James Stoup has written an interesting piece speculating that Flash will be the new storage medium for laptops. He bases his speculation on the recent Samsung announcement that 16GB flash drives that can be combined to form one larger 32GB drive.
James then notes that many current iBooks ship with 40gb hard drives so a 32gb capacity would be close enough to that to not matter to many people. Also, flash memory has advantages over hard disks - it can be read from and written to faster than hard disks, it consumes far less power than hard disks and is much smaller - allowing for smaller laptops with longer battery life.
However, these flash drives won’t be available until next year and does anyone really think that 32gb will be enough capacity for a laptop in 2006?
To be fair to James - I do think he is correct overall - i.e. I do believe that flash memory will replace hard drives in laptops but I think it is a couple of years out yet.
I’m off to the IIA Congress tomorrow - I’m looking forward to hearing some of the talks (esp. Tom Murphy’s talk on business blogging) and meeting up with as many of you as attend.
I see Michele is going and Ed has already told me he’ll be there too.
I’ll have my mobile with me so feel free to text me if you’d like to meet up (086 384 0828).
Some of the speakers for this year’s IT@Cork Annual Conference have been announced today.
The main headliners are Robert Scoble and Charles Handy - Robert will be a big draw for anyone with an interest in technology while Charles will be a major draw for anyone with an interest in business management. Fortunately the two won’t be talking at the same time so delegates won’t have to decide which to attend.
Another big name at the conference is Eoin O Driscoll - Eoin will be chairing the afternoon session - “Growing Irish Technology Businesses�.
It should be a very interesting conference.
[Disclosure - I am on the steering committee of IT@Cork]
I have written recently about Yahoo!’s extremely shady business practices (working with the Chinese government to help jail journalists, building spyware into their IM client, and funding spyware developers) but today they launched an innovative search recently called Yahoo! Instant Search which appears to be quite good!
Built with AJAX - the search box attempts to give you a single answer to your query in a “speech bubble” before you even press enter!
Stephen Hood, Product Manager for Instant Search, gives some other examples to try:
- south beach diet (this one gives you three interesting results as you type)
- 701 1st ave sunnyvale (Yahoo!’s address; try your own address too!)
- san francisco giants scores (should be interesting to watch now that Barry’s back)
- time in copenhagen (in case you’re planning a trip)
- katrina (Yahoo! News results are appearing because the hurricane is a top story right now)
- ninjas (do you want real ultimate power? I’m not sure I do…)
- convert 100 dollars to euros
Personally I am rarely looking for a single answer to a search query - generally I am researching a topic and I want many opinions/options as opposed to one but I can see situations where this would speed up some serch queries and, in any case, if you want more answers, just click the “search the web” button!
Loath though I am to admit it because of Yahoo!’s lack of corporate ethics, I like this innovation.
An important feature of Google’s new Blog Search to be aware of is, as Niall Kennedy and Damien Mulley have noted, it is not really a Blog Search - it is a Feed Search.
This may sound like semantics but there is an important distinction - many bloggers only publish summaries of their posts in their feeds (I’m looking at you Damien and you too Bernard!) - they will now be penalised as Google will only index the summaries of their posts - not the entire post.
Another reason to publish full feeds!
Btw, kudos to Google - they updated their index on this blog just over an hour after I posted that it was well out of date - they are obviously listening.
Google’s long anticipated blog search was launched overnight (I guess that means they’re not buying Technorati then Tom!).
Google have made a faq about their blog search available where they say:
There are a few different ways you can get to Blog Search:
* blogsearch.google.com (Google-style interface)
* search.blogger.com (Blogger-style interface)
* The Blogger Dashboard
* The Navbar on any Blog*Spot blog
It’s the same search in each place, no matter how you get to it. The Navbar, however, provides two buttons: one to search the blog you are currently viewing, and one to search all blogs.
This is a big move for Google and one which is long overdue - however they still have some work to do on it - I did a search for blog author “Tom Raftery” (vain or what?) and the most recent post I found was one written on the 12th of August! was This one of the last posts I wrote before I went on holidays for two weeks but I have been back now for over two weeks and Google’s blog Search appears to be blissfully unaware of this! Many people would say this is a good thing!
It does point to an underlying flaw somewhere in their algorithms though.
Google also allows for subscribing to blog searches similar to Technorati and other blog search engines:
At the bottom of each page of search results you can find several links, offering the top 10 or 100 results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just grab the links from here and subscribe to them in the news aggregator of your choice and you will get updates whenever new posts are made that match your query.
Hat tip to Memeorandum
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