Not Pretty - But it Works

PopGist is not much to look at. Neither its Google inspired logo nor the bland presentation of its search results immediately instilled a feeling of confidence in us. If you can look past that, however, the search results themselves are very useful.

If you search for Google Chrome, for example, PopGist will return reviews from most major blogs as well. If you look for a company, PopGist will also include links to profiles on services like TradeVibes in the results. At its best, PopGist can become a one-stop search engine for researching a company or a product and safe you a lot of time and energy, as you won't have to try multiple search queries to get relevant results.

Services like PopGist tend to be prone to being overrun by spam, but surprisingly, PopGist's results always came back very clean. In our tests, PopGist usually returned the best results when entering relatively simple queries and the most useful discussion sections were always clustered around the top three results.

Overall, we were impressed with PopGist's results. While it surely won't replace Google for us, its search results allow us to get a quick glance at a product in its context without having to use various services.

The new Board is made up of an all-star cast. Copyright and corruption fighter Larry Lessig, tech pioneer Esther Dyson and brilliant social network analyst danah boyd make up the group, along with Brad Fitzpatrick, whose work has been key in the development of LiveJournal itself, OpenID, social graph theory and the Google-led OpenSocial. That's hot.

It has always been one of the leaders in innovation, but it's not been the cash-cow that other leading social networks have been. It's also faced more than its share of controversy, blatant breast-feeders had their avatars struck down (not without a fight) in May 2006 and a scorched-earth campaign against sex themed groups knocked some "legitimate literary discussion" off-site in May of 2007. You know what that means: danah boyd is going to be a key asset for LiveJournal, especially in the month of May.

Why is this an exciting announcement? Because a large, important social network just got some of the best minds on the web to engage with it in this formative time of social networking acceleration and change. That means LiveJournal is going to do some very cool things, if they take the Advisory Board as seriously as they should.

Readers unfamiliar with the work of these luminaries should check out their blogs and Wikipedia pages.

• danah boyd's blog, Wikipedia page and the most popular URLs tagged danahboyd on Del.icio.us


• Larry Lessig's blog, Wikipedia entry and Techmeme discussion this week on his decision not to run for US Congress. (Too busy with LiveJournal, just couldn't tell anyone yet.)


• Esther Dyson's blog, Wikipedia page and tweets about Dyson
]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/livejournal_filled_with_awesom.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/livejournal_filled_with_awesom.php Social Networks Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:58:40 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick