Searching for A Living?

I've been doing a lot of searches lately, looking for information and new companies involved in a wide variety of topics (social networking, entity extraction, content policing, business intelligence, etc etc).

Maybe I should go work for Mahalo.

Random Thoughts Again

1. First off, I was wrong about salesforce.com and google. I guess they were being coy because the announcement they were about to make was so boring.

2. Mark Andreessen makes an excellent point about Microsoft hiring for logic puzzle ability:

For example, a classic Microsoft interview question was: "Why is a manhole cover round?"
The right answer, of course, is, "Who cares? Are we in the manhole business?"

I had a similar experience interviewing at Google, where the question was something about fitting a 2-mile long runway into a city where you'd been told you could only have one mile to put it in. My first response was to figure out why the city would only give me that much, whether there were alternate spots in the city to explore, etc. Then, once they got frustrated with that line, I started thinking up silly ideas like putting the whole runway underground or building an elaborate 'in the sky' structure.

I'm not sure if they didn't hire me because of that non-engineering answer, the fact that the Palm Pilot ("does one thing well") at the time was my favorite product (It was only in an interview several months later that Marissa revealed the correct answer was "swiss army knife"), or the fact that I didn't have a PhD in engineering.

3. My final random thought: The "Attention Crash" gets the attention of Valleywag, Mark Andreessen, and Steve Rubel. "We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing." Oh, so true.