Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

I’ve been using personalized search across a variety of sites for sometime now. Eurekster has been my favorite – and not just because I am an advisor to the company.

Google’s entry into the market looks a bit like Rollyo with advertising, customized look and feel and a bit of Eurekster’s keyword flavoring. Overall, a good start and good for the personalized search market. You want to see the traffic boost that Eurekster gets when someone like Google enters the market… Very much like when Yahoo! took a swing. hard to buy that kind of lift as a start-up.

Comparing Google to Eurekster I don’t see anything missing on the Eurekster side. What is missing on the Google side is the learning, buzzcloud and community engagement (they do have a variation on this but only allowing users to suggest sites to add to the index). The buzzcloud is key for drawing users into use the search and the community stuff will be key to improving the search results.

Eurekster should be thrilled that the two search leaders are in fact following their innovations. It’s about the 5th time someone has come out with something that has looked to threaten their business but typically it seems to encourage more growth (e.g. Wink, Rollyo launches, Yahoo Search builder, Google Flavors, Google Co-op).

So what happens next? Maybe Google becomes the Gorilla in the market. Maybe, much likewith the acquisition of Blogger, they become another player and in fact contribute to accelerating awareness and adoption across the market. Either way, this is a great move for personalized search and supports the few that becoming your very own Google is a good thing.

This is a terrific new service that’s going to solve a major pain point for me – how I share fat .ppt presentations. Love the look and feel and some of the presentations are brilliant.

Cisco’s got a new look and done an upgrade to their site. In a quick vote around the office most didn’t like the new ID but I do – pivots well off the previous look and feel. While the use of blogs, RSS and podcasts is there, I’m surprised they didn’t drive subscriber buttons onto the home page. Seems like an opportunity missed. Same goes for the visibility of blogs and the like.

Richard has an interview with Buzzlogic founder Mitch Ratcliffe.

R/WW: Why did you start this company?
It actually began with a question about how to deal with a blogger, from a friend who is the CEO of a public company. I found myself drawing maps to explain not just the connectedness of a blogger to others in the market, but the way that a blog’s influence varies from topic to topic. It was a short step from that to deciding, with Todd Parsons, to start the company in early 2004 – in order to find automated ways of analyzing influence.

Basically, I was doing something with those maps that is analogous to building a spreadsheet with pen and paper. There had to be a technological solution to gathering the data and a methodology for processing it into meaningful insight. We started by drawing maps with a project called MyDensity, which let bloggers display a fairly rudimentary social map around their blogs. It got some traction, but we ran through our crawling/hosting capacity without coming up with a business model to support it. That quickly evolved into a business built on providing much more detailed data to paying customers, since the backend processing was awfully expensive. We’ve always been focused on actually building a business, which is why we brought on a team and CEO Rob Crumpler, all who worked for next to nothing while we made progress toward the launch.

Now, the company has built an infrastructure that is both more powerful and much more efficient – so we are able to launch our first product, which is a hosted influence monitoring and tracking service that combines our analysis with tools for interacting with influencers, so that marketers can measure the results.

Google has just announced a new blog ping service joining an already very crowded space – I’ve been using Pingoat.

Today we’re launching the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, which is a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform us of content changes. Blogging providers who syndicate RSS/Atom/XML and want to be included in our Blog Search index can now ping us directly. We’ll continue to monitor other pinging services and will contribute change notifications to the community.