• For Yahoo’s CEO, News Keeps Getting Worse

  Yang made no concessions to the growing chorus of angry investors and media pundits calling for his ouster at a Web industry conference in London this week. (Reuters Nov 14 2008)

• Sweeping Changes At Live.com: It’s A Social Network!

  US Live.com is now a social network, too, pulling in activity information and content from around the web. (TechCrunch Nov 12 2008)

• Could a Social Twist Brings Good Tidings to Microsoft’s Live Service?

  The new Microsoft Live Service portal will bring together Windows Live Messenger and an upgraded Hotmail, Windows Live Group, photo gallery, toolbar, calendar… (SE Journal Nov 13 2008)

• Would an Apple Google Split Mean an Apple Yahoo Acquisition?

  Apple may be working on their own search engine technology and search advertising format (SE Journal Nov 13 2008)

• The next step in search

  Microsoft on the the new the Live Search API for publishers and web developers. (Live Search blog Nov 13 2008)

• Google Site Search gets more demanding

  On-Demand Indexing is like a turbocharger for Google Site Search, ensuring that your newest pages appear in search results on your website fast. (Google Blog Nov 13 2008)

• Will Disney or Apple Buy Yahoo Before Microsoft Does?

  Disney buying Yahoo is much more hairbrained of an idea than Apple buying Yahoo. (SE Journal Nov 13 2008)

• Microsoft Opens the Live Search API to the Public

  On the release of the Live Search API which is also known as Project Silk Road. (SE Journal Nov 13 2008)

• Microsoft Live Search Cashback Program Showing Positive Results

  20 of the top 50 online retailers in the U.S. and 140 of Internet Retailer’s Top 500 are now into the Live Search cashback program. (SE Journal Nov 13 2008)

• Google’s Site Search Gets Faster; Yahoo’s Goes Away

  Google has upgraded its Site Search tool to give users more control over the frequency that Google spiders a site. (SE Land Nov 13 2008)

• Eagerly Awaiting Google’s Voice Search For The iPhone

  On Google’s introduction of voice search for its iPhone app. (SE Land Nov 15 2008)

• Google’s SEO Starter Guide

  Google’s PDF titled “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide” includes basic tips for making sites more accessible to search engines. (SE Journal Nov 14 2008)

• A Selection of Social Media Search Engines

  Phil Bradley looks at look at some of the ways in which social media and user-generated content can be searched. (Ariadne Oct 2008)

• Google Docs: An Enterprise Laggard

  or maybe competitors wants it to look that way (Beyond Search Nov 15 2008)

• Dogpile Lends A Paw with $1 Million Campaign

  Dogpile, a search engine that pools results from all major search engines, is donating a portion of revenues from searches conducted on the Dogpile Web site to the ASPCA (AltSearchEngines Nov 14 2008)

• Google Finally Starts Firing Slackers?

  Nicholas Carlson says Google is getting rid of underperformers (Nov 13 2008)

• Yasni: People Search

  Beyond Search takes a look at people search tools (Nov 14 2008)

• Search for Your Name with Namepedia

  Onomastics or onomatology is the study of proper names of all kinds and the origins of names. (AltSearchEngines Nov 13 2008)

• RefSeek - an academic search engine

  RefSeek searches more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers. (P Bradley Nov 12 2008)

• Yahoo Layoffs Set for December 10 (And, No, Jerry Yang Is Not Leaving Too)

  Yahoo! to lay off 10 percent of workforce (BoomTown Nov 14 2008)

Make Pay Per Click Pay Off Big!

Anyone working withing the fields of online information dissemination and Internet marketing need to know something about the arts of setting up and designing web sites, so these resources may also be of interest to the readers of Pandia.

The list is partly based on web statistics gathered by Ranking.com.

