Getting started with Dipity is easy. Simply start feeding the service your data: photos from Flickr or Picasa, blog entries, RSS feeds, music from Last.fm or Pandora, videos, or microbloging feeds. Anything that offers a publicly accessible feed is fair game.

And that means, that it's not just your data. It's any publicly accessible data. If you want to add data from other RSS feeds - say you wanted a timeline showing when the top tech blogs publish stories - you can do that, as well. Or maybe you'd like to add content from a Google alert or Yahoo! Pipes? Or build something with Dapper to populate your timeline? All viable options. Suffice it to say, there are any number of ways to feed Dipity.

But, the true value of Dipity is how it lets you visualize that data. Once the sources are added, the service plots each discrete element along a timeline. And that view of the data provides a very different perspective of "what's happening when." You can also zoom in and out of the timeline - down to hours or out to years - to help provide additional perspective.

It's a like a graphing engine for your lifestream - or any combined stream of reference data.

After only a few minutes, I was working to push all sorts of random collections through the tool. No doubt, you're already thinking of some very interesting data sets to run through it, as well. And if you're short on ideas, the folks at Dipity have compiled some interesting timelines to inspire you.

Interested in taking a different view of the data you're producing? Visit Dipity and register for a free account.

TimeBridge's stand-out feature is the simplicity with which it gives recipients alternative times and dates for each appointment. The appointment organizer sends out invitations with five optional times, and attendees are requested to select "Yes," "No," or "Best." If a particular time appears to be the "Best" for all attendees, TimeBridge will automatically set it as the time of the appointment. Otherwise, TimeBridge notifies the organizer of the alternatives and awaits confirmation.

We'll go into TimeBridge and other scheduling applications, such as Doodle and Tungle, in more detail in an upcoming post.

"A new search engine is Google.com, founded by some kids out of Stanford, the same university where Excite and Yahoo spawned. You might think the search engine market has already developed and today's leaders -- like Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite -- are going to be the search engine leaders for years to come. Guess what? You're wrong. Start-ups like Google will offer better services, and unless the established players react, they'll lose market share. Whether you like the name or not, Google is going to be a search engine to be reckoned with."

"While Google won't be #1 overnight, they'll get up there because people will like their search over Yahoo, Lycos, or Excite. Google produces accurate results, and that is what search is all about, right?"

"Can just a search engine company support a $1+ billion market value? Those billion dollar companies have more services like personalization, chat, and message boards other than search. You're right, but if you take search away, you take away the basis of the whole site. Users don't go to a portal to get stock news, they go to a portal to get to where they want to go. They might stop for a couple minutes on the portal using the extra services, but internet investors have to remember the epicenter of the whole business is the search engine. Instead of portals putting search on the backburner and letting their indexes get outdated, they should be buying out companies like AskJeeves and Google. They are the future."

Original article

Time Inc. launched its much anticipated magazine meta-subscription service Maghound today. The idea is that for a small fee, starting at three titles for $4.95 a month, you can swap out magazine subscriptions every month. It's like Netflix for magazine subscriptions, but unlike Netflix the selection is awful. We like the idea a lot though and we hope it will improve.

At launch, it has 240 titles, about 40 less that what Time Inc said at a trade show in June, Folio notes. In addition to all Time inc titles, of course, it has titles from Conde Nast (not all), Rodale, and others. Notably missing is any magazine from the Hearst stable, including Esquire, Cosmopolitan and others. Some of the other notables I checked on which are missing are The Atlantic, Business Week, Wired, The Economist, Reader's Digest, and National Geographic .

There's a whole world of independent magazines beyond the big titles as well, see directory sites like NewPages.com and Mygazines. We'd love to see Maghound include titles from those directories. Is it in Time's interest to do so? Probably not.

We had high hopes for another magazine experiment called Brijit, but that innovative service went belly up in May and is no longer even online.

We hope print periodicals aren't dead, because we really like reading them. If this is the best the industry can do, though, then there's probably not much hope.

We like what Maghound is trying to do, and Time's distribution largess might help it work, but the service at launch isn't interesting enough to leave us anything but dissapointed.