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Web Trends

ReadWriteWeb Guide to Recommender Systems

We're running a special series on recommendation technologies and in this post we give an overview of the different approaches - including a look at how Amazon and Google use recommendations. Wikipedia notes that recommendations are generally based on an "information item (the content-based approach) or the user's social environment (the collaborative filtering approach)." We think there's also a personalization approach, which Google in particular is focused on. We explore some of these concepts in this post.

See also: 5 Problems of Recommender Systems

4 Approaches to Music Recommendations: Pandora, Mufin, Lala, and eMusic

Thanks to MP3s and the Internet, we now have millions of songs readily available to us with the click of a button, but, paradoxically, this has often made it even harder to discover new music to listen to. Every online music store and every social network that focuses on online music, however, now features some kind of music recommendation system, and some services like Pandora or Slacker Radio are indeed nothing else but highly sophisticated music discovery engines. In this post, we look at the different approaches behind some of the most popular music recommendation and discovery services.

10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009

"Social media" was the term du jour in 2008. Consumers, companies, and marketers were all talking about it. We have social media gurus, social media startups, social media books, and social media firms. It is now common practice among corporations to hire social media strategists, assign community managers, and launch social media campaigns, all designed to tap into the power of social media. But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie.

See also: The Unforeseen Consequences of the Social Web

8 Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2009, 2010

Analyst firm Gartner released a report this week that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

In Cloud We Trust?

Cloud computing may have been one of the biggest "buzzwords" (buzz phrases?) of this past year. From webmail to storage sites to web-based applications, everything online was sold under a new moniker in 2008: they're all "cloud" services now. Yet even though millions of internet users make use of these online services in some way, it seems that we haven't been completely sold on the cloud being any more safe or stable than data stored on our own computers.

4 Realistic Things You Should Know on International Data Privacy Day

This week featured the second annual International Data Privacy Day. Though data privacy is a big issue these days - it's not a whole lot of fun to think about. We offer in this post a list of four things you should make sure to know about regarding privacy, including some pointers to discussions of how the privacy situation today is more complicated than a traditional approach to privacy protection may allow for. We're not going to focus on how to get your tin foil hat to use PGP encryption, we've got a short list of things that all of us realistically should know about for a baseline of online privacy awareness.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
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• Discover the Semantic Web, at a Dow Jones Webinar.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
• Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 allows you to create interactive social media experiences.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• DEMO09 is the launchpad for emerging technology.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Jobwire

How to Read the Jobwire, from ReadWriteWeb

The ReadWriteWeb Jobwire is a site dedicated to reporting on the newest hires in tech, new media and related industries. Every day we scour the web for the freshest hiring news and then we publish periodic reports on aggregate hiring trends. What hires are your competitors making? Click on the tags in any story for company names or industry sectors. For example, you can see all the latest hires reported on in social networking or by software companies. What kinds of positions are being filled? Check out the latest hires tagged by job title, like sales or developer. Have you just been hired or made a new hire at your company? Fill out this form and let us know - we love to report on hires of all shapes and sizes in tech!

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB'S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Products

The State of Blog Search, 2009

What blog search engine should you use? That depends on your needs.

In order to join a conversation, you've got to be able to find it first. Three years ago "blog search" was expected to be a booming industry, startups left and right developed different technologies and more than a few raised millions of dollars to help users search the part of the web made up of blogs. These days no one thinks consumer-market blog search is a serious business, but many of us still have a need to limit searches to blogs. What should we do? ReadWriteWeb offers some recommendations and an assessment of the state of the industry below.

Google and Plaxo Combine OpenID and OAuth for Improved Usability

As a concept, OpenID has shown a great deal of potential. But that potential has often been hamstrung by the series of hurdles through which OpenID users have been required to jump in order to use their credentials. When Facebook Connect entered the distributed digital identity fray, those OpenID usability problems came into stark relief. Now, Google and Plaxo have responded with a new workflow for OpenID logins that simplifies the process and improves the usability - by adding OAuth and the Google Contacts API to the mix.

Gmail Gets Offline Support, Finally

One of the longest-running requests for Google's web mail service Gmail has been for offline functionality. Now, finally, Gmail users will be able to type up those emails inside an airplane. Google has just announced offline Gmail support via Gmail Labs - to start with for consumers and businesses using Google Apps, but regular Gmail consumers will get it a couple of days later. The offline feature was built using Gears, Google's offline web application API.

Notifixious' Superfeeder: Getting Closer to the Real-Time Web

RSS feeds have become the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement, but as we are moving towards a real-time experience on the web, RSS is starting to show its age. To update your subscriptions, you have to regularly poll these feeds. This, of course, is a major problem for RSS readers and notification services which often have to deal with a substantial lag before new posts and messages appear. The newest service that tries to tackle this problem is Notifixious, but as Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux explains, a lot of problems still need to be fixed before ubiquitous real-time notifications can become a reality.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Enterprise

How Can Web Tech Help Enterprises with Innovation Management?

In his book The Innovator's Dilemma, Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School describes the theory of how large outstanding firms can fail "by doing everything right." The innovator's dilemma, according to Christensen, affects companies whose success and capabilities can actually become obstacles in the face of changing markets and technologies. There is no more important an issue on the agenda of top management than driving innovation. In this post, we'll review the evolution of "innovation management" and how social media has a significant role to play. This is one area where social media can "move the needle" for large enterprises and help them change the very nature of the firm.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

In order to join a conversation, you've got to be able to find it first. Three years ago "blog search" was expected to be a booming industry, startups left and right developed different technologies and more than a few raised millions of dollars to help users search the part of the web made up of blogs. These days no one thinks consumer-market blog search is a serious business, but many of us still have a need to limit searches to blogs. What should we do? ReadWriteWeb offers some recommendations and an assessment of the state of the industry below.

Different circumstances call for different search engines. We've made a chart below illustrating our different recommendations to fill different needs. When, for example, we're looking to see if anyone else has written about a breaking news story yet - we use Google Blogsearch because it's the fastest. When we're putting a live search feed on a public web page, though, we use Technorati and crank up the spam-control it offers. Many businesses use profesional blog tracking services for some of their search needs, but we're not convinced those services are as useful as grabbing some of these worn old tools and doing it yourself.

Where These Services Stand Today

Technorati is the old stand-by, the blog search engine that the smartest blog lovers used to use. These days it's a sad shadow of what it used to be. The company leadership is focused on building an advertising network and search features have been shed like there's no tomorrow. The company's developers say that features will be returning, just in a more accessible form, but we're not holding our breath.

The service is slow, misses a lot of search results (perhaps in the name of spam prevention) and is so loaded down with cruft and extraneous page loads that it makes us want to scream.

That said, the fundamental value proposition of Technorati remains - it counts inbound links to every blog it has indexed and it will let you sort by that metric of "authority." More advanced RSS-heads will appreciate the fact that Technorati delivers "authority" numbers in its RSS feeds and those numbers can be used to fine tune spam filtering in Yahoo Pipes.

Google Blogsearch is the fastest in the industry but has gone almost untouched since the day it launched, except for a recent dabble with memetracking on the front page. Google Blogsearch spam control is not good and recently the search engine started bringing back search results from places like blog sidebars. It thinks that content is new, too, every time a new blog post (the content we really care about) is published. It's painful to look at Google Blogsearch results pages, but if you've got a need for speed or want to make use of the relative heft of the Google search input box for things like complex queries - then it's a good option.

IceRocket is Mark Cuban's baby and has improved more in recent years than anyone else on this list. It's quite a sophisticated tool for searching blogs. It's got trend analysis, author awareness and a number of other cool features. Unfortunately it only lets you organize search results by data and sometimes other needs arise.

IceRocket also misses some search results that even Technorati catches, though it catches some that Technorati misses as well.

Ask.com Blogsearch has become an unexpected favorite of ours over the years. It's nice. Spam control is pretty good, speed is pretty good, the size of the index is pretty good. It's a pretty good blog search engine. The best thing about it is that it's very easy to sort results by relevance, date or "popularity" of the source, as defined by the number of subscribers the source feed has in Ask's formerly market dominant feed reader Bloglines. Want to find out who the biggest blogs are that have written about Chihuahuas lately? (We'll just tell you, it's Jalopnik, Celebrity Baby Blog and Fark.)

If there's a downside here, it's that Ask does index a fair number of feeds that aren't really blogs. And it doesn't do anything else that's particularly fabulous. None the less, we find ourselves going back to it every day.

FriendFeed is a lot of things, but it's also a blog search engine of sorts. It's a cross-network, real time social site originally built by a team of ex-Google employees. It's pretty awesome and once you've got an account there you can search blog posts, Twitter messages, YouTube videos, SlideShare powerpoint presentations and much more. The down side is of course, it only lets you search the content that other users have synced with their FriendFeed account. That content has a whole lot of conversation going on around it though! Several members of the ReadWriteWeb team use the newly launched FriendDeck to do real-time tracking of FriendFeed. You can meet our whole team on FriendFeed here or join us in the RWW room (open to anyone) here.

That's How We See it - What's Blog Search Like for You These Days?

We'd love to hear about your favorite blog search tools these days. What do you use and in what circumstances do you use it? Is blog search itself old news in a new era of real-time microblogging? We welcome other perspectives on this field that may have lost some of its luster but remains useful and important several years after it was so hyped.

Why Use ContextMiner?

Marketers will probably be interested in how this free tool is able to track views and links, but that's not really the purpose behind ContextMiner's creation. Instead, the tool is designed more for research than anything else. For example, one of the main reasons to use ConextMiner is its ability to document the cultural phenomena of viral videos.

Often, when a video goes viral, very few people are aware of where it came from, what the story is behind it, who created it and why. As time goes by, finding the original video creator and source is even harder as the video spreads across the internet. But now, thanks to ContextMiner, the history behind a video's creation is no longer a mystery.

Take for instance, Vote Different, the mashup of Hillary Clinton with the famous Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad and one of the most popular videos on YouTube. We've probably all seen this video at one point or another, but did you ever want to know who created it and why?

With ContextMiner, that information can easily be discovered. Because of its ability to pull the inbound links to a video, we can see that the original creator of the video, a user by the name of "ParkRidge47," is the subject of one of the inbound links to the video. A blog post on TechPresident titled "Who is ParkRidge47?" gives us a great history of this particular video's creation. You could also sort through the links provided to find the very first person to link to the video, which is often the creator themselves.

ContextMiner is still under development. In the future, the developers hope to offer tools and policies for exporting the videos, blog pages, and metadata. That's probably not an empty promise - there's already an an option to "download Flash video from YouTube" on the campaign creation form, it's just disabled right now. When that feature becomes available, we think it would be fine to then call ContextMiner a YouTube archiving tool. Since "Archive" implies making a backup copy, until then we think ContextMiner should really just be considered a research tool. Still, we have to say, it's a pretty good one.

Ask.com is a decent search engine, it does a lot of things well enough to check out once and appreciate before moving on. (Maps, for example.) I use its Blogsearch all day long. I like Ask and many of the innovative things it does, but not enough to use many of its tools with any regularity. Today the search engine relaunched, saying it now leverages Semantic Technologies. Upon performing some searches though - I can't tell what's different. I just wish they'd stop.

Presenting direct answers to your searches, front and center, has always been at the heart of the Ask.com experience, and we push further down that path today with the introduction of three new answer technologies: DADS, DAFS, and AnswerFarm.

Didn't anyone ever teach Erik Collier, Ask VP of Product Management, that it's rude to drop acronyms in conversation without defining them? He never does in the announcement. It makes you look pretentious, unless you are a perpetual also-ran after years in your field and millions spent advertising - then it just makes you look silly. By DAFS I presume they mean Document Attribute Format Specification (or did they mean Direct Access File System?), I can't find a mention of DADS in 40 semantic web blogs we follow and presumably AnswerFarm is the new Q&A tab. So the new Ask.com brings acronyms for superior performance to the table.

The Q&A tab is cute. I tried a wide range of questions and it gave me nothing but ads. If I grunted a phrase at it, then the AnswerFarm offered some Questions on that topic that I might not have thought to ask. Entertaining, educational and a bit like flipping through an Encyclopedia with a celebrated but totally non-functioning table of contents.

Just a few months ago it was reported that Ask decided to focus on the Question and Answer paradigm because it's popular with existing users. Today's announcement appears consistent with that - though semantic parsing of the questions being asked is a lot less impressive than semantic analysis of the pages being indexed by the search engine. According to an eWeek profile this morning, Ask is showcasing its ability to understand the meaning of search queries, even if the words are jumbled. It sounds like "semantic web" more in the flavor of Powerset than Yahoo Search Monkey - and presumably Ask didn't spend Powerset-like cash to do the same level of research.

What Ask Does Right

I like Ask's Blogsearch a lot. It offers a very clear value proposition. It places a premium on blog feeds that have been subscribed to in the company's popular feed reader Bloglines. That cuts down on spam and offers all kinds of intriguing possibilities for discovering who the top bloggers are who write about certain keywords. I'm not kidding when I say I use it all day, every day.

These incessant "relaunches" of Ask.com's primary site are getting really old, though. Relaunches and stupid ad campaigns just aren't cutting it. Ask should focus on doing something they can really compete in. The AnswerFarm tab could be a good one, if it worked better.

PayPerPost

PayPerPost pays its bloggers to write posts about their advertisers and link to them. Basically, it is an elaborate search engine optimization scheme. Bloggers are supposed to disclose their affiliation with PayPerPost, but the ethics of this scheme are debatable and some bloggers fail to disclose their affiliation.

Every memetracker (and every popular site for that matter) will, of course, attract spammers. It's surprising, however, to see that Google, a company that is generally known for its good spam filtering, let these two sites slip through. While the memetracker in Blogsearch is relatively new, the Google blog search index has been around for a long time and tends to be very clean.

However, because Google Blogsearch ranks posts according to the number of links they received, it is prone to list spammy posts from networks like PayPerPost.

A lot of memetrackers had to deal with these problems before, and we are confident that this will be an isolated incident, but Google clearly needs to improve its algorithms to shut this kind of spam out of its system or institute filters that shut out PayPerPost blogs by default.

The user interface isn't nearly as nice as leading tech blog memetracker Techmeme, but the new Blogsearch has some major advantages.

We're in shock that Google Blogsearch has actually updated. It's cleaner and less spammy than Technorati, it's more transparent than Yahoo Buzz, it's more inclusive than Six Apart's new Blogs.com and to the big question will be whether it's faster than Techmeme. (Techmeme caught this story far faster than the new Google Blogsearch!) That's our concern as a tech site. This has to be entirely new for bloggers who write about television, video games or business. Those sectors have got to be excited.

The science blogosphere has Postgenomic, which is so full featured it probably won't lose any traffic at all to Google Blogsearch Science.

A Techmeme Killer?

Even in tech, though we may love Techmeme - it's audience is more influential than it is large. The new Google Blogsearch has the potential to reach tens of millions of people and drive insane amounts of traffic.

Techmeme indexes a limited number of tech blogs, primarily blogs linked-to by other blogs that are already indexed. Google Blogsearch, on the other hand, indexes all blog posts faster than anyone else on the web.

Techmeme is a great site and founder Gabe Rivera works hard to update its machinery and functionality regularly. The same iteration strategy can't be assumed for the new Google Blogsearch, in fact it appears that the Google News algorithm has just been applied to blogs. All this may or may not be significant. Rivera offered no response when we contacted him asking for one.

We're excited about the new Google Blogsearch. What do you think? Can you imagine yourself visiting it now?