Here are the top 20:

1. about.com (All round information site. The reason it has been included here is most likely the Web Design subsite)
2. w3.org (World Wide Web Consortium, info for web site coders)
3. mashable.com (Web 2.0 blog)
4. Webdeveloper.com (Articles, resources and discussions on web coding, programming and graphics)
5. apache.org (The Apache Software Foundation - web server software)
6. oswd.org (Open Source Web Design, for free web design templates)
7. oreillynet.org (Publisher covering web software and tools)
   

8. devshed.com (Open source web developer tutorials)
9. netmechanic.com (HTML, SEO and web design tools and help)
10. webreference.com (Help and reviews for web designers and developers)
11. tamingthebeast.com (They are probably referring to tamingthebeast.net, a site covering internet marketing, web development, affiliate programs and ecommerce)
12. webmonkey.com (Web developer tutorials, references, blogs and code libraries)
13. web-source.net (Guide to web site design and development)
14. weberdev.com (Guides to PHP, MySQL and more)
15. devx.com (Web programming resource)
16. pageresource.com (Web development tutorial and information site)
17. irt.org (Articles, FAQs, software etc on web coding and design)
18. webdesign.org (Popular guide to web design)
19. killersites.com (Web site design how to guides, also for beginners)
20. smartwebby.com (Commercial web design tools)

To see them all, sign up for the free Website Magazine and look at the November issue.

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It is that time of the year here on the Northern Hemisphere.

A steady stream of new mutated flu viruses reach Europe and Northern America from Asia, leading to sore throats, runny noses and feverish days and nights, and there seems to be nothing we can do about it.

Normally you would look to the medical field for a solution (there is not one yet), but now Google wants to use web search to help out.

New Scientist reports that Google Flu Trends, created by the company’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, provides daily estimates of the number of flu cases in the US.

Google uses its database of internet search queries to do this. In short Google counts the number of queries related to flu symptoms and look for changes in the number of such searches. A surge in searches indicates that there is a new outbreak.

Google can detect an outbreak days before it shows up in the weekly statistical reports compiled by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Needless to say, this information cannot stop an outbreak, but the hospital may be better prepared for the next wave of flu patients.

Google.org is working on similar web search trend statistics for other diseases.

Below is a figure that shows the correlation between searches (flu) and CDC data.

An animated version can be found over at Google.org.

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• New Face Recognition Search Engine Luxand

  A unique facial-mapping engine that enables a website to find people by faces (Alt Search Engines Nov 7 2008)

• The Post Google, Post Microsoft Yahoo

  Get new hitters. Simple enough. And a new technology management. (Beyond Search Nov 7 2008)

• 5 Ways to Power Up Your Google Reader Efficiency

  Here are some strategies you can use in Google Reader to help you separate the proverbial blog-corn from the chaff (Google Tutor Nov 5 2008)

• Google CEO on Obama tech czar job: No thanks

  Google Inc Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Friday he would not serve as technology czar in Barack Obama’s administration (Reuters Nov 7 2008)

• AOL Launches Local Search Engine When.com

  A new hyper-local online event guide that enables users to search and browse for a wide range of events in their local area (AltSearchEngines Nov 3 2008)

• Microsoft-Yahoo soap opera continues

  Microsoft is looking for some kind of search partnership (Todd Bishop Nov 7 2008)

• Some Lyrics Websites Experienced Ranking Drops

  Is Google punishing lyrics sites? (Google Blogoscoped Nov 5 2008)

• How To Get Discovered Through Video Search

  People aren’t going to discover your product through video search if you can’t create a compelling video. (SE Land Nov 6 2008)

• Google November SERP Changes… Reverted!

  Changes in rankings caused by Google bug (PageTraffic Nov 4 2008)

• Facebook Ad Rates Fall: When 32% Growth Is Not Enough

  Facebook is growing, but not enough in the US (Marketing Pilgrim Nov 7 2008)

• Microsoft Tries to Steal Verizon Deal From Google

  Microsoft Corp., capitalizing on Google Inc.’s regulatory snarl, is working to steal a deal with Verizon Wireless away from its rival. (WSJ Nov 7 2008)

• Google Help Forums Being Converted to New System

  Includes improved search results, including posts from current and new forums (SE Watch Nov 7 2008)

• MSFT CEO Ballmer to Yahoo: No New Bid

  “We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition,” Ballmer says. (SE Land Nov 7 2008)

• Jeeves Returns To Ask Jeeves; Ask.com Still Shuns Him

  Go to askjeeves.com, notice how it redirects you to ask.com and then shows you the old Jeeves character. (SE Land Nov 4 2008)

• Google Slowly Dropping PageRank From The Toolbar?

