Daniel Staemmler

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Things about eLearning, Educational Technology, and more…

Goolge – Search Goliath and Ad Network

Wow, have you paid attention to the recent earnings of Google? For the first quarter of 2007 “… Google reported profit of $396.2 million” (Source: washingtonpost.com) which is almost double from the earnings last year in the same time period. This booted out Yahoo’s profit which “… dropped by nearly a third from a year” (Source: CNET News.com). That is a lot of profit for Goliath under the search engines and most of the earnings are from online advertisement not only on the Google website but also on their partners sites.

Why am I writing about this? I stumbled upon a blog entry by Jeol Downs from Answerbag.com (Referred by: We are all end users…) with the title “Why Google doesn’t care about Search“. And even though I like a lot of the services that Google offers I think he makes a very good point in naming Google an ad network. Don’t get me wrong I use a lot of Google’s services and like them and I also understand very well money has to be made somehow. The recent acquisition of Adscape for $23 million by Google (Source: TechCrunch) also sends a clear sign into the direction of building a stronger and powerful ad network.

Update 5/25/2007: I found an article from Ionut Alex Chitu with the title “What has Google done is Search lately?” that is contradicting the above mentioned article from Jeol Downs and argues that Google does a lot to improve their search functions and results.

Filed under: Search Engines, WorldWideWeb , , ,

One question easily answered: What are you doing?

Twitter LogoAfter a lot of things have been written about Twitter and it’s community that answers only one simple question: “What are you doing?” I checked this “… social networking and micro-blogging service“, that even has an entry at Wikipedia already, out. I have to admit that I have checked Twitter out a little while ago and was wondering what makes people interested in continuously post what they are doing right now. For example, are you interested who is having lunch right now. No problem. A visit at Twitterment, a Twitter search service, will reveal who is lunching right now (Source: Binaryplex.com ,Library Clips).  Okay, now the question remains what are people doing right now and where geographically wise are they doing it? The answer is out there and Twittervision.com is a pretty neat mash-up application developed by David Troy that will show what is going on in real time at the Twitter community.
Alright, and for those of you who want to ban Twitter to their Apple Macintosh computer their is the free software application Twitterrific out there (Source: Twitter Blog). If you know of a similar application for Microsoft please add a comment to this post and let other readers know about it.

What makes Twitter so popular? I think it is very simple, we are always interested in what our friends are doing. A lot of times it is “… the first thing we ask when we call someone” (Source: Read/WriteWeb).  A little snipped of text provides us with the real time information and a simple social need id fulfilled.

However, I have not decided yet for myself if I am going to use Twitter to keep my friends and readers up to date with my activities. If so you probably will see it on this blog in one of the sidebars.

Filed under: How-To, Search Engines, Social Networks, Technology, Web 2.0 , , , , , , , ,

Unlimited online storage space, interested?

John Kremer, the vice president of Yahoo, announced at the end of last month that Yahoo Mail is lifting the limit of their inbox storage space. Wow, I remember quiet well that I did search for unlimited storage space for backup copies of presentations, manuscripts, photos and the occasional music file. Right now they are scattered all over the place.

However,  Asher Moses wrote in The Age an announcement about this and refers to comScore Media Metrix stating that Gmail “… has 51 million users worldwide, [and] offers 2.8GB of space; Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail offers 2 GB and has 228 million users.” What I personally didn’t know so far is, that Yahoo is the leader with 250 million users of their mail service. Which makes sense, since they have been around the longest, for 10 years to be precise.

The question remains, how long it takes for Gmail and Window’s Live Mail to catch up or offer features that convince users to use their services over the one from Yahoo Mail?

Filed under: How-To, Technology, WorldWideWeb , , , ,

A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievement, Challenges and New Opportunities

Dan Atkins, John Seely Brown and Allen Hammond compiled for the Hewlett Foundation a report about the Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative. Open Educational Resources (OER) have been mentioned in this blog before and this report is a great and worth reading addition to it.

Filed under: Evaluation, Open Access / Open Content, eLearning , , , , , ,

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