
***
"Cock-tale telling time," said Old Ike. It was the next day and he rubbed the front of his dirty,worn overalls where his bulge made the fly expand as his fingers smoothed the denim around the outline of his expanding cock.
I wasn't sure what he had in mind but I knew it wasn't something my straight-laced Grandma would approve of.
"Don't you like taking your cock out and jacking it?" Ike licked his lips.
I shook my head in denial.
"Sure you do. A young man in his prime has got to be pulling his pud."
I stared at his calloused hand moving over the growing bulge at his crotch.
"Like I said," continued Ike, "I got me barely six inches when he's standing up." He winked at me. "How much you got, son?"
"Almost seven inches . . ." I stuttered. "Last
time I measured."
"And I'm betting it feels real good with your fist wrapped around it."
"I don't do . . ."
"Everybody does it." He scratched his balls and said,"I'll show you mine if you show me yours." Then, looking me in the eye, he lifted his leg like a dog at a tree and let out a long, noisy fart.
Denying that I jacked off, I said, "I saw yours yesterday."
"A man has got to take out his pecker every once in a while." He winked and his fingers played with a button on his fly. Care to join me today?"
"I don't think so."
"What's the matter, boy? You ashamed of what's hanging 'tween your skinny legs?"
"It's not for showing off."
"That would be so with a crowd of strangers but with a friend, in a friendly showdown, where's the harm?
"It shouldn't be shown to other people. My Grandma said that a long time ago when I went to the bathroom against a tree when I was seven.
"There's nothing like a joint pulling among friends to seal a friendship," said Ike.
I don't think so." I felt very much, ill at ease.
"Then what the fuck is it for," demanded the old man. "A good man shares his cock with his friends. How old are you boy?"
"Nineteen almost twenty."
You ever fucked a woman?"
"No."
"Ever fucked a man?"
"Of course not.
"Son, you ain't never lived till you've fired your load up a man's tight ass."
"I didn't know men did that to each other."
"Men shove it up men's asses men all the time. They just don't talk about it like they do pussy."
"You've done that?"
"I admit this old pecker's been up a few manholes. More than a few hard cocks have shagged this old ass over the years." He shook his head, wistfully, "I still have a hankering for a hard one up the old dirt chute."
"I think that would hurt."
"First time, it usually does," agreed Ike. He took a bite from his sandwich.
I looked at my watch. Ten minutes of our lunch hour had already passed.
"We got time for a quickie," said Ike. "There's no one around to say, stop, if were enjoying ourselves."
He unhooked the slide off the button of one shoulder-strap, pushed the bib of his overalls down to let them fall to his feet.
"Showtime," said Ike. Between his legs, white and hairy, his semi-hard cock emerged from a tangled mass of brown and gray pubic hair. The foreskin, still puckered beyond the head of the cock, extended downward forty-five degrees from the horizontal but was definitely on the rise.
I could only stare at the man. Until the day before, I had never seen an older man with an erection besides my grandpa.
Ike moved his fingers along the stalk of his manhood until the head partially emerged, purplish and broad. He removed his hand for a moment and it bobbled obscenely in the subdued light of the potting shed. Ike leaned back against a bin of clay pots like a model on display. "Like I said, boy, it gets the job done."
I found it difficult not to watch. "You shouldn't . . ."
"C'mon, boy. Show Ike your pecker. I'm betting it's nice and hard."
I grasped my belt and tugged on the open end. I slipped the waistband button and two more before pushing down my blue jeans and shorts down in one move. My cock bounced and slapped my belly as I straightened."
"That's a beaut." Ike stroked his pale, white cock with the purplish-pink head shining. "I'm betting it'll grow some more if you stroke it."
"We really shouldn't . . ."
"Now don't tell me you never stroked your hard peter with a buddy."
"I've done that," I finally admitted,. "But he was the same age as me and it was a long time ago." I though back to the last time Chuck and me jerked each other off in the loft of our old barn. Chuck wanted more as a going away present and we had sucked each other's dicks a little bit.
"Jackin's always better when you do it with somebody," said Ike. "Then you can lend each other a helping hand."
"I don't know about that," I said.