  Google seems to not be promoting the PageRank indicator on the latest version of their toolbar. (SE Roundtable Nov 4 2008)

• The art of the field study

  Dan Russell, a member of the Google Search Quality team doing user experience research tells an interesting story over at the Google Blog (Nov 11 2008)

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It was a strange deal from the very beginning: Yahoo! asking Google to serve pay-per-click ads on its sites, in spite of Yahoo! having its own ad service.

It was definitely an admittance of defeat. Yahoo’s ad service is not on par with Google’s, in spite of the fact that Yahoo! has based its technology on the pay-per-click pioneer Overture which Google copied.

But these were desperate times. The Yahoo! leadership wanted to avoid a Microsoft take-over, and this was one way of proving to the shareholders that money was coming their way. Some argue that the deal would have added some US$ 250 to 450 million annually, others as much as US$ 800 mill.

It was not to be. The threat of a US justice department antitrust lawsuit made Google abandon ship.

It is amazing that Yahoo! finds itself in this position. It is admittedly not number one in search, but its sites generates more Web traffic than Google. In an age where more advertising money is moving over to the Web, Yahoo! should be in an excellent position to be successful.

Still, the company has reported no increase in its cash flow for four years, according to the Financial Times. Part of the explanation can be found in a lack of a clear overall strategy and a bad compartmentalisation of its activities. In short: Company units are competing as much against each other as against external competitors. Yahoo has, for instance, two bookmarking services.

Furthermore, the company are keeping too many alternative search technologies alive at the same time, and have failed in turning its pay-per-click solution, code named Panama, into a worthy challenger to Google Adword.

One alternative to the Google deal has been a merger with the AOL part of Time Warner. To us that seems like madness. AOL is firmly locked in the past and has not been able to adjust its strategy to the changing times. Why it should help Yahoo! to marry an even weaker old-timer is beyond us. But then again, we are not economists.

To the extent AOL brings in the money, it is because its ad revenue is delivered by Google ads. That would have to stop if Yahoo! took over.

This brings us back to Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer says that the company is not interested in restarting talks, but given the right incentives, they are bound to make a new offer. Microsoft has neither a search engine nor an ad system that can rival Google’s, but by buying Yahoo! it could at least get a search engine brand that is well known among people.

That is one reason we think option B – buying the Yahoo! search engine only and leaving the other Yahoo! properties out of the deal – is unrealistic. Microsoft’s Live Search isn’t that bad. It is the brand that doesn’t communicate.

“To this day the best thing for Microsoft to do is buy Yahoo,” Jerry Yang is reported to have said at the Web 2.0 summit in San Fransisco. “I don’t think that is a bad idea at all, at the right price whatever that price is. We’re willing to sell the company.”

Is he panicking? Yang seemed to be vehemently opposed to such a take-over earlier this year. Now he says he was never fundamentally against such a deal.

From this we can at least conclude that Mr. Yang does not consider continuing alone as a viable option.

Yahoo’s choices: Go it alone or cut a deal (CNET)
Yahoo Invites Another Bid From Microsoft Search Engine Land
Jerry Yang Speaks At Web 2.0: Our Live Notes TechCrunch
Yahoo tells Microsoft: ‘Buy us’ BBC

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Google image search returns lots of hits, but the results can only be sorted by image size. Even the advanced image search option lacks one important option: You have no way of knowing if the image copyright rights are reserved or not.

Creative Commons licensed photos

On Flickr, users have the option to tag the images they upload with a Creative Commons license.

There are several Creative commons licenses and they all indicate that the photographer want to share the photos for free as long as you credit them for the creation. Then there are several more restrictive licenses that allow only non-commercial use, that allow no derivatives or that require you to share the work under identical terms.

All six types are explained here.

