Citizen journalism slow to catch fire - Commentary: Is old media relevant? Plus, Google multiples - By Bambi Francisco, MarketWatch (Jan 30) [Subscription]
Top three news sites are Yahoo, AOL and Internet Broadcasting (does web sites for television stations), and Google News is not far behind. So far most revenue is through advertising. But Francisco sees signs of Google and Yahoo trying to change the formula for web news. "Google is trying to do so by enabling people to post their videos on its Google Video Store. Yahoo is doing so by incorporating blogs in its news searches and cultivating its own star."
Will people's news work? So far it hasn't and she cites three news sites that aren't doing well - Pajamasmedia.com, Backfence.com, and Buzzmachine.com.
I can't imagine anyone wanting to rely solely on reports and analysis done by volunteer and amateur journalists for anything other than supplementing formal news reporting with some on-the-scene accounts of a disaster. Who has the time? However, from time to time citizen journalism may expose stories that the mainstream media shut out because of political or business interests.
Thirteen Simple Ways to Bring Order to Your Inbox - Tips for organizing your e-mail in Outlook 2003, Outlook Express 6, and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5. - by Scott Spanbauer (January 26, 2006)
Kosmix raises cash for a new search engine -- to compete with Google, Silicon Beat, Mercury News (Jan 30)
Kosmix is a new search engine in a field already very crowded. It analyzes the page and pages linking to it for topic and groups results by these topics. Topics may be subject and format (weblogs, journals etc). It has an alpha version available for health search - www.kosmix.com. There is an option to display results sorted by category - an approvement over other clustering search engines. It has potential but will have to add more powerful search features to gain a following.
HighBeam(TM) Research Expands Premium Content, Makes 1.5 Million Articles Free; New Sources Include Knight Ridder, Oxford University Press' Pocket Dictionary & Thesaurus and The Washington Post , Business Wire via Marketwatch (Jan 30)
Highbeam is making a pitch to get new users by offering 1.5 million full-text articles from 200 sources for free, registration not required. BusinessWire, Financial Management, Science News, USA Today are among the sources. As well, the Reference section will have The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English and The Oxford Pocket Thesaurus of Current English as well as the current Columbia Encyclopedia.
Those who are paid members will have access to more content from Knight Ridder, Oxford University Press and The Washington Post.
Canadian libraries join race to digitize books - Arts CBC.ca (Dec 29, 2005)
"Canadian research libraries have formed a digitization alliance called Alouette Canada to get their books online." ... "University of Toronto chief librarian Carol Moore will head a group of 27 major Canadian academic research libraries that have joined the Alouette Canada project."
Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki - is a wiki that acts as a directory to blogs being kept by Fortune 500 companies. Also lists other business blogging resources and gives background information about business blogs.
Google 4 Toolbar by Davis D. Janowski, PC Magazine (Jan 30)
- Add custom buttons for searching a favourite site.
- Send pages for posting to your Blogger blog.
- Map feature to Autolink a US address to an online map.
- Only for IE 6. Firefox users will have to wait.
Available at http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/T4/index.html
Reviewed in Google Releases Upgraded Toolbar by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Jan 30)
Never Search Alone by Rick Broda, PC Magazine (Oct 21, 2005) - looks at some "community" search engines for sharing bookmarks and content.
- Clipmarks - for capturing snippets. There is a plug-in for IE and now Firefox.
- del.icio.us - bookmarks - but notes that the site is confusing.
- Jeteye - part community, part blog, part wiki - a place where you can store notes in jetpaks. Jeteye calls itself an "online scrapbook".
- Shadows - for bookmarks, and considered more attractive than del.icio.us. Has blogs and groups.
- Yahoo My Web 2.0 - "a more fully realized social bookmark engine than either del.icio.us or Shadows".
Answers.com Adds More Research Tools to Database at SEW Blog (Jan 10)
There's a Popular New Code for Deals: RSS by Bob Tedeschi, New York Times (Jan 26) - Use a personalized page at Yahoo, MSN, or Google to track information on deals from travel sites such as Orbitz, Travelocity, Sidestep, Kayak, and others. The information comes as an RSS feed.
Kayak.com Becomes First Meta-Search Site to Launch Fare Watch and Instant Messenger Functionality PRNewswire via Yahoo (January 26)
Kayak.com introduced Fare Watch and KayakBot. Kayak.com's Fare Watch. Users can "track an unlimited number of trip itineraries and receive email notification when the fare meets or beats a traveler's specified price. KayakBot provides travelers with flight, hotel, rental car and flight status search capabilities from the convenience of AOL Instant Messenger".
Web-Based Applications Are The Next Wave: Zoho Shows The Way by Robin Good (-- interview with Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho.com, creator of web-based applications that may be alternatives to the Microsoft suite of desktop-bound applications.
Yahoo's Social Circle "In a bid to challenge search giant Google, the Web's most-used portal is betting on the wisdom of crowds", by Ben Elgin, BusinessWeek (Jan 23)
Will search move from ranking algorithms to social networks?
"It could represent a monumental shift in search technology. All major engines analyze the link structure of the Web as a key ingredient in determining what pages are most relevant -- a breakthrough that Google championed when it launched in 1998. A Web page that has a lot of other sites linking to it will rank higher, figuring more prominently in a given search, than one with only a few incoming links. Social search aims to shift power from Web publishers, who create these links, to everyday Internet users by examining their bookmarks or giving them tools to express their opinions. "
How people use search engines by Dan Blacharski, ITworld.com /23/2006
HIghlights from recent studies on usage and search engine standings.
