Meet Gillette, your new government agency

Got to love the TSA (<-- link love!).

I am on my way to Web2Expo. In the spirit of the Butterfly Effect, a car crashing into an aircraft in Paris delayed all flights from Israel to NY. That's a good start.

Spent hours on the phone, got on standby, bla bla, made it to an alternate flight (no, it wasn't easy), missed the connection to SF by 15 minutes, bla bla, new connection delayed by 1.5 hours (and still counting). But the real highlight so far was the TSA supervisor.

Following the New and Advanced "3-1-1" branded TSA rules about clear, 3 oz bottles, I did exactly that - got several clear 3oz bottles, and put the stuff that I need to take with me when I travel in them. And this was fine with the TSA during the last 3 or 4 trips.

But today, they realized that actually, since these bottles do not have a commercial company label attached to them, they don't know what its inside and therefore cannot allow them.

You have to ponder. Now, if I wanted to do evil, how hard would it be for me to take a commercial bottle with a nice label, empty it and fill it with a malicious substance?

And is Gillette now a government agency, in charge of approving liquid substances on board?

And by how much exactly did the cosmetics companies profits increase as a result of these amazingly smart decisions by the TSA?

Technorati tags: rant, TSA, Web2Expo

FoxyTunes Planet is awesome!

FoxyTunes opened up FoxyTunes Planet, which has been in a private beta for a while.

Check it out, it's pretty amazing.

When I first heard about it, I thought it'd be a complementary service to their popular browser add-on. Turned out it's actually a full featured, rich, personalized all-in-one standalone music portal.

I love the implementation. Again, when I saw the earlier versions I thought it's too much. But looking at the final result, it's slick, clean, well thought of. Kudos to Alex Sirota and the team!

 

Technorati tags: FoxyTunes, FoxyTunes Planet, Music

From Manhattan to London, The Google Way

Would you like to get from Manhattan to London? Check out the route suggested by Google Maps:

In case the drawing isn't clear, check out step 14 in the instructions:

That's right. Have a good swim!

(Courtesy of Gilad Judes)

Technorati tags: Google Maps

A Mega-Crawler for the rest of us

Do you get this urge sometimes, to query the entire web for something?

Do you wish you had your own Mega-Crawler?

I mean, it's not like you can go to Google and type in some box

SELECT TAG
FROM PAGES
WHERE DOMAIN(PAGE-URL) IS IN  "domain1, domain2, domain3"

Lunch took a long time today, so Eran and myself had some time to brainstorm a bit about a crawler-for-the-rest-of-us:

• Crawler code would be hosted on Amazon's EC2
• The data would be stored on Amazon's S3
• Anyone can add "post-crawl-processors" which will post-process crawled pages (build a full text index, extract microformats, calculate rank...). The persistent data generated by the post-processors will also be hosted on S3.
• Anyone can submit URLs to be crawled. The system will automatically fork from these URLs to any other discovered URL. Eventually, the entire web will be crawled.
• API for querying the crawl data, or the data generated by the post-crawl-processors.

Who will pay for this? Companies and organizations who wish to use this data:

• The basic crawling code will be divided among the "subscribers". Initially, small database, low costs. Later, larger database, more subscribers, costs (hopefully) remain low.
• The cost of a post-processor (CPU, storage) is divided by the number of subscribers the post-processor has. The more useful it is, the more subscribers will use it, and the less each will pay. If it's a proprietary post-processor, no need to share it, but it will naturally cost more (being used by only 1 subscriber).
• Retrieving query result will cost by bandwidth.

The general idea is pay-as-you-use, with prices going down as more subscribers use the service. No one makes money (well, except for Amazon of course), everyone sharing costs, IP (post-processors) can be shared or protected. The more you consume, the more you pay. The more you share, the less you pay.

This is very rough of course. But what do you think? Is it feasable? Is it interesting?

Technorati tags: crawler, mega-crawler, search, open source

Choose-your-own Google Ads

I was reading this blog (wonderful source for photography tips, thanks Gabi!) when I noticed something I haven't seen before:

Notice the "Ads by Google: View ads about: [   ]" area. Once you type in a search term, you see page with Google text ads related to the search term.

Is this a Google Ads feature I missed or some kind of Google Ads experiment? The concept of asking the user to proactively ask to see ads on a specific topic is interesting, to say the least.

 

Technorati tags: Google, Ads, Advertisement, AdSense

Oh, the Places you'll go!

I received this wonderful gift from Jonny Sacks (our newest board member) -  "Oh, the Places You'll Go" by Dr. Seuss:

And will you succeed?

Yes! You will, indeed!

(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed)

Of course, in real life, 90% (or is it %50) of

startups fail. But, as I learned from Maya in the Social Web session, "statistics lie"!

Technorati tags: Dr. Sauss, Jonathan Sacks, Maya Lotan, Startup

KinnerNet 2007: RobotsFireEatersPowerToolsDragRacePeoplePeoplePeoplePeople

Technorati tags: kinnernet, kinnernet2007, kinnernet07, unconference, israel

 I got back from KinnerNet 2007 (the un-conference created by Yossi Vardi) on Saturday, but the effects still did not wear off. It was an exhilarating event, a 3 days (and nights) circus made of robots, fire eaters, drag races, jugglers, creativity and people – lots of fascinating, special, creative and positive people.

Only yesterday did I finish uploading the pictures to Flickr – all 213 of them out of, well, it’s embarrassing to say how many :)

Don’t miss Lior (Wishood) and Gil (UrbanSeeder) ’s cool Supermarket 2.0 video, and Eyal Gever (Gizmoz) and Gideon Weiler’s KinnerNet cult video.

The TheMarker COM.Vention conference was immediate following KinnerNet, on Sunday & Monday. After attending several amazing un-conferences, it becomes harder and harder to put up with the artificial rigid structure of conventional conferences. Suddenly it seems ridiculous to have to put up with fixed length, must-attend, one-speaker sessions and pre-planned orchestrated and exclusive panels.