More than 80 million photos on Flickr are tagged with a creative Commons license and this number is growing day by day.

But Flickr’s own search engine may not be the best way to find the photo you want with the license that is right for you. Here are three great ways to search Flickr.

CompFight

CompFight is a third party Flickr search engine with a simple yet advanced interface. Here’s how to make the most of it:

By clicking a button next to the search box, you can choose to search just the photo tags (for more precise results) or all text associated with a photo (if searching just the tags didn’t provide enough results).

Below the search box, you can choose to search all Creative Commons licensed photos or only those with a license that allows commercial use of the images.

A very convenient feature is “Seek Original”. When you use this option, blue bars on the photos indicate that Flickr is holding an original. Linger your cursor over the image to display dimensions. There is also a safe search option.

FlickrStorm

FlickrStorm works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images. In spite of the very simple start page, there are several useful options.

Clicking the link named “advanced” below the search box, you may search for images labeled with all kinds of Creative Commons licenses.

When you do a search the search results are presented as thumbnails. Scrolling to the bottom of the list, you get access to links that help you to refine your search.

When you see a thumbnail of an image you like, click on it! The image is then displayed in a larger size on the right hand side of the screen along with information about what kind of license it is labeled with and links for downloading it, see it on Flickr, and add it to tray.

The tray is a place to stack images you like and then download them all in one batch.

Along with each photo, you also get information about the username of the photographer, a link to his or her photostream on Flickr and a link to a contact form.

FlickrStorm also stores your history, so you can browse the photos you have clicked on during a session. Once you navigate away from FlickrStorm, this information is forgotten.

One disadvantage is that not all the hits for a search phrase are shown.

Flickr Search

If you are already on Flickr, browsing the categories of Creative Commons photos is an option, but given the enormous amount of photos available, this quickly becomes confusing.

In stead, try the Advanced Search option, which is by far the most advanced way to search Flickr. This page gives you a lot of different search criteria and at the bottom of the page, you can choose to search only photos with Creative Commons licenses.

You can also choose to search within those photos for images that may be used commercially or that may be modified, adapted or built upon.

On the search results page you can choose to view the most relevant shots, the most recently uploaded or the most interesting (”interesting” here is a composite of popularity criteria applied by Flickr).

You can display the photos with detailed descriptions (default), as a list of thumbnails (for browsing through large amounts of photos) or as a slide show.

Recently, a 3D browsing option is also available through a collaborative effort with CoolIris. Point your mouse to any photo on Flickr and click on the little arrow icon that appears. You can now scroll through the photos in a three dimensional interface using the arrow keys on your keyboard. This requires a high speed Internet connection.

See also:
Xcavator photo search for searching professional databases
Free online image search tutorial
Are there search engines for image, sound or movie content?
Live Image Search lets you search for faces

Google Book Search lets you search the contents of a large number of books that have been scanned by Google. Google Book Search will list books that contain your search query and display relevant paragraphs from these books. If the copyright owner allows it or the book is in the public domain, Google may also display more content from the book.

So far Google has scanned some 7 billion books from all over the world. 1 million are in full preview mode as part of formal publisher agreements and 1 million are in the public domain.

A deal with US publishers

The deal between The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google covers the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search.

If approved by court, the agreement would provide:

• More content from out-of-print books, enabling US readers to search and preview them online.
• Introducing new ways of purchasing and downloading copyrighted books.
• U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations may obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the libraries.
• Free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries.
• Compensation to authors and publishers and control over access to their works through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry.

Under the agreement, Google will make payments totaling US$125 million. The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees.

What does it mean?

Keep in mind that Google has a very ambitious goal for its search service: The company wants to index all available content it the world, and they mean this literally.

Sometime in the future you should be able to go to Google and search the content of all books, magazines, newspapers, periodicals that have been published.

That goal is, of course, unattainable, as there will always be some obscure publications tucked away in some remote book collection, out of reach of Google’s scanners.

However, this deal proves that Google may come very close to its objective.

This deal will lead to similar deals with publishers, libraries and authors in other countries, giving its book search database wide coverage of current and historical literature.

