Cornett Experience

After I missed a few critical email messages recently, I spent a good part of today simply trying to get my email inbox under control. Over the past decade, the “email problem” has slowly grown into an unmanageable beast. I looked at my work inbox today (this isn’t even counting my personal email accounts) and noticed I had over 18,000 emails in the Inbox alone, with over 3000 marked unread (and I file and filter even more than that). Ouch. Staying ahead of email, responding to one as several more come in, has become a Sisyphean task. Quite simply, email is failing us. The system hasn’t scaled with the volume and variety of communication we deal with today.

I’m obviously not alone in reaching this massive point of failure in the email system:

• Lawrence Lessing publicly declares email bankruptcy
• TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington returns from a trip and decides to simply delete his entire inbox
• Andrew Baron starts over as well, telling everyone to resend their email if it was important

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Well, we finally announced it. Yahoo Search is going way open very soon. We will be allowing publishers and site owners to provide us with additional information about their site. This will provide a next-generation search experience with results that can display some of the rich data that is today only available on the website after the user clicks through. For example, ratings and reviews, great photographs, useful site links, etc. The additional beauty is that users can control whether they want to see this additional info or not. Their choice. Read full article…

Yes, I’m an early adopter. That’s why I bought an Apple TV last year. And, I will admit that it has mostly just been an experimental toy until now. The biggest benefits? Being able to access my iTunes library of music and view my photos all from my living room entertainment system. My kids love going through all of our photos on the big screen HDTV. The YouTube videos were fun for a little while, but that faded quickly.

The 2.0 Upgrade
However, the latest 2.0 software upgrade finally made it a lot more interesting. Now I can instantly rent movies (including a number in high-definition with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound), buy TV shows, and browse Flickr photos on my widescreen HDTV (and I love Flickr)… Read full article…

Well, it looks like Sony’s Blu-Ray technology has won the high definition DVD format battle. Toshiba is dropping support for the HD DVD format. This is great news for consumers who will no longer have the confusion of the competing high-def formats. Well, except for those consumers who invested in HD DVD systems. Sorry!

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Grinds Coffee & Tea House, Capitola, CA,
originally uploaded by Larry Cornett.

I have talked about the commoditization of the coffee business before. You can certainly get a good cup of coffee (or name your favorite coffee drink) at many of the coffee houses that sprang up over the past decade. So, when “quality” is no longer the differentiator that it once was, what is a coffee house owner to do? Well, as many industries are discovering, you start focusing on differentiating through the consumer experience.
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Well, the biggest consumer-facing change to the Yahoo! Search experience has arrived. We just launched our new Search design this week, which features an incredible amount of great new improvements including Search Assist, multimedia integration, and enhanced shortcuts. Read full article…

The final whitepaper has been published by Enquiro Research for “Search Engine Results 2010″. In it, they cover what search engines may look like in the future, thoughts on personalization, universal search, eye tracking research, and interviews with leading industry experts such as Marissa Mayer, Jakob Nielsen, and Danny Sullivan. Read full article…

Where do you go to get your daily fix of fresh information? If you are like millions of other users out there, you hit sites like Digg, Delicious, Techmeme, or just open your favorite RSS reader. Or, you tap into your Stumbleupon toolbar to see what your fellow Stumblers have found interesting lately. Most people don’t automatically think of search as a place for serendipitous exploration. Search is best when you have something specific in mind, right? Read full article…

I was recently interviewed by Gord Hotchkiss over at Search Engine Land on the future of Search. The meta question was: “What will the search results page look like in 3 years?” He also interviewed Jakob Nielsen, Marissa Mayer, Danny Sullivan, Michael Ferguson, Greg Sterling, Justin Osmer, and Chris Sherman. Read full article…