Google Reader Update : Tags, Sharing, Blogging
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Google Reader Update : Tags, Sharing, Blogging Google has taken its blog &#038; feed aggregator, Google Reader, to the next level with an across the board update which adds to the service&#8217;s usability while also adding a more social experience to feed aggregation. The new Google Reader, about a year old and part of the Google [...]
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(InfoWorld) - Tagging, the emblematic activity of the "Web 2.0" and social computing era, appears destined for mainstream status, a new study concludes. Among U.S. Internet users, 28 percent have taggedÂ online content like blog entries, photos, Web sites, video clips, and news articles, The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports in a study released Wednesday. On any particular day, 7 percent of users engage in this activity to categorize and label material they upload or find on the Web. Justen Deal, a manager in Los Angeles who tags news articles on sites like Slashdot, believes that as the use of tagging increases, it will give blogging and the Web in general a significant boost by making content easier to organize and discover. "Right now we have one great big pile of stuff on the Web, and especially in the blogosphere," Deal said. "With tagging, both by the content author and the public, I think there'll be a good opportunity to start moving content into more specific, relevant piles, that would help make sorting through the blogosphere a lot easier and a lot more useful for a lot of people." Because this is Pew's first survey about tagging, the study doesn't quantify how fast tagging adoption is growing, but it points at the rising popularity of tagging sites like Flickr and del.icio.us as an indicator that the practice is increasing in popularity. Jill Hurst-Wahl, president of Hurst Associates, a digitization consulting firm in Syracuse, New York, began tagging about a year ago and finds it very useful and convenient. Recently, she has attended conferences in which attendees agree to tag their blog postings and photos about the event with specific labels. This has made it possible for her to find a wealth of material online from conference attendees in a way that would have been impossible, or at least much more difficult, without tagging. While she finds the 28 percent adoption rate the study reveals encouraging,Â Hurst-Wahl still encounters many people who are completely unfamiliar with the concept of tagging or who, ironically, do tag, but don't recognize the term or fully comprehend the scope of the practice. "To some extent, tagging is user friendly, but a lot of people don't understand it," she said in a phone interview. Tagging is catching on as people realize the convenience of categorizing sites and files online and as large Internet players like Google and Yahoo, which owns Flickr and del.icio.us, offer tagging features in their services, like Web mail, search, photo and video sharing,and social bookmarking, according to Pew. "The act of tagging is likely to be embraced by a more mainstream population in the future because many organizations are making it easier and easier to tag Internet content," the report reads. By giving people the chance to organize online content they're interested in and sharing it with others, tagging helps with the perennial challenge of finding useful things on the Web. "Tagging is a kind of next-stage search phenomenon -- a way to mark, store, and then retrieve the Web content that users already found valuable and of which they want to keep track," the report reads. For its study, Pew surveyed adult U.S. residents in December 2006 and found that men and women are equally likely to tag content online. "Taggers" are more likely to be under the age of 40, to have high education and income levels, and to have broadband Internet access at home.
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Links to this week's topics from search engine forums across the web: SEO Thoughts on Google - Yahoo! Local Listings - New Program - User Reviews and Local Search Optimization - Data Providers: The Engine That Drives Local Search - Google Affiliates Update - Confessions of a White Hat Content Spammer: What I've Learned by Ignoring Google
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Search Engine Watch gains a blog, as a new method of better speading news and information about search engines to readers.
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I've not made much of a secret of the fact that I've been working on a new product, and am getting close to offering it as a public pre-alpha thing for Mac users only.  It's fairly Flickr-centric, sucking photos down from Flickr in a variety of ways and pushing up photos in others. Like Radio 8 and Google Reader, it has the ability to maintain an output feed of stuff you want to pass on to friends and associates. As I was developing this I wished that Flickr had the ability to store simple text files, because I needed a place to put an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures on behalf of each user. Of course I used Amazon S3, but I had to implement my own lightweight identity system so that Juan couldn't accidentally or intentionally replace Alice's feed. If only every user had a place where they could store stuff that's net accessible so that once and for all we could stop inventing new places. I was inspired to write about this when I read an Uncov review of Pownce where they reminded me that they were reselling S3 storage at a big markup. What if the users had their own S3 storage that they paid for themselves?  Then it occurred to me to ask if people thought S3 could be an end-user thing. I'd like to find out, so if some non-technical users who have Amazon accounts would like to try setting up an S3 account, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. Here's an idea of how you get started. 1. You must already have an Amazon account. Nothing special about it, if you buy shirts or books or stereo equipment from Amazon, you use the same account for S3 storage. Already that's pretty easy, millions of people have Amazon accounts, right? 2. Visit this page on Amazon, ignore all the stuff about objects and buckets. In the right margin is a big button that says "Sign up for this web service." Click the button. A very familiar page appears, asking you to sign into your Amazon account as if you were going to buy something (you are!). 3. From there, I'm not sure what you see, because I have already enabled my account. But the end result of signing up is that you get two strings with weird names: Your Access Key ID and Your Secret Access Key. Any software that would save a document in S3-space on your behalf would need these two strange strings. In return each document would have a URL just like any other document on the web. Nothing strange about that.  4. You could also use the space to store stuff using an FTP-like app that runs in Firefox called S3 Organizer. It's about as hard to use as the Mac Finder or the Windows Explorer, i.e. it's no challenge for a moderately geeky user. The cool thing about it is that you're able to share anything you upload into S3 space with anyone else. You can even use BitTorrent to access any file to save you bandwidth bills and distribute the load round the net. It's all very easy to do, imho. As a developer who has to pay for his users' storage needs I would very much like to see users learn how to use S3 to store their stuff, so I can focus on writing software and fixing bugs instead of paying to store your stuff.
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Aaron Wall at SEObook has put together a thought provoking post on current linking techniques, structure, and how Google reliance on trusted sources &#038; domains is in jeopardy as those resouces become more and more abused. Finding the Most Powerful Links Anything that has been greatly trusted has been abused. The difference between the current abuse and [...]
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In my last blog post, I mentioned the work on rubinius (then at a 0.7 release and now at 0.8) and JRuby.  I also promised I&#8217;d follow up on them.  Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s been going on so far.
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"As part of the Jakarta Commons Feed Parser, I have created a Wiki page that details autodiscovery support/non-support, syndication formats, and the common locations of all syndication files across all of the major blogging services:"  Brad created  a great "Hall of Shame" for blog services which don't use autodiscovery or have problems with feed subscription.  Shame. Shame. Shame!
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Open post!  What do you want in your RSS/Atom aggregator that doesn't exist today or hasn't not done correctly?  Better recommendations?    Offline reading support?  Better transparent browser integration?  Better performance?  Better threading support?   Ability to aggregate comments?  Support for media integration?  Of course the best ideas might end up implemented in Rojo .  Just add your thoughts to the comments...
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New .mobi and .jobs, a shift in the ownership of .net
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.
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Wednesday we pushed a new build of Rojo  which introduced a few new and important features:  * Tags *  Chris does a good job of explaining  tags so I'll start there:  "Feeling taggy? Some prominent bloggers have been talking about tags and there have been some fascinating discussions about how tags, also known as keywords, can facilitate the "merging of personal information architecture and public/shared/group/emergent information architecture." But if you have been using sites like del.icio.us or Flickr you don't need to read this high-brow stuff to know: tags are cool. They are an easy way to categorize your stuff and a great way to see what your friends are categorizing as well."  Tags ar ...
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Blog: Here's a follow up to a blog of a few days ago outlining workaround until Google issues a patch.
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Links to this week's topics from