The three steps in the evolution of book search

In many ways this may represent the third revolutionary step for book dissemination.

The first step was reached in antiquity. In the Library of Alexandria it was possible to track down the works of the most important philosophers, poets and scholars. In Europe in the Middle Ages the monasteries stored essential books for theologians and scholars.

However, these books were hand written copies and there where very few of them available. This was a resource for the wealthy or the people inside the religious or political elites.

The second step was reached with the printing press (Gutenberg 1436), which made it possible to print a large number of copies of each book.

The distribution of books remained mainly in the hands of the wealthy (and — of course — those that could read), but throughout the next couple of centuries books and pamphlets became more widely available to wider sections of society.

Modern democracy is one of the results of this process. Information is no longer exclusively in the hands of the people in power.

It is still not easy to get hold of all books

Still, identifying, finding and getting access to out-of-print books continues to be a hassle, even in countries with well developed library systems.

Researchers have to rely on bibliographies and footnotes in scholarly papers to make a survey of must-read books. Library databases may help you along the way, but they do not allow you to search the content of the books.

If the book is out-of-print the researcher will have to order the books from the library. If the local library does not have a copy, it will have to be ordered from another collection, which takes time. Moreover you will have to return the book after a certain period of time.

The system certainly works, but it is cumbersome and use of the system is for all practical purposes limited to librarians, professional researchers, journalists and intelligence experts.

Step Three: From Gutenberg to Google

The World Wide Web and sites like Google and Wikipedia have already given us access to enormous amounts of information. No longer do we have to wait weeks or months to read it.

However, most of the printed material is unavailable online.

This is the goal of Google: To make printed material as easily available as web pages and online PDF files. That will indeed represent a third revolutionary step for literature dissemination. Anyone, anywhere, can immediately find and read the content of books relevant to their interests.

They will obviously have to pay to get full access to copyrighted texts, including out-of-print material, but public domain books will be available for free.

We believe it is hard to overestimate the impact this third step can have on research and the public debate.

Remember that this technology is made available in parallel with two other important global trends:

• The educational levels in the more wealthy part of the world is increasing significantly. In many “first world” countries half of the population takes part in some form of tertiary education. This means that they at least have some of the skills required to make use of this literature.
• More and more developing countries are getting their own middle class, highly educated and with the financial resources needed to become “Internet citizens”. There are several hundred millions of them i China and India alone.

The world may be reaching a new kind of critical mass both as regards access to information and the skills needed to make use of it. This development may have major consequences for economic, social and cultural development, and Google has decided to play one of the main parts in that development.

An information monopoly?

This has led to concern in some quarters: Isn’t it dangerous to let one big American company control all this information? Isn’t this concentration of power a danger to democracy?

Actually, we do find it a bit disturbing that Microsoft has abandoned its own book scanning project. This decision is another example the current lack of vision in parts of the Microsoft management system.

Alternatives are good for innovation. Moreover, they may stop one company from becoming too dominant in a certain field, and in this case we are talking of a service that may finally be considered a “public good”, in the same way as roads, mobile phone coverage or Internet access are public goods today.

If Google gets a dysfunctional leadership or get caught in some future economic tsunami, it would be great to have alternative options available.

However, that should not lead us to uncritical Google bashing.

The realistic alternative to Google Books is having no online book search at all, limiting this kind of universal book access to the current elite: scholars, scientists, librarians and other types of information experts.

That is also a kind of monopoly, although admittedly it is one divided between different people with different power bases, ideologies and mentalities.

Moreover, the “old” system with the distribution of copies of physical paper based books will probably remain in place for the foreseeable future.

As people get used to the ease of use of Google’s Book Search, however, the number people capable of using the old system will dwindle.

The fact that Google also will be a portal for the sales of PDF versions of the books, will hasten the movement away form the distribution of physical books to the dissemination of ebooks. We are now getting more reader friendly ebook readers (like the Kindle) that makes ebook reading a real alternative. Google Books will become an important portal for the sales of such books.

This is why Google watchers should make sure Google keeps its promise and does its best to make its database as all encompassing as possible.

