Happy San Jordi’s Day! I’ve gotten neither a book nor a rose, which kind of sucks, but I’m trying to keep upbeat.

For those you outside of Catalunya, Sant Jordi (”Saint George’s Day” for English speakers) is a special day, similar to Valentine’s Day, but not quite as commercial. All around the streets of Catalunya, there are small vendors with small, folding tables selling roses and books for a few euros so that couples (or friends or even bosses) can express their love for and appreciation of one another. Women walk around town with roses, men show off their books and everyone enjoys the beautiful springtime weather.

Sant Jordi’s Day is the Day of the Book and the Rose in Catalunya, and celebrates a martyred Roman soldier who was decapitated when he refused to kill Christians. There are popular stories of San Jordi and a dragon. Through a random lottery, the king’s daughter was chosen to be given as a sacrifice to a dragon that was terrorizing the village of Montblanc, but San Jordi arrived just in time to kill the dragon and save the beautiful princess.

Giving roses in celebration of San Jordi has been done at least since the Rose Fair began in the 15th century. The book part came into effect around 1930. April 23 was chosen as the official day in Catalonia, because it was the day on which Cervantes and Shakespeare, among others, died. Quite logically, it’s also the accepted date on which San Jordi died in 303 AD.

Speaking of love, Mariah Carey is the queen of the love song, and I’m really loving her new hit, Touch My Body. It explains what happens after you’ve given your partner the rose or book for San Jordi’s day. Touch My Body was the number one song in the US for the last couple of weeks, only recently replaced by Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love. In addition to the mellow beat and sweet vocals, I like the reference to a web 2.0 start-up. It gives me something to which I can aspire.

First, Mariah tells her lover how she feels about him:

I know that you’ve been waiting for it
I’m waiting too
In my imagination I’d be all up on you
I know you got that fever for me
102
And boy I know I feel the same
My temperature’s through the roof

But then being the paparazzi-stalked star that she is (when she’s not begging for media attention, that is), she warns her lover not to try to embarass her on the Internet:

If there’s a camera up in here
Then it’s gonna leave with me
When I do (I do)
If there’s a camera up in here
Then I’d best not catch this flick
On YouTube (YouTube)

That’s when you know that you’ve hit the bigtime. Not when you get paid $1.65 billion for your not even 2-year old start-up. Not when important bloggers and analysts note that you dominate your category more than Google dominates search. It’s when a superstar like Mariah Carey name-checks you in her number 1 song without even asking to get paid for it or having to explain who you are. That’s when you know you have become an important part of popular culture.

Sometimes it’s surprising that Americans can’t see how racist and provincial they seem to the rest of the world, even when they are Ivy-League university presidents or “leaders of the free world”.

I wasn’t really following with any great fervor the controversy surrounding the invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, to speak at Columbia University. I was just kind of surfing the web, when I stumbled upon the lead article on the New York Times online.

But when I read about how the president of Columbia, Lee C. Bollinger, introduced the foreign dignitary to the audience by insulting him with patronizing, almost racist challenges, I couldn’t help but get annoyed.

Would North Korean or Chinese leaders have been subjected to the same sort of insulting treatment, or are they higher in the racial (and political) hierarchy of respectability, even though their support of human rights is also a bit suspect?

By way of disclaimer, I am no fan of Iran. From what I’ve read in the Western press, it’s not exactly a hotbed of human rights. And I find Ahmadineja’s assertion that there are no homosexuals in Iran slightly Nazi-esque in its genocidal implications. Plus to be 100% frank, the hatred that many parts of the Arab world show towards the US scares me. I am, after all, American and the religious fanatics don’t seem to discriminate in their hatred of and/or desire to attack and kill Americans.

September 11th was a defining moment for me.

But I still don’t think that the way to convince someone from another culture that his point of view might be misguided is to insult and patronize him publicly. All you do is make him hate you more.

Why should he accept your argument that you and your culture are morally and evolutionarily superior when he has his own proud history and social norms?

Why should he trust you when the basis of your argument is “Do as I say, not as I do”?

As Ahmadinejad asked quite pointedly: “If you [the United States] have created the fifth generation of atomic bombs and are testing them already, who are you to question other people who just want nuclear power?”

This is the heart of the matter. What is the moral or cultural basis that separates the US’s right to produce weapons of mass destruction from the claims of other nations? That they’re Arab and can’t be trusted?

Again, after September 11th, I completely understand the rationale behind that argument, but I admit that it’s not a morally upright or intellectually convincing point of view. It’s a purely emotional reaction with racist implications.

It’s pure survival of the fittest.

