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Google's personalised search offering is 'neat' to use a US term

It replicates the saved search and elements of eurekster.com, but as per normal google's simplicity (and data set and users who create more data) is the winner.

Charlene from Forrester thinks this will make their search smarter and smarter.

I didnt want this g-service (im finding google a bit stepford wives), but now i can tag it with delicious, its not easy to find the exact URL for googles non 5 letter URL beta services.

So, use it, it gets creepier as you build up a profile - check the mirror.

You are what you search (you sick puppies, joking mom)

http://www.google.com/searchhistory/

seek and ye shall find IPO

Australia's number 1 job site www.seek.com.au has IPO'd and now has a market capitalisation north of $600M. For the latest price check 0

http://au.finance.yahoo.com/q?m=a&s=sek&d=v1

With the growth of vertical meta job search in the US, it cannot be long before these types of next generation services come to Australia

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/28/technology/28ecom.htm?ex=1114228800&en=f9660856ff85646f&ei=5070&oref=login

No-one wants to get busted by their boss having 5 job boards open looking for a job, when you could use one 'search engine' (that doesnt look like a job board) to look for your next challenge.

Think about if you were running a newspaper - print circulation down, online market share lagging web pureplays (seek, carsales etc) and a whole range of new technologies to tempt consumers (RSS, meta search, tagging, remixing, blogging, podcasting etc)

What would you do ?

I know what I'd do - jump onto it !

Tagging the Internet

The big trend in 2005 along with blogging is tagging. I have tried for months to get my head around the much vaunted de.icio.us.com service - remembering the URL is almost impossible.

Well it took me 6 hours, but I am now vigourously tagging the Net, and its a pretty good source for new material, esp after reading my maximum of 100 feeds on my RRSreader (which covers all major news and blog services I am interested in)

There are basically 4 major steps :

1. Register
2. Go to about page and you need to drag posting tools (popup post, experimental post) to the 'View Bookmarks / toolbar' under the URL field, using Firefox
3. Post on any website you like with tags such as 'blogs' 'rss' 'google' etc
4. Use the delicious site to find other 'social bookmarks' by going through other users bookmarks (check mine @ http://del.icio.us/benbarren) or use the aggregation of bookmarks under a tag eg http://del.icio.us/tag/rss

You can then go back to your home page and search for pages and sites through your tags and descriptions, which is a great long term benefit because we all know how unyieldy bookmarks are in all the browsers (boring !)

Its very challenging to set-up but now they have received VC I assume the 3rd expense line after founder's salary and hosting will be application and UI development, so to quote Google "your mother could use it"

Like RSS and meta-vertical searches, the great thing about tagging is I am being presented with new relevant material for me from the Net, without having to spend a lifetime finding, or more specifically, finding useful material I would not have found going to a content portal or doing a google search.

I have now deleted by bookmarks, made delicious my default home page, and its great I will be able to access the bookmarks whichever device I am on.

Del.icio.us : an acquired taste, but yum

Rupert Murdoch gets closer to RSS'ing

Excellent quotes from Rupert Murdoch of News Corp about the webs impact on the newspaper business. I wonder what he thinks about meta-news services such as Topix, Yahoo/Google News... and RSS / Newsgator.

It is only a matter of time till media companies start playing in the RSS/news/search space - I wonder if Rupert like Bill Gates (who uses an Outlook RSS reader) uses RSS ?

"Scarcely a day goes by that someone does not claim that technology writes newspapers' obituary," Murdoch observed. "I didn't do as much as I should have after all the [Internet] excitement of the late 1990s. I thought this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along. Well, it hasn't. It is a fast-developing reality that we should grasp to improve our journalism and expand our reach."

"Unless we awaken to these changes, we will as an industry be relegated to the status of also-rans," Murdoch said. "There is an opportunity to improve our journalism and expand our reach. Not one newspaper in this room lacks a Web site, but how many of us can say we are taking maximum advantage of our Web sites?"

april fools day meets social networking

I recently joined the yahoo 360 social networking beta (thanks mark jones from afr), and people who know me know i was sold on gmail the minute i could buy one on ebay (for $7 US) - nb if you want an invite to either email me.

So, there seems to be two trends this week, both of which remind me of the 90's -

1. April fools day sites

http://660.sixfoot6.com

I had to laugh, inside, at myself...when I saw this page, which forms a nice part of a resume for a web designer... i especially liked the (user) profile of friendster which used a pamela anderson pic and the following intro

"..design! I blog now and stuff! Remember me?!?! I'm still around, boy am I ever around! So, blogs are totally the future. Come by and set one up so you can share stuff with your friends! At the very least, come by and check out your profile to see what kind of music you were listening to in June of 2003..."

Harsh, but until social networking sites are delivering the billion dollars of revenue like google, and figure out whether they make money from subscriptions, micro classifieds, or contextual ads, we will have parodies that extend beyond april 1.

2. M&A and press release mania

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,42233,00.html

'Tags' include 'social networking', or was that 'blogging', or 'video blogging' (latest google announcements), or photoblogging (yahoo flickr.com acquisition followed by cnet acquisition of webshots.com - some 30somethings who sold their company to excite for $82M, bought it back for $2.4M and have sold it again for $70m, $60m in cash plss;)

Remember when yahoo bought geocities for billions and cmgi had a venture capital model around viral / eyeballs, then it stock decreased like 99.5%

I love this industry

a new search engine

"...Brin, known for his amateur trapeze acrobatics, is going to use his vast wealth to create a new circus to travel the world. He won't just fund the circus -- he plans to perform, as well. It's said he wants to do for circuses what he did for web search, make a massive redefinition.

Page is going to stay on with the company but concentrate on what he calls "searchable clothing," clothes that retain the knowledge you need.."

the anti-google blog

Just as there was a wealth of websites during the dot-com boom outlining dodgy web practices and employee layoff rumours... which then morphed into the more pcorrect apple rumour sites and the like.. here is a more subversive yet funny site : (excuse language)

"Why yes, Mr. Budweiser Ad Sales Guy, FuckedGoogle.com gets 47 billion unique visitors a day so I will demand you pay one million dollars to display a banner ad on my site for one month. No, you may not see my traffic logs. You'll just have to trust me."

sony psp

I cant wait till this game playing, movie watching, mp3 device comes out in Australia.

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/psp/paris-hiltons-psp-038200.php

Web Services Wish-List for Australia

People love Australians for their laid-back attitude and ability to call a spade a spade. Us Aussies generally stand out.

When it comes to local search engines and next gen services though, Australia is the land of me-too products.

We have localised lite versions of yahoo, msn, and google. As well as local imitations of google such as sensis, and well crafted pr/popularity engines like ansearch.com.au

There's gotta be a business case now dot crash has finished for some new type of search services (none of which we have in aust) :

- Meta-Travel engine ala www.mobissimo.com
- Job meta-engine like the recently beta'd simple but great www.indeed.com
- The wacky things that come out of ex-amazon employees like www.findory.com (the best for implicit personalisation of news) and www.43things.com (takes tagging to a new level)
- A kick ass local RSS aggregator (pleassse) www.newsgator.com
- Video search www.blinkx.com
- RSS/XML/Blog search engine - Please feedster.com and technorati.com come down under
- A local operation for one of the major blogging companies eg blogline, movable type etc

OK - I'm going to go back to business casing the best of the above, esp the RSS parts ! I love not having to surf as much anywhere but seeing 10 times the content.