Copernic to be Acquired; Who's Paying for Desktop Search?

Amit Agarwal points to a news release that Mamma.com is looking to acquire Copernic Technologies.

I wonder what this will mean for the free Copernic Desktop Search.  I like CDS, but I don't see the unique advantage it delivers in what's getting to be crowded market.  What niche can Copernic carve out when much bigger guns like Microsoft and Google also deliver a free product? 

More importantly, is a free desktop search program viable for the long run?

Niki Scevak of Jupiter Research is quoted saying that free desktop search software lacks a clear revenue model on its own, since revenue is really only tied to "searches of commercial interest." 

Essentially, how is anyone going to make money by letting me search my own hard drive for my own files?

A number of possibilities exist, including: 

1) Show me advertising while I'm searching.  (The quandry here is how do you make advertising effective but not intrusive.)

2) Show me similar information from the Internet, whether I want it or not. (That seems to be Blinkx niche now. Personally, it's interesting but not my ideal. When I want to search the Internet, I will.  When I just need to find something on my own computer, searching the Internet is wasting my time.)

3) Tie this tool into other pay- or advertising-driven products in a way that I want (or need) to use both.  (Google and Microsoft's approach)

4) Skip the whole dance of giving you free software and finding someone else to pay for it -- and just charge you for the program (X1's approach. They just need to cut the price in half.)

My guess is that some of these approaches more shaky than others and that ultimately many of the current players will be bought up or will abandon this market.

Bogging Down Fast Computers

Alex Scoble asks:

"Here's a question for all of the Computer Engineers out there. Why do PCs become slow almost to the point of unusable when the PC's drive buses are in heavy use?

What am I talking about? Copy a CD to a CD or perform a disk intensive process like copying a lot of data from one PC to another and see what happens to your nice 3.2Ghz P4 with 512MB of DDR RAM. It slows to a crawl! At least it does in Windows...."

Read the rest of Alex Scoble's post here.

He mentions that servers handle disk I/O much more effectively, and wonders why desktop computers can't too.

Great point.  Right now I have two computers under my desk connected via an Iogear KVM switch so that when I tie one up with a long-running task, I can bounce to the other.  With the KVM, shared drives through Windows, and a shared clipboard (using a freeware program called Spike), it's *almost* like getting the benefits Alex would like to see built into every computer -- though at twice as expensive and a lot bulkier.

And this is an area where improvements could mean really noticeable benefits to users (as opposed to the MHz races that made good marketing copy but often didn't deliver anything in real-world use).

- Jim

Thanksgiving Photo Essay

Ran across this Thanksgiving photo essay at www.donaldsensing.com. 

Thank you for the touching reminder of what we're really supposed to be dwelling on at Thanksgiving (and it's not football, not turkey, not preparing to shop on Black Friday).

We have so much to be thankful for this year, and, as we gather with family this holiday, I hope we'll keep in mind all the good things we've received and look for ways to share our good fortune with others.

Best wishes to you and yours for a safe, happy Thanksgiving holiday!

Blogjet 1.2 Beta

There's a new 1.2 beta available for BlogJet, the blog editor I've mentioned I like before. Lots of new features that will come in handy, including extended posts, image thumbnails (and resizing of images), and typographic characters.  Nice quick write-up at Working Smart.

Library Contest Winner

We're very proud of Christopher, who was one of nine children recognized from among over 100 entrants in the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Public Library's Design Your Own Bookmark Contest. Christopher's bookmark showed a cross section of an ant colony with the slogan "We Dig the Library." The winners had a little ceremony, where they got books as gifts and learned about writing and illustrating from children's book author and illustrator Slyvie Wickstrom.   A lot of fun and very interesting.

As I've mentioned before, I think libraries are fantatisc places that help foster curiosity and a love for learning. The whole family visits the library regularly and it’s so nice to see Christopher enjoying the trips. 

Blinkx Takes a New Tack on Desktop Search

Several people have suggested I take a look at the new Blinkx 2.0 beta for a better desktop search tool.  From what I've heard, Blinkx takes a very different approach from its competitors by trying to judge the "gist" of any document and automatically show the users related files on the users' PC and other related information from the web.  The new beta includes Search Folders, which let you create topical folders on your computer that are automatically populated with related documents Blinkx finds.  Very innovative ideas, and nobody else seems to pursing them.  However, cool as some of these features sound, I'm still not sure Blinkx is going to be the best fit for my specific needs, which are more about finding/browsing a variety of files on my computer.  Most of the time I'd turn to my search program to find something, I wouldn't need -- or even want -- to waste time with additional information from the Internet (which is what Blinkx seems to do best).  Marc Orchant has posted some thoughts on Blinkx, pointing out some rough spots but ultimately saying the program will stay on his "worth watching" list.

Hacking Writer's Block

Lots of ideas for getting past writer's block in this post from 43folders.com. And great responses in the comments that add even more food for thought.  For me, writer's block = procrastination + distraction.  When that happens, I try to tackle the work a digestible bite at a time so I can see I'm making progress and negotiate in breaks for reaching important milestones. 

The suggestion about unplugging your router is dead on for me, and I even liked Andrew's comment that a computer with just a word processor can help.  I've also found that I'm much more effective if I also turn off as much background noise as possible -- even instrumental music cuts into my concentration.