+ "43 percent of online searchers use the search dialog to find their way to common Web sites, as opposed to just typing the URL into the address bar of the browser. " (Nielsen//NetRatings)
+ "Google and Yahoo! are diverting ad revenue from the "old guard" information companies, many of which own newspapers and magazines. " (Outsell)
+ "the top three search engines made up 93.5 percent of all U.S. Internet searches, with Google taking the lion's share, or 59.2 percent, of search activity." (Hitwise)
The Search Continues By Brad Grimes, Red Orbit (Jan 23) - Interview with Vinton Cerf, often called a Father of the Internet for his early involvement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He's now Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.
To the question "what Internet developments have most impressed you over the years?"
"Cerf: Certainly Google itself has made a huge impression; VOIP similarly. The massive sharing of information among individuals who offer their expertise and knowledge has been stunning in its scope. Spam and the secondary domain name market have impressed me, though not always positively. In fact, the commercialization of much of the Internet has had unexpected side effects. However, I continue to believe that the Internet would not have spread so quickly without good business models to drive and fund the expansion. "
Mapquest has some new features - find places with keywords, business names, and airport codes US only), and sort places by distance, relevance, or alphabet.
Location search now works for Canada too. Use the Place Name box to enter a business name (eg Baka Communications) along with city and province to get a list of addresses for that business and a map. Mapquest also has a category breakdown for types of business services. The one for restaurants is very detailed - locate Indian restaurants in your neighbourhood.
Medical subject headings (MeSH) used by the U.S. National Library of Medicine for Medline are well described in this online educational video - Branching Out: The MeSH® Vocabulary. Learn about the structure of the headings, how medical literature is indexed, and how to search PubMed using the terms. Length - about 12 minutes.
Mentioned in ResourceShelf.
Beyond Beta: Google News Graduates by Greg Jarboe, SearchDay (Jan 25)
Google News, noted for the way it groups news stories, is not the leading news aggregator it once was: Yahoo News and AOL News have many more users. But Google News is now out of beta and has added some personalized search features.
More in Bye Bye Beta: Google News is a Beta No More, Gary Price, SEW Blog.
The Strength of Internet Ties: The internet and email aid users in maintaining their social networks and provide pathways to help when people face big decisions, from Pew Internet and American Life (Jan 25)
From the press release: "Disputing concerns that heavy use of the internet ight diminish people's social relations, the report finds that the internet fits seamlessly with Americans' in-person and phone encounters. With the help of the internet, people are able to maintain active contact with sizable social networks, even though many of the people in those networks do not live close to them."
Brewster Kahl's Open Library Project pushes imaging envelope -- an alternative to Google by JEFFREY R. YOUNG,
The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan 27) -- Update on progress with the Open Content Alliance project to digitize out-of-copyright books. Some of this is taking place at the University of Toronto.
New Firstgov.gov Search Database Goes Live by Gary Price, SEW Blog (Jan 24) - Search of U.S. government services and resources just got a lot easier with the new and Vivisimo enhanced First Gov Search. Gary Price has the details.
The name is silly but the product is interesting. Dumbfind.com is a new search engine currently in beta that offers additional keywords to refine the search. In the style of today, Dumbfind calls them tags. There are two boxes - one for the main keywords you think of, and a second for any additional terms (tags) that will refine the search. The two boxes aren't as important as the display of search results with "related tag clusters" where the stronger clusters are in larger type and a different colour.
Two Is Better than One: In Pursuit of a Better Search New Dumbfind.com Search Engine's Two-Box Search Method Combines Keywords with Clustering and Tagging Technologies, Offers More Than One Way to Find Results Business Wire via Marketwatch (Jan 25)
Ask Jeeves Launches Proprietary Image Search Technology Industry-Leading Relevance and Image-Specific Zoom Related Search Provide Superior Image Search Experience Image Search Now Accounts for 16 Percent of All Searches on Ask.com , PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Jan 24)
"Ask Jeeves, Inc. today announced the launch of its first proprietary image search technology, available on Ask Jeeves at http://pictures.ask.com . The new technology debuts Ask Jeeves' first internally-created index of Web images, further improvements to its image search ranking algorithms and new Zoom related search suggestions specifically for image searching. "
Chris Sherman reviewed the new Ask Jeeves image search favourably in Searching For a Better Image (Jan 26). It seems to use additional ranking factors including Teoma's ranking system for authority, and to make some sense from characteristics of the images. As well it offers Zoom - suggestions for alternate terms.
WebMD Announces Acquisition of eMedicine.com, Inc., EContent (Jan 24)
"The acquisition of eMedicine.com is intended to enhance WebMD's ability to deliver diversified promotional and educational programs on behalf of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, which the company reports spend more than $8 billion annually for promotional and educational programs for physicians and healthcare professionals."
The Emergence of News 2.0 at Mashable (Jan 24) - News 2.0 is a play on the Web 2.0 - news services with community features such as citizen journalism, user ratings and sharing etc. Sixteen news services are listed in this post and there is more about features from Tin Finger, one of the contestants.
Be anywhere with Google Earth, by Richard Louv, San Diego Union-Tribune (Jan 24) It's fun to fly over planet earth with Google but it raises some disturbing questions about surveillance and privacy.
Elsevier’s Scopus Introduces Citation Tracker: Challenge to Thomson ISI’s Web of Science? by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Jan 23)
Detailed descriptions of coverage and functionality of Scopus and ISI's Web of Science. There is strong competition between these two companies that is making citation tracking a "generic feature" and possibly leading to some price advantages for customers.
The New Yahoo Mail is Really Good, Google Blogscoped (Jan 20) - review with screenshot of the new Yahoo Mail. Says it's like Microsoft Outlook and a strong competitor to GMail. It's implied that Hotmail should be toast. This beta version doesn't appear to be available for Yahoo Canada users.
However, the current Yahoo Canada Webmail program is very impressive - 1 GB of memory, can pick up mail from other POP servers where you have an account, format text, add attachments, manage an address book, and several other features. Just have to be able to live with the advertisements.
Terrific Real Estate Search Tools By Gary Price, SearchDay (Jan 23) - Maps and aerial views are good starting points for looking for real estate. Most of the resources mentioned in this article are for the US with a few that apply to Europe.
Mainly they are interesting for what is now possible. Skyline, as an example, offers 3D views of places. It can be used for travel as well to show hotels, restaurants and points of interest.
Point of clarification - HousingMaps.com, a mashup of real estate and Google Maps, is also available for Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Also, in Canada, MLS.ca, although it doesn't have the aerial views or detailed demographic statistics as the sites mentioned in SearchDay, is an easy way to find listings for a particular community.
A9 adds people search from ZoomInfo, Pandia (Jan 20) - Here's another reason to use A9 - the convenience of being able to search for people through Zoominfo. However, it is still better to go directly to Zoominfo for more search options.
Forgot what you searched for? Google didn’t - Online giant stores users’ queries, click patterns and more - by Leslie Walker, Washington POst via MSNBC (Jan 21) - US Justice Department request for information from four search engines on usage of the Internet for pornographic purposes raises questions about how much information the search engines collect. Google is the only one to refuse. Leslie Walker reflects on the amount of personal information Google probably has on her. She's used "Gmail, Orkut social networking, Froogle shopping lists, personal search and a custom home page". Maybe we should be more careful about allowing a search engine to log our personal queries.
My Yahoo! Gets Ajaxy at Traffick (Jan 19) - New drag and drop features are at My Yahoo, but Cory at Traffick prefers Netvibes, a new news portal. Add RSS feeds and set up a weather watch. Also has Flickr photos, del.icio.us tagging, bookmarks, to do list - much more.
Revised guide from Marcus Zillman for Deep Web Research Research 2006 in LLRX (Jan 2006). Zillman organizes the resources into categories but doesn't provide full citation (no date or source) and never offers any comment about the resource. The categories are very loose too - for resources for deep web research he includes Mooter, a search engine, and Findarticles, a source of articles from journals, along with a jumble of others. Many of the resources he lists are his own Subject Tracer Information Blogs.
Second issue of Google Librarian concerns trust - How Does Google Determine Which Web Sites Are the Most "Trusted"? by Matt Cutts at Google; and Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust by Karen G. Schneider, Director, Librarians' Internet Index.
More Instant Answers from MSN. - comments at the MSN blog about these are the most interesting part. Can get sports scores but not Nobel prize winners?
Weather facts are here now -- "Weather statistics for US states and major cities." However, the instant answers are a bit hit and miss.
- answers for rainfall and snowfall in Toronto but not London Ontario, or for Lisbon, Portugal.
- has average temperature in july in seattle - but not for Toronto or for Lisbon.
But not all is lost. Just phrasing the queries will find pages that have those statistics.
There isn't an instant answer for weather forecast, but the sponsored ads might take you to radio or tv station website that does have the forecast, or the top result will. Enter - toronto weather forecast.
Survey: Google, Yahoo Still Favorites in North America by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Jan 19) -- Keynote Systems study shows that people are more satisfied with Google for search than with competitors.
"Google outperformed its competitors in all 13 business success drivers measured in the study. Yahoo put in a strong second place showing in 12 of the 13 drivers measured. The top "impact drivers" that affected user perceptions were general search quality, home page appeal, special features and perceived site performance."
Mashup Feed is another notice board for new mashups of maps (mainly Google) with information.
Reviewed in Keep Up With Available Mashups, ResearchBuzz (Jan 12)
Europe's 'Google killer' goes into hiding -- Project to launch a European search engine imposes 'news blackout' to avoid scrutiny -- By James Niccolai, IDG News Service (Jan 13)
Thomson didn't like all the news coverage surrounding its search engine Quaero and has shut down the web site. "It was unclear how far the work has progressed, but it seems unlikely that users will be searching the Web with Quaero any time soon. The participants are still determining how they will divide up and manage the various parts of the project, according to one source. And Waibel suggested that some of the language technologies he is working on may be years away."
Video Search: Still "Early Days" by Greg Jarboe, Searchday (Jan 17) - report on session at the Search Engine Strategies Conference - "this session featured three executives from video search engines: Suranga Chandratillake, the co-founder and CTO of blinkx, John Thrall, head of Multi-Media Search Engineering at Yahoo! Search, and Karen Howe, vice president of AOL Search and General Manager of Singingfish. The session also featured one expert in video search from a full-service interactive agency: Jon Leicht, Senior Project Manager at SiteLab International."
blinkx Brings the Best of British TV to the Web - blinkx Partners With UKTV to Make Hundreds of Hours of Lifestyle TV Watchable and Searchable Online - PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Jan 17)
"The agreement will make online clips from UKTV Style, UKTV Style Gardens and UKTV Food available and searchable for the first time at www.blinkx.tv."
Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye - Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds - Michael Hopkin, Nature.com (Jan 13)
"A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions."
From Russia with results KMWorld (Jan 16) -- Announces Quintura, "which the company claims finds relevant results from the Web faster than Google, Yahoo and MSN through its "One-Click Search" technique." It is described as offering dynamic clustering, a semantic map, and easier search.
There is an online demo, which shows some very attractive features. Select the engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN are on the list and others are possible), enter the terms, and adjust sliders for accuracy and scope. Terms show up as a tagcloud.
But this is a search client and must be downloaded. Need Windows 98 and up plus IE5.5 and above. Available in English and Russian.
LiveDeal.ca Goes Live, Globe Technology (Jan 16)
Canadians have a new online place for finding and posting classifieds. LiveDeal Canada "enables buyers and sellers to meet in person and try before they buy, eliminating shipping costs and reducing fraud. LiveDeal.ca specializes buying and selling bulky or big-ticket items such as furniture, cars, pets and major appliances."
LiveDeal is associated with The Toronto Star, the Hamilton Spectator, The Record and the Guelph Mercury, but will accept postings from anywhere in Canada.
The site looks very useful, but needs an option for posting reviews of services.
CanWest has just announced an advertising partnership with Google for its portal, Canada.com . Canada.com is now "powered" by Google and will provide users with search-related advertising.
In light of this announcement, I thought it was time for me to look at this site again. Canada.com has undergone a makeover and now sports a grey-blue background and border with a red accent (likely chosen because red is associated with Canada, eh?)
There is easy jump-to navigation to Canwest's papers and TV stations, and also to the marketplace and announcements.
Of all the features, I think easy access to the obituaries (with guestbooks) might be the best. Obituaries stay online for 30 days.
There are city guides for events, movies and restaurants for all the major cities.
News is organized by World, National, and Local where headlines can then be viewed by newspaper.
Archives are typically 7 days, but I've pulled up stories that were over 30 days old. Search results from Canada.com do not show the date and do not seem to be in date order, making selection a little harder.
The Web search display has only headline, short description - often drawn from a metatag for description, and url. The database also seems smaller. Search on Olivia Chow in the title at Canada.com found 51, and at Google.ca, 298.
Canadian-related ads do appear. Olivia Chow shows as a sponsored ad through Shoptoit.ca. "Canada's shopping search engine" has cleverly glommed onto the election by having a section for comparing candidates in the ridings.
Free registration allows users to customize viewing, use a Canada.com email account, participate in discussions. If you also have a print subscription to one of the papers, you can register for more privileges (presumably archives).
Factiva to Launch Search 2.0 Beta by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Jan 16)
"The new search interface, which features results visualization and interactive graphical navigation, is targeted at end users who desire a search experience that is similar to popular Web search engines, though it may also appeal to seasoned researchers."
Find-for-Free Policy Returns for Infotrieve’s ArticleFinder by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Jan 16)
"Now it’s 2006 and ArticleFinder is again open to all Web users at no cost, offering more than 26 million citations and 8.5 million abstracts from more than 54,000 journals. Infotrieve promises full document delivery for almost all content, but the “fetch” function is definitely not free."
St Lawrence of Google The Economist (Jan 12) - about Larry Page, co-founder of Google and "visionary geek-in-chief".
What is Google really up to? "Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, “they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test”—in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina."
Yahoo Hacks by Paul Bausch, CNet (Jan 2006)
Fine-tune Yahoo Web search queries covers the basics of using Yahoo meta words (site, intitle, inurl, link, hostname) and some of the main search shortcuts.
Personalize, track, and share the Web is a useful orientation to using Yahoo's MyWeb2 for saving and sharing pages.
Compare Yahoo and Google search results points people to Twingine, and to a graphical comparison done by Christian Langreiter. Article doesn't mention Dogpile.
Yagoohoogle, which used to be very good at this, seems to have died.
Search engines going far beyond maps by Alllison Linn, AP via Business Week Online (Jan 15) - reviews the mapping and local services offered by Google, MSN, Yahoo, and A9.
Math Will Rock Your World "A generation ago, quants turned finance upside down. Now they're mapping out ad campaigns and building new businesses from mountains of personal data". Business Week Online (Jan 23 issue)
"Converting words to math" ... "The world is moving into a new age of numbers" ... "slices of our lives now sit in databases:.
Fascinating article on what is being done with math, why - the business purpose and the money-making possibilities, and just a bit on what this will mean for privacy.
"This industrial metamorphosis also has a dark side. The power of mathematicians to make sense of personal data and to model the behavior of individuals will inevitably continue to erode privacy. "
The network effect of photo sharing - Commentary: Managing our digital mess is getting bigger by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Jan 12)
Digital photos may bury us. People take an average of 2,000 photos a year with a digital camera, and the global volume of prints is 101 billion. We will need help in organizing our digital photos and videos. Francisco mentions several companies that are in this business. This is a growing market - others will appear.
The two top photo sites are Yahoo Photos and CNet's Webshots.com. Google has stepped into inviting video submissions. Blogs are loaded with photos. And there are also sites like Filmloop.com and Slide.com for photo sharing.
Flickr is not mentioned, but maybe it's because it is so well known. There are many other services for managing digital photos. How does one select from all these? And what are the risks?
Finders Keepers by Bob Doyle, EContent (Jan 3) -- Short report on the project, Keeping Found Things Found, at the University of Washington Information School. Bookmarking is most used and the new tools like del.icio.us and Furl.net are making this more usable and supposedly things more re-findable.
Also mentions the Memetic Web where you can use set of keywords - your Meme IDs - to tag saved pages.
Google increases lead over Yahoo in search Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service (Jan 9) - Comscore's November figures show Google handling 39.8% of all searches in the US, and Yahoo slipping to 29.5%. MSN was 14.2%; Ask Jeeves - 6.5%; AOL - 8.7%
Two articles by Andrew Goodman at SearchDay to report on Danny Sullivan's keynote address at the Chicago Search Engine Strategies Conference.
