Monday Links - 2008-04-28

• Fire Eagle & Plazes talk to each other - More networks will be doing this
• ClaimID enhanced with RecognitionAUTH
• Spime search - via Findability.org
• Spock on Reuters - the people search engine continues TV appearences
• Opera browser to get its own web developer tool - via CSS3.info
• Use twitter to track packages - via TwitterThoughts

Technorati tags: claimid, opera, spime, spock, search, development, twitter

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Microformats come to Mahalo...

The human-powered search engine, Mahalo, has now introduced microformats in their profile section.

Chris Miller has a good breakdown of microformats employed in Mahalo on his blog.

Now they've had a taste of the kool-aid from Tantek, I'm looking forward to seeing these creep a little more into the result pages in the future.

Blogged with Flock

Energy saving search...

Use Google for all your searching?  Concerned about the environment?  If the answer to both of those is yes then you need to try Blackle.

Apparently it takes more enegy to display a white screen than a black one so the people at Heap Media created Blackle which delivers the same results from Google but on a black background.  As of writing this 123,591.010 Watt hours had been saved.

They make use of the Google custom search engine (which is something that Optiem has done for certain clients) but take it in an interesting direction by tailoring it specifically to a certain set of internet users.

Technorati tags: search, google, conservation, green

Number 1 in Google...

My blog post that mentions the story of the 40Gb per second connection is number 1 in Google for the term "40Gb per second".

Not bad out of 47,000 results - I'm chuffed to bits :-)

Technorati tags: google, "top ranked", blog, search

podzinger changes their name...

Podzinger, the audio/video search engine, has now changed it's name to everyzing. The thing that makes everyzing different (and what turned us on to them a while ago for podcasts such as City Club) is their speech recognition software.  You can enter you RSS, Yahoo or iTunes feeds and everyzing will go and get the content, transcribe the content in to HTML and add jumplinks/bookmarks into the media. They have recently added and embeddable player, digg & stumbleupon links and a slew of other goodies. Now with an additional $10M in funding they are looking to improve that and help push the media content further into Google etc.

Blogged with Flock

Monday link list

• Paul wrote about the YouTube remixer.
• View your websites in different versions of IE by using NetRenderer - great for anyone building sites especially if your on a MAC.  They also give you were the different screen resolutions will cut off you content.
• Gez Lemon has updated his Colour Contrast extension for Firefox.  This now matches the latest version of WCAG2.0.
• Matt Dickman on the new Ask.com advertising.
• Initial post from the Media Hatch

Blogged with Flock

People searching people...

Your online reputation is rapidly becoming one the big things to track at the moment.  There are a few sites out there, I use ClaimID, that you can gather together comments, feeds or sites that you own or that are about you. I can tag this information, add notes and use XFN to highlight the relevancy of these links to "me".  But what if I want to search for a person using this type of information?  Well that's where Spock comes in. Spock is, in their words, a search application for people.   This means that you can search, as would in Google or Yahoo, for a person but the information that you get is a mixture of community & self tagging as well as spider crawls of popular sites. This then returns you a list of search results more like condensed bios.  Once you find the person that you are looking for you can then click through into their profile.  You can also search for terms such as "drunk driving" and see which "celebrity" pops up. From here, if you are signed in, you can claim the entry (if it's about you) add tags, vote for a tags relevancy, plus a host of other options.  Also on your own profile you can add websites that are to do with you, claim email address and import your contact lists from a wide array of clients and sites (I assume this is to grow the amount of people in it's servers). I found it very easy to use and navigate around.  I found myself, filled in some of my profile and started digging around.  Though still in beta (I did stumble across a problem & they were very prompt in replying)  it's very solid.  The index updates every couple of hours which, I've been told, is faster than Google. You can also:

• decided if users can tag you with adult terms or not
• create a widget to put on your blog/website pointing back to your spock profile
• add photos of yourself or others
• define relationships between you and other people
• add a descriptive blurb about yourself.
• add favorites and search amongst those

It would be good if they started using microformats to mark the relationships between you and others as well as the tags, but I'm sure that's on the radar. It has the potential to be a great tool for companies and individuals alike as we create and join more and more social networks. With that spock has been kind enough to let me have some extra invitations to pass out so if anyone wants to try spock out either leave a comment/IM/email your email address.

Blogged with Flock

Mahalo need you!

Mahalo, the new search engine from Jason Calacanis, is looking for you to make the web a better place. Chris posted about their new project, Mahalo Greenhouse, this morning.  It's not a new idea, paying a nominal fee to get content created, but I hope that with the help of the full-time guides reviewing the work and the small fee (you won't get rich quick) it will succeed and not go the way of DMOZ.

Blogged with Flock

What do you know about Google PageRank?

Well if you don't work at Google, probably not much. There's been a lot of speculation about this algorithm in the past and Smashing Magazine have posted a great article all about PageRank on their blog this week.

It's great reference material and ties up quite a few loose threads about this particular bit of SEO. An updated PDF will be available from them soon, with corrections from comments made after this post went live.

You can see more of my SEO bookmarks at Ma.gnolia.