Latest entrant: Blekko

Possibly the most exciting entrant to the implicit web is the new search engine Blekko, which uses user-curated slashtags to make search more relevant. Disappointingly my blog wasn't crawled yet, but hopefully my creation of the /implicitweb slashtag is going to change that :-).

Better late than never ..

.. getting back to my blog after a long time I noted the subject is still central to what I do on a daily basis, although I now apply it to eCommerce at Shopping.com rather than Customer Service at Openwater.

I also discovered it ranks #6 for this term on Google, not bad :-). Perhaps not surprising Wikipedia ranks #1, funny I hadn't seen that before.

Awesome analysis of how Amazon controls e-commerce

Here's a great presentation laying out Amazon's strategy to control e-commerce http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/how-amazon-controls-ecommerce-slides/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Vertical Shopping Search as a Service

Here's an interesting news item about google's commerce search, searching in a SaaS model for shopping verticals. This is a serious threat to the Endeca's, Omnitures and FASTs of the world.

More intent -- will Yahoo! catch up with this?

Interesting overview of new features.

The best thing since sliced bread?

Read a seemingly very biased article about Sphinx.

The author seems to resent the Apache Foundation in general and Lucene/Solr and Java in particular, so whatever else he says I will take with a grain of salt. But for people who think that text search as supported by RDBs is the only search you need it might open some eyes ..

Cloud computing and Ford

This article

Cloud is Bigger Than the Internet - II
— Finally coming to grips with cloud means coming to grips with its high-level potential. This thing is bigger than the Internet, probably not bigger with fire, but maybe on a par with electricity.

surmises we have no "father or mother of cloud computing".

Depending a bit on how you define Cloud Computing, one might argue that we do have one: Jeff Bezos. People tell me he pushed hard on the project to make Amazon's infrastructure available as a service, which made Cloud Computing available to everyone with a credit card.

Sure Cloud Computing is built on virtualization and sure it uses technology honed during the waves around grid computing, utility computing, all the way back to "time sharing" on Mainframes. But all of that relates to Amazon Web Services as Arpa/Internet relates to the World Wide Web.

Of course Werner Vogels would be the person who made AWS happen technically, and I'm sure he didn't do it alone, so maybe pinpointing an exact person isn't so fruitful.

I do think that Jeff Bezos/Werner Vogels/Amazon are to Cloud Computing what Ford (Motor Company) was to the car industry.