Ike's hand continued moving on his old cock as he leaned over to inspect mine. "God Damn! Boy. That cock looks good enough to eat." Ike licked his lips. "You ever had that baby sucked?"
I shook my head as I watched the old man stroke his hard, pale cock.
"Well boy, I'd say you're packing a real mouthful for some lucky gal or guy." He grinned. "Well c'mon. Let's see you get down to some serious jacking. Old Ike's way ahead of you."
I wrapped my fist around my stiff cock and moved the foreskin up and over the head on the up stroke. On the down stroke the expanded corona of the angry, purple head stared obscenely at the naked old man.
Ike toyed with his modest six inches. "What do you think of this old man's cock?" His fist rode down to his balls and a cockhead smaller than the barrel stared back at mine.
"I guess I'm thinking this is like doing it with my grandpa."
"You ever wish you could a done this with your grandpa?"
"I thought about it a lot."
"Ever see him with a hard-on."
"I told you about that!"
"Ever think about him doing your grandma?"
"I can't imagine her ever doing anything with a man.
"Take my word for it, sonny, we know she did it or you wouldn't be here." Begrudgingly I nodded in agreement.
"Everybody fucks," said old Ike. "They fuck or they jack off."
"If you say so."
"Say sonny, your cocks getting real juicy with slickum. Want old Ike to lick some of it away?"
"You wouldn't."
Ike licked his lips as he kept his hand pistoning up and down his hard cock. "You might be surprised what old Ike might do if he was in the mood for a taste of what comes out of a hard cock."
And that is what he proceeded to do. He sucked me dry.
Then he erupted in half-a-dozen spurts shooting out and onto the dirt floor of the potting shed. He gave his cock a flip and shucked t back into his overalls. He unwrapped a sandwich from its wax paper and proceed to eat without washing his hands. He took a bite and chewed. "Nothing like it boy, a good jacking clears the cobwebs from your crotch and gives a man an appetite."
***
The following day, We skipped the preliminaries. We dropped our pants. Ike got down on his knees and sucked me until I was hard and good and wet before he stood and turned.
"C'mon boy, Shove that pretty cock up old Ike's tight, brown hole and massage old Ike's prostate.
Ike bent forward and gripped the edge of the potting bench. The lean, white cheeked buttocks parted slightly and exposed the dark brown, crinkly, puckered star of his asshole "Now you go slow and ease it along until you've got it all the way in," he cautioned. "This old ass craves your young cock but it don't want too much too soon. You've got to let this old hole stretch to accommodate you."
"Are you sure you want to do this?"
"Easy boy, easy," he cautioned. "You feel a lot bigger than you look. Put a little more spit in your cock."
"It's awfully tight. I don't know if it's going to go or not."
"It'll go," said Ike. "There's been bigger boys than you up the old shit chute."
I slipped in the the last few inches.. "It's all in."
"I can tell," said Ike. "Your cock hairs are tickling my ass."
"Are you ready," I asked.
"How are you liking old Ike's hairy asshole so far?"
"It's real tight."
"Tighter than your fist?"
"Might be."
"Ready to throw a fuck into a man that reminds you of your grandpa."
"I reckon."
"I want you should do old Ike one more favor."
"What?"
While you're pumpin' my ass, would you reach around and play with my dick like you would your own? Would you do that for an old man?"
I reached around and took hold of his hard cock sticking out straight in front of him. I pilled the skin back and then pulled it up and over the expanded glans. I felt my own cock expand inside him as I manipulated his staff in my fingers. I imagined that my cock extended through him and I was playing with what came out the other side of him.
"C'mon, boy, ram that big cock up the old shitter and make me know it. God Damn! tickle that old prostate and make old Ike come!"
I came. And I came. Ike's tightened up on my cock and I throbbed Roman Candle bursts into that brown hole as I pressed into him. His hairy, scrawny ass flattened against my crotch and we were joined as tightly as two humans can be.
"A man's not a man till he's cum in another man." said old Ike. "You made it, boy. But still, a man's not a man till he's had a hard cock poked up his ass at least once."
Every time I think of that scene, I get another hard-on. Then I remember the next day when old Ike returned the favor.
I never have managed to come that hard again. If only Ike were here.
