The blog market on a country by country basis

Here’s some interesting market information -for people in the Blogging business. Clearly, blogging is a US phenonmenon, and it’s spreading faster in Asia than it is in Europe. Africa lags behind, as usual.

Seronio wins!

Isaias Seronio, the Philippines lone entry in the Men’s Singles at the Asian Table Tennis Championships won his first match against the Mongolian entry, Tumurbaatar Enkh-Tur, 4-1! Today he faces the youngster Yang Zi from Singapore at 4:20 pm at Table 8 in Jeju, South Korea. Our prayers are with him. Yang Zi is a superior player and it should be an interesting match. Isaias is ranked 7th on the Philippine National team. If he somehow hurdles the match against the Singaporean, he then faces either Achanta Kamal of India or Ahmedov Rashid of Turkmenistan. The winner of that group ends up playing Hao Shuai of China. And if by some miracle Isaias should make it past Hao Shuai, he will then find Wang Liqin waiting for him in the semifinals.

Yahoo is coming on strong!

I’m very impressed with the way Yahoo has come on really strong. First they acquire Flickr, then they introduce tag-based searching in MyWeb 2.0 (which, I believe will be a far more efficient way of searching than using google in the near future, if only because it is humans that are tagging webpages, rather than google’s algorithms). Yahoo local is really powerful too (too bad it isn’t available locally). Yahoo Adsense is now beta, and they promise to release it at then end of the year. Yahoo 360 is a worthwhile challenger to Myspace, and now we see Yahoomail leapfrog Gmail! Holy cornball batman!

As anyone who’s used both Gmail and Yahoo Mail knows, one of the standout features of Gmail is its search ability. But Yahoo seems to have leapfrogged Gmail’s search, for now, anyway. The Sunnyvale company has rebuilt its search capabilities, expanding its indexing to include photos and attached documents, and designing a user interface aimed at making it easy to drill down to the messages you want to find.

There are lots of little improvements to Yahoo’s mail search that make it far smarter. But especially clever are the photo and attachment views. A single mouse-click will bring to the surface all the photos in your in-box, displayed as a page of thumbnails. Ditto for document attachments.

Yahoo has also added a side panel that lets users refine search results by sender, date or other criteria.

Power users can also build more precise search queries right in the search box, such as “from:michael” (only messages from michael) or “tahoe -from:bob” (anything on “tahoe” not from “bob”)

It’s incremental innovation, but important as it helps nudge up the bar for the whole industry.

Rebuilding the search capability was a massive undertaking, Yahoo’s Drew Garcia tells us. Until today, Yahoo only indexed the subject and sender fields of an email message. Now, the company is vowing to go back and index the entirety of every stored email message and attachment in every Yahoo Mail account in the world. That’s many, many terabytes of data stored across a dozen data-centers. Because of the scope of that task, Yahoo says it will take several months to roll out the new search capabilities. Some users will see it starting tonight. Others will have to wait.

The original article is available here.

.XXX underscores US control over the DNS

James Seng makes an excellent point about how this entire .XXX domain episode highlights one thing - that it’s really the US that’s in charge of the DNS - not ICANN.

James goes on to say

why are we wasting time in ICANN? The industry, registries, registrars and also ccTLDs should start hiring their own lobbists in Washington now!

Want to raise VC cash for your company?

Here’s an article that tells you what the Sand Hill Road VCs are looking for.

Podcasting Hype

I have a lot of respect for Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger. But I have very serious doubts about his new Podcasting venture, Odeo.

Sure, the iPod is big, and yes - there are lots of people who take hour-long commutes the way Ev used to do from Google in Mountain View to San Francisco, but I don’t think there are many people who are “type A” enough to want to listen to podcasts rather than good music, or rather than lose themselves in their thoughts at the end of a busy day.

So when really impressive people like Mitch Kapor (lotus 123) and Tim O Reilly (O Reilly books) fork over good money as seed capital for Odeo, I can only shake my head. Because of the impressive work Ev has done on Blogger, I won’t rule him out just yet, but let’s see if he has something else up his sleeve?

