Web Farming Newsletter

His labor-of-love, Alexa Internet, was sold to Amazon.com for over $250 million, which is quite a sum for a 50-person company with under a million in revenue and no profit. Alexa's core idea is to map the foot-tracks of people surfing the Web as clues for finding the better resources. The deal with Amazon includes continued support for the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that is preserving the Web for historical research.

Over ten years ago, Brewster invented the WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) system, pioneering Internet publishing.

WF Seminars

A three-day seminar on Web Farming is offered by DCI on the following dates:

- September 15-17 in San Francisco
- November 10-12 in Dallas

For full details, see the online brochure. Seminars in Rome and Brussels are planned for October.

Tool of the Month

Inxight is offering a free file viewer called MagniFind. It uses their Hyperbolic Tree visualization

that allows quick navigation of complex hierarchical structures. It is a great way to try this visualization on your own local data. While visiting their site, also try the site map, which loads a Java applet using the Hyperbolic Tree.

Hyper-Searching the Web

In the latest Scientic American, an article explains the logic behind the Clever Project, work conducted at the IBM Almaden Research Center. The logic is based on an iterative algorithm that classifies web pages as hubs (pages that link to many authorities) or authorities (pages that are linked to by many hubs). By detecting clusters of these pages for a topic, a community can be identified, as an aid in information searching.

Told You So!

Last week Company Sleuth, a service of Infonautics, created quite a stir over the acquisition of SkyTel by MCI WorldCom.

Google Gets Funding

Goodle, a new search service, received $25M in venture funding from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for a 40% equity stake. CEO Larry Page (26 years old) and President Sergey Brin (25) started a year ago and have 23 employees. As reported in the WSJ, the site gets 800K visits per day, with a 50% monthly growth rate. Google emerges from a research project at Stanford and uses an algorithm similiar to IBM's Clever Project (see below left).

New WF Articles

Two feature articles on Web Farming were published this month. DM Review contained the article "Farming Web Resources for the Data Warehouse" in their June issue.

DB2 Magazine printed the article "Web Farming" in their summer issue.

XML Support in DB2

As real progress in XML adoption, IBM is enhancing the text extender in the new DB2 UDB Version 6.1 to handle XML and other structured text. SQL searches can be limited to sections and even nested sections within an XML document. DB2 includes an XML parser so that XML documents can populate DB2 tables and DB2 tables can generate XML tagged documents. Entering beta, the new text extender will push XML support into the heart of the engine.

MiningCo is now About.com

In May, MiningCo.com changed their name to About.com. The site is noted for their expert guides on 650 topics, along with supporting discussion groups.