Ahmadinejad is the president of a proud nation, one that’s profoundly influential — for good or for bad — in the modern political world. Bollinger is the president of a prestigious national university. That’s a great job, but not quite as influential or powerful.

So why does Bollinger think that he’s superior to Ahmadinejad? Just because he’s an American WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)?

A few gems from Bollinger’s introduction:

• “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” (Nice technique. Call someone “petty”and “cruel”, and then hint that he’s “astonishingly uneducated”, but buffer the insult by starting with “Mr. President”.)
• He noted that it was “well documented” that Iran was a state sponsor of terrorism. Wasn’t it also well-documented that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Isn’t that why we went to war with them?
• After 10 minutes of insult in which he suggested that Iran did not belong to the “civilized world”, Bollinger concluded that “I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions.”

If Bollinger felt this way, why did he invite someone he regards as an “intellectual coward” to speak? Maybe he just wanted to get free press and benefit from Ahmadinejad’s celebrity/infamy?

Isn’t he the intellectually disingenuous one?

Ahmadinejad is no idiot. As he astutely observed at the beginning of his speech: “In Iran, tradition requires when you invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students enough to allow them to make their own judgment, and don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of complaints to provide vaccination to the students and faculty.”

On that point, I think that the “petty dictator” is correct. And it’s not just an Iranian tradition. I think it’s pretty universal that you should treat your guests with respect.

All of this hypocrisy in the context of a country where, as Paul Krugman notes in his New York Times column, “race remains one of the defining factors in modern American politics”. The context to his commentary is the case of the Jena 6, a group of black students who beat up a white classmate (admittedly, not a nice thing to do) and were charged with second-degree murder.

The punishment doesn’t seem to fit the crime, which has made the trial a cause celebre. It is indicative of a culture in which the white majority has often used its political and economic superiority to control and oppress racial minorities.

In this environment, some white students warned black students not to sit under “whites only” trees by hanging nooses, a reference to the not-so-distant past when blacks were lynched (killed and hung from trees) as a means of social control.

And the party of our President has historically used the promise of continued racial superiority in order to win the white Southern vote. A few examples:

• President Bush, the idealist who goes to war to protect the freedoms of other countries’ citizens, exploited the symbolism of Bob Jones University in 2000 as part of his electoral strategy. Bob Jones’ claim to fame is that it banned interracial dating and punished students who dared to date people of other races.
• All four leading Republican candidates for the 2008 nomination have rejected invitations to debate minority issues on public television, and they have declined to address Latino voters directly. Given how a lot of poor whites are defensive about immigration rights — and given that poor, Southern whites were the only group to support the Republicans in the recent Congressional elections — the candidates don’t want to appear to support Blacks, Latinos and Asians. Their loyal, religious, white and often racist Southern voter base might get offended.

In short, intolerance, religious fanaticism and racism are not unique to “uncivilized” parts of the world.

Violence and aggression are not only initiated by (Arab) state sponsors of terror.

I’m happy to be American. But every now and then, I can’t help but be a little embarrassed and disappointed.

Since I haven’t posted in a bit (I was away in Nice for a few days of vacation), I’m feeling a bit apologetic and maybe also a bit nostalgic. So I’ve decided to “honour” the Wall Street Journal article that initially inspired us to start migoa. It was back in late 2005 when Oriol and I were looking to start a business together and were scanning the US newspapers for interesting ideas. We came across this article, and the rest is history. It seems a bit outdated now — we’ve learned so much since reading this article about search, vertical search, advertising models, Internet businesses, etc. — but the article’s key insights remain the same: One size doesn’t fit all.

I hope the Wall Street Journal won’t mind this brief “honour”. It’s done with nothing but love (and Rupert Murdoch is apparently going the online Journal more accessible, so I’ll help give them a jumpstart).

