There has been a lot of commentary written about News Corp playing with the idea of exiting Google’s search index. Cringely said that News Corp would be denying themselves valuable traffic, handing them to competitors. Mark Cuban, on the other wrote that Twitter is heading to be THE news search site, leaving Google News has little impact.

Both these comments misunderstand Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch doesn’t care about news.

He cares about loyalty and eye balls. Listen carefully to Murdoch’s interview on Sky News.

On visitor loyalty

It is about “News You can Trust”, not “News You can Trust”. Hence, the bundling of Fox News with operators like Hannity and Beck. In doing so, Fox becomes the destination because Fox validates what their visitors already believed in, and hands out new corroborating facts every day.

For those people who don’t read the news, there is Myspace. A site that again appeals to the narcissist by reminding them how important they were to the rest of the world.

On eye-balls

The visitor from Google does not stay on their property because visiting from aggregator sites do not instill a rabid following. These types of visitors are of low value.

Rupert wants the old days back, when you paid your dollar for the paper, the paper holds you captive for the rest of the day. Advertising is sold on the circulation numbers x number of pages on newspaper. This is different from selling advertising on CPM basis, since one page-view lacks the multiplier effect of “number of pages on the newspaper”. A once-only web visitor is only worth a fraction of the advertising dollars.

To get the old days back, one has to recognize that the desire for deep news is merely another compulsion. People have got by in the past without them. Since there is no way News Corp can own all the coverage for a particular news item, it is necessary for them to either cut off the fuel from aggregator sites, or to own one themselves. Through their experiments with Fox, they have shown that it is not necessary for opinions to be separated from facts, hence the positioning of Fox as a cross of Huffington Post and CNN – Newstertainment at its finest.

What next for News Corp

Firstly, after walling off News Corp articles from Google’s indexes, reorganize news content around visitor profiles than news similarity. Instead of listing similar news articles alongside a piece of news, for instance instead of listing news of other shooting beside the Fort Hood shooter, News might link to articles on radical Islam, or Barack Obama is a Muslim. There is a little narcissist in every one. While the visitor profile to Washington Post may be different, they are no less obsessive about their own world-views.

Secondly, prove to other news proprietors that a paywall works. News may be free, but causes aren’t. By taking a hardline position on a set of issues, News Corp can extract more rent than a politician can.

Thirdly, use a paywall to cognitively engender value, and hence extract more page-views. If one has paid $1 for the day’s news, one is more likely to stay on the news property to read everything else that is there. In truth, $1 a day is cheap entertainment. The poor showing at Myspace has been ostensibly due to the ever-increasing web inventory pushing down advertising rates. However, it appears that someone used his playbook better.

So, is Rupert Murdoch a Narcissist?

No. But the rest of us are. And he consistently shows how wrong we are about the narcissists inside us.

Once in a while, one comes across a problem that is so totally perplexing, and people have various success with different approaches that it makes me think of the tale of the blind men and the elephant.
Recently, in a production environment, we are seeing errors in our SQL Server clients: reporting
TCP Provider, error: 0 – [...]

Brad Wilson has a nice long post about the use of model metadata in ASP.NET MVC.
While most of these do not deal with database operations, they have a certain place in database modelling. The following are must haves:

Short Display Names – a sane toString() for tabular listings
Simple Display Text – a sane toString() for summarizing [...]

It used to be that one could simply rename a Word Template .dot file to .doc. However, Microsoft has made it somewhat harder today.
One way to do this is through using Word Automation. However, another way is to do some XML manipulation, given that .dotx and .dotcx files are actually zip archives.

import xml.dom.minidom
import zipfile

def dotx2docx(src, [...]

I don’t know if you recall this article from the New Scientist discussing whether obesity is spreading through social norms.
However, there may be another pathway.
A 2007 Scientific American article mentions that bacteria can cause subjects to gain weight faster.
For one thing, bacteria produce chemicals that help us harness energy and nutrients from our food, Huffnagle [...]

Over the term 3 school holidays, we (my family) spent 11 days travelling in Japan, and I’d like to share some observations.

Osteoporosis is common among the elderly, far more prevalent than Australia for example. Despite the (relatively) higher consumption of soy products in Japan, this comes across as a little surprising
People are generally taller in [...]

