I'm at the Webstock conference in Wellington, New Zealand. Currently speaking is Peter Morville, whose topic is "Ambient Findability and the Future of Search". Peter Morville was co-author of the famous 'polar bear' book about Information Architecture - which was like a bible to many of us who started our careers as webmasters or designers.
The crux of Morville's presentation was that we're "at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet", but "the user experience is out of control, and findability is the real story."
Since Microsoft made its $44 billion offer for Yahoo! (so far rejected), many industry veterans, including Fred Wilson
and Paul Kedrosky, have proposed ideas for Yahoo! to increase profitability, avoid a take over by Microsoft (which could potentially damage M&A activities) and stay
independent (though without search, I’d call it semi-independent). In this
article, let’s take a look at the other side of the coin and discuss a scenario which would give Microsoft the competition power it needs without
Yahoo!
This week, 37Signals started to preview the upcoming update to their Backpack service, which received its last major update in July. Though most of the new features seem very useful, they also seem to transform the app from a simple organizational tool into something else entirely. We can't help but wonder, considering the company wrote the book on keeping things simple in software development, has 37Signals lost focus with Backpack?
Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog
Android has landed. And it looks like, well, some sort of space alien. Several companies at this week’s Mobile World Congress unveiled prototypes of Android, Google’s highly anticipated, open-source operating system. But rather than showing off sleek, sexy cell phones, with a super-fast OS running groundbreaking applications, attendees were treated to reality.
MyBlogLog is a powerful application for learning more about any blog's readership but with the release of an API last month, we knew this Yahoo! owned service was only going to get cooler. Kent Brewster at Yahoo! has hit a home run with BlogJuice, a javascript bookmarklet that uses MyBlogLog and YahooPipes to quickly display any information available on other sites about recent readers of a blog you're visiting.
I regularly check the MyBlogLog widget on a new blog I discover to see if I recognize the faces of other recent readers, as a way to get a feel for the site's community. BlogJuice takes that practice and amplifies its usefulness by orders of magnitude.
Research in Motion, the maker of Blackberry smartphones, was once again under fire due to Monday's service disruption, the second in a span of 10 months. The outage left customers without Blackberry service for several hours on Monday of this week. Coincidentally, RIM has now just announced its first "push" email server for the home. The new server, just unveiled at the Mobile World Congress, is currently only available in Europe is for personal users of the Blackberry email service. For those who choose to use the server in their homes, Blackberry outages will no longer be a concern - if the server goes down, they have no one but themselves to blame.
ManagedQ is a new search search that provides a visual interface to Google's results (see our full review on AltSearchEngines here). Since ManagedQ's results come directly from Google, there's no loss in result quality, but the service adds a semantic layer to search, by automatically determining the key Person, Places, and Things for your search.
Microsoft released the results of a survey today indicating that the small percentage of young people who know the laws around copyright are much less likely to violate them than are kids who do not.
The survey was released along with a new website at mybytes.com ("They're MY bytes, not yours!") and a newly announced curriculum for middle and high schools to teach the Microsoft economic and political agenda. “Intellectual Property Rights Education" is the innocuous name of the Microsoft provided curriculum materials.
It was just Monday that the New York Times reported on the difficulty some users were having when trying to permanently delete their accounts from Facebook. The social networking site offers a "deactivate" feature, but still archives all of a user's personal information in case that user decides they miss Facebook and want back in. Frustrated members turned to groups on the site to complain (where else?) and get advice on unofficial processes for deleting their accounts. Today Facebook made account deletion a tiny bit easier.
PicLens is a nifty web browser addon from Cooliris that I hadn't tried until the company emailed us a couple of weeks ago to let us know that they had updated their software with a couple of new features, both stunning and useful. If you haven't tried out PicLens yet, this is definitely a good time to hop on board, as the browser addon is a lot of fun to play with and makes searching and viewing images on the web very enjoyable.