If this service becomes profitable, Google competitors may develop alternative book search tools.

The agreement between Google and the US publishers and authors is non-exclusive, meaning that other companies may make similar deal with libraries and the like.

They will not get access to the scanned files, though, and would probably have to scan the books all over again. That is not a trivial matter. Nor is it easy to build up the computer power needed to run such a service.

Are there possible competitors available? Microsoft may change their mind and reestablish their scanning program, though we doubt it. If Yahoo! gets its house in order, they may possible see the benefit of such a program, but that is unlikely in the short term.

The safest bet is Amazon, a company that already is presenting the content of some of the books it is selling online. Amazon know that it needs more content for its Kindle ebook reader, and it would make perfect sense for the company to sell out-of-print but copyright-protected books through its online store.

A tip

Here’s a tip: If you want to search for PDF-files containing out-of-copyright books, go to the advanced search form and by click on the “Full view only” radio button before entering your search terms. Once you select a book from your results, you’ll see a “Download” button on the right side of the page. The result pages also have a pull-down menu that lets you select this option.

See also:
Google pays small change to open every book in the world (Guardian)

Outsource Link Building!

• Accoona re-emerges?

  The business search engine has been transferred to Masterseek B2B (Phil Bradley Nov 1 2008)

• Viewzi — Power Grid View

  This is a search engine that utilises the Google database to produce results in a visual format with a thumbshot of the page that you’ll be going to (Phil Bradley Nov 2 2008)

• Google Blog Search Now Reads Links on Web Pages

  Google Blog Search automatically uses the link: operator and shows list of blogs that have earlier linked to the web address mentioned in your query. (Digital Inspiration Oct 31 2008)

• Google Earth For The iPhone Released

  It is a free app that brings many of the features of the desktop version of Google Earth, to your iPhone. (SE Land Oct 27 2008)

• Microsoft Adds Virtual Earth Images To Live Search

  They appear to be live in the US only right now and around selected points of interest (SE Land Oct 27 2008)

• hakia Launches Personalized Search Feature

  hakia is jumping on the personalized search page bandwagon with My hakia. (SEW Oct 27 2008)

• Gmail Now Supports Gadgets

  You can now include gadgets to the left-hand side of Gmail (Google Blogoscoped Oct 28 2008)

• Want to Abuse Google’s New Hot or Not Buttons”?

  Can I really get better rankings just by clicking this New Button? (SEO Blackhat Oct 28 2008)

• New chapter for Google Book Search

  Google deal with US publishers and authors (Google Blog Oct 28 2008)

• PeopleJar - a New Concept of Social Connecting

  A new people search service PeopleJar offers a new (somewhat innovative) focus on social connecting versus social networking. (SE Journal Oct 29 2008)

• Why Is Yahoo Gaining Search Share? Three Reasons

  Yahoo has gained search share over the last month while Microsoft has dropped a bit. (SE Journal Oct 29 2008)

• Google Using OCR To Index Scanned Documents

  Googlebot recognizes the content of scanned or image-based documents. (SE Land Oct 30 2008)

• Google to Integrate with OpenID

  Google announced that they are starting to push towards a global login. (SE Journal Oct 30 2008)

• RSS Comes To Google Web Search!

  Google has finally launched RSS feeds as one of the options to Google Alerts (PageTraffic Oct 30 2008)

• Google Can Crawl More Than a 100 Links Per Document

  Sccording to the Official Webmaster Guidelines page, it is recommended that one should keep it under 100 links per document (PageTraffic Oct 30 3008)

• Is Yahoo’s Buzz A Buzz-Kill?

  Sites buzzed on Buzz rarely make it to the Yahoo front page (SE Land Oct 29 2008)

• Knol - now with Custom Search

  Custom Search gives us all of the speed and relevance of Google’s search technology (Google Custom Search Blog Oct 30 2008)

• Google Makes All PDF Documents Copy & Paste Friendly with OCR

  If a PDF document is scanned as an image, Google can create an HTML version using OCR. (SE Roundtable Oct 31 2008)

• Amazon’s WindowShop Offers A Sleek Interface For The Online Megastore

  Each product is displayed as a tile on a large grid, which users can pan across until they find something they’re interested in. (TechCrunch Oct 27 2008)

• Microsoft Fast Want a Search Health Check

  Fast ask about the future of enterprise search (BeyondSearch Oct 28 2008)

• Google readying SearchWiki?

