George Dearing dot com

None of the major engines are focusing on how to monetize real-time search results, at least not yet. Casey mentioned that at Google there is a “solid separation between church and state,” i.e., product development and monetization.

Monetization is an angle that one real-time search startup, OneRiot, has tackled with some success. In the following conference session, Tobias Peggs, General Manager at OneRiot, explained how with RiotWise, OneRiot is showing ads from the Huffington Post for articles that match real-time search queries. OneRiot also has a wide distribution network, saying that 97% of search volume comes through partner sites via its API.

"Dragon Search allows iPhone users to search across Google, Yahoo!, Bing, iTunes, Twitter, Wiki, or YouTube by speaking their search terms." -- TechCrunch

"For starters, the company said today that it began sending out two-dimensional barcodes to more than 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. This will enable mobile phone users to snap a picture of the barcode (known as a QR code and pictured to the right) and trigger a search for the local business. Right now, the capabilities for the program are fairly basic — you can find reviews of the place, get a coupon if the business is offering one or mark the business for remembering later." [Kim-Mai Cutler]

"Google on Thursday wrote in a blog post that "in about two weeks, we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines...This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people."

Songza is my favorite and there's a good chance I'll pay for Spotify when it hits the AppStore. :)

5 SITES THAT TAP THE MUSIC IN THE CLOUD
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Fizy

Muziic

Songza

Spotify

Twones

I don't see much value in Twitscoop until hashtag abuse diminishes. It's gotten better over the last few months, but I still see too much crap trending to take all the topics too seriously.

Louis Gray points to another graveyard created by Google -- the market for standalone RSS readers. But the snippet that stands out for me is this one:

"not only is innovation alive and well, but blogs and RSS are key components in creating new products." Exactly.

Let's take that a bit further. Many of us describe RSS as plumbing, infrastructure, whatever. What we mean is that it's important technology that facilitates how we use the internet as a platform. And it enables other services and tools to work properly as we slice, dice and interact with information across the web. Transporting data via RSS is something that every new service or tool will provide, at least to some extent.

Owning big pieces of the RSS and blog pie (Blogger.com) gives Google an advantage in a number of ways. Not only can it cherry-pick its way to the internet acquisition top, it gains valuable insight around the real-time web.As it delivers RSS-powered content via Google Reader, it can use the same lens to understand who's actually creating all that content. That's insight that's priceless as big companies pay big bucks for insight into the web's data streams.

The bigger question is what other pieces are ripe for the taking? I think the Yahoo, Microsoft deal answered that for us.

Yahoo will be able to partner with Microsoft against Google, and allow [Yahoo] to focus more and spend more on its content business, which is a tremendous growth area [where] Yahoo has a leg up.

Over the years, Yahoo has proved it knows the content business, so i think at its core, Icahn's take is a good one. But I still have concerns related Yahoo's ability to innovate.

If your premise is that it can convert and cross-sell hordes of eager users (corps too) because of better products and services, you have to look at its recent track record. It only takes one hand to count the compelling services that it's launched or bought over the last 3-5 years. I don't use its home page or mobile services and I rarely depend on its media properties for content. The services I use are Flickr and Delicious. And neither can be described as true differentiators for Yahoo. Hmm, do I sound like a fence-sitter on the deal?

The flip side of course, is that outside of Google, the list of internet innovators is a short one. Somebody has to gain market share, right? That's part of the reason I think Microhoo is much more of a prize fighter together than alone.