———

	December 19, 2005

THE JOURNAL REPORT: TECHNOLOGY

DOW JONES REPRINTS This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit: www.djreprints.com. • See a sample reprint in PDF format. • Order a reprint of this article now. Consumer Technology Beyond Google Yes, there are other search engines. And some may even work better for you. By KEVIN J. DELANEY Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL December 19, 2005; Page R1 One size doesn’t necessarily fit all. It’s true whether you’re talking about clothes or screwdrivers. And it’s also true in search engines. While Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are great at serving up answers to many types of queries, they aren’t always the best way to find specialized information. You’ll often get thousands of results for your query — but many of them end up off-topic, and there’s no easy way to narrow them down to get to what you want. THE JOURNAL REPORT   See the complete Technology report1. That’s where a growing crop of specialized search sites comes in. They’re sometimes known as “vertical” search engines because they target a single vertical, or industry, category — such as booking travel, buying a house or finding a job. Instead of trawling through billions of Web pages to find results, the way the big engines do, vertical engines limit their searches to industry-specific sites. And they usually serve up lists of actual things — such as houses for sale or open jobs — instead of links to pages where you might find them. So you spend less time skimming through irrelevant links to find what you want. On top of that, the sites let you filter the results by factors such as salary, price or location. “Often, a specialized database can take you directly” to the most useful information and save you time, says Gary Price, news editor of the Search Engine Watch site. “Every useful result can’t be in the first few results from a major Web engine, and that’s where most people look.” GOOGLE KEEPS ON GROWING   PODCAST:2 Where will Google stop? The search giant has branched out into a variety of other Web services, from email to news to displaying satellite images online. WSJ’s Kevin J. Delaney discusses Google’s evolution, where it may be going from here, and how much of a threat its expansion poses to other companies. These sites often don’t look much like regular search engines. Since they often focus on finding goods and services instead of information, it can be hard to tell them apart from comparison-shopping sites or out-and-out retail sites. But the vertical sites all draw their data from a range of sources and generally don’t engage in any sorts of transactions themselves — they simply pass users along to the source of the information. The sites usually make their money from advertising, but in some cases they earn a commission on transactions, such as when users purchase books found through their site. To be sure, much of the material that vertical engines turn up also shows up in large search engines. The big guys also offer advanced search commands that let users home in on some types of information. But the big names’ general-purpose search engines rarely offer the vertical engines’ precision or ability to sort and filter the results. Perhaps the best measure of the vertical engines’ effectiveness: Big search-engine companies have splashed out into vertical areas themselves, such as Google’s video and book search sites, and the local search sites from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that let you find businesses in a specific area. Here’s a look at some common search tasks — and a sampling of specialized search engines that will get you what you’re looking for. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR a book SEARCH TOOLS isbn.nu3, BookFinder4, RedLightGreen5, NetLibrary6 Searching for books online doesn’t begin and end with Amazon. Isbn.nu, a site owned by Seattle free-lance journalist and consultant Glenn Fleishman, allows users to find and compare prices on books across about a dozen different online retailers. BookFinder.com7, run by a unit of Canada’s Abebooks Inc., provides a similar service. RedLightGreen.com8, provided by RLG, a nonprofit collective of libraries and other institutions, takes the searching in a slightly different direction. Not only can you trawl through a database of bibliographic information looking for a title, you also can type in the name of your local public or university library and see if the book is in the stacks. Then there’s the NetLibrary.com9 service provided by the nonprofit OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. The service allows you to search the full text of more than 100,000 digitized books and audio books and then access that content from your computer. The service is free, but you usually need to supply a library-card number. A NetLibrary text search for “slavery,” for instance, returned 721 results, ranging from “The Boys’ Life of Abraham Lincoln” to “New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable Awakening.” Users can see where the keyword appears in the texts and then read the entire books online. Users can also find, download and listen to audio books free — including recent works such as “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer — on their Windows PCs or some compatible portable music players. Technology built into the audio files causes them to become unusable three weeks after being downloaded. Some big-name search engines are getting into this area. Google has made headlines with its program for scanning books in a handful of libraries and letting consumers search their texts; some writers and publishers are upset with Google’s digitizing books that are still protected by copyright. Meanwhile, a separate coalition of libraries and companies has created the Open Content Alliance, which aims to support the scanning of books and make them available for users to search and read online. The effort is starting with books whose copyrights have expired, and plans to get permission before scanning copyrighted books. The OCLC, for its part, has explicit agreements with publishers. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR job listings SEARCH TOOLS Simply Hired10, Indeed11, Yahoo HotJobs12 Job-hunting sites abound on the Internet. But some specialized search engines can turn up more postings — and make it easier to home in on the ones that interest you. On a recent day, Simply Hired Inc.’s site, for example, boasted an index of about 4.5 million help-wanted listings. Simply Hired, of Mountain View, Calif., draws from thousands of sources, including online classifieds and company Web sites, and job seekers can filter the results using a host of sophisticated criteria — ranging from location to whether an employer made the Working Mother magazine list of the 100 best companies to work for. A recent search on Simply Hired for accounting jobs in a 25-mile vicinity of Portland, Maine, turned up 74 help-wanted listings. A similar search at Monster Worldwide Inc.’s site turned up only six postings. Using filters, Simply Hired’s list can be narrowed to, for instance, 29 jobs at companies with revenue over $500 million. Indeed, of Stamford, Conn., takes a similar approach to searching a vast number of job-listing resources on its Web site, though it has a narrower range of filtering options. Users can get updated results for their searches sent to them via Really Simple Syndication, or RSS — a service that forwards the information to special Web sites or software for easy review. Yahoo’s HotJobs offers a similar service, having in July expanded to search through employer Web sites and other online job services. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR information from your industry SEARCH TOOLS GlobalSpec13, Scirus14, IT.com15, LawCrawler16 People in some fields — mostly technical ones — can use specialized search engines to easily find information related to their line of work. GlobalSpec Inc., for one, offers an engineering search engine that searches about 200 million engineering and technical Web pages. GlobalSpec, of Troy, N.Y., also allows users to search within specialized databases, such as published technical standards and patent filings in the U.S. and internationally. Elsevier BV’s Scirus.com17 search engine includes over 200 million science-specific Web pages. A search for “synapse” on Scirus turned up an estimated 38,000 results from scientific journals alone. Washington-based IT.com Inc.’s search engine is geared toward people researching topics and products related to corporate information technology, such as computer servers. But industry-specific engines aren’t limited to scientific fields. The FindLaw unit of Thomson Corp., Stamford, Conn., offers LawCrawler.com18: a Google search engine that limits its searches to legal-related Web sites or databases. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR a home to buy or rent SEARCH TOOLS Trulia19, HomePages20, Oodle21 Various commercial databases of homes for sale exist online, including the more than 2.5 million listings available through the National Association of Realtors at Realtor.com22. A few specialized search engines try to offer an alternative by searching through a range of other real-estate listings, such as classified ads. The search engine from San Francisco-based Trulia Inc., for example, mines more than 100,000 real-estate Web sites. Trulia, which was still in testing mode and limited to California listings at the time of this writing, recently turned up 175 homes for sale in Oakland with asking prices over $700,000, plotting them on a Google map of the area. HomePages.com23 from HouseValues Inc., Kirkland, Wash., similarly aggregates online real-estate listings and plots results on a map. The service covers the whole country, but it appears to be limited when searching in smaller cities. Oodle Inc., San Mateo, Calif., searches classified ads — for real-estate as well as other listings — and allows users to filter results by location, price, number of bedrooms and other criteria. Users can also have new listings emailed to them as they are posted. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR airline flights, hotels SEARCH TOOLS SideStep24, Kayak25, FareChase26, Mobissimo27 Many travel sites offer flights on a variety of airlines, cars from a range of rental companies, and hotels from a number of chains. But travel search engines can provide the most options by drawing on multiple sources. They search through the listings on traditional travel sites, as well as those on hotel, airline and rental-car sites — some of which don’t show up elsewhere. One granddaddy of the group is SideStep Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif. When the service started up, users had to download a toolbar for their Web browser to do comparison shopping. But consumers can now conduct searches using the company’s Web site, SideStep.com28. SideStep searches more than 100 travel-related sites, including ones whose listings don’t show up on some of the main travel-broker sites, such as discount airline JetBlue Airways and the Holiday Inn hotel chain. Kayak.com29 from Kayak Software Corp. of Norwalk, Conn., and Yahoo’s FareChase.com30 service offer similar features. Kayak’s bells and whistles include a graphical list of best fares from a given airport, using the Google Maps service. San Francisco-based Mobissimo Inc.’s Mobissimo.com31 Web site distinguishes itself by including flights from travel sites and discount airlines based in Europe and Asia. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR a person’s phone number and postal or email address SEARCH TOOL Argali White & Yellow32 The big search engines can provide addresses and phone numbers for businesses and individuals. But few, if any, can match the depth and power of Argali White & Yellow (Argali.com33), a search engine devoted to the task. To use Argali, from Darwin Holdings Inc., of Princeton, N.J., you must install a piece of software on your PC. (The program is free, but if you want a faster, ad-free version, a subscription costs up to $29.95 a year. No Mac version is available.) The service scours more than 20 online information sources and provides a number of useful ways to search and sort the data. Argali’s features include reverse lookup of phone numbers and addresses, links to maps of any given address, and information about other people and businesses on the same street. The service also offers to look up people’s email addresses, though it had little success in a quick test: A search for email addresses for a handful of individuals didn’t turn up any accurate ones. YOU’RE LOOKING FOR entries from reference sources SEARCH TOOL Answers.com34 If you go to a big search engine looking for background on a certain topic, you’ll usually get a series of links to other pages — which means more surfing to get what you want. Answers.com, formerly known as GuruNet, cuts out the middleman by collecting all the information and organizing it into a Web page. Type “Internet” into the site, for example, and it displays a comprehensive history and explanation of the Internet, with entries culled from the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press Encyclopedia, Wikipedia and other sources. The top results from Google on a recent day, by contrast, included the sites of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer software and an online movie database. “We see ourselves as complementary to search engines,” says Bob Rosenschein, chairman and chief executive of Answers Corp. in Jerusalem, which offers the service. Indeed, Google’s results page for some queries includes a “definition” link that takes users to the Answers.com results for the same query.   –Mr. Delaney is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau. Write to Kevin J. Delaney at kevin.delaney@wsj.com35

