Search Yogi

Linkedin Apps

searchyogi — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:22:38 +0000

Linkedin today announced that they are allowing users to add applications to their profiles. This is a move a-la facebook and Orkut. I would expect a significant increase in traffic (Page views) for Linkedin with users now logging in to see the new blog post or slide presentations of their friends. Linkedin has the following integrations in place now:

Blogs: WordPress and SixApart.
Box.net for sharing files
Tripit to see where the people in your network are travelling.
Google docs and slideshare integration for embedding, sharing and commenting on slide presentations.

I am sure this will aid their monetization efforts significantly. Excellent move Linkedin!

Powerset email

searchyogi — Wed, 14 May 2008 05:29:10 +0000

powerset

Originally uploaded by Search Yogi

Here is the Powerset email.

Poweset Live – but only on Wikipedia?

searchyogi — Wed, 14 May 2008 05:22:56 +0000

powerset website

Originally uploaded by Search Yogi

I got an email from Powerset that they are fully live. However, a visit to the site shows that the searches are restricted to Wikipedia only. That’s a complete let down!

Business Week to Twitter away

searchyogi — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:00:52 +0000

Business Week is going to do a story/article as a twitter stream i.e. in 140 character chunks. The interesting part of the experiment being that the writer Stephen Baker will develop the story based on the responses to each tweet.

Business week to twitter away

“Googley” design

searchyogi — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:08:19 +0000

The folks at Google have a great note today about what they focus on in terms of design principles. Here are the takeaways I especially liked from their list:

Googleys according to Searchyogi

1. Simplicity is powerful.

2. Design for the world.

3. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.

4. Engage beginners and attract experts.

5. Be worthy of people’s trust.

Kingmaker

searchyogi — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:52:34 +0000

Look at Mike Arrington’s picture – As featured in Time Top 100. Nothing like having the smug look and gloating over being a king maker!

Robert Scoble and RSS feeds

searchyogi — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:41:19 +0000

I have spoken about information overload in couple of other posts. Robert Scoble’s RSS feed page has the following note on it:

I’m a tech geek blogger who reads hundreds of feeds every night from around the tech world. I pick the best items for you from about 800 feeds and try to get interviews with the most interesting people in the technology world.

Scanning 800 feeds seems like a LOT! In addition to all the near real-time twittering that Scoble has to do! This got me thinking about what is the variance of sources in his shared items. I am not sure if there is a Google RSS feed API, but it will be an interesting project for someone to look at the variance of sources in the shared items on a statistical basis. Given the finite bandwidth of human processing, my guess is that there would be low variance in sources on a daily basis. Perhaps one coping mechanism would be to look at a different bunch of sources everyday so that they fall in rotation over a few weeks. Of course, the problem here is that technology moves fast and information gets old very quickly.

How do you cope with this overload?

Technorati Blog Ranking

searchyogi — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:19:40 +0000

I met Kevin Marks at the data portability meet-up. Here is an interesting post from him on Technorati ranking. Kevin was at Technorati between 2003-2007 and was responsible for their spiders which tracked the millions of blogs across the web.

All Bloggers are Above Average

Twistori

searchyogi — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:19:47 +0000

Check out this twitter app: twistori

Its very cool. Shows messages that contain words love, hate, feel, think, believe and wish. It reminds me of wall mounted screen at Googleplex that shows search queries from around the world being done on Google at that moment.

Twitter, Friendfeed and Information overload

searchyogi — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:01:51 +0000

As I open myself up to the information deluge through Twitter, Friend feed and the 100s of feeds in my Google Reader, I find that the mind can focus and digest only so much. As these tools go mainstream, I expect that this problem will become more pronounced. As one would expect, apps are being built on top of Twitter and Friend feed that will alleviate this problem.

I have been testing twhirl, Alert Thingy and Feedalizr. While twhirl and Alert thingy mainly help in reading and responding to tweets and (friendfeeds?), Feedalizr has filters that can be enabled so that only certain tweets can be seen in the client. For example, I set a filter for “investor” and the application only showed messages containing this word. This is only the beginning and I expect more sophisticated information filters to come along that will alleviate this firehose of messages.