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Making It Easier for Blogs to Link to Blogs Instead of News Sites

So Robert Scoble got upset the other day about people linking to major media sites instead of other blogs.

It seemed interesting to me. I started to think about the issues involved, mostly because it didn’t seem like natural behavior. But then it hits you like a brick, all of the major search engines have news and search search from their main pages, while only Ask.com has blog search on it’s home page (they should move it above news). Yahoo!, Google and Live Search do not. In fact Yahoo! and Live Search would have to acquire or develop such technology.

As you may recall, I have a history of suggesting search engine home page changes that become reality.

So, I’d like to please ask all of the major search engines to add blogs as a major top line category (to the left of or above news) and potentially think about creating options to merge blogs and news into one category if a user desires (I would find this helpful). If the Internet is all about user generated content, shouldn’t the major search engines reward and make that the easier default view?

It will look like this (though a little neater, I’m no graphic artist!).

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WSJ Writes Unfavorable Yahoo! Article

Kevin Delaney wrote a Wall Street Journal article today that rips on Yahoo! for the way it is handling the conversion to customers.

This flies in the face of all the articles and public opinion I’ve witnessed in person and online. I’m starting to think the Wall Street Journal is a bit guilty of bashing Yahoo! while letting the issues of another certain search engine slide completely. This is unfortunate.

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Best Blog Post of 2006 (non-search engine related)

On October 9th, I wrote this about Kathy Sierra’s “Knocking the Exuberance Out of Employees”.

It’s a great post and it relates to a lot of problems in the business world in terms of having innovative customer service. Let’s hope her post prompted some people to realize that operating in this manner is a mistake.

Congrats!

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Q&A With Jimmy Wales On Search Wikia(wikiasari)

Ever since the Times of London first reported Jimmy Wales intention to start a search engine, the blogosphere has been ablaze with speculation and misinformation about the concept (which is much earlier stage than first reported).

While considerable questions remain, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land did a good job getting some clarification from Jimmy and then giving his opinions as only Danny can.

I think the thing that everyone overlooks here is that Mr. Wales says in response to Danny about ads, “There are no immediate plan to sell ads, so for now we’re not too focused on that. If we don’t build something useful, selling ads on it is sort of a moot point.”

In my opinion, what the search industry should be most worried about is if Mr. Wales built a “good” search engine which was not at all focused on monetization. Now that could be actually quite disruptive if searchers were to migrate to it under some purest movement of some sort. I think the odds of that are considerably more significant than a great search engine killer emerging here.

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AI Gateway Accepted to Major University Technology Incubator

AI Gateway, a development stage search portal and ad network with a truly unique value added technology, was accepted into a major university incubator today. Founder Joe Holcomb put significant work into this effort and gave me a shout to let me know that this goal has been reached. 

AI Gateway is currently seeking angel funding and or an aggressive venture capital participant willing to fund a predevelopment concept based on a unique business plan that starts to generate revenue quickly upon completion of a beta product.