Search Marketing's About People and Principles, Not Just Algorithms, Part 1 - Interesting mainly for comments about the movie Good Night and Good Luck where "plumes of smoke in Clooney's movie symbolize the lingering potential for bias, and the hazy but not invisible pressures to self-censor controversial views". Presents a series of obloquies as a method of describing the main techniques used by the search marketing community and complaints about them.
Search Marketing's About People and Principles, Not Just Algorithms, Part 2
"Sullivan senses the tide turning in terms of public acceptance, predicting that ongoing education by experienced community members, and a rising bar for what constitutes minimum professional standards, will eventually win the day in the battle for more positive PR (and we don't mean PageRank) for the search marketing industry."
The Definitive Guide To 2006 by David Berkovitz, Search Insider (Jan 10) - Describes 8 developments expected for search in 2006 among them will be combining search with behavioral targetting. MSN started demographic targetting. Can behavioral be far behind?
Google Scholar Goes International SEW Blog (Jan 11) Google Scholar now has content in English, Chinese, and Portuguese and interfaces for the countries Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.
Sounds very odd. Understandable that Google would aim for the Chinese market, but why Portuguese over French or German or Russian? And having added those two languages, why are there special interfaces for the Scandinavian countries and not China or Portugal?
Craig's Competitors: No one is on his list by Shawn McCarthy, Globe Technology (Jan 12)
Craig Newmark, creator of Craigslist, the very popular service for online classifieds, seems unperturbed by the prospect of the big companies such as Google, Microsoft or News Corp taking away traffic. At a conference in New York, "He warned, however, that would-be corporate competitors will find it hard to match Craigslist.org's appeal because, for the most part, its service is free and its users have a feeling of community."
Craigslist operates now in 190 cities in 35 countries, and has 10 million users every month. In Canada these cities are Vancouver , Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Victoria and Quebec.
Some Favorite Firefox Extensions from Cory at Traffick.com (Jan 12)
One of the favorites is Listzilla for creating a list of favorite extensions. Listzilla was created by Roachfiend. This weblog is about development of extensions for Firefox.
Newsplorer is a new newsreader for RSS and Atom feeds from a Toronto-based company. This is one where you can play with the skins to make it look pretty on your desktop. It groups feeds by category and can do so for an unlimited number of them. Strictly for Windows computers.
PodZinger Makes Podcast Searching Fast, Easy and Accurate, Business Wire (Jan 11)
"PodZinger today announced the launch of its podcast search engine (www.podzinger.com). Based on 30 years of speech recognition research and development from BBN Technologies, PodZinger is the fastest, easiest, and most reliable way for users to find the information they care about in podcasts. Two unique features of PodZinger make it exceptionally powerful and user-friendly: it displays the text surrounding the search term, so users can skim results the same way they skim text search results to assess relevance quickly; and it allows users to listen to the most relevant sections of their search results by simply clicking on any word in the search result and beginning audio playback from there."
Wonder if they will use the music to Goldfinger in their ads.
Quaero as a new search engine being developed in Europe gets press, but what is there to see? This project to provide multimedia search solutions is being billed as a challenge-to-be to Google. But there is nothing to see at the moment. The Quaero home page is blocked with a password signin (presume Thomson, the owner, will remove that), and the technology is still under wraps. One thing - it will need to buy a domain. Quaero.com is already in use.
Quaero, the European Developed Multimedia Engine, Gets Press Attention - overview from Gary Price, Search Engine Watch Blog (Jan 11)
European Tech Giants Craft Search Engine by Angela Charlton, AP via Washington Post [registration] (Jan 11) - expresses some doubt about ultimate success -- "Quaero is the latest in a string of largely French-led efforts to compete with America's dominance of the global marketplace, a theme of Chirac's foreign policy."
The Internet socket rocket By Matt Lake, CNET Reviews, January 9, 2006 -- Article has tips on how to hook into the Internet from nearly anywhere. Of course there is Wi-Fi, but the latest is power-line carrier (PLC) networking made possible by iBridge from Telkonet. Hotels in the United States and Europe (eg Best Westerns in the UK and Sandman in Canada) are putting in Telkonet backbones. Guests "plug in an iBridge to any power socket (next to the bed, in the bathroom, even in the corridor or the elevator), then plug an Ethernet cable between it and your notebook".
Future of Internet TV Is Coming Into View, By Leslie Walker, Washington Post (Jan 12) -Judging from developments in Internet protocol TV (IPTV) at the Consumer Electronics Show, Walker says, "The unmistakable theme was how video is moving over the Internet onto home televisions and mobile devices in ways that will finally allow consumers to talk back to their TVs, much as they have been interacting with Web sites for the past decade".
Wikibooks is a "collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit." You might not want to use a wiki text on brain surgery but it could be useful for a text on basic dog training or chess or maybe electronics. Texts are marked with symbols to indicate how far content building has progressed: developing, maturing, or comprehensive.
Yes, Virginia, Everything is available on the Web for free, by Lyn Warmath, Virginia Lawyer (Dec 2005)
It's not time to give up books yet for legal research. Article looks at what to expect from the free web and for for-fee services and where the weaknesses are.
December issue of Virginia Lawyer has several articles on research. Table of contents is at http://www.vsb.org/publications/valawyer/dec05/index.html
"It's not rocket science": Making sense of scientific evidence, by Paul Barron, Virginia Lawyer (Dec 2005)
"This article will review a search process using advanced search query features in Google, (see figure 1) Yahoo and other search tools to find publicly accessible Web-based information on toxic substances and the law and the reliability of
scientific evidence about toxic substances. Search tools that perform better with specific topics are searched using queries related to “sick building syndrome.”
