If you don’t know what SERP is, don’t bother reading on.  But – if you care about where your site shows up in the search engines, take a look at Ted Rheingold (CEO of Dogster’s) post on Recommended Free Online SEO Tools.  I’d spend some time on this but I’ve got to go pet Brooks.

Ok – I’m stretching for a clever title for this post.  Several weeks ago I saw two great technical posts from friends. 

The first is from Stan James – the founder of Lijit.  Stan was fiddling around with the idea of short URLs which have been made popular by TinyURL and recently amplified by Twitter.  This is the "short" problem – simply, how do you turn a long url like https://www.feld.com/archives/2007/12/the_glue_that_b.html into something manageable like https://www.feld.com/5v00v that is guaranteed to be unique for all cases.  Stan walks you through the code at Geekout: How To Make Short URL’s.  Yes – it’s simple – and I’m surprised more web services aren’t doing something like this.

The second is from Nick Bradbury – the creator of FeedDemon.  Nick is an integral part of the NewsGator software brain trust and has been working hard on several things, including the attention algorithms being used in NewsGator’s products.  In response to the question "I’d be interested in more detail on how you compute the scores [which determine a feed’s attention]. Nothing that gives away your competitive edge of course but just some generalizations of what you are tracking that amounts to attention" Nick responded by posting the current version of his algorithm.  As with all powerful things, it’s simple. 

While I’ve always been a code nerd (even though I can’t program for shit anymore I can read and appreciate a handful of languages), I’ve loved the evolution of code sharing via tech blogging.  I’ve always found that the most confident software developers are willing to share snippets of their code that do important things, in the same ways that experienced entrepreneurs are willing to share ideas.  It’s not the snippet or the idea – it’s the implementation of the entire thing that really matters.

Oracle buys BEA Systems for $8.5 billion.

Sun Microsoft Systems buys MySQL for about $1.0 billion.

Gregory Reyes – Brocade’s ex-CEO – gets 21 months in jail for backdating stock options.

What was it that Apple announced again yesterday?

Now that I use 267 different social networking tools, I’m confused.  I’ve got so many different "friends", but I don’t know how to differentiate between them.

My "friend" Dave Nolastnamesogoogledoesntindexme recently asked me if I have seen any moves toward private hierarchies of relationships.  Specifically he (and I) want to categorize my "friends" into a hierarchy that I get to create.  One example set might be (lover, buddy, friend, acquaintances, met once, jackass, enemy).  This "friend set" should be user customizable and private.

My head starts to hurt when I think about this across Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, Plaxo, Outlook, Gmail, Bebo, Dogster, Shelfari, …)  What a mess.

While I’d love a consolidation layer across all my social network (e.g. I want "one Dave Nolastnamesogoogledoesntindexme object"), I know I’m not going to get that anytime soon.  So – I’ll just settle for being able to create my own special unique proprietary private "friend hierarchy" within each social network tool.

I’m really pleased that Google has taken an aggressive position in fighting back against the Jarg search patent.  The Jarg patent is another absurd one and Google is on now on the receiving end of the same kind of patent troll (which – ironically – is being promulgated by a major university) action that has haunted Microsoft for a decade.

At some point I hope the folks at Google get motivated to really change the game here, like they have with so many things.  Google is one company that is well organized to dig up endless prior art to invalidate bogus software patents.  This has to become an organizational mission, not just the domain on the Google legal group.

In the spirit of "do no evil", if Google gets the religion that software patents are evil, some interesting things might happen.

How about a portable turntable scratch pad for playing Guitar Hero.

Or even better – using a real guitar to play something that looks like Guitar Hero.

Nah – I think I’ll just stick with my Internet Connected Refrigerator that has an iPod port and a tablet PC connector.  My veggies stay fresher when they are listening to Nirvana.

Tom Evslin picked up my challenge to help invalidate the proposed patent in my post Have You Ever Coded a Progress Bar?  Tom has prior art going back to 1987 from a program he wrote called Desktop Express (Dow Jones Software). 

He writes his thoughts and how he’s nailed 5 of the 20 claims in his post Patent Absurdity – A Possible Cure.  Tom got on the Peer-to-Patent site and entered a detailed challenge to five of the claims. 

Thanks Tom!  Anyone else game to play?

I didn’t listen to any voicemail in 2007.  I got plenty of them – but I didn’t listen to any of them.  Yet I got 100% of the information that people left to me.  I discovered a magical system that transcribes voicemails to emails.  And it doesn’t involve anyone that works for me.

I’ve been searching for a speech-to-text voicemail conversion system for a while.  I approached the problem incorrectly – I assumed that it was a technology issue.  I’d periodically come across something that tried to do what I wanted but truly sucked.  For a while I had my assistant transcribe my voicemails, but that was tedious, a poor use of her time, and often had a lag if the call was after hours or when she was in the middle of other stuff.  Plus, she hated doing it (think "extremely tedious part of the job – yuck.")

In my quest for a solution I came across SimulScribe early in 2007.  It’s exactly what I want.  For $30 / month I have my voicemails immediately transcribed and sent to my email account with the text and an attachment of the message (if – for some reason – I have to listen to it to pick up a nuance that the transcription missed.)

The real aha was that SimulScribe didn’t actually try to solve the hard technology problem (in this case – translating voice to text.)  They simply outsourced it to India.  Transcription has been around for a long time (it’s what your doctor’s office has been doing for decades) – using the Internet, email, low cost outsourcing, and a simple web service makes this a marvelous solution for the voicemail haters of the world.  I wrote about an analogous dynamic on the post Manually Automate Your API.  While it’s nice to believe that technology can be applied to processing any and all data, there is an old fashioned way to get there quickly.  In some cases, like SimulScribe, it’s quite elegant.

Other folks are using this same approach, including SpinVox and Jott.  I’m been happiest with SimulScribe for voicemail and can’t imagine living without it.  I look forward to 2008 being another voicemail free year.

It appears that Vonage had something in its patent portfolio that Nortel didn’t like.  Several weeks ago Nortel sued Vonage for patent infringement.  They just settled for a limited cross license to three patents.  Good for Vonage for standing up to Nortel.