Google’s blog search functionality may be starting to eke past Technorati. Google now offers users the option to get to its Blog search functionality from the main page on Google. Users can search blogs, by clicking the more button above the search box and then selecting Blogs, which is the top option in the drop down box.

Google launched the blog search option in September of 2005, but apparently didn’t realize that linking to it from their own home page would be the thing necessary to make it successful. This is a rather startling mistake in that Google is lauded as being a very smart company, but took over a year to figure this out.

Now that they are past that lesson straight out of the obvious book, they are making up time and picking up searches from key age demographics among searchers in the age group of 18-24 year olds, while Technorati’s shows a strength among searchers that are over 45 years in age.

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Many growing organizations and even some large developed organizations are constantly working on systems and accounting algorithms that will enable the company to properly assess IT development charges to the appropriate groups.

Determining these charges appropriately can mean the difference between pricing a product or service out competitively and in managing budgets across multiple departments. Setting up a systematic means of doing this rapidly and efficiently is also necessary for many companies to get their books closed on a monthly, quarterly, yearly basis and be able to perform real time analysis on those results so that they can make the most accurate operating decisions possible.

Plus, this same information becomes the backbone for future financial modeling, planning and forecasts that will help senior leadership tack towards a successful strategy without receiving a nasty surprise in an unexpected budget allocation. The worst thing that can happen to a senior executive sometimes is receiving an unexpected number that they can not explain to their investors.

Some organizations may try to wing it on occassion, but the more a company grows and develops the more important it becomes for senior leaders to not only receive the right answer but to have the backup and proof instantly available that shows how the right answer was derived and why it truly is the right answer. Leaders need tools that allow them to look critically at the data they are provided, slice and dice it and insure that everything is rock solid.

Acorn Systems provides IT value management software for customers looking to track IT chargebacks through a company and come up with the appropriate ABC cost assumptions and put those assumptions to work to allocate and track direct and indirect costs precisely and efficiently.

Their solution deliverss the following utilities:

• Rate-based cost allocations or usage-based cost allocations, using a consumption driven Activity Based Costing model.
• Data integration and data capture.
• Web-based reporting with robust drill-down for IT as well as business units.
• Invoice and cost analysis reports.

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We often cover some of the fights on patents within Maven Mapper’s Information as it is often very important to understand who if anyone owns information.

It has just recently become public that Microsoft filed for a patent back in June of 2005 for technology possibly covering and relating to RSS or really simple syndication.

This has made inventors of the technology, non Microsoft employees and many open source contributors, livid over Microsoft’s claim over the technology rights.

RSS is a technology that enables website owners to rapidly and easily syndicate their content to other sites. Think of it like Jerry Seinfeld spending five minutes to setup a free account on the internet and Walla, the TV show Seinfeld is syndicated around the world instantly through many to millions of sights that Jerry might choose.

Microsoft has apparently along with other large companies including Apple, who has not been attacked in the Blogosphere, attempted to put a patent on this process and technology along with additional improvements that they claim to have designed but again may have been invented in the open source community first. It highlights the extremely complex collision of patent law, intellectual property and the rapid design and improvement of online software code through open source communities.

Many companies attempt to patent open source code so that they can use it in their own technology without receiving lawsuits from multiple designers in the open source community or having to share their own design developments and innovations back to the community as is often required by shareware licensing. This fight could prove to be very ugly as RSS is rapidly becoming a key component driving the internet and the sharing of information around the world, you can find it in use in many major news sites and especially on aggregation sites like a users my.yahoo page.

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