Global Nerdy

The Blog Juice Calculator is an amusing diversion for the curious or those who like to obsess over their blog ranking and pageview counts. Given the URL of a weblog, this web application calculates its “juice” (that's street slang for “credibility”, “respect” or “influence” for our non-North American readers) on a scale of 0 to 10. The juice score is based on these factors:

   

       

       

   

   

       

       

   

   

       

       

   

   

       

       

   

   

       

       

   

Factor	Notes
Bloglines	Approximate number of people on Bloglines subscribed to the given blog. Accounts for 40% of the juice score.
Alexa	The Alexa rank for the given blog. Accounts for 15% of the juice score.
Technorati	The Technorati rank for the given blog. Accounts for 30% of the juice score.
Inbound links	The number of links pointing to the given blog, as reported by Technorati. Accounts for 15% of the juice score.

As points of comparison, here are the juice ratings for a few well-known blogs:

• Gizmodo: 9.8
• Boing Boing: 9.6
• Daily Kos: 9.2
• Scripting News: 8.8
• GigaOM: 8.5
• Scobleizer: 8.4
• SEOmoz: 7.4
• Gawker: 6.8
• tmz.com: 5.6

In case you were curious, this blog's juice score is currently 0.2. We've got our work cut out for us.

If you understand that Microsoft is still a software company at heart and look where the Windows Mobile group sits in the org, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the Zune/Phone strategy is. (if you still don’t get it, give me a call and I’ll walk you through it.) I’ve seen the next version of Windows Mobile and the version after that as well and I can tell you that they are very compelling stories for mobile devices going forward. If Microsoft can execute a proper marketing message around these devices with a legitimate Zune story, Microsoft will have the chance to be more than just a player amongst many in the mobile arena.

Sure the first iteration of Zune isn’t anything to email home about but then again, so were the first three versions of Windows and we all know how that story turned out in the end. Right?

Mebbe yes, mebbe no. As Joey's recent post pointed out, Microsoft has a tendency to stumble when it hits competition, so all the "ifs" around execution and marketing message are actually pretty big risks, given the cutthroat competition in the mobile business.

On the other hand, as Gartenberg points out in his quote (above), Microsoft's also got deep pockets. When they're in it for the long haul, they're willing to bleed red ink as long as their Windows and Office franchises keep on gushing cash. Microsoft's willing to lose money with every Zune player they ship for quite a while, if it means a successful defense against Apple in the digital home.

Link

Tags: Zune, Microsoft, Apple, iPod, digital home

Oh, thanks, George, write about the successful company and leave the topic of these guys to me, why don't you:

In the article The Secret Failures of Microsoft, Daniel Eran writes that the Beast of Redmond's fortunes are largely based not on their technical merit, but rather PC vendor laziness and the “OEM tax” that comes from including Windows with new PCs:

All of these partners hooked up with Microsoft simply because they had
no idea of what to do on their own. Few even experimented with their
own independent technology plans; they simply picked Microsoft because
the company seemed like a safe bet at delivering technology. They
obviously didn’t do their homework.

The article's main thrust is that when you consider areas beyond the desktop, where a more level playing field and actual competition exists, Microsoft fails more often than it succeeds. Eran walks through a short list of Microsoft's failures in consumer electronics — phones and handhelds, tablets and PDAs, various incarnations of WebTV and XBox (24 million units moved, but at a loss) — citing keyboards and mice as the only area where they've experienced commercial and critical success. All these serve as data points from which he makes the (rather easy) extrapolation that the Zune will be the next flop in the series.

While beyond the scope of Eran's article, one could easily apply the same thinking to their application development tools, another area where they face real competition. As with consumer electronics, they do well with input devices (Visual Studio, a tool with which even many die-hard open-source coders look upon with envy) and with SQL Server, a field where few competitors exist. When you consider the move away from their desktop stronghold and towards “Web 2.0”, the rest of the Redmond toolset offerings don't offer anything special to developers. Their efforts seem to be an attempt to build a slightly better Java — a strange aspiration, considering how some of Java's most vocal proponents and biggest contributors are migrating towards Ruby, functional programming and agile frameworks like Rails.

Google today retired the Writely name and look and feel, replacing it with the cumbersome "Google Docs & Spreadsheets."

Writely users won't notice much in the way of new functionality; Google's main focus has been combining users' lists of their documents and spreadsheets into one view and keying them off their Google account (which also means a single method for sharing documents and spreadsheets with collaborators). The top left corner of your Google pages is starting to get crowded with all the services Google offers: Google, Gmail, Calendar, Photos, Docs & Spreadsheets…

Google bought Writely in March of this year, so this integration took eight months. Pretty speedy. Yahoo!, by comparison, bought Oddpost in July 2004 but it took them until September 2006—over two years—to roll the new Ajax-ified Yahoo! Mail out to the general public. Similarly, other Yahoo! acquisitions like Flickr and del.icio.us still live in splendid isolation from Yahoo!'s other services.

An unfair comparison? Perhaps. Nevertheless, these kinds of comparisons are a big reason why people are saying Yahoo! is quickly losing its edge to Google.

Link.

Tags: Google, Writely, office 2.0, web 2.0, spreadsheets, Yahoo!

New USA BFFL, Libya, is joining Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, and Thailand in the One Laptop Per Child program.

The government of Libya reached an agreement on Tuesday with One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit United States group developing an inexpensive, educational laptop computer, with the goal of supplying machines to all 1.2 million Libyan schoolchildren by June 2008.

Discussions between the One Laptop project and the Libyan government began as part of work being done by the Monitor Group, an international consulting firm co-founded by the economist Michael E. Porter. It is now helping the Libyans develop a national economic plan.

A million Libyan kids will soon be disappointed to find out they can't play Half-Life 2: Episode One.

Link.

Tags: OLPC, Libya, globalization

WidSets: Microcontent for your mobile phone, delivered via widget-type…uh…widgets. The project comes out of Nokia, but is compatible with any Java MIDP 2.0 phone. Widgets—tiny targeted portals for content—seem ideal for mobile form factors. [via O'Reilly Radar]

Tags: widgets, microcontent, mobile, Nokia

“If you believe it’s the future of television, it’s clearly worth $1.6 billion,” Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said of YouTube. “If you believe something else, you could write down maybe it’s not worth much at all.”

So says Uncle Fester, and he's right.

I suppose everyone's got a take on Google's purchase of YouTube, so here's mine: $1.6 billion is an insane amount of money for Google to spend on YouTube, the stand-alone business model, but it's a pretty cheap way to buy yourself into the future of entertainment.

Google's core business is putting an audience in touch with the information they want, and slathering the whole experience with ads that are somehow tuned to the individual reader's interests. They're quickly dominating that business with regards to text, but the web sure isn't limited to alphanumeric characters. Since YouTube is beginning to dominate the way people search for, discover, watch, and share video on the internet, it makes sense for Google to bring that network into the fold. As I've said before, the new network looks more like Google than it does ABC, CBS, or NBC.

And while the existing dominant players in video entertainment (the broadcast and cable networks, and their production partners) slowly adopt digital distribution strategies, I suspect smaller independent producers will start to see the large reach, digital word-of-mouth, searchability, and potential for revenue presented by a Google/YouTube-mediated network as an increasingly interesting option.

Link.

Tags: Google, YouTube, media