Popular blogger Jason Kottke recently posted an entry criticizing blog search companies for the incompleteness of their results compared to his internal search tool powered by Movable Type. I happen to know both Movable Type and blog search pretty well, so I decided to dig into the data and see where search engines might have missed the mark in the interest of improving quality. I found that Jason’s criticisms where a bit unfounded yet still may alter the perceptions of many people who are heavily influenced by what they read on his blog. Jason found more results searching his installation…
Category Archives: Search
My Yahoo! feed API
Yahoo! has developed a backend infrastructure that can be easily deployed across various applications online or on the desktop with full synchronization and feed parsing handled on its servers. Developers could tap into the Yahoo! backend and develop new feed-aware applications quickly and easily on a robust platform already used by millions of users. Yahoo! just needs to publicize the code and make sessions a bit easier but I reverse engineered their code and I’ll give you a primer. Aggregator developers spend a lot of time dealing with issues such as proper parsing, feed storage, and at later stages…
New Technorati search results, profile features
Technorati released a redesigned search results page and member profiles tonight, including some features I’ve been wanting for a long time. You can find the official announcement on the Technorati weblog and I will share my personal thoughts and favorites below. Personal tag cloud Technorati now displays a personal tag cloud for each member profile! You can now glance at a blogger’s profile and get a pretty good idea about his or her most blogged about topics. Tim Appnel’s Tags.App plugin for Movable Type displays some similar tag visualizations but now anyone on any blog platform can visualize their topical…
Feedster loses founder, CTO
Feed search company Feedster has parted ways with its CTO and founder Scott Johnson as of this morning. Scott’s final papers were faxed to Feedster from the Technorati office! I spent this morning with Scott and I can tell you this was not of his will or a pleasant process. I’ve known Scott for a few years. Scott has split his time over the past year between Feedster’s headquarters in San Francisco and his wife, son, and home in Indiana. I think once some dagger wounds heal Scott will be much happier on his next project. What’s next? Scott said…
Technorati Web Comments for Firefox
I may have a Technorati version of the Blogger Web Comments Firefox extension running on my machine right now. Google directs users through a terms of service for the extension that asks users to agree to not modify the code, so I can can’t confirm my hacking… You can download the Blogger Web Comments Firefox extension directly without passing through the terms of service if you would like. Under part 4 of Google’s Firefox tools terms of service, proprietary rights, they claim full ownership over all released plugins and prohibit all modifications and derivative works. Except as expressly authorized…
Blogger Web Comments Firefox extension
Google just introduced an extension for Firefox that allows you to see the latest blog post linking to any page as it’s viewed. The extension brings up a small window in the bottom right-hand corner of the browser window with the most recent reference to the page. You can click on the box to extend it to the last 6 posts or view the entire result set on Google Blog Search. Users can also add their own comment about the page by clicking a special “Add Comment” button linked to their Blogger account. The Google FAQ mentions they hope…
Paying bloggers for generating useful content
As more and more companies create business models around “consumer generated media” individual publishers are beginning to wonder when they might see a slice of the revenue. I believe there are opportunities for bloggers to be paid for their content without compromising editorial integrity and also rewarding the tool builders. Profiting from consumer generated media is not a new thing. Shopping sites such as Amazon.com or PriceGrabber have been doing it for years, asking an author to turn over the rights to their content in exchange for the author’s work being featured alongside a product. At PriceGrabber we paid anywhere…
Yahoo! launches podcast subscription center
Yahoo! just launched My Subscriptions, a new area on Yahoo! Podcasts where users can manage their subscribed podcasts and listen to these audio files online from their browser window. Users can also rate and review each podcast and its individual episodes. The online audio player uses the Windows Audio format and redirects the stream through Yahoo!’s servers allowing for some additional services as the middleman. I am currently on a high bandwidth connection and Yahoo! is offering me podcasts at 56 Kbps. Yahoo! passes the audio file location to a JavaScript file to create a new audio stream. Here is…
Google Personalized homepage API
Yesterday Google announced an API to add content to the Google personalized homepage using a custom XML file. Last night I coded my first Google homepage widget to display a Technorati Mini on my personalized homepage with a pre-populated value of my blog URL. Here’s how you can check it out: Go to the Google personalized homepage and sign-in. Click on “Add Content” in the top-left corner. Create a developer section by adding a feed URL of “developer.xml.” You will now see a new “My Modules” section. Add a module by entering with http://www.niallkennedy.com/gmodule.xml in the URL field. You…
Technorati Kitchen: it’s what’s cooking
Technorati just introduced the Technorati Kitchen, an area where we can post projects we have been working on that we do not feel are ready for integration on the main site. The first project available in the Technorati Kitchen is Explore, a way to discover the most popular recent blog posts around a specific topic of interest. You can use Explore to see emerging trends in the areas you care about or just catch up with the top stories of the day in a few minutes. The beta moniker is so overused and abused no one can really take it…