At least for my non-fiction work, being at a loss of what to write next usually just means I didn't prepare properly. I find it's a lot easier to start with a very fast and rough outline, which gives me a road map for where I'm going and starts my brain thinking about how I'm going to get there.  If I get stuck on one section, I can always shift to another for a while and then come back.

RSS Overload Strategies

I've been using SharpReader for a while now to track/read RSS feeds from a few dozen blogs.  Works well. But I'm finding it hard to keep up all the new feeds.  Here one take on how to deal with the firehouse of incoming information:

Roland Tanglao's Weblog: My RSS Overload Strategy that I developed after the BloggerCon III Overload Session

Unauthorized MSN Desktop Search Screenshots Available

Is Microsoft feeling a little left out of buzz about new desktop search tools? Maybe.

Their own MSN Search blog went to some pains today to say that screenshots of a pre-release build of MSN's desktop search posted at Neowin.net were unauthorized. But the Microsoft blog post still included a convenient link right to the screenshots for anyone curious.

The screenshots do look very promising -- certainly no other company is better positioned to& integrate searching into applications like Explorer, IE, Outlook, etc. -- and it's good to hear that they're still hoping to get a beta out the door before year's end.

New Beta for X1 Desktop Search

A beta of the upcoming version 5 for desktop search program X1 was just released.  Lots of improvements to the search options, user interface, integration with other programs, and overall performance (check out this list). 

Feature-wise, the beta addresses many of the shortcomings I've mentioned in posts over the last couple months about X1 and competing products like Copernic Desktop Search and Google Desktop Search.

With so much competition -- and Microsoft supposedly poised to deliver its own MSN-branded destkop search utility -- X1's enhancements couldn't come at a better time.  But at least two more things still need to be done:

• X1 needs to lower it's price. I'm willing to pay for useful software, but my guess is that X1 needs to cut is $74.95 price about in half if it wants to grow (or even just keep) its share of the market, especially when some serious competitors are totally free.

• X1 needs to drop its constant "phone home" anti-piracy approach.  Even if X1's activity is totally benign and respects users' privacy, the company is going to have waste a lot of time and effort explaining that to customers. Reviewers will continue to bang X1 on this issue too.  Whatever value X1 gets from this offset by lost goodwill and trust.  Instead, X1 has a golden opportunity: by flipping its policy and becoming a champion of user privacy, X1 can position itself as distinct from for-free competitors who make their money by pushing advertisements to their users or who gather and re-sell user activity statistics.

Chromasia.com: Great Photoblog

David Nightingale's chromasia.com is a great photoblog!  Enjoyed browsing the archives and really loved the photo he chose for his "about" section.

Closing Old Comments

Comment spam continues to grow.  MT-Blacklist put a big dent into it for a while, but more has been sneaking through lately.  I think it's very inconvenient to force visitors to register before being able to comment, and I'd hate to get rid of comments altogether. However, I really have to do something.  One simple step I've startedt today is to close comments for most of my older posts (using the very handy MT-Close2 plugin). Hopefully, this will help a bit. 

Microsoft's beta MSN Search

The beta of Microsoft's new MSN Search is out. 

Fast and lots of advanced search options.  Didn't return as many results as Google does to my sample queries, though, so not a Google-killer yet.  Press and the blogger pundits seem interested but underwhelmed.

But that's why they call it a beta, right?  Microsoft certainly has the resources to do it right.

Thomas Hawk has interesting advice for Microsoft:

"Now if you want an idea to help you pull search from Google, how about this -- proprietary search results. What do I mean by this? Find sources of content that are not presently indexed by Google and Yahoo! and offer exclusive indexing of this content through your search engine. You could start by working out a deal with the networks to be the exclusive provider of all indexed closed captioned transcripts since they've been collecting them.Now if you want an idea to help you pull search from Google, how about this -- proprietary search results. What do I mean by this? Find sources of content that are not presently indexed by Google and Yahoo! and offer exclusive indexing of this content through your search engine. You could start by working out a deal with the networks to be the exclusive provider of all indexed closed captioned transcripts since they've been collecting them."

Interesting idea -- though good luck trying to pry transcripts from any of the major networks <g>. One of the great things Google did early was to buy and then incorporate a searchable database of all Usenet posts via the Google Groups option.  I found the ability to search for information on web pages and also in Usenet invaluable.  Usenet's successor these days seems to be the blogsphere -- maybe new and better ways to search/track information there would help MSN Search too. Blog-centric services like Technorati and Feedster exist already, but I've always found them to be slow and to do fairly poor job returning relevant results.

AppRocket - Faster than a speeding finger

Nice review at mrpunkin.com of AppRocket, a Windows program similar to the popular Quicksilver for the Mac.  AppRocket gives you a little typing window that lets you quickly find/open programs, files, browser favorites, songs, and more.  It's not a replacement for a full-fledged search program like X1 and isn't as flexible as a keystroke macro program like ActiveWords, but AppRocket is small, simple and fast.  As a quick way to navigate your files or launch common programs it looks very handy -- and the price is very, very reasonable (under $10!).  Bryan pointed out couple ways it could be improved; hope CandyLabs spots his ideas (hint: take advantage of the buzz and support Firefox).

(By the way, check out Bryan's photo gallery too.  Very nice work.  I really like the porch shot -- the simple construction of the chairs, the texture of the wooden building and the golden reflections in the windows fit together perfectly).