Also uses and comments on Scirus, OAIster, and PubMed.
Mentioned in TVC Alert Jan 11.
Infotrieve® Converts ArticleFinder® STM Search Engine to Free Access Model , Press Release (Jan 5) - people looking for journal articles will be able to search Infotrieve's ArticleFinder for free again. ArticleFinder is an "online scientific, technical, and medical (STM) database with more than 26 million citations and eight million abstracts from over 54,000 journals".
This is a clear response to the Google Scholar challenge.
"ArticleFinder is similar to GoogleScholar® in that STM content from MEDLINE/PubMed and publishers can be searched in multiple ways from one online location. However, ArticleFinder differs from GoogleScholar in many ways, including: the total number of copyrighted articles that can be retrieved; the ability to add articles to a single shopping cart and continue searching; fulfillment from a single document delivery provider; and the absence of advertising on results pages."
Yahoo! shortlists top sites of 2005 at Net Imperative (Jan 10) -- Yahoo UK announced its list of innovative sites in 2005 in the categories of community, educational, entertainment, innovative, TV, travel, celebrity and a ‘weird and wonderful’.
Searching for Online Video by Gary Price, SearchDay (Jan 10) - selection of sources for downloading video and films in the U.S.
Most Important Infotech Stories of '05 "From silicon photonics to social computing, Technology Review picks five of this year's most significant advances in information technology." By Kate Greene, Technology Review (Dec 2005)
"Social machines" - the Web2.0 kind of social networking (flickr, myspace.com, delicious) and social computing site (sites with blogging and filesharing) - is among the five. As is vertical search - special purpose search such as is offered for blogs at Technorati, or for product research at Become.com.
There are also the "anti-algorithm" search methods. Yahoo Answers is given as the example - but it remains to be seen how well these will do. Google has had Google Answers for several years and many so-called answer sites collapsed a couple of years ago.
Feeds and podcasting were also named.
Web Linking: Is It Legal or Not? by Reid Goldsborough, LinkUP Digital (Jan 2) -- The Web is about linking, but not all links are good. Links to the welcome page are encouraged and considered good -- all the better for higher ranking. Links to specific bits of content or images are not - and are called "bandwidth theft". Webmasters can fight this. Deep links to internal pages may not be welcome either, and it may be better to ask for permission.
Google Scholar gets better at indexing PubMed content, but it's still several months behind. -- Rita Vine and Sitelines are back on the air. In this posting (Jan 9) Rita re-examines Google Scholar's indexing of PubMed. It's better but could be five months off.
Firefox Auto-Complete Bug Fixed! Traffick.com (Jan 9) -- Wonder why Firefox "auto-complete" wasn't working? Cory at Traffick.com figured it out. It was the Google Toolbar. He recommends the "unofficial Googlebar extension".
I don't mind the official Google toolbar for Firefox, but did have to turn off the annoying auto translation of every word I pointed the mouse at.
The State of Search Engine Marketing by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Jan 9)
-- New SEMPO report on the search engine marketing industry shows "U.S. and Canadian SEM industry has grown from $4 billion to $5.75 billion, with paid placement accounting for 83% of the total spend." Search engine optimization was 11% of a total of $643 million. Market is expected to grow to $11 billion by 2010.
-- 95% of search marketers advertise through Google, and 60% through Yahoo.
Google Pack: A bundle of free software, Pandia (Jan 1) - Google has developed a bundle of free software that people running Windows XP can download. Several Google applications, along with Adobe, Norton Anti-Virus and the Firefox browser are included. Why? Could be very appealing to new users and build even more loyality.
Multilingual Search, site covering search engines world wide Pandia (Jan 1 ) - There is more to Web search than what we see through U.S. search engines. Multilingual Search is a blog that is to serve as "the reference point on search engines and internet statistics worldwide for marketers working globally."
The Research Reality Check by Genie Tyburski, Search Snippets in Law Office Computing (Jan)
Sometimes the information is not to be had. Tyburski tells a fascinating story about doing research as part of a criminal check in the US on a witness for the opposing side. Along the way she mentions the sources she used and the techniques.
Yahoo! Local, YellowPages.com Partner by Pamela Parker, Clickz (Jan 6)
Advertisers in Yellowpages.com will also show up in Yahoo Local as sponsored listings
"YellowPages.com, which recently re-launched, is a joint venture of AT&T Yellow Pages and BellSouth Advertising and Publishing. The company represents the telcos' most committed effort to compete against standalone Internet search players in the local market. Besides the distribution deal with Yahoo!, YellowPages.com ads are distributed to Switchboard and AOL Yellow Pages.".
BBC to post past reports online for free , Globe Technology (Jan 5) -- BBC will make their television reports on major events in the last century available online for free, but at this time access is restricted to people using a computer in the UK.
"Footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, protests in Tiananmen Square and the famous 1984 dispatch detailing famine in Ethiopia, which prompted the Live Aid charity concerts, are included in a trial project being tested on the British Broadcasting Corp.'s website."
Google to sell video from CBS, NBA: Report, AP via Globe Technology (Jan 5)
"Google Inc. will let consumers buy video over the Internet from CBS, the NBA and other providers, becoming the latest company to explore the new method of distributing TV content, according to a report Thursday."
Search is About Communication Aaron Wall, SEO Book (Jan 6)
Suggests that one good way to improve search results is to get more information from other people whether intentionally or as part of the system. States that, "Many of the major search and internet related companies are looking toward communication to help solve their problems. They make bank off the network effect by being the network or being able to leverage network knowledge better than the other companies." There are several examples given for the major search engines showing this direction. The technical apparatus in place now for ranking may break down under weight of size of the web and spamming. Sites will thrive if they can build relationships with people.
