Category: Closed Course

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EBay Spawns Drop off Stores

Internet Week > EBay Spawns Niche Market > EBay Spawns Niche Market > March 18, 2005
“With the explosive success of EBay, it’s not surprising that several companies are jumping on the bandwagon to help people sell their unwanted items on the Internet auction giant.

In this growing niche, companies like ISold It, AuctionDrop, NuMarkets, QuikDrop, and Snappy Auctions are providing convenient locations where sellers can leave their wares and let the vendors handle the rest for a fee.“

There is money to be made here, but there are a lot of issues to deal with. A franchise is probably the way to go for an individual interested in this sort of thing. Stuff to consider: storage space for sales items; minimum value of merchandise; not becoming an unwitting fence; developing expertise in pricing and/or spotting value; dealing with customers looking to unload junk. See, lots of work.

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OpenSearch RSS

A9.com > OpenSearch
“OpenSearch is a collection of technologies, all built on top of popular open standards, to allow content providers to publish their search results in a format suitable for syndication. “

Dave Winer pointed to this an it seems intriguing. If I read it right OpenSearch RSS is an extension of RSS 2.0 that describes formating for search results such that the results returned are in RSS instead of whatever the engine would normally return.

This sounds interesting, but most search results can already be easily expressed as RSS without the extension.

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Rich McCue Releases OpenExpert

[teknoids] OpenExpert 0.1.1 release
“OpenExpert.org (http://www.openexpert.org/) is a web based, easy to use Expert System. It is being developed by the University of Victoria Legal Clinic as a diagnostic / teaching tool to help students navigate technical areas of the law (such a divorce), more quickly, and with fewer mistakes. That said, the project is still under heavy development, with new features being added, and refinements being made. Please see the roadmap for the project for further details on planned features and enhancements (http://www.openexpert.org/documentation/roadmap.html). You can see a demo of the system here: http://www.openexpert.org/demo/ “

Rich is a friend of ours and a frequent Teknoids poster. He demoed this project last June at the CALI Conference. It is cool and I can think of a thing or two to do with now that I have the code:)

The Freshmeat announcement is here and the SourceForge summary is here.

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Add Structure to Your Blog

Library Stuff
“Structured Blogging is exactly what it sounds like: Having more structure to a blog entry (and more importantly, the syndicated feed behind it) in order to go beyond just reading it in your browser or aggregator. It allows people to connect with others in more ways than ever. It allows for more organization (and then manipulation) of blog entries.“

I need to take a look at this to see how it goes beyond (or if it goes beyond) categories in a blog. Suddenly meta data seems to be all the rage.

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SXSW MP3 Torrent

Scripting News: 3/8/2005
“Wired News: “For many years SXSW has provided on its website a library of free MP3s of bands participating in the conference. This year, the festival is making it even easier to listen by providing a huge BitTorrent file (2.6 GB) of more than 750 songs.” This is excellent for at least three reasons. 1. It’s great to get all this music. Not clear what terms it’s being offered under, though. Can it be used in podcasts? That’s pretty important. 2. It’s a non-infringing use of BitTorrent, thus helping assure BT’s future. 3. It’s something that a lot of people will download so the download rate should be very good. It’ll be interesting to see how high it goes.“

There are a couple of things worth noting here. Dave’s analysis of why this is a Good Thing is spot on. P2P things like BitTorrent do have legit uses that often get lost in the screaming about piracy. I managed to download the file in less than 3 hours on Tuesday night over my Comcast cable connection. That’s right 2.4 gigabytes in less than 3 hours on a cable modem. That’s broadband and BitTorent for ya.

BTW, using BT to d/l 2.4 gig in < 3 hrs means that d/l DVD quality movies and TV shows is feasible, though I'd need to get that terabyte array online:)

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What’s Google up to?

Google is up to something. In recent months they’ve added Mozilla developers and a MSFT NT engineer to the payroll. Rumors swirl about some calendar app. Well, imagine this. A Linux distro that turns your PC into a node on a Google network, replete with a desktop that runs Windows apps (who better to straighten out Wine than someone who helped design NT) , a Google browser, Google searching capabilty of all of your data, and as a bonus, the ability to Google your fiends PCs. During down time, your screensaver runs some distributed processes from the Google net.

Just a thought.