Yesterday afternoon I updated the Hurricane Katrina page on Technorati with new first-person reports and information resources about the hurricane and its aftermath. The original featured content from Monday focused on the latest news about the hurricane and it’s immediate impact. There were links to weather sites such as NOAA and first-hand accounts from people who had been in the middle of the winds and rains that tore through southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. Many people updated their blogs with the latest news, accounts, and general observations from their immediate geographic area. Commenters provided advice from tornado and hurricane affected…
Category Archives: Search
The Onion on Google
The Onion posted an article on Wednesday about Google’s plans for world domination. In the Onion’s satirical account Google will index all of the world’s information by destroying anything it cannot index. The Onion also speculates about Google Sound, a global network of microphones to index the world’s emitted sounds, and Google’s vast army of laser-equipped robots that will scan the DNA of every living organism. (via Doc Searls) Tags: theonion…
Technorati Blog Finder
Technorati just introduced Technorati Blog Finder, a browsable and searchable directory of blogs powered by tags. The Technorati Blog Finder helps you find blogs of interest in the subject areas you care about. The Technorati Blog Finder is a product created with a lot of user feedback about what groups they identify with online and how they would like to find other bloggers within that interest. Technorati seeded the list using a blogger’s most common post tags but authors can edit, change, or delete these tags — up to 20 total — through their Technorati member account page. You can…
MSN Search quietly introduces feed search
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…
Shopping comparison questions answered
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…
Hurricane Katrina on Technorati
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…
Yahoo! leasing San Francisco office space
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…
Google Talk client now available
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…
Google Talk is live
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…
Two Google announcements this week
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…