March 2005 Archives

On Google's blog yesterday comes the announcement of enhanced searching capabilities for Firefox, the up and coming browser. The enhancement allows Google to prefetch, or start downloading the top results of your search in the background allowing you to get to the site you click on faster. The Mozilla Organization which builds Firefox has an FAQ on prefetching available.

It's comes as no surprise that Google is trying to support Firefox in any way it can, as they want to erode people's dependency on Microsoft's Explorer browser. I switched to Firefox myself about 6 months ago. It's faster and more secure than MS Explorer. I was actually using Apple's Safari before Firefox, but Safari still has a few faults, although it renders images and fonts better than Firefox.

In looking at the web statistics for all my sites I found that 74% of site visitors use MS Explorer compared to 18% for Firefox and 4% for Safari. That's a significant increase for Firefox and a big drop for Microsoft, after all Firefox 1.0 was released just under 5 months ago.

In other news, Search Engine Watch, the respected leader in disseminating news about Search Engine's announced today the winners of its 5th annual awards. The most surprising result, Outstanding Search Service went to Yahoo, not Google who came in second. Google did however get 4 other awards including Best News Search Engine, best US Shopping Search Engine, Most SEO/Webmaster Friendly Search Engine and Best Search Ads provider.

Looksmart, joining Google's Scholar search engine has launched it's own 24 Hour Scholar search engine.

I'm not sure how it stacks up to Google, no pun indented, but creating vertical searches is something I've been advocating for some time.

From science fiction to reality, NASA's TETWalker robot successfully completed it's first walk demonstrating technology that could eventually be minituarized and joined together to form autonomous nanotechnology swarms (ANTS).

Eventually ANTS will be able to "alter their shape to flow over rocky terrain or to create useful structures like communications antennae and solar sails. This technology has the potential to directly support NASA's Vision for Space Exploration".

Urchin, a provider of Web Analytics software and on demand services has been bought by Google (Wall Street Journal, subscription required).

About a year ago I had become dissatisfied with the software I was using to analyze the traffic for all my web sites. After some thorough research I settled on Urchin. I have not been disappointed. The software is great and provides a true picture of who comes to my sites, what they do and how I can take advantage of the patterns I see. Looks like Google agrees. :-)

Every know and then I'll post a little tip to help those of you out there who want to improve their companies Internet visibility or marketing. Today's tip, getting your press release disseminated effectively for free.

Although I was familiar with the following company a several years ago it was not until last year that I had the opportunity to meet its President and CEO, David McInnis, at Search Engine Strategies. PR Web has been offering free online press release distribution services since 1997.

Well, a few days after I praise SpaceX I learn that not only is the initial launch delayed again, albeit through no fault of their own but that they also had an incident at their test facility in Texas.

Today I read in a Space Politics article by Jeff Foust that because of of a conflict with a Titan IV launch carrying a classified national security payload the SpaceX launch has been delayed. I was actually aware that there might be a conflict but until an actual delay had been confirmed I said nothing.

According to China's People Daily a joint project between the Advanced Technology and Materials Co., the University of Science and Technology Beijing and the Institute of Physics under Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) has achieved a major breakthrough in the developement of Nano-crystalline material joining Japan and Germany as leaders in the field.

Nano-crystalline material is made up of crystal particles five to ten nanometers long. The new material will be used on Shenzhou VI scheduled to launch in mid-October with a crew of two Yuhangyuan (astronauts).

NASA with its partner the Spaceward Foundation announced yesterday the first First Centennial Challenges Prizes.

This is quite exciting as the first prizes deal directly with technologies required for a space elevator. And as some of you may know I've been a proponent of the Space Elevator concept for some time and created the Space Elevator Reference. The first two prizes are as follows;

The Tether Challenge centers on the creation of a material that combines light weight and incredible strength. Under this challenge, teams will develop high strength materials that will be stretched in a head-to-head competition to see which tether is strongest.

The Beam Power challenge focuses on the development of wireless power technologies for a wide range of exploration purposes, such as human lunar exploration and long-duration Mars reconnaissance. In this challenge, teams will develop wireless power transmission systems, including transmitters and receivers, to power robotic climbers to lift the greatest weight possible to the top of a 50-meter cable in under three minutes.

The Teal Group announced today today the publication of its new Near-term Outlook during the Satellite 2005 conference. "The study highlights Hughes' Spaceway dedicated broadband satellite system and SpaceX's Falcon partly-reusable rocket as two programs that could have noticeable impact on the market."

I first met Elon Musk the founder of SpaceX in the summer of 2001 at a space conference and have had the opportunity to talk him on several occasions since then about space exploration and in particular his company SpaceX. I'm a big supporter of SpaceX because Elon is attacking the biggest problem we have with space exploration in a creative and inivative way.

Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman M.D. teamed up to write one of the most fascinating books I've read in some time, Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever.

Never have we humans lived as long as we do now. And with advances in health care, genomics and upcoming nanotechnology I could conceivably live a happy and healthy life well past my 100th birthday. (I'm 41 now) But health care and technology will only take you so far say Kurzweil and Grossman.

Last summer at the Search Engine Strategies conference Google hosted its annual Google Dance and during the festivities I was offered a Google Gmail account. At first I was somewhat intrigued, but really what was the big deal?

It was almost a year ago that I sent out an email to my friends and colleagues letting them know I would be creating my own weblog or blog. After much procrastination I finally decided to get going on this project.

I'm usually connected wherever I may be so I expect this blog to updated frequently. So stay tuned and enjoy. I've enabled comments albeit you first have to sign-up using TypeKey to post. This is to protect the site from those evil-doers, spam bots.