  Google is probably planning a feature where you can comment on search results (ZD Oct 26 2008)

• In Google Book Settlement, Business Trumps Ideals

  By settling a lawsuit with book authors and publishers this week, Google is looking out for itself (PC World Oct 30 2008)

• Microsoft faces uncertain financial future as it looks to the cloud

  Ozzie is trying to lead the company into a new period of cloud computing (TechFlash Oct 31 2008)

• Can Anything Derail Google’s Growth Engine?

  Its all about amassing the most talent without falling prey to what’s known as Big Company disease (msnbc Oct 28 2008)

• Google Reader Adds Writing Trends

  This trending tool is great to visually see how often a feed is being updated. (Google Tutor Oct 31 2008)

Ready To Get New Customers?

Election 2008

Courtesy of Twitter, you can follow hot topics concerning the US election to keep up to date on this race that concerns us all whether we like it of not.

You see the latest updates from the official campaign Twitter accounts of both candidates and a live stream of all the public tweets mentioning Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin. It’s like a live and personal poll and at times it’s very interesting.

Several third party developers are also making tools to take advantage of all the information that is available on Twitter or to present it in innovative ways. Here are 5 fun things to do with Twitter — some of them are even quite useful.

TwitPic

If you send your tweets (twitter updates) directly from Twitter, you are limited to sending 140 characters of text. Thar’s it.

With TwitPic, you can also distribute links to pictures. All you have to do is log in and upload an image of your choice. You can also add a location, tags and a short message.

Once the photo is uploaded, TwitPic also gives you the option to share it in other channels, like email, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious and more. There is also a code to embed it in your blog or web site and a badge that shows your recent TwitPic updates.

TwitPic also allows people to comment on the uploaded images. There’s a lot of useful interactivity here.

TwittEarth

Ever wonder where on Earth all the tweets originate? With TwittEarth, you can get a sense of just that. You won’t see a geographic rendering of all the updates in Twitter’s public time line, but you’ll see where all the TwittEarth users are.

This is an alternative way to update your status on Twitter. Go to TwittEarth, where you’ll see a 3D image of Earth. Then little cartoony characters pop up and sprout a text bubble with their update message. As you watch, clusters form where most people are active at the moment.

To participate, you log in with your Twitter username and password. Then you type your update and give your location. The globe then spins to reveal a little avatar speaking your update. This might be a good idea to use when teaching geography.

Twemes

You might not know this (I didn’t): Twitter allows you to highlight words in your tweet by prefacing them with #. This turns the word into a tag and this is where Twemes enters.

Say my friends and I were planning a garden party (and let’s say, for the sake of argument that they are all on Twitter). I could send them this message:

Twitter #susisgardenparty to add tweets - http://twemes.com/susisgardenparty

All those that contribute to planning the party now know that they can go to http://twemes.com/susisgardenparty to follow the activities.

Twemes adds further useful functionality to Twitter by allowing people to comment on items. It is also possible to reply to a specific tweet by clicking on the reply link below that tweet. This will take you to the twitter website with the update box already filled with the tweme and the @name of the twitterer that wrote the tweme.

Crowdstatus

Crowdstatus is a tool labeled “Very much in Alfa”. And it isn’t 100 percent stable. But it could become a useful tool.

It lets you set up a crowd — a group of people you follow on Twitter. You then get a URL where you can go to see all of their most recent updates in one place.

At the moment, Crowdstatus only works with Twitter, but you might soon add friends from Facebook or Seesmic.

Get Twittered by Pandia

If you are using the popular Twitter service to keep track of what your friends are doing, you may also get an update every time Pandia publishes a new article or news story.

Use Twitter’s search field for finding people and search for pandianews. Beside the Pandia listing you will find a “follow” button. Click on it!

