An online notebook
As I haven’t posted for a little while I thought I may as well mention the little site I was working on last wekk, LGNews.
It’s a WordPress installation that aggregates various news feeds. To be honest, I don’t like it too much, thogh much of the problem seems to be that a couple of the feeds are borken and don’t contain, as far as I can see, the correct date information, meaning they constantly appear at the top. Frustrating.
Hurrah! WordPress now has a decent plugin directory!
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… 
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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?