Phil Butler Unplugged

As the search saga continues, rumor has it Microsoft is just about to announce it did a little shopping and acquired Powerset – one of the leaders in natural language search. On the other hand, Microsoft’s future plans of buying Yahoo’s search functionalities no longer seem dead and buried, as they’ve teamed up with [...]

The discussion over “who owns what?”, and particularly content on the Web will become more and more intense in the months to come. Some of the major news outlets have already begun their campaigns to monetize or at least limit who uses their content. The days where a trackback or just traffic pays for the [...]

Back in October of 2007 I wrote about a great little innovation called Disqus, a very refined comment/discussion tool for sites. Back then, and even now, I was convinced that Daniel Ha – the founder – struck hard at a point of pain on the Web – interactivity. The Internet is about communication and not [...]

The first couple of months I spent here in Germany fairly dashed some of my perceptions of both the people and the essence of the place. I expect this is true for most visitors, and certainly my "American" sense of old world charm was slightly skewed by not so much disinformation as being [...]

I have decided to redouble my dedication to being unplugged. In this, my first post of the post “writer’s block”, I shall attempt nothing short of proving that God exists. I know, my readers are saying: “Uh oh – unplugged just got unhinged.” This is not the case however, but rather that I think from [...]