Ever heard of ConnectU?

Neither had I until I read about the lawsuit that they’re bringing against Facebook in today’s New York Times. It’s an interesting addition to the cloning vs. innovation debate, as it shows that both European and American start-ups “borrow” innovations from their competitors. Technology companies exist within a free marketplace of ideas. Facebook, the current media darling, is perhaps an exaggerated demonstration of this reality.

Here are the facts that no one disputes:

• In 2002, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twin brothers at Harvard, wanted to start a social networking site called HarvardConnection.
• In November 2003, they “hired” Mark Zuckerberg, a computer science student at Harvard, to develop the software and database for their site. They never paid him anything but told him that they’d compensate him if the project ever became successful.
• In January 2004, Zuckerberg registered the name “thefacebook.com” (Zuckerberg didn’t invent the name. The “facebook” is what students at Ivy League schools call their student directories.)
• In February 2004, Zuckerberg abandoned the Winklevoss brothers’ project. By the end of the month, he had registered half of Harvard’s student population for his project, and by April his success had spread to other Ivy League schools.
• ConnectU (the Winklevoss brothers’ project) eventually launched in May 2004. They claim that Zuckerberg purposely delayed delivering their technology so that he’d gain a competitive advantage over them.
• Today, Facebook has 30 million users, lots of buzz and is worth upwards of $900.000.000 (the price that Yahoo was willing to pay last year); ConnectU has 70.000 users and the only buzz that it’s generated is largely because of its lawsuit against Facebook.

So the Winklevoss brothers came up with the idea. They trusted Mark Zuckerberg to implement it (at least with the regard to the technical elements). He told them that he would but never actually delivered the promised technology, all while secretly plotting to use the Winklevoss brothers’ concept to create a competitor website.

It sounds like the Winklevoss brothers have a good case, right?

Wrong.

As famed intellectual property professor (and noted proponent of diminished intellectual property protections) Larry Lessig notes:

“The general rule is that ideas are free unless strapped down by contract or patent.”

In other words, the free market — and not the courts — tend to determine who owns a great idea, unless there is a very clear intellectual property protection (like a patent) in place.

No one disputes that Zuckerberg got the idea from the Winklevoss brothers. Morally speaking, he should probably give them something. Without them, Facebook never would have happened, and he’d probably be working as a junior programmer at Google. But he wouldn’t be on the verge of becoming mind-numbling rich before he turns 25. Why can’t he just give them a few million dollars? It seems wrong to say that the Winklevoss brothers are entitled to nothing.

That’s just tacky.

And it certainly makes me reflect a little bit more on the moral implications of “Greed is Good” argument.

But the US legal system is clear: without a binding contract between the Winklevoss brothers and Zuckerberg, the brothers don’t have a case. As the judge hearing the case advised the brothers before giving them 2 weeks to come back with a stronger argument, “Dorm-room chitchat does not make a contract.”

Say what you will about Zuckerberg. He might not be the most morally upright person. But he knew how to spot a great idea and run with it, regardless of who he had to stab in the back to achieve his goals. His cut-throat actions remind me of the best and the worst of the US business culture.

The Winklevoss brothers’ problem is that they were too trusting with what turned out to be literally a billion-dollar idea. If they had gotten Zuckerberg to sign a non-disclosure with a non-compete clause, the case would be entirely different. But telling someone your trade secret — and forgetting to get them to sign a non-disclosure agreement — means that your trade secret is no longer legally protected.

Likewise, if the Winklevoss brothers had paid Zuckerberg for his work — if he had been their employee — they would have some claim to it. But given the lack of compensation and/or employee status, Zuckerberg’s work all belongs to him.

Bottom line: If you have a good idea, don’t trust anyone. People are funny when it comes to money. Try to put everything in writing. Get all of your service providers to sign NDAs with non-compete clauses, or you might find that today’s collaborator is tomorrow’s competitor.

I know that most start-ups think that lawyers are a waste of money, and money is often tight, but as the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In other words, it’s better to pay a lawyer a few dollars today, than end up like the Winklevoss brothers, watching a former collaborator make billions of dollars off of your idea.