Google today unveiled Google Sitemaps, a way for webmasters to let Google know about the files on their site as they are published. Webmasters can create a XML file describing the files available on their site and ping Google or simply ping with the location of a RSS or Atom file with each update. You can sign in to your Google account to add and track sitemaps. Update: User-Agent seems to be new: “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” coming from 66.249.66.1….
Category Archives: Search
eBay acquires Shopping.com for $620 million
eBay has agreed to acquire shopping comparison site Shopping.com for $21 a share in cash, or about $620 million. Shopping.com just went public in October. Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, told the Wall Street Journal eBay became interested in the comparison shopping sector after they noticed sellers listing on both shopping comparison sites and eBay. I am not sure this acquisition will cause other players such as Yahoo! or Google to acquire a shopping comparison site such as PriceGrabber or NexTag. Epinions was not mentioned in the press release but I am sure eBay would like to provide…
Technorati Japan enters beta
Technorati Japan just entered beta. It’s exciting to see the first of what I hope will be many country-specific Technorati sites unveiled to the world. Have you ever wondered what are the top blogs in Japanese or the most talked about books in Japan? Now you can! The internationalization process is really interesting and exposes a lot of details about your data structure but mostly how you look at the world. Every society and country has their own ways of using weblogs and Japan is no different. Recent legislation in Japan requires all personally identifiable data travel over SSL. Anonymity…
Google tries to lure analysts away from covering Yahoo!
Is it just a coincidence that Google scheduled its “Factory Tour” for press and analysts at the exact same time as Yahoo!’s shareholder meeting? Definitely a strategic PR move. I wonder if anyone will stop covering Yahoo! for the day to attend….
Blo.gs sold
Jim Winstead just announced blo.gs has been sold to an undisclosed buyer and the site will change hands on or after June 13. The new owner will “continue providing the same features that exist now, and will be working on making blo.gs even better.” Blo.gs is a pretty large ping beacon, second only to weblogs.com in its level of integration into all the different weblog tools available. My guess is a company wanting to move into the space purchased blo.gs for its ping beacon and its database of posts. There is a small chance the acquirer cares about the site’s…
Technorati partners with Salon.com
Technorati has partnered with Salon.com to integrate weblog content and commentary in Salon.com’s home page, the end of every article, and a roundup. Richard Ault took some good screenshots of the new features if you would like a small walk-through. I am really excited to see the writing of the masses combined with the edited writing of the few. Salon.com has been publishing original content online since 1995 and I have been reading the site intermittently since it started. Salon owns The WELL, the most famous online community. Salon chose to measure its hottest stories by the number of bloggers…
Underpants gnomes
Underpants Gnomes South Park clip from Season 2.
Grokker visualizes Yahoo! Search using Java applet
Groxis, a data visualization company, converted its Grokker desktop software to a Java applet and is demonstrating the ability of its software using Yahoo! search results and advertisements. I tested it out with an ego search of course. I am able to see generalizations of how Yahoo! search users might view me based on the size of circles. You can adjust the starting date and number of search results through the tools on the bottom of your screen. Overall a very clever way to show off what Grokker’s technology can do for other data sets.Technorati Tags: grokker…
Nominations for the Open Media 100
AlwaysOn Network is working with Technorati to create a list of 100 top individuals who are leveraging the power of communities online to accomplish great things. The list is branded as the “Open Media 100” but has nothing to do with the Open Media Network. The list will not be ranked, but will include 100 individuals in the categories of pioneers, tool smiths, trendsetters, practitioners, and enablers. I am pretty sure members of the Open Media 100 need to publish a weblog and that requirement excludes people like Ward Cunningham or John Doerr. I think Dave Sifry and Joi Ito…
Technorati search goes to 11
Why does Technorati’s search page paginate through 11 result pages when other search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves all use 10? Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap explains it best in this clip shown below. When you’re at 10 where can you go from there? If we need that extra push over the cliff we go to 11. Especially for the all-important presence amplifier.Technorati Tags: spinaltap…