A-List Web Sites Use Hidden Text to Fool Google, Yahoo! and MSN by Robert G Medford, SEO News (Dec 19, 2005)
Medford has found that some big and well known companies have used "black hat" search engine optimizing techniques to get higher rankings in search engine results. These have mainly been variations of hidden text, loading key words into no-script tags and CSS styles, as two examples. Among the companies that Medford found were GM, Harry and David, and Fairmont Hotels. Medford has screen shots and text to show how the spamming was done.
Medford notes that the "methods employed by the offending sites may be unethical, but they are not illegal" and that the site owners may not be aware that these techniques have been used.
New Web Mail: More Polished, Powerful by Ryan Singel, PC World (Jan 2006) -- "Microsoft, Yahoo, and Zimbra betas preview Web mail's new desktop-like interface."
Catalog of Movie Script Holdings Now Available ResearchBuzz (Dec 29) -- Online catalog of 30,000 motion picture scripts held in six southern California collections is available for research from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- http://scriptlist.oscars.org.
From About the Database, "Entries include title, releasing company, Los Angeles release date (or production date), a description of film type (where applicable), screenwriter(s) and institutional holdings."
Dohop Search Engine Compares 667 Airlines at ResearchBuzz (Jan 2) -- calls the DoHop search engine for best flights and connections as "unsettling smooth" and intelligent.
Selecting travel points and dates is very easy, and the search across 667 airlines is fast, but it is slow to show price (in fact, I stopped waiting.) There is a forum for reporting bugs and making suggestions.
Pack Your Blogs by Ivor Tossell, Globe Technology (Jan 4) - names five ways for planning travel over the Internet.
+ Trip Advisor - user testimonials - a great way to find out what others thought of hotels and places.
+ Travel weblogs - Real Travel (realtravel.com) and TravelPod (travelpod.com)
+ WikiTravel where you can add and edit pages or just read others people's.
+ Maps of course, especially Google Earth. Article also recommends Wayfaring where you can see mashups people have done on places; for example, the Seattle Dumpster Diving Guide. Nearly all of the maps are for places in the US.
+ Virtual travel agencies at Yahoo and Expedia where you can plan your trip.
How Women and Men Use the Internet: "Women are catching up to men in most measures of online life. Men like the internet for the experiences it offers, while women like it for the human connections it promotes." Deborah Fallows, PEW/Internet (Dec 28)
Men are first to use new technologies. Men, according to this report, will also use the Net for a wider range of information and as a destination for recreation / entertainment. Women still show a preference for using the Internet to connect with others. But both are using the Net for online transactions, and both value the access to information.
Of interest: men "... work search engines more aggressively, using engines more often and with more confidence than women. " 88% of men say they find what they are looking for vs 86% for women. And 54% express self-confidence in searching, whereas only 40% of women do.
[This study is based on self-reporting. To dare even more generalizations, we might point out that women tend to be less self-confident than men.]
Study also examined the strategies men and women use at search engines. Both used similar approaches for health and government, tending to start at a search engine and then specific sites as a secondary step. But for religion they started with a known site, and turned to the search engine as a second resort.
"Competitive intelligence: an introduction" By Vernon Prior, FreePint (Jan 5, 2006) - overview of conducting competitive intelligence by author and presenter, Vernon Prior.
Wrapping Up 2005; Looking Forward by Paula J. Hane, Information Today (Jan 2) - sums up the Newsbreaks from 2005.
"The biggest drivers of the news were not traditional information industry companies but “GYM”—Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. Of the 88 NewsBreaks posted this year on the http://www.infotoday.com site, 24 (or 27 percent) covered news from these three or another Internet search company, such as Ask Jeeves, AOL, blinkx, or Amazon. Another 12 articles covered content/service offerings from startups or other companies not considered to be “traditional” content providers, including companies like Newstex, Healthline, Inform.com, Answers.com, and PubSub."
College and Research Libraries is still publishing a newsletter that guides readers to Internet resources. December 2005 issue is Music: A survey of some quality resources by Valerie King.
The New Life Cycle of Business Information By Marydee Ojala, Online (Jan 2006) - The life cycle of business information used to be linear, understandable, and traceable. Now, as Ojala, points out, it's a jumble -- "It can come from anywhere—a blog entry, a professional discussion list, a company message board, a rumor mill—rather than the traditional press release. Even unlikely sources can be authoritative ..."
Article shows how to manage in this new world - picking up press releases from news aggregators, getting RSS feeds from corporate blogs, and perhaps mining podcasts for the unintended divulgence.
Winners and Losers 2005 by Dan Tynan, PC World (Dec 27) Lists some of the "best and worst tech stories of the year" - and some are both good and bad.
"It was a year where blogs and podcasting threatened to overtake mainstream media, where a Web search giant tried to be everything for everybody but instead became a magnet for critics, and where the recording industry won a major battle against peer-to-peer file sharing only to shoot itself in the foot (and every other appendage) over a disastrous copy-protection scheme."
Paid Search to Grow 41% With Google Leading the Way by Kevin Newcomb, Clickz (Jan 4) No wonder Google's share price is predicted to climb to $600. This article says that Google had 64% of the paid search market in 2005 estimated at $10 billion. This is expected to grow to $14 billion in 2006 with Google keeping the lion's share. According to Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray -- "Over the next five years, we estimate the paid search industry will grow at a 37-percent CAGR [compound annual growth rate] to more than $33 billion in 2010, and we expect Google to capture the lion's share of that revenue and grow faster than the market as a whole."