According to The Register article here:
[Special Operations contractor] will, at a minimum, develop Internet-based marketing procedures such as use of Google AdWords and Search Engine Optimization to prioritize search result listing of the applicable websites
What next? Affiliate programs? Cost per action? I know! email submits. Any creatives with landing page ideas?
Here’s a visualization of what [...]

Came across this site Allergy Translation Cards. They do a supreme good.

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The information is supplied here: http://dotgov.gov/help_qualify.aspx
Good luck!

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I have this problem when driving my wife’s car: Why Do Cars Have Fuel Doors on Different Sides
But here’s the kicker. Commenter spewlman advised:
Want to avoid the frustration of not knowing what side your gas tank is on? Car manufacturers actually solve this mystery for you. On your dash is a picture of a fuel [...]

Mary Garden writes about her thirst for transcendence, but instead finds mystics and charlatans, who make ordinary human beings look like saints. Serpent Rising 2nd Ed

It is now thirty years since I first set foot in India and felt at last I had come home. From time to time in my now busy life, I [...]

I don’t know what it is about xml configuration files that simply turn me off learning a particular library or framework. For example, here is a Hibernate XML monstrosity.
I realize it all makes sense, but there is something terribly off-putting about xml. To me it’s a sign that the host language is not sufficiently dynamic [...]

I just tried to “go back” to the previous page, but still want to retain the current page I’m reading. Middle click on the back arrow did the trick, and opened the previous page on a new tab.
Sweet.

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Here is a non-exhaustive list of JDBC connection URLs for various databases. Corrections welcome!
Microsoft SQL Server JDBC connection URL
jdbc:microsoft:sqlserver://localhost:1433;DatabaseName=northwind
com.microsoft.jdbc.sqlserver.SQLServerDriver
msbase.jar;mssqlserver.jar;msutil.jar
downloadl
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 JDBC connection URL
jdbc:sqlserver://serverName\instance:port[;user=value][;password=value][;property=value]
com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver
sqljdbc.jar
download SQL Server 2005 driver
Microsoft SQL Server (JTurbo) JDBC connection URL
jdbc:JTurbo://<HOST>:<PORT>/<DB>
com.ashna.jturbo.driver.Driver
Microsoft SQL Server (Sprinta) JDBC connection URL
jdbc:inetdae7:<HOST>:<PORT>?database=<DB>
com.inet.tds.TdsDrive
download

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Alfresco uses JNI on Netbios to serve files over CIFS on windows servers,
http://www.codase.com search for win32netbios.c
Uses a combination of

[NetBIOS]-> NCBADDNAME
[NetBIOS]-> NCBLISTEN
[NetBIOS]-> NCBRECV

Also see their JLAN product.
Unfortunately, this is apparently not supported on Vista, Windows Server 2008. Source: MSDN
There seems to be some workarounds documented on the Alfresco wiki Vista And Windows 2008 through firewalling [...]

Using a combination of floor, mod and div, we can implement bitwise tests in XSLT. I happened to need to do that today. Thanks to the power of Google, and the Mulberry XSLT forums, the following snippet implements XSLT test for 000010

<xsl:comment>
Bitwise test for 00010
</xsl:comment>
<xsl:if [...]

From a BBC Foreign Correspondent, who is leaving the US:
I deplore the superstition and the eating competitions and the tatty dreariness of so much of America, and I note that the new president is also unimpressed by the infrastructure and not a fan of fat but, after more than seven years living here, I am [...]

Tamara from Mark Robertson’s Plumbing did a good job for me sorting out a leak this morning. She did a good job and didn’t overcharge like my last one, so here’s an unsolicited plug. No, they don’t have a web site, but you can look them up in the Yellow Pages.

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Dan Bricklin points to a new generation of applications that will utilize a new mode of interaction with the computer, beyond mice and menus.
In a podcast with Scott Hanselman, Dan also said that it will also affect the way programs are written, similar to the transition from text/console programs to event-driven ones [not his exact [...]

An Australian company is working on a AusIndustry grant on rapid application modelling.
I’d love to interview these guys on the blog just for some insights they gained from the process.

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