Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 22 of 72.

TailRank experiments with community funding

Kevin Burton has been working on a new ranking system for webpages to help sort through the data overload faced by readers. TailRank is currently in an experimental stage and using the Wikipedia database to make sense of a known set of about 800,000 articles. Kevin is currently looking to expand TailRank to the world of weblogs and eventually to the people behind those weblogs. He would ideally like to link authors to their multiple blogs, podcasts, events, and jobs for a more complete view of online activity and content of interest. Kevin needs some servers. He is a huge…

Del.icio.us search

Del.icio.us now offers keyword search for its database of annotated bookmarks. Every search result page includes a list of related tags, providing an interesting snapshot of how the universe of del.icio.us users classifies you and your work. Top related tags for “Niall Kennedy”: rss blogs technorati blog blogging Tags: delicious, folksonomy…

Google spam suite primer

Google provides a full suite of services for the entry-level blog spammer. There are plenty of legitimate uses for all of these Google services, but Google’s market-leading position in search creates a spam ecosystem that inflates corporate revenues, index size, and user data. Google’s blog hosting service, Blog*Spot, received a lot of attention this week as blogosphere neighbors threw up their arms in protest of the host, which is like the seedy motel at the edge of town that rents by the-hour. It’s cheap and inviting to those who know no better, but those in the know don’t want anything…

Engadget Labs under construction

The opening of Engadget Labs has been delayed as the new offices are still being constructed. I previously reported the new office space would open October 15 but Peter Rojas and Ryan Block told me this week the contractors are still working on the new space. Engadget continues to operate out of their own apartments. Tags: engadget…

Igor Jablokov interview on multimodal search

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…

Visiting New York next week for BlogOn

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…

WordPress Germany and Google Maps

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…

Matt Mullenweg on VeriSign’s move into the blog space

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…

VeriSign acquires Moreover

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…

Yahoo! Blog Search

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…

Vote for the Internet Explorer 7 feed icon

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…

Blogger adds inbound links to posts

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…

Google Reader

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…

Yahoo! RSS awareness whitepaper

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…

VeriSign acquires Weblogs.com

Michael Graves of VeriSign announced the acquisition of Weblogs.com this evening. SiliconBeat reports Dave Winer sold the service for $2 million. VeriSign plans to maintain the ping beacon in its current form with additional revenue models and ping extensions beyond the current implementation. VeriSign hints at upsell opportunities for ping submission and retrieval and views the weblogs.com ping beacon as a “competing service.” They plan to overhaul the Weblogs.com infrastructure to achieve higher levels of performance and stability. VeriSign also mentions a future statistics service available at Weblogs.com that will display statistics such as total pings received, processed feeds, and…

Mickey Hart on file sharing

Mickey Hart, former drummer for the Grateful Dead, is on stage at Web 2.0 right now and making a whole lot of sense. Jeff Mallet from SNOCAP, a digital licensing and copyright management company is also part of the discussion panel to represent the paid model. Some choice quotes from Mickey: “[The fans] didn’t steal it, we gave it away” “If we ever make a good album, they’ll buy that.” “I’ve probably been recorded more than anyone else.” “We played in the park and we always played better when we played free. I think it’s a good thing to share…

Quotes from Terry Semel of Yahoo!

John Battelle interviewed Terry Semel this morning at Web 2.0. Below are some select quotes I found particularly interesting. If you look at Google as being more than search, “as a portal [Google] would probably be rated #4.” “So far [Google] seems to have no real plan, but maybe they do.” “We think the big change on the Internet is not just to get more and more unique users. As we go forward it’s more about a deeper experience, more time spent, and a deeper experience for users and advertisers.” Almost every session is mentioning Google even though there are…

Technorati clustered search

Technorati has combined keyword search and Blog Finder to enable clustered search across various blog-level topic areas. Searching for the information you care about can be a bit elusive. A gardener looking for the last information about a bush will be overwhelmed with information about George W. Restrict your search to gardening and you have some interesting results. You have a similar problem with the search term “Java.” Would you like information about coffee, the Indonesian island, or the programming language? You can combine advanced keyword search with advanced tag search for some even more interesting results. You can search…

Weblogs Inc. sold to America OnLine

Jason Calacanis just announced the acquisition of Weblogs Inc. by America OnLine. Weblogs Inc. is a blog network of 90 weblogs employing over 130 bloggers in the consumer, technology, wireless, video games, media & entertainment, business, life sciences, and events. Weblogs Inc. received venture capital funding from Mark Cuban. I have heard terms of the deal are cash and stock with about a $25 million base and $15 million worth of incentives. If true, Weblogs Inc. received a similar valuation to Flickr. Update: Wired News reports the deal was $25 million in cash with no mention of incentives. Some questions…

eBay and Skype terms and details

I talked to Steve Jurvetson today about the sale of Skype to eBay, the terms of the deal, and what the team at Skype looked for when considering potential acquirers. It sounds like Skype had a pretty good deal and were able to name their terms. Skype was approached by a variety of potential acquirers but was not too interested in selling at first. Skype was able to keep some form of autonomy by through its own board of directors, an annual budget from eBay, and a two-way incentive plan that provides financial and ownership incentives if Skype meets certain…

Interview with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons of NewsGator

I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons to talk about the NewsGator and its recent acquisition of Ranchero Software. I spent about 30 minutes with Greg and Brent talking about how they decided to work together, how NetNewsWire contributes to NewsGator’s product strategy and revenue goals, and what changes we can expect from both sides in the near future. I asked a few questions Greg and Brent had never discussed and there are definitely a few details yet to be worked out. We also talked about Nick Bradbury and NewsGator’s acquisition of Bradbury…

Web 2.0 launchpad

I am attending the Web 2.0 conference today and decided to crash the Launchpad session to see what’s new with a variety of companies. The Launchpad provides 6 minutes for a company to introduce and demonstrate a new product to the audience in a manner very similar to the DEMO conference. Socialtext just announced at Web 2.0 a move into completely open source by Q1 2006. Socialtext is currently only 20% open source. Rollyo is an interface to Yahoo! Search allowing users to restrict the scope of their search to specific sites. Dave Pell described it as “Yahoo! provides the…

Yahoo! acquires Upcoming.org

Yahoo! just announced they have acquired events site Upcoming.org and the three-man team of Andy Baio, Gordon Luk, and Leonard Lin. Upcoming is an events message board for individuals and companies, providing a way to publicize and discover events. Upcoming has a database of venues supplied by users, tags for events, as well as information about what events its members are attending and watching. Upcoming recently added a groups feature to allow private events and recurring distribution lists. Upcoming and its team will be integrated with Yahoo! Local. Yahoo! Local has a database of venues complete with reviews and merchant…

NewsGator appIcon for OS X

I just created a new application icon for OS X using the NewsGator logo. Here’s how you swap logos for NetNewsWire: Find the NetNewsWire application on your hard drive. It is most likely in your Applications folder. Right-click, and select “Show Package Contents.” Open the “Contents” folder. Open the “Resources” folder. Replace the existing appIcon.icns with the new NewsGator icon (you may want to back up your existing copy). Launch NetNewsWire. Yes, it could be more pretty with transparencies, so feel free to modify if you like the idea. Tags: netnewswire, icon…