Demofuse and Screencast-o-Matic

Two fairly similar services here, brought to my attention by the ever reliable TechCrunch.

Demofuse

Demofuse allows you to create ‘tours’ of your websites, to demonstrate functionality, say. It looks very useful indeed, and will be something I will be using for some of the services I’ve put together.

Screencast-o-matic

Screencast-o-Matic is a service that lets you create screencasts – that is, the recording of what happens on your PC screen – within the browser for free. Cool! Screencasts are great for recording demos of how to do stuff on the PC, whether online or not.

Tags: , ,

Mahalo

Mahalo

Jason Calacanis has launched Mahalo, a human edited search engine, based on the MediaWiki platform used by, amongst others, Wikipedia.

It’s funny, I remembered immediately the blog post Jason wrote about buying the Mahalo domain and not knowing what to do with it back in November last year.

Here’s how the FAQ page explains the model:

Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

Interesting – so it’s Google crossed with DMOZ crossed with Wikipedia. Kind of.

Tags: ,

Catchup

A flare-up of my blood sugar levels meant I had the pleasure of spending a couple of nights at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital last week, leaving me with stacks of RSS feeds to get through today, when I could face them.

Still, there’s been some good stuff going on, which I’ll be posting about later.

Sometimes Search IS Broken!

ACrappySearchEngine

Now, this is the future of web search:

How can you really claim to explore the web when your search engine only returns the results you are looking for?

You can’t. That’s why ACrappySearchEngine.com returns results from all across the web regardless of what you search for…

Now some people will say our service isn’t useful but to that we say, “Look Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis and every venture capital company we pitched this too – what people really want is to discover what they weren’t looking for! Heck, Columbus was searching for India when he found America and that seemed to work out for everyone didn’t it?”

Just what we all need!

coRank

CoRank

CoRank is a site which lets you create your own social bookmarking sites, which are hosted at yoursite.corank.com – a similar kind of thing to what Ning does with social networks.

This is a great way for small groups to share information through weblinks between each other, without going to the trouble and expense of setting up something like Pligg on a server.

I’ve set up a CoRank at http://virtualcommunities.corank.com/ – feel free to join it and have a play. I’ll still be using del.icio.us as my main bookmark repository though.

Tags:
Load more posts!