Real-time search outfit OneRiot announced today some updates to their search algorithm, which parses data in real-time social streams to index and rank links.
Although results based on freshness alone are available through the search engine's real-time firehose setting, the results returned through the Pulse Rank setting are weighted based on several factors that riff off similar considerations for the static web and Google's PageRank system.
Today, at the Semantic Technology Conference, Rob Larson and Evan Sandhaus of the New York Times announced together that the Times will soon be publishing its copious index as Linked Data.
The Times' data will join content from Project Gutenberg, a vast online library of text from public domain books, data from the U.S. census, and information from many other formative and vital entities in the semantic web space. Larson and his team intend to make available hundreds of thousands of tags for content dating back to 1851. This will providing give developers an invaluable, automatically navigable roadmap for the publication's vast directory of knowledge and will link that data to existing pages, people, and content around the web.
Three weeks ago M.T. Richardson's job disappeared, his employer ran so far out of money that it said no one was getting paid and offered computers from the office as compensation instead. Yesterday, M.T. had one of the best days of his life. He's the junior-most developer in a still unlaunched company riding high behind the scenes of the iPhone 3.0 launch.
M.T. works for Urban Airship, a mobile company that most iPhone users will be touched by, but will never hear of. The company powers the new push notifications and in-app purchasing features for app-making client companies who can't or don't want to do all the heavy lifting themselves to implement these new capabilities of the mobile device. Three weeks ago Urban Airship was an idea and some code, a side project of one of the men who would become a co-founder. Yesterday Urban Airship helped Tapulous, its first customer and one of the biggest gaming companies on the iPhone, launch push notifications before almost anyone else.
We have written quite a bit about the pitfalls of disclosing too much in your social network profiles, especially when it comes to employers accidentally stumbling over your party pictures on Facebook and MySpace. The city of Bozeman, Montana, however, is taking this to a new level by actually asking prospective employees to disclose not just that they have profiles on Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Google, and YouTube, but by also asking for the usernames and passwords for these profiles.
Google Books may be mired in controversy, but that isn't stopping Google from regularly adding new features to the service. Today, Google Books received a major update, with seven new and useful features, including the ability to easily embed a book into a blog post, better search within books, easier access to tables of content, and a way to turn pages, as well as an improved Book Overview page.
Gerry Campbell was one of the advising investors at Summize, the search engine Twitter acquired and now uses to power search on the site. He's led search at AOL and new tech at Reuters, and now Campbell and a small team of XMPP rock stars are launching an ambitious real-time search engine called Collecta.
Collecta purports to pull in blog posts, comments, Twitter and Identi.ca updates and photos concerning your search query, as fast as technically possible. There are some rough edges for sure at launch, but Collecta has a lot of promise. Pagerank or other systems of authority are in many cases not what you're looking for in search - timeliness is.
Even though the iPhone 3.0 OS update went out successfully yesterday, the #1 feature many users were still waiting for was the ability to receive push notifications. While a couple of apps had already been updated with this functionality over the last few days (Zillow, AP Mobile, Weather Alert, etc.), no push notifications went out yesterday. Only this morning, around 10am, did Apple enable push notifications and the first alert went out to the AP Mobile app.
After thinking about how Apple has implemented notifications, however, we think that while this is a great feature, there are a couple of areas where we would like to see some changes.
At next month's Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas, two HP researchers are going to demonstrate "Veiled," a new type of darknet created within a web browser and built exclusively for the purpose of secure, anonymous web surfing and online communication. The darknet, created using just PHP and JavaScript, works with any HTML-5 browser allowing its users to avoid web monitoring and online censorship.
After all that waiting, today should have been a day of rejoicing for SIRIUS XM subscribers. That's because today, the satellite radio company finally launched their much-anticipated iPhone application (iTunes link). However, instead of being pleased, subscribers are sorely disappointed. It seems the app is more notable for what it is lacking than what it offers. What's missing? Only some of Sirius XM's best content: Howard Stern, NFL Play-by-Play, MLB Play-by-Play, and SIRIUS NASCAR Radio.
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The Web is changing. In today's world, user participation can make or break a site. Allowing users to react, participate, and contribute while keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. If poor-quality content or spam hits your website, it can undermine your site's search engine listing, damage your brand and reputation, and degrade your visitors' experience. Good user-contributed content, meanwhile, can add a lot of value to your site, which translates into more activity, improved stickiness, and more and better monetization opportunities. As the Web continues to become more social, more websites will need a strategy to deal with spam and unwanted content.