Ten websites you shouldn't miss By Jim Regan, Christian Science Monitor (Dec 28) - Other people's lists of 10 best sites often lead to good discoveries. This list is especially interesting with maps, travel with 3D tours, Amsterdam municipal archives, and a way to catalog your library of books. Wikipedia is on the list too.
This is the Google side of your brain by Elizabeth Weise, USA Today (Dec 18) - Google has become our auxiliary brain. Why memorize anything when we can look it up on Google?
Top 10 Tech Transformations of 2005 by JD Lasica, New Media Musings (Dec 29) -- "Top 10 ways in which technology has impacted our culture during 2005" -- Lasica has noted some trends that mark a change in how we gather information. It's more community and more multimedia than print newspapers and mainstream sources. Not insignificantly, Lasica also noted "a steady erosion of traditional notions of privacy".
2005 in Review: The Top Search Industry Stories of the Year by Danny Sullivan, SearchDay (Dec 29) - says that "search caught fire" in 2005.
Blinkx Carves Out Niche With Podcast Search Tool By Keith Regan, Technology News (June 29, 2005) -- Blinkx has a podcast search tool -- "The Blinkx podcast search tool uses voice recognition software to transcribe audio and video content and then searches those transcripts for specific keywords entered by users. Blinkx made no secret that it felt its approach was superior to those from the major search engines."
Tracking Changes on Web Pages by Gary Price, SearchDay (Jan 3) - Refers to a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick on A Review of Web Site Change Detection Services. Price adds to this list the WebSite-Watcher software for serious tracking of changes on web pages. Also the new web-based Trackle.
What Happens When You Mashup RSS, IM, and Publishing Services? by John Battelle (Dec 30) - Battelle has been predicting that mobile web will "bust out" any time soon. MakeBot, he says, will be the means. This is an IM chat bot - chat, set up alerts, and get RSS feeds on the mobile through IM.
Search Engine Journal Blog Awards - summary of winners at Pandia Search. No surprise that Search Engine Watch Blog was picked as best search engine news blog.
Desktop Search: Just What You Need by Steve Manes, PC World (Jan 2006) - Don't see as many articles about desktop search anymore, but in this one, Manes endorses Yahoo Desktop Search.
What the Google-AOL deal means for users by Elinor Mills, CNet News (Dec 28)
Google says that users will see only some slight changes in appearance following its agreement with AOL to show ads.
"Instead, people may see small graphical ads on Google's home and search results pages and banner ads on video and image pages, more exposure to Google's Web crawler for America Online sites, prominent links on Google Video to AOL video content and lots of chat between the popular AOL Instant Messenger program and the nascent Google Talk."
Farewell, Explorer; hello, new browsers By David L. Hart, San Diego Union-Tribune (Jan 2, 2006) - Gives Safari and Firefox top rank but names Mozilla, Netscape, Camino, Opera, OmniWeb and a few others.
More cooks say 'blog appétit!' By Jennifer Wolcott, The Christian Science Monitor (Dec 29, 2005) - There are over 3,000 food blogs -- "Besides recipes, some blogs feature restaurant reviews, tips for dining out in Tokyo, cooking with the kids - or how to forage for wild mushrooms".
Article lists 5 blogs to start with and mentions the Food Blog Awards. Learn more about the awards at the Accidental Hedonist.
Digital mapping only begins with the roads By Anick Jesdanun, The Associated Press via USA Today (Jan 1, 2006) - Online mapping services at Yahoo, Mapquest and the others compete on features. All use NavTeq and Tele Atlas for the maps but Microsoft and Google added aerial views, some are looking to get subway and transit information.
"Yahoo provides information on subway stations and is testing multiple-point directions, in case someone wants to stop off to buy a gift on the way to a friend's. Yahoo, along with Microsoft, also provides real-time traffic information for some cities.
Google and Microsoft have satellite imagery from private and government sources. Microsoft also is testing aerial, bird's-eye-view images and is working to create 3-D maps over Web browsers (Google does these through free software called Google Earth.)"
The future of online search, in CNN.com (Dec 26) - interview with John Battelle, author of "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture". Also points to tagging as the future for finding things on the web.
"The idea is that we might get to the point where everything in the world of value is in the index correctly, is on the Internet and some way represented, whether it's your car, your child or whether it's a media object like a page or an audio file or whatever, or in this case a picture. And then you create these vast semantic attachments to everything and that becomes the seedbed for the next generation of search to crawl and make sense of."
Too heavy on my mind - Overload lurks as information flows so fast, so easily - By Anick Jesdanun, Associated Press via Rocky Mountain News (December 24, 2005)
Amount of digital information available over the Internet is expanding exponentially through scanned books, television broadcasts, radio programs - all of it contributing to information overload. What will we do? This article suggests that part of the solution may be in virtual communities to help sift out the best, but also recognizes that research skills will be essential.
"Del.icio.us, Flickr and several newer services also support tagging, the ability to organize items by keywords. Even more important will be good research skills - infoliteracy. That means knowing where and how to look, and evaluating what you get back."
Also lists several book scanning projects.
The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging by Ellyssa Kroski, Infotangle (Dec 7. 2005) - thoughtful review of strengths and weaknesses of folksonomies. Finds that folksonomies - user created tagging - will succeed where more formal taxonomies will not - "The fact of the matter is that the enormity of information that is now being published online through new mediums such as blog, wikis, etc., make a traditional taxonomy and controlled vocabulary an impossible solution."
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