Cuil’s arrival on the search engine scene is has been a modest one, (Techcrunch defined their modesty as ’stealth mode’). It’s a brave step to venture into a world that giants like Microsoft haven’t yet been able to become category leaders in, and under scrutiny which seems to expect them to be as good or [...]
Monthly Archives: July 2008
Will Carocean.co.uk Sink or Swim?
July 31, 2008 – 8:25 am
Now I love my cars, I really do. It’s like a curse, I really can’t help it. Spending an early Saturday morning trailing the classifieds on Pistonheads.com is a sad and lonely pass time (with one eye on the penny jar) which I enjoy. So when I heard that a new ‘Car [...]
Micro-blogging: When Does A Trickle Become A Flood?
July 30, 2008 – 6:48 pm
One of the ways in which Web 2.0 can be characterised is by sites which deal with “presence”, i.e. short form communication, which is constrained to bite-sized chunks of information.
Twitter is a contemporary web phenomenon which illustrates the phenomenon very well. Calling itself a “communication utility” Twitter recently announced it has raised US$20.4m of funding. [...]
Wordle, Tag Clouds just got sexier
July 30, 2008 – 4:35 pm
Tag Clouds have been one of the defining visual styles of ‘web 2.0′ - you can see our tag cloud on the right hand side there. In essence a tag cloud monitors every word you publish [in this case, tags] and displays them randomly with size and weight based on frequency of word. In our [...]
Searching Rich Media
July 29, 2008 – 12:26 pm
Google has been indexing Flash since 2004 but the underlying technology that powers millions of front pages and zillions of banner ads has defied the kind of interrogation that makes it truly searchable, until very recently. At the beginning of July, Adobe released what it calls Searchable SWF technology but although this is a step [...]
Google launches Wikipedia Rival
July 29, 2008 – 8:11 am
Google announced last week, the full launch of their Wikipedia beater, Knol [short for Knowledge.] It has a long way to go to beat the 8bn+ articles written on Wikipedia, or the 9.6m unique users in the UK. However, they have a cunning plan up their sleeves.
With immediate effect, any contributor can earn income for [...]
Google tops 1 trillion URLs..
July 28, 2008 – 6:11 pm
With all the noise of new product launches, and more innovation, it is sometimes hard to remember the original search battle was over index size. Namely, how many pages did each search engine index?
On Friday Google [in what seems to be a new spirit of openness] announced they had topped the 1 trillion mark. That [...]
Yahoo BOSS and the odd description of Daylife
July 24, 2008 – 12:43 pm
OK, Yahoo launched BOSS last week [Build your own search service] in attempt to find market share in this tough [for them] market. You can find out more about BOSS here, or read my review of BOSS and opinions around its ability to save Yahoo over on Chinwag.
One of the first search tools out the [...]
Social Media Network Theory
July 23, 2008 – 10:22 pm
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This excellent slide show by Jyri Engestrom seeks to shed some theoretical light on the way social media networks function in terms of “social objects”. It’s pretty easy to make sense of even without the accompanying lecture, and if you’re interested in the way social networks currently function and [...]
Google to buy Digg?
July 23, 2008 – 9:52 am
StrategyEye this morning published rumours from ‘multiple sources’ that Google was in the final stages of aquiring Digg.com the market leading social news service. The rumoured price tag is $200m which seems quite fair in this near hysterical market [remember the $1bn to $15bn valuation of Facetbook?].
The details are currently sketchy and we will post [...]
