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Google Notebook Integration With Search Results Is Neat
Having logged into Google account, do a Google web search, you’ll notice a new option ‘Note this’ for every result in the SERP’s for .com and also it’s international sites. This is a neat extension of bookmarking without having to visit the actual web page. Using this option changes the status to ‘Duly noted’ for individual results. Unfortunately, the results page does not retain the ‘Duly noted’ status when navigated between different pages of search results. Additionally it throws up the miniature notepad which eases the management of noted items. Another benefit in terms of minimizing the mini notepad while the user continues to browse the search results on a given page. Atleast an option to retain the widget when navigating across pages should be a useful.
You’ll Know When You See It with Searchme
Thumbshots with annotations in search results is a past. With Searchme, the new visual search engine offers an option to browse through search results in the regular format or clickthorugh the album of real screenshots of actual search results. Beauty is that the selected visual result highlights the textual result when browsing in dual mode. Textual results can be hidden if only visual format is preferred. Relevant vertical search options are provided while the search keyword or phrase is typed dynamically for the users to choose. Quantitatively, it’s yet to catch up in terms of indexing the web. Addition of some elements of social web would be better. Ability to navigate between categories in results pages would be another good usecase. Surprisingly they don’t blog which is a rarity these days.
Tune The Crowdsourced Web To Suit Your Interests
Jaanix is taking the crowdsourcing to the next level by considering clicks, ratings, tags, saves, comments, and new posts to identify your interests. Digg probably does some or all of this with their stealth algorithm. Sliders help users tune the main page dynamically to suit their topic which is very handy. Only the firefox bookmarklet allows the users to submit stories to Jaanix. UI across the site needs a lot of improvement with Jaanix. Votetheuser, not the story is an attempt by YCombinator’s Hacker News to consider the user karma in ranking the submitted stories.
Creating Web Forms Is Easy with Wufoo
Can creating web forms get any simpler? May be Yes. But with hosted web form creation service Wufoo, more than just form creation can be accomplished like even integrating your payment gateway within a few minutes. Very neat & flashy UI adds fun to the form creation task. Creating even complex of the web forms is made simple with good usability. Hosting & storage is cheap these days, but paid options are quite expensive. Pricing based on unique technology will not give them an edge in the logn run. Besides generic options and without being just US centric, a good amount of international usecases does exist. Wish they had a self-hosted script for those who prefer to manage forms on their own server. Roaming workforce will hugely benefit with the notification feature.
Micro-Blogging Getting Popular
It all started with ‘Asides’ feature in WordPress and twitter made it popular. Sometimes I wonder if Evan Williams got the idea for twitter from Orkut’s Scrap book feature or Facebook’s wall and extended it as a standalone communications service. Today micro-blogging is used for a wide variety of reasons like life streaming, marketing activities, live event commentary and even some enterprise use cases. So will micro blogging eat into the activity of regular blogging? With many clones like Revou, WordPress Prologue theme and other similar hosted services like Jaiku, Pownce & others, it sure is going to disrupt existing popular online and offline features.
Quotably Must Not Restrict Only To Twitter
Quotably is a new service for twitter which attempts to add sense for those who want to follow the distributed conversations by grouping threading them. While the service for twitter is still being optimised, why restrict it only for twitter? Every post in popular blogs gets hundreds of comments which needs grouping and threading to make sense. By submitting a RSS feed URL for a post comment section, this service could use the same technology to put sense for those who read comments on blog posts. May be it would be difficult to group and thread the comments ‘as is’ unless the blogging platforms has a way to identify related comments.
Mixing Crowdsourcing with Q & A
Most often, when I visit digg for tech news, I am reminded to ask a question to digg community seeking help and advice. I was hoping they would add such a feature which would be a nice and useful addition. However a YCombinator startup ‘Hacker News‘ has this feature mix and they seems to already have good traction and usage for this feature which is a proof enough to say it was a missing feature with digg. Presentation on Hacker News looks like more of reddit but it concentrates on the startup vertical. The startup community will find it useful similar to killerstartups.com and startupbug.com
How To Read wsj.com For Free
Because of the low CPM’s in the online display ads segment, Rupert Murdoch may not quickly remove the pay wall for the content on wsj.com. But he seems to have knowingly creating a back door entry for anyone to read the WSJ online content for free. If the source of the click is either from digg or Google News, the deal is to let the user access the content without any pay wall. Is this an experiment or digg & Google are sponsors making it effectively a zero cost for users to access content? Step-by-Step instructions on how to use ‘referer-spoofing’ for Firefox users is on Salon.
No Keyword Based Search on Techmeme?
For an aggregator like techmeme whose home page changes periodically and very often, keyword based search may not do justice and it seems they have understood this. Instead they have a date and time based search which displays the main page content for the specified date and time. I found this more suitable than keyword based search or calender based navigation, particularly for a site like techmeme. This sounds like an extension of date based archives which is generally seen but with the addition of time also.
Monetising Every Word On Any Webpage
Generally double click is never used on any web page. But try double clicking on any normal wod on the nytimes.com pages and you see a search results page popping up related to the double clicked word. Users unknowingly do this and can find the popup search results page either pleasant or unpleasant.
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