Posts from August 2005

MSN Search introduced feed-specific search last week using two new search operators for advanced users: feed and hasfeed. You may now restrict your search to only return results from the content of a RSS or Atom feed using the feed search operator. Here is an example MSN feed search for Niall Kennedy. You may also restrict your search to only include HTML pages with a declared RSS or Atom link alternate. Here is an example MSN feed search for Niall Kennedy on pages with a RSS or an Atom feed. These two operators pave the way for MSN to introduce...

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I recently received a couple inquiries from people interested in the shopping comparison industry for academic studies as well as new business development. I decided to make the answers to some questions and the discussion around the industry an open conversation not constrained to e-mail. I hope you find the information below useful insight into the shopping comparison industry. The text in blockquotes contains questions sent to me via e-mail from a MBA student at the University of Maryland regarding large shopping comparison sites Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, and NexTag and the industry as a whole. Competitive advantage: My observation is, to...

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Yahoo! and Microsoft are definitely paying attention to emerging forms of data transport such as RSS. It is evident not only in their product roadmaps but also in the essential tools to help potential candidates succeed in their jobs. Microsoft mentions RSS in 15 current job descriptions across product groups such as portable media center, marketing, and MSN. Looks like Microsoft has some plans for RSS on mobile devices. Yahoo! mentions RSS in 12 current job descriptions including what they are calling their "open content (RSS) platform." Google currently has no job listings for feed technologies RSS, Atom, or even...

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I spent my morning summarizing the current happenings around Hurricane Katrina for a new Technorati page on the topic. Some interesting observations with limited citations as I am just braindumping. Bloggers opened their houses to each other sight unseen. Blogs with video and photo coverage quickly exceeded their bandwidth limits and were offline this morning. CNN setup a special citizen journalists page for submissions. Technorati received calls from media outlets this morning in their search of the latest news from the blogosphere. Bloggers lost power and Internet access put kept on blogging through laptops connected to dial-up modems and free...

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Yahoo! plans to lease 200,000 square feet of office space in San Francisco according to the San Francisco Business Times. The new office is located at 475 Sansome Street, near the landmark TransAmerica pyramid. Yahoo! currently has a HotJobs office in San Francisco and is currently hiring for two account executive positions. I wonder what teams will be located at this new location. I have thought about working at Yahoo! in the past but the commute to Sunnyvale is just too much for city dwellers like me or people living in Marin or the East Bay. 200,000 square feet holds...

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Six Apart released the final version of Movable Type 3.2 today, almost a full year after the release of 3.1 on August 31, 2004. New feature highlights: A detailed user manual. New templates allow default markup compatibility across all Six Apart properties. Trusted commentors, junk folders, and simpler individual archive templates help authors fight spam while jumping through less setup hoops. SpamLookup is a bundled plugin. Reworked administrative interface including color icons and list actions. Bundled with an OpenID server as an extra feature. Atom 1.0 template is included while the RSS 1.0 template has been removed. Separate configurable...

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The Google Talk application is now available on Google for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It features voice and text messaging and loads all of your contacts from Gmail. The application is only 900 KB in size. Google Talk supports voice codecs PCMA, PCMU, G.723, iLBC, ISAC, IPCMWB, EG711U, and EG711A. They are evaluating the Speex codec. They currently use XMPP-based signaling but plan to support SIP signaling in the near future. Google is currently working with EathLink's Vling product as well as Sipphone's Gizmo Project for integration with Google Talk. Google also has a page listing Jabber/XMPP clients...

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Want to chat with your friends using Google's instant messaging platform? Do you have an instant messaging client that supports Jabber messaging and a Google ID? Here's what you need to do: Open a client supporting Jabber (AdiumX, Gaim, etc.) Your server name is talk.google.com Your username is the same as your Google ID. Example: user@gmail.com Your password is the same as you use to login to Gmail or other Google login locations. That's it! You can add your friends using their full ID and encrypt your messages to be safe. I am sure Google will introduce a nice UI...

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Would you like to contact people listed on business networking site LinkedIn without a paid account or even an approval? I have received a few calls from recruiters lately using LinkedIn as a prospecting service but not paying anything for the service. How? They simply look at my current company and search the web for corporate contact information. A quick call to a receptionist at a small company like Technorati and the recruiter asks to speak with me. It's not too difficult, and the recruiter just avoided the LinkedIn InMail cost of about $5 an e-mail. The practice seems to...

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The New York Times reports Google plans to introduce a new version of Google Desktop on Monday and a "communications tool" on Wednesday. The new Google Desktop will feature live content panels allowing developers to write their own widgets associated with Google Desktop. A beta version of Google Desktop version 2 is now available on the Google Desktop site. What communications tool will Google introduce on Wednesday? Google mobile? Google IM? We have a few days to speculate. Tags: googledesktop...

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