Couple of search related stories here, following my recent posting on whether or not search is broken.

Mike Arrington announces that Euekster have managed to grab $5.5 million in funding.

One of their products is a system for creating site specific search engines called Swickis, which also allows some user contributions in the form of voting for links.

Noel Hatch has set up a local government flavoured Swicki here.

Arrington also notes the launch of Wikiseek, which searches Wikipedia in a community-edited kind of way. It sounds pretty interesting, and I will be having a play. Their homepage looks familiar though…

Still, it’s interesting that these new approaches to search are starting to appear, and are working albeit on a fairly limited scale.

From the BBC:

Entertainment giant Viacom Media says it will sue web search engine Google and its video-sharing website YouTube for $1bn (£517m).

Viacom, which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, says YouTube uses its shows illegally.

Viacom alleges that about 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes have been loaded onto YouTube’s site and viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Google says it is “confident” that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders.

As well as more than $1bn in damages, the legal action seeks an injunction to prevent what Viacom calls “massive intentional copyright infringement”.

Dave Winer’s view:

Obviously this is a negotiation, either that or Viacom is jumping off the bridge and hoping that the fall doesn’t kill them.

Euan Semple on the advantages of social media for everyone:

What I find interesting is that some people leap to the conclusion (both for and against) that social computing in business is bottom up. It isn’t. It is potentially as liberating for the middle and the top as it is for anyone else.

How many managers do you know who feel really listened to by their staff at the moment?

How many managers feel really understood by their boss?

Wouldn’t even your control freaks benefit from a better platform on which to influence their organisation?

All taken at Lake Vyrnwy today.

The Google Operating System blog points out Google’s coverage of the upcoming cricket world cup.

Google’s stuff includes a cricket blogging competition (Blogger only, of course – boo!); some Google Desktop gadgets; an Orkut community and a special blog written by Krish Srikkanth.

Here are the latest stats from LGSearch:

Via Mashable:

Am playing around with the theme of this blog at the moment – sorry for any irritation caused!

Lots of people are talking about Twitter right now, and a lot of them are pretty high profile and influential. Twitter is pretty big, and it’s going to get bigger.

What is it? The best way to describe it is as micro-blogging. You can only write posts of 140 characters or less. Hardly the medium for composing massive essays on the future of the web, then. But pretty useful if you just want to let people know where you are and what you are up to.

To make posting more accessible, you don’t have to visit the Twitter homepage everytime you want to post. Instead, you can activate your instant messaging client to send messages to Twitter. That 140 character limit is important too – because you can post via SMS as well.

Another cool feature is that Twitter works as a kind of social network – you can subscribe to other’s Twitterings, and they can yours. Everything is RSS-ified as well.

What are the applications here, though? Apart from inanely keeping people interested in the minutae of your life? Marc Orchant notes some benefits:

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now and must admit that it has stuck in a way many social tools have failed to for me. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that it’s very low effort. But more to the point, many of by online buddies are using the service as well and that makes it a very convenient way to keep up to date on what they’re doing.

Yes, there’s an inevitable noise level inherent in this sort of thing. And the volume has gone up (way up) since Scoble, Pirillo, and Rubel decided that Twitter was cool. But all in all, there’s little not to like and the conversations are often quite interesting.

It is in the conversations that the benefit lies for me. Massive, disparate communities could grow up around Twitter, making it a great platform for discussion and sharing.

Tags: twitter

Lots of people are talking about Twitter right now, and a lot of them are pretty high profile and influential. Twitter is pretty big, and it’s going to get bigger.

What is it? The best way to describe it is as micro-blogging. You can only write posts of 140 characters or less. Hardly the medium for composing massive essays on the future of the web, then. But pretty useful if you just want to let people know where you are and what you are up to.

To make posting more accessible, you don’t have to visit the Twitter homepage everytime you want to post. Instead, you can activate your instant messaging client to send messages to Twitter. That 140 character limit is important too – because you can post via SMS as well.

Another cool feature is that Twitter works as a kind of social network – you can subscribe to other’s Twitterings, and they can yours. Everything is RSS-ified as well.

What are the applications here, though? Apart from inanely keeping people interested in the minutae of your life? Marc Orchant notes some benefits:

Great article from David Wilcox:

Does it matter whether politicians who talk up the Internet’s potential for re-inventing politics, education, employment actually use it hands-on for the purposes they present, and join in? Or should we just be grateful if they have a good script from their researchers, have met the right people, and can engage in sensible conversation about social networking? What coverage do they get with that good script, but no online presence?

Ning is a great platform for creating individual social networks or communities of practice. It allows you to have your own site to which people can sign up and leave blog posts, have forum discussions, upload photos and videos and publish RSS feeds. I had a play here.

It’s another example of being able to get a social site up and running quickly and freely. The only ads are Google text ones, so they aren’t really intrusive.

Another reason to pay attention to Ning is that it is backed by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame – a man who knows his stuff.

To find out more, Scoble has a couple of videos up.

Tom Foremski over at Silicon Vallery Watcher points out the things that annoy him about search:

– There are many publishers that try to make sure their headlines catch the attention of the search engines rather than catch the attention of readers. The same is true for content, editors increasingly optimize it for the search engines rather than the readers.

– Why should I have to tag my content, and tag it according to the specific formats that Technorati, and other search engines recommend?  Aren’t they supposed to do that?

– Google relies on a tremendous amount of user-helped search. Websites are encouraged to create site maps and leave the XML file on their server so that the GOOGbot can find its way around.

– The search engines ask web site owners to mask-off parts of their sites that are not relevant, such as the comment sections,  with no-follow and no-index tags.

– Web sites are encouraged to upload their content into the Googlebase database. Nice–it doesn’t even need to send out a robot to index the site.

– Every time I publish something, I send out notification “pings” to dozens of search engines and aggregators. Again, they don’t have to send out their robots to check if there is new content.

– Google asks users to create collections of sites within specific topics so that other users can use them to find specific types of information.

– The popularity of blogs is partly based on the fact that they find lots of relevant links around a particular subject. Blogs are clear examples of people-powered search services.

It’s my view that web search has come as far as it can based on algorithms and sheer grunt alone. There needs to be a human element in terms of whether or not a result is actually a) relevant and b) useful to the searcher.

This is the thinking behind the Search Wikia project which Wikipedia and Wikia’s Jimmy Wales is running. I wrote a little about this on my personal blog here and here.

It’s also why I am working on a human generated ‘search engine’. The aim will be for people to submit links they have found useful, tag and categorise them, and allow others to vote them as useful. This database of links will then be searchable, producing fewer results, but ones which have been recommended by others. I think it is going to be really useful, but it will need the committment of other people to make it work.

Watch this space.

 

Feedable is a nice online news aggregator. As well as having your own feeds, it also provides information on hot topics of conversation in a variety of subjects.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing it out.

Tags: feedable, steve+rubel

Hmmm. FeedDemon has starting playing up all of a sudden. It claimed not to be able to connect to my NewsGator account a couple of times, despite the credentials being correct, and refused to do anything.

So, I removed the sync between the two and gave it another go. Now all sorts of old feeds and posts are popping up from nowhere. Most annoying.

Thanks to Steve Dale for pointing me in the direction of Blueberry Software and their BB Flashback range of screencasting tools. Steve has just finished a screencast of the IDeA’s Communities of Practice platform using the full blown version of BB Flashback.

At £99, that’s too steep for me. But I am trialling the ‘Express’ version, which will cost £20, and it seems to do everything I want it to. I’m putting together some videos showing how the various bits of LGSearch work. My only issues at the moment is how to display and host the video. Am experimenting with self-hosted .swf files and uploading AVIs to YouTube.

I’ve started a new page on the LGNewMedia wiki, called the Local Government Blogger Directory. I’m working from a pretty liberal definition of what ‘local government’ means so feel free to chuck in anything that comes even close to the LGNewMedia sphere of interest!

Thanks to David Wilcox for pointing me in the direction of nfp 2.0, Steve Bridger’s blog about ‘How not-for-profits can benefit from blogs and social media’.

A great addition to my blogroll.

Since cobbling together all the various posts from my previous blogs into this one, I came across a few posts that surprised me by being quite interesting!

• My Top Ten Websites and services
• Living without the Desktop
• Things I Use
• My 10 thoughts on successful blogging
• Clear your desk(top)

BlogJet was always my favourite blog editor when I used Windows regularly. I was pretty annoyed when version 2 was released not long ago, as by then I had made the transition to Ubuntu. I’ve so far failed to find anything even remotely as good in Linux, and have been blogging using the inbuilt WordPress editor and the Performancing for Firefox plugin since.

I still have Windows available on a dual boot, and on popping in today I downloaded the trial of BlogJet 2, and it’s great. It retains the simplicity of the original, but packs in loads of new features. I like it a lot.

I’ve also always liked FeedDemon as an RSS aggregator. Google Reader is the best online newsreader, but I still prefer FeedDemon overall.

So, for the tools I use most on my PC, I prefer the Windows variants by quite some distance. The advantages of Ubuntu are that is has never crashed on me, and is lightening fast.

So what do I do? I could reinstall Windows and see if it makes any difference speed-wise… but would going back to XP be a retrograde step?