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Yahoo! announced that it would lay off 10 percent of its workforce this week. Is the search engine industry feeling the recession already?

There might be optimists out there that continue to believe that a global economic downturn can be avoided, but we do not belong to them.

When confidence in the market evaporates and people fear for their jobs, they will cut spending. Weakening sales will push more companies into the abyss, leading to more unemployment, less spending and so on and so forth. In short: There are tough times ahead.

Not all companies suffer during downturns. People still need basic goods like food. Department stores offering cheap clothing may thrive during a recession. The question is: Where are search companies like Google and Yahoo! positioned in this spectrum?

People will probably look to the Net for cheap entertainment

As regards the user base, a recession may lead to more traffic. Unless they get so poor that they have to drop their internet service provider, people may spend more time on the Net searching for news and entertainment. It won’t cost them more anyway.

Cinemas, amusements parks and stores selling DVDs and CDs will suffer much more.

As the business sector lay of employees the Internet traffic generated by companies may go down, but the same people may continue to surf the web elsewhere, so it is hard to guess how much this will affect the search engine companies.

Email and chat traffic will probably not go down, again because there are no added costs for using these services.

Enterprise search will suffer

There is one area where search companies like Exalead and Microsoft’s Fast will notice the downturn: As companies start saving, they are less likely to invest in new enterprise search solutions.

There is one exception from this rule: Some web companies and online stores will probably like to upgrade their site search in order to keep more customers happy. As competitions increases, these are the kind of factors that decides who win and who lose.

Advertising

You may argue that discussing web traffic is not the point, as the real search engine customer is not the web surfer, but the advertiser.

Fair enough, the advertisers are the ones that pay most of the bills of Google, Yahoo!, Ask and Microsoft Live. Still, the amount of web traffic determines the attractiveness of the ad offerings of these companies. In short: the more eyeballs, the more ad spending.

And if you are able to deliver relevant customers to the advertisers — i.e. potential customers looking for exactly the kind of services or goods the advertisers are offering — the chances are that you will be able to keep many of your advertisers.

Google has, for instance, invested millions of dollars into research making text ads more targeted and relevant to searchers. This is exactly the kind of investments that pay of during a crisis.

We would guess that companies short of cash will spend more on online pay per click ads than on huge billboards and TV spots. Pay per click ads are cheaper, and it is easier to control the effects of the expenditure.

The banner ad is the loser

There is one area where these companies may feel the credit crunch more acutely, and that is in banner ads and more dynamic, graphic, Flash advertising, exactly the kind of ads you will find on Yahoo!, AOL and MSN. These are sites that rely more on content delivery than search result pages.

The delivery of graphic ads like these are not as targeted towards the interest of the reader as are text ads accompanying search results or emails. The click through rate and the rate of return is therefore normally lower.

Such ads are often used for the branding effect, but that effect is much harder to measure, making them harder to defend when companies start seeing a lot of red numbers.

That is bad news for Yahoo!, a company that is just as much a content deliverer as a search provider, but good news for Google, a company that still has its main focus on search results.

Bad time for start-ups

The search and Web 2.0 companies that will suffer the most under the oncoming “Internet Winter”, as some has called it, are probably smaller companies and start-ups, companies that are not yet generating a sustainable stream of revenue.

The reason for this is the lack of venture capital. Banks starved of cash will also be more reluctant to help smaller companies stay afloat during a recession.

Mahalo has cut some 10 percent of its staff. Mahalo, who is a kind of human powered search engine, is now outsourcing much of its editorial department to freelancers instead of in-house staff.

In a blog post Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo, writes:

Although we’ve got a significant amount of cash on hand, and the business is ahead of schedule in terms of traffic (4m uniques a month, double where we thought we would be at this point), we’re fairly certain that the advertising climate for the next two years will be severely depressed. To ignore this obvious fact would be irresponsible.

He writes that market conditions are much worse than he thought they would be.

Another human search tool, Wikia, is getting rid of a third of its staff. Wagging the Long-Tailed Dog: Search Behavior & The Economy

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