It is. Whoever coined the word needs to be shot.
Does it remind you of the "other" quintessial portal site?
The word "blog" is stupid. It's beyond stupid. What idiot came up with that abbreviation, anyway?
Is it just me, or is everyone else happy with the idea of typing a FTP username and password into to a third party web form?
Slashdot is a weblog. More specifically, it's a content management system ("CMS" for all of you TLA fans). The term weblog covers the gamut of human interests from "Fluffy's Hairball of the Day" to political commentary from "Big Blue Basketballs". The term also includes topics that are parajournalistic, like industry and local news. Google will have to host all of it.
I have seen a lot of comments that bash or deride weblogs, but you are insulting the very thing that you are using to post your insults. In addition, Slashdot has a Journal feature that smacks of a weblog as well. Can we bite the hand that feeds us? Sure, but only at the risk of starvation.
This reminds me of the ICQ v. AIM a few years ago. ICQ dominated IM; AIM shows up and quickly takes over as the predominant IM service in town. Looks to me as if Google is poised to take the Blogger s/w to new levels of popularity and at some point surpassing Slashdot.org with some iteration of its own. It might even buy OSDN if the conditions for acquisition are optimal. Slashdot.org and the other affiliated blogs are HQ; the same was true with ICQ, and look who owns that little s/w.
Good....Now maybe the google folks can take a few of those *nix based 486 machines and replace the mess of M$ products that "run" blogger. I thought blogger was cool back in the day -- but was always perplexed as to the software choices they made in running such a big, complicated, heavy traffic service.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
If Google spiders blogspot.com blogs from day one, that gives them an unfair advantage.
Wow, Evan is actually my girlfriends good friend - from a little bit back. From what she's told me, he's had some tough choices to make over the few years, but it sounds like he kept the dream alive and it has paid off - if that's the goal. I guess I could think of worse companies to be purchased by. Coulda gone to M$ and been wrapped into some shitty feauture in LookOut or MSN. ;)
Seriously tho, this is actually inspiring for me since I've always felt like I wanted to do my own idea(s) and there's always someone there - from the awful 'manager' to press to whatever else - putting down those ideas in favor of conformity or dissing them due to their lack of vision. That might not be Pyra's feelings, but to know someone has really stuck to their guns in face of all kinds of obstacles, gives me some hope to keep pushing forward.
Gooblogs, boogles, blogoogles, blegooglos ...
Ah ha! Finally, a solution for the Google Time Bomb! Google would be able to filter out 85% of the blogs and show us the real (read: unblogged) results.
$DEITY bless $NATION
Google is aiming to provide global knowledge platform, covering lifelong learning and business intelligence
Ironically, our Boston Public Library BPLers decline doing web logs that might give people a better idea of their expertise, experience and interests. Treasured BPLers talents remain relatively unknown because of the general atmosphere of discouragement, the difficulties of communicats at our city public library. Web logs give people opportunities to let others know of their expertise, experience and interests.
Web reviewers are one possibility, of course, but how many reviewers would it take to cover the web as it now sits - google just told me it is "searching 3,083,324,652 web pages".
Blogging and its relatives are probably far more powerful when allied with automatic page classification and ranking.
Suppose Google builds an extended blog format - perhaps with XML tags - and a tool to make entries using that format. This already gives them some more meta information that could be useful in building better searches.
And, as has been said, the ability to track the activity in a blog on a (sort of) real time basis gives them the capability to track news as it happens.
But there are more possibilities yet - just knowing the times entries are made gives you some information. If you have a blog coming from a specific user (track by cookies or even IP) you can correlate blog entries with google searches and with the user looking at other blogs. Sure, much of this will be uncorrelated, but add it all together and I suspect it will start to show interesting patterns. And much of this kind of information will only be available to an organization hosting the blogs.
I think there are other ways to extract more information from a blogger as well.
This could pay off big for Google as a search engine and augmented information indexer - most especially if they can get the human factors right and tempt a few more people into blogging.
(There's more - and in some rather more specific domains and contexts - but google seems uninterested in hiring me, so I don't see any good reason in giving them my ideas.)
It's a rule. Commercial success and non-Open-Source-itude are considered evil
Your argument is just plain stupid. I'm an open source Zelot, yet I have a commercial company that makes money. The rallying-cry of open source people is that software copyright should not be used to generate "monopoly" situations where innovation and consumer options are stifled.
Furthermore, just beacuse we are pro-Google now doesn't mean that they can't become evil 10 years from now. If they abuse the power they get, and try to concentrate further power, then they may very well become an "evil empire" and chastized quite appropriately.
The core problem here is that the "ideal" state for a company is a "monopoly". Yet, monopolies are the cancer of a free commercial marketplace. In the same way human biology works this way, we want to live as long as possible; yet, when a group of cells achieves immorality (a condition we call a cancer) they become dangerous to the body as a whole. At first glance it seems strange, but really it is a *ballence* which we require. A company can be commercially successful without being a monopoly, and this is the overall ideal state of the system; lots of successful, but competing companies.
ultimately, the quality of the product matters.
You are forgetting two crucial factors.
First, you neglect that how the product is made is an essential (yet invisible) quality of the product itself. If I pollute the environment or abuse the marketplace via monopoly rents then this "damage" to society may very well trump the "quality of the product". If I take advantage of children in slave labor to make shoes, then no matter how good the shoes are... the company that made them is "evil" without a doubt.
Secondly, in our domain, the primary value of software is not intrinsic, instead it is proporational to the number of people who have adoped the software; the value of Microsoft Windows is much more proporational to the third-party applications that run on it rather than the code base itself, in a similar way the primary value of Microsoft Office is the number of business associates who also use the software, who can assist your usage of the software and who can read your files. Don't confuse the "network effect" with the value of the network itself. VHS was worse technology than Betamax, but VHS won for a single reason -- it had a better distribution channel for the tapes, in other words, the value of VHS was the movies that it can play, not necessarly how well VHS plays those movies.
The world isn't white and black, it's a mixture of greys.
You're assuming google is buying blogger to improve google's services.
But it's likely google wants to improve blogger's services, and that may be the main game: if google's own resources can dramatically improve blogger, then a strong synergy exists after all.
What do people blog about? Recent events.
What is the world's best source of info on recent events? Google.
Google can integrate its data into the blogger UI to structure blogs, possibly link between them, etc. This in turn will improve google's own services. As you say, that part could be done by spiders. BUT by no means as effectively as a situation where the blog data itself is directly linked to google's records before it is is even published to the web.
No doubt Google Blogs will be cool. It will also be the crystal clear sign of feature creep that even naysayers will have to recognize.
This topic is of some interest to me because I just wrote a Google Widget that uses the Google API to do geographic searches of Blogs (it was just in SlashBack; godseye).
No relationship to this acquisition, but it still felt vaguely spooky. I promise to get to the point. So skip the next paragraph.
It's also weird that people are talking about the Memex - just the other week I was chatting away in the Google API forums about amazon recommendation like incidental pathways found through client side bookmarking. And I actually think Google is going to continue to ignore client side improvements- but it will be interesting to see what new kinds of indexing they create for their own little ecosystem. Will they seperate semantic content?
The most striking part of all this is Google having a hand in the development of the Blogger API, which sets what is supposed to be evolving into an simple open standard for inter-blogware communication, invocation, et cetera. Some of the Google engineers must be pulling their hair out (yes, yes, I know that they're both brilliant and enlightened, but this is the chaotic frontier we're talking about here) trying to see where blogs / knowledge management systems (hello?) are taking the web as a whole in a hurry, search algorithms be damned.
Will Google also gain control of the syndication standards, whatever passes for RSS/XSS/whatever? How do you properly index ongoing permutations of feed standards, if everyone snarfs feeds, or if your base algorithms depend on pages mostly staying in one place? Maybe someone who feel that they know more about the future of syndication can enlighten.
--
Elwyn Jenkins, who is behind Google Village or Googlology Info Site wrote a comment about this story minutes after we both discovered Dan Gillmor's article. His comments are available at Google Buys Pyra: Fuel for The Blogging World!. Here are my comments about his story. "I agree with you, it's all about content. But there's a business aspect too. Larry and Sergey might run the technical show. But Eric Schmidt is here to take care of the business. And how Google will make money? By hosting bloggers for a fee? There were not so many paying customers for BlogSpot. And even imagine one million subscribers for $40 a year. That would not bring a great stream of revenue to Google. They must have an hidden idea."
That didn't even allow you to sort by price?
I don't see Amazon, Yahoo Shopping, PriceWatch losing much sleep over this half-baked turd.
What else does Google get out of this that they couldn't get without buying Pyra?
Instantaneous access to blogs as updated doesn't sound interesting until you imagine correllating that data. I know instant zeitgeist doesn't sound terribly interesting, but I think it will be.
For example, Pud over at FC could improve the value of his rumors, with questions that only he could answer. Perhaps he's already doing this: Is a batch of rumors about a new F*ck coming from a competitor's netblock or the company's own? What's the timespread? There are other interesting things to be found in that data, too.
Google could build a killer blogsite. They could cruise existing blogs. They must want existing content & users, already blogging, and not just their content, which they already have, or could have. They're already caching a significant portion of the net. Other thoughts?
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
A scoop!! A scoop!
The idea that bloggers are on the cutting edge of the news biz is hilarious.
Bloggers collect links, they do not typically report on the news. Conference blogging is a trvial exception.
I believe you are looking for the Blogger API.
Try waypath.com. Search blogs and link to related posts.
The announcement is very exciting - I was there when he made it.
But it's scary, too.
At the panel. "Doc" Searles praised GeoCities as being an early example of web apps helping people publish online - empowering folks to put their own shit out there.
As former Senior Web Developer for GeoCities, I appreciate his sentiment. That's why I loved working there - and what makes the Internet special.
On the Net - no matter how much big media wants to monopolize it as a pipe to deliver the same old content - the Net is about the uploads, not the downloads. It's about you, and me, and that grrrl over there.
I fervently hope the Google purchase of Pyra doesn't result in a Borg-like assimilation of Blogger.com; GeoCities _disappeared_ as a brand after we were assimilated by Yahoo!
If Blogger lowers the threshold by making web publishing as easy as sending an email, the other interesting tidbit that came out of the Blogosphere event was the demonstration of audio blogging from the folks from AudBlog.com.
Dial AudBlog, enter your s3kr!+ PIN on the cell phone, and you're on the air! You can hold up the phone to record events (this was the mind-blowing way they showed off the product) or talk to the hand to "tell your story."
If Blogger made self-publishing as easy as email AudBlog makes it easy as dialing a phone!
Congrats to the Pyra people, props to Doc, and good luck AudBlog!
we come in peace for all online
Pyra Labs, the creator of blogger, was funded by O'Reilly & Associates and others.
How did a venture company like Pyra Labs get funding from the "big" companies?
If I wanted to form a venture company (like Pyra Labs), how can I get funding from the "big" companies?
GOOGLE ARE BUILDING THE MEMEX.
They've got one-to-one connections. Links. Now they've realised - like Ted Nelson - that the fundamental unit of the web isn't the link, but the trail. And the only place that's online is... weblogs.
There are two levels to the trail:
1 - what you see 2 - what you do ("And what you feel on another track" -- what song is that?)
And the trail is, in its simplest form, organised chronologically. Later it gets more complex. Look to see Google introduce categories based on DMOZ as a next step.
So, the GOOGLE TOOLBAR tracks everything you do on the web, giving you low-level anonymous trails tying the web together. These are analagous to the strings of physics, or the rows and columns of Excel. This is 1, what you see.
Now there's the semantics, the meaning extracted from these, and that's done with the human mind. This is 2, what you do. What you choose to elevate. Now these trails are the basic units.
The combination of the two is startling.
Oh, and you can analyse how people search to add extra data. Stop and start points.
Imagine, searching at Google, and then:
this trail is highly followed
do you only want to see what people suggest, or where people went?
here's a worn track in the interweb. Follow the Google Pixie!
this trail is uncommon, but made by someone we see (by your weblog) that you value
And next, it's the true Memex. The Google appliance based on microfiche, punchcards and cameras...
... Jesus cried with a loud voice: Lazarus, come forth; the bug hath been
found and thy program runneth. And he that was dead came forth...
-- John 11:43-44 [version 2.0?]
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