Cruising the Sphere
A colleague of mine pointed me towards Sphere; a fast, new blog search engine. The interface is simple and uncluttered, making it easy to perform searches and track trends. After entering a search term and selecting “custom range” from the first drop-down, a graph of mentions appears just above the results. Click on one of the bars and you can see all of the posts from that day. Move the sliders and you can pick a custom date range.
Additionally, you can see featured blogs for your search term. You can suggest a blog for a certain topic by clicking the “Suggest a Blogger” link, which results in a handy AJAX box making it easy for you to quickly enter subsequent URLs without waiting for the page to reload. Clicking “Related Media” results in a page showing photos, news articles, books, and podcasts related to the search term. Looks very promising.
Medishift on Wikipedia: Read It
To use an awful cliche, when I first started reading blogs I was a kid in a candy store. I wanted to read everything and thought all information was valuable. I didn’t have the palette to differentiate between blogs that offer value to me personally and those that, well, don’t. I’ve read about lots of people that read hundreds of blogs on a daily basis. At one point, I might have tried to keep up with thirty (never daily). But the more I’ve gotten into writing blog posts the less blogs I read. I’m down to maybe ten, at most, that I read regularly, with the occasional fit of exploration. For me, reading lots of blogs results in diminishing returns.
One of the blogs I’ve always found valuable is PBS Mediashift by Mark Glaser (I’ll do a post on the others I read religiously at some point). Why? I actually learn something new when I read Mediashift because Mark is an actual journalist/blogger who writes about things I care about. Mark’s series this week on Wikipedia is a great example of why Mediashift is a great blog. Below are direct links to Mark’s Wikipedia articles this week:
- Wales Discusses Political Bias of Wikipedia
- Negativists, True Believers Debase Wikipedia’s Trustworthiness
- Top 5 for Wikipedia Week
- MySpace, Wikipedia Cope with Growing Pains
- Is There a Neutral View of George W Bush?
- How Much do you Trust Wikipedia?
If you have an interest in the Wikipedia phenomenon, read these articles. Great articles. Great discussion. I left a comment on one Mark’s posts. Following are the key points I made for those that care.
Meme Tracking Hits the Sports Market
A few weeks ago Sports Illustrated published an expansive feature article (subscription required) about how citizen sportswriters are changing sports journalistm. Obsessive and often posting about events in real time, these sports bloggers are spreading rumors, arguing and just generally feeding their sports addictions 365/24/7. Sometimes they even break stories. By the time a traditional sports columnist publishes their take on a game/issue in the local paper, these guys have changed topics three or four times. The real time nature of sports blogs make traditional sports pages obsolete to truly obsessed sports fans.
So it should come as no surprise that Memeorandum has launched a baseball meme tracker called Ballbug just in time for baseball’s opening day. Ballbug hopes to be the real time newspaper for the most passionate (and computer literate) baseball fans – tracking which stories and blog posts are being talked about the most in the baseball blogosphere.
It should also not come as a surprise that a competing baseball site called striketwo.net beat Memeorandum to market a few weeks ago or that there is a basketball meme tracker called lowpost.net.
There is little doubt in my mind that by the end of the year we will see meme tracking sites devoted to just about every vertical you can imagine – football, finance, health care. It’s just a matter of who enters which vertical first at this point.
I first read about Ballbug on Techcrunch.
Update: I took a closer look at Ballbug and Striketwo.net and Striketwo.net has a big advantage in that it allows you to track entries specifically on the team and players you follow. Politics and sports are always local. Here’s a screen capture of the Striketwo.net team tag cloud.
Diving into Online Storage
Like a lot of people, I work from multiple computers. I have a personal laptop, a work laptop, and randomly find myself using different machines when going to meetings, traveling or visiting friends and family. So I have a problem getting files from one machine to another. I have a flash drive I use on occasion, but usually resort to emailing myself files I know I’ll be working on. The result is multiple versions of documents and, well, confusion. In talking to friends, lots of people have this problem.
I’ve been using Netvibes as my homepage for awhile now and recently tried out the Box.net tool Netvibes offers as a plug in. Box.net is an online storage service that allows you to access your uploaded documents from any computer with an Internet connection. It is a great product. Box.net stores up to one GB worth of documents for free, and includes features like tagging, the ability to make documents private or public and extremely fast uploads and downloads. There are a number of other players in this space besides Box.net, including Amazon.com.
I’ve been using Box.net pretty cautiously so far. I’m not storing any documents that are sensitive in nature and make sure to have local backups of anything I post to Box.net. But having just used this service for a little while, I’m sold on the power of online document storage and will be watching closely as the online storage industry matures.
Live.com Search Has Serious Usability Problems
Joel Spolsky, the guru behind Joel on Software, has a straightforward and on point definition of usability:
“Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.”
By that definition (and just about any other), the beta web search currently available off of Microsoft’s Live.com website isn’t usable. Here’s the problem:
Generally speaking, when I do a search, the first link I click on doesn’t do it. Unless I’m looking for a specific website, searching usually involves clicking on multiple search results links until: (a) I find exactly what I’m looking for, (b) what I’ve learned from the multiple results I’ve clicked on satisfies my research needs or (c) I give up.
So when I search, I have an expectation that when I click the “Back” button the results will appear as they did when I left them. If I’m on the third page of results, I want to see the third page of results when I click back. The Ajax-driven Live.com web search doesn’t meet that expectation. It loses your place. Continue reading “Live.com Search Has Serious Usability Problems” »