The Top Ten Reasons I Love Google Base ...

We have been working with GoogleBase since it launched. Over time and from my perspective, we have seen it take a step forward, then a few back and then a few more forward. The normal growth of any product. But I have always believed in Google Base.

Here are my top ten reasons why I love Google Base

1. First and foremost, it is web based and I am a firm believer in the power of the Internet.
2. I am a firm believer in simplicity leads to adoption. Google Base is really simple to create and work with. We load it using our RSS feeds and it just can't get any easier than that.
3. Well Google Base fits nicely somewhere between structured and a semi-structured query language. I see Google, itself as an unstructured query engine using plain language. The simplicity of just typing in a few words and getting the results has proven widely popular. With Google Base you can augment the plain language query with drop downs to formulate a semi-structured query ... so you can find all the credit unions in California with assets greater than 10 million. Very Cool. Almost a semantic web.
4. The results of the search are returned in RSS. Perfect for a mash-up.
5. Yahoo Pipes interfaces with Google Base. Again great stuff for a mashup.
6. I love the bulk upload. Our Bulk upload is scheduled on a weekly basis.
7. We use Google Base as our search tool for our website. Go to iBanknet.com and click on our SEARCH and play with it.
8. In addition to RSS, the results can be returned in 3 views, list view, grid view and map view. Map view looks very promising and we may start to use that feature.
9. Google Base used to integrate nicely with Google Docs, however recently Google Docs has made the interface extremely clumsy. I look forward to seeing the two products play nice together in the future.
10. It's free.

I don't know the future of Google Base. But being an RSS centric product, it is a nice fit in the Web 2 world. Oh by the way, go to Google itself and do a search on "recipe". Well there is Google Base looking right back at you.

Have a great evening!
Chris

Busy, Busy, Busy ....

I can't believe I haven't posted an entry since the end of August. All I can say is we have been really busy.

We finally took a necessary breather last Sunday and sailed up the coast. We stumbled across 'Friendship' returning from the Gloucester Schooner Festival. 'Friendship' is a reconstruction of a 1797 171-foot three-masted Salem East Indiaman.

So why have we been so busy? Well, we're getting ready to publish June 2006 content.
iBanknet.com is built on dual XML(extensible markup language) and XBRL(extensible business reporting language) foundation. Each quarter we maintain 7 banking taxonomies. There were not a lot of changes to the taxomonies this quarter:

1. Credit Unions - No changes this quarter.
2. Thrifts - June features Schedule SB Consolidated Small Business Loans.
3. Banks and Holding Companies: A new fixed item 'F465' replaced text/reporting item '5351'. The caption is 'Cumulative - effect adjustment resulting from the initial adoption of FAS 159, Fair Value Option'. There were also some modified parenthetical changes to clarify applicability to tiered bank holding companies.

The biggest changes are our back-office processes. All the back-office processes have been now fully automated. I am now redundant. I feel a certain loss of control as a result. But in business, this is what you strive for. Now I can spend more time on strategic things.

I hope you enjoyed your summer and have a great autumn. I know we're looking forward to increasing our content significantly over the next quarter.

Cheers,

Chris