Bob Caswell

I have a sister who, over the weekend, pointed out a major shortcoming of search engines. It’s so obvious that I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it first. And keep in mind that this is my sister, which arguably boosts the creditability of this anecdotal story. That is, this isn’t some nerd’s dream come true; rather, she’s fairly representative of “regular” people trying to utilize the Internet practically. So here it is:

Why can’t you organize your results by date? And why don’t the search results themselves include the date each entry was published/updated?

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The rumors of this kind of deal have been around for a while but never seemed to materialize. Microsoft will hold a conference call to discuss the details of the proposal, though CEO Steve Ballmer has already laid it out pretty clearly in his public letter to Yahoo (see below for full text). One aspect of the letter to note:

“Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.”

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Amazon today has announced plans to take its DRM-free MP3 music store to countries beyond the United States. In the U.S., at least, Amazon MP3 is already the online music store of choice.

It’s hard to compete with the largest library (3.3 million songs from 270,000 artists) of restriction free music, much of which is priced lower than the going rate of $0.99/track. And it integrates seamlessly with iTunes (or other desktop music applications) plus works with pretty much any digital music player available.

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This past week a national cable and high-speed Internet provider by the name of Charter Communications accidentally deleted all the contents of 14,000 active email accounts. A spokeswoman for the company explained that there is no way for them to retrieve anything that was erased. The spokeswoman offered this explanation and apology:

“We really are sincerely sorry for having had this happen and do apologize to all those folks who were affected by the error… During this maintenance we erroneously deleted active accounts along with the others. It’s never happened before. They are taking steps to make sure it never happens again.”

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Hot on the heels of the Last.Fm announcement that you can stream any song up to three times for free, Yahoo rumors are brewing again. According to two record company executives wishing to remain anonymous, Yahoo is in talks with major record labels about offering DRM-free (unprotected) MP3s either for sale or for free supported by ads. Either way, Yahoo wants to launch the new service this year sometime.

This news could be even more interesting when juxtaposed with what Yahoo Music’s VP of Product Development Ian Rogers hinted at a couple weeks ago. Namely, big news revolving around dramatic changes in Yahoo’s music model. He said, “We’re in the process of redefining what Yahoo! Music is, and making it the Music destination in Yahoo!’s successful image.”

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Last year around this same time I wrote on the then current companies killing DRM (Digital Rights Management, music with restrictions). Coincidentally, this year has the month of January giving us even more news on the battle-for-unrestricted-music front.

Here’s the latest news about music within the context of Amazon, Napster, Sony, and Yahoo:

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Plenty of buzz is a flutter today on the news that airlines will soon have in-flight Internet access. Back in April of this year, the same buzz existed. Here’s a quick summary of what’s new today plus an overview of other details released earlier this year:

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Switching from one search engine to another is simple, right?

Well, I thought I’d try a couple new options, but it was difficult. I had to consciously remind myself that I was going to use new (for me) search engines. If I didn’t think about it, Google is always where I ended up.

First on the list, the other two of the big three: Yahoo and Microsoft / MSN / Live (come on, Microsoft, I still don’t know what you want to be called here).

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