The only angle I can see is

1) iPod will soon support Video.
2) Odeo uses the same technology to distribute videos (as it uses for podcasts)
3) Odeo inserts video ads into the video stream.

but that seems so far from Odeo’s vision…

Bloglines

It’s not often that I rave about a website, but bloglines.com is truly life-altering technology. The time will come when most of us will rely on blogs as our primary source of information - rather than the Inquirer or Philippine Star. Why? Because blogs are news that have been filtered by people whom we know to be authorities in their own fields. PDI, on the other hand, as well as most of the local press, does very cursory fact-checking on its stories. (I learned this first-hand when the local press would write about me). So if I hear a story in PDI about a new rule on VoIP, I prefer to wait and see what my brother’s blog would have to say about the issue.

Today, about 40% of my news comes from blogs. 40% comes form online sources like cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, and - of course - espn.com. The other 20% comes from print (Time, PDI, etc). I think the time will come when 70% is derived from blogs. With technology like bloglines.com (which is an RSS-feed aggregator), I’m able to read far more blogs than I normally would have time for.

Check it out!

Make a skype call on your Nokia mobile!

Useful Apps, from Handango, is a Symbian client that works on most types of Nokia phones. The mobile connects to your PC notebook via Bluetooth, and a Useful Server (running on your PC) processes the voice packets and interfaces with the Skype Client on your PC. This is excellent if you travel a lot or go to conferences with free Wifi. Merely leave your PC running, and you can walk about the conference (or your hotel room) and receive (as well as make outbound calls) via Skype! (When you see the $$ Globe and Smart charge for roaming, you’ll immediately see the benefits!)

There’s also a DECT phone solution for those who need greater range that what bluetooth offers.

Government to back off in regulating ccTLDs

I just love it when I know I’m right, and everyone else thinks I’m wrong. Or crazy.
In 2000 people thought it was absurd to put PHone features in the DNS. We were pilloried in the local press for this. I think we counted no less than 60 negative stories. One particularly vocal critic went on to say that “we [the Philippines] would become the laughingstock of asia”. Yet a few months back we saw ICANN issue not just one but two domains for phones - the .mobi and .tel domains!

And in ‘99, fellow ccTLDs were panicking as governments hovered above, threatening to seize control of “the national public resource”. A few actually signed tri-partite contracts with their government and ICANN. So it’s quite interesting to spot the bellwether signals that show change is in the air. The first was Paul Verhoef’s statement in Cape Town that ICANN will not intervene in the event of a dispute between the ccTLD and the Government. Then, less than 2 months ago, the Bush Government went out and said that the US will never relinquish control of the Root Servers. Now we see the University of Ottawa Law Journal publsh a paper, that essentially says “there is no point in the Government regulating its ccTLD”. Beautiful.

The paper is available here.

Here is an excerpt:

Several arguments can be brought forward in favour of increased gov-
ernment regulation of CIRA and of the .ca domain-name space. Yet this paper
argues that none of these arguments is really strong enough to warrant govern-
ment regulation. Such arguments as the qualification of ccTLDs as national or
public resources are weakened by examples of countries “selling out” their
domain names and marketing them as generic names. While domain names are
important for internet communication in general, specific domain names, such as
.ca, are not. Therefore, they cannot be seen as a public resource. Another argu-
ment against government intervention is that there are already policies and pro-
cedures in place like the CIRA dispute-resolution process that deal with certain
issues arising in the context of domain names.

Furthermore, government regulation cannot be justified on accountabil-
ity grounds. Even if domain registries do in fact make public policies, the power
to make such policies is a consequence of users allowing their computers to “lis-
ten” to their name servers and of users thereby assenting to the way that domain
registries administer the name space. Given the fact that the infrastructure con-
fers such a built-in freedom of choice, governments should allow the system to
regulate itself and should abstain from imposing their own representative
democracy over the existing grass-roots, democratic architecture of the DNS.

If the Canadian government were nevertheless to choose to regulate, it
would face some further difficulties. Legislation can effectively only be passed
within the boundaries already set by ICANN. Furthermore, as with many internet-
related issues, government regulation of a particular phenomenon within cyber-
space such as ccTLDs poses the problem of harmonizing this new and specific
regulation with the existing general law. Contracts, as a different way of influ-
encing CIRA in order to meet regulatory objectives, suffer from the same fault of
not involving ICANN and of therefore facing restrictions set by ICANN’s delega-
tion policies. Furthermore, if one justifies contractual regulation with the argu-
ment that CIRA administers a public resource and makes public policy, then the
question arises of whether such regulation can legally be delegated by entering
into contracts without greater public accountability and control.