Ideas and Stuff

So in the last week or so, I’ve noticed some press on serval ideas that I’ve been thinking about.

First there was freecache from archive.org, which is an attempt to offer cheap (free) a “demand-driven, distributed caching system”. I was talking with my former networks prof, Alex Lopez-Ortiz, about an idea similar to this.

Second, there was a NYTimes article about Google “preparing to introduce a powerful file and text software search tool for locating information stored on personal computers.” Personal seach really sucks in it’s current state. And even if Longhorn is going to address this problem, it is still far away, and will they really do it the way people want it. I’ve been talking about this for a little while now with serveral people including Phil Graham, the prof working on the Digital Junkyard project.

Third, Bill Gates has publicly addressed the use of weblogs in business. I researched and wrote a paper for my CS 480 course on the idea of using weblogs in business for knowledge management, project management, and customer communication.

Forth, and along the lines of my personal google idea and similar to Furl is Seruku which lets you create a local copy of all the pages you visit on the web. More on this at SearchBlog.

Ultimately the last three ideas here are linked to the idea of having a personal google that lets the you easily archive and search over all of the content you create (weblog, bulletin board, newsgroup, comments on websites, sent email, my documents, IM, etc.) and all of the content you read (browser, RSS reader, incoming email, etc.) Currently there are a bunch small applications that solve part of the problem, but eventually things will become unified. I think Google and Microsoft are in the best positions to pull this off. Microsoft seems to be aiming for this in Longhorn, whereas Google is trying get in front with some PC search software. With all the hype and brand recognition Google currently has, right now is the time to pull something like this off.