Posts from October 2005

Last Monday night I sat down with Igor Jablokov, an IBM program director working on new methods of multimodal search using open standards, to do a podcast. Multimodal search adds voice commands to a visual display to allow easy access to a long list of commands and contextual information. The technology is currently used in web browsers, mobile phones, and automobile computing systems. I also recorded a presentation by Igor on mobile search at Mobile Monday in April. IBM is one of the contributors to the VoiceXML proposed standard. Opera and Motorola are also active contributors. IBM promotes a...

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I will be in New York City next week from Sunday until Wednesday for the BlogOn 2005 conference. If you are in New York and would like to meet up feel free to contact me. I arranged for a late flight on Wednesday to allow time to meet with interesting people during the day. Tags: blogon, nyc, blogon2005...

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The team over at Deutche WordPress just added the ability to browse WordPress blogs in Germany using Google Maps. Deutche WordPress maintains a searchable directory of WordPress-powered blogs in Germany and each directory level contains a new map overlay of locations. Check out WordPress blogs in Germany focused on soccer for example. Google Maps currently provides no map coverage of Germany so the site is using only the country outline at the moment. Tags: googlemaps, mapsmashup...

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Matt Mullenweg recently posted his views on VeriSign moving into the blog space with its acquisition of Weblogs.com. Matt is a lead developer of WordPress, an open source blogging tool, and one of the developers of Ping-o-Matic, a ping relay service that currently forwards a blog update ping to over 20 destinations. Matt has some first-hand experience with the team at VeriSign. We should have been better prepared for this. Earlier in the year Verisign had the Boston Consulting Group calling people in the space trying to pick their brains, while at the same time refusing to reveal who they...

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Moreover Technologies has been acquired by VeriSign for between $25 million and $30 million. The acquisition is VeriSign's second announced move in the blogging space in the past week having previously acquired Weblogs.com. Moreover founders David Galbraith and Nick Denton confirmed the deal on their own personal blogs. Rafat Ali reports Google came in with a higher bid a little too late. Moreover currently powers sites such as My MSN feed modules, and Microsoft has to be questioning its relationship with Moreover if it was not already. It's interesting to hear Google attempted to make a play for the company...

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Yahoo! launched its blog search product tonight as a sub-property of Yahoo! News. Here is a results page on Yahoo! Blog Search for "Bush" for example. The content is also exposed on Yahoo! News Search result pages. Here is a results page on Yahoo! News search for "Bush" showing 4 results in the right sidebar. Yahoo! branded the new search as "Blog search" but it is obvious from the results that Yahoo! is currently focused on one file format: RSS. Every search result in my test searches includes a link to the source RSS feed. Yahoo! Search blog notes the...

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The Microsoft Internet Explorer team is soliciting feedback for the icon used to represent the presence of a feed in a web page viewed in Internet Explorer 7. I personally like option 4. The suggested icon is very similar to Firefox Live Bookmarks icon and shows the transmission of content from one point to many possible receivers. Tags: IE7...

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Blogger blogs can now easily add a listing of inbound links to any blog entry. The new feature utilizes Google Blog Search's URL search feature to display the a list of links on the individual post page. Each view of the individual post page results in a dynamic JavaScript call to generate an array containing a link URL, title, excerpt, author, and time. Each link uses the "nofollow" attribute value. Users without JavaScript see a link to Google Blog Search for the post URL. Blog authors can enable the inbound links display across their entire blog and alter the...

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Google just released their web-based feed reader named Google Reader. Users can login using their Google account and track web feeds in a two-column layout with a default sort of "relevance." Google is not currently pulling from its archive of past blog entries and only displays the items currently present in the feed. The first column displays a list of subscribed feeds and switches to a list of posts when you click an item. Posts are displayed in the sidebar drawer using title and publication date only. The complete entry display contains the entry title, author, publication date, link, and...

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Yahoo! conducted a study of Internet users in August in an attempt to quantify the ubiquity of RSS among Internet users. Yahoo! released a whitepaper covering some of their findings after surveying over 4000 Internet users in August. Findings Only 12% of those surveyed were aware of RSS, and only 4% have knowingly used RSS. 27% of respondents had interacted with RSS content in personalized start pages such as My Yahoo! but did not realize they were using RSS. The average RSS user subscribed to 6.6 feeds and spend an average of 4.1 hours per week reading those feeds. Only...

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