Media junkie… Me?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I don’t know how, but all of a sudden this blog has started to generate a lot of interest. I’ve been quietly typing away, on the train, in my spare moments, and often late into the night, for over two years now and what started out as a project to store my notes in a format that was accessible from wherever I happened to be working has become something that I can no longer devote as much time to as I would like. I try to leave tech news to other sites that are better able to cover it but I do occasionally write some opinion posts in between the technical discoveries and presentation brain dumps that I hope are useful to others too.

Quite how they found me I’m not sure, but two journalists have been in touch this week – the first looking for a Windows Vista opinion piece which will hopefully appear in next week’s Computer Weekly and the second writing an article on blogging for this Saturday’s Independent.

Of course, the articles might never appear (or I might not be quoted) but it’s good for my ego to have the occasional burst of minor fame (I was quoted in IT Week a couple of years back, although that was a deliberate PR exercise by my employer at the time), but sadly I won’t be giving up the day job just yet!

Does the world really need another search engine?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Windows Live
Two of London’s free newspapers for commuters (Metro and The London Paper) are featuring wrap-around ads for Microsoft’s Windows Live Live Search today. The front page is almost entirely blank, save for a search box which asks “Does the world really need another search engine?”:

Does the world really need another search engine?

As Google and Yahoo! have once again extended their lead on Microsoft in the search engine rankings and Google has become the most visited website in the UK, I have to wonder if Microsoft should be asking themselves the same question. It’s all very well emphasising the extra features that Live Search offers – like controlling the size of the results on a single page, hovering over images for more detail, providing bird’s eye views to accompany maps and directions (all very well for pilots and birds, but not so useful on the ground) and personalising results; however, of all organisations, Microsoft should be well aware that it’s not necessarily the product with the best feature set that gains the most market share. Having said that, Google came from nowhere a few years back – and who uses the pioneering Lycos, Excite and Altavista search engines today?

Live Search is certainly impressive and Microsoft’s ads state that:

“To us, search is in its infancy. This is just the start.”

Maybe Live Search will push Google into doing some work to integrate their disparate Web 2.0 applications (many of which seem to be in a perpetual beta state); in the meantime, the message seemed to be lost as I observed commuters at Canary Wharf – one of London’s major commercial centres – simply flicking past the four full page ads to get to the news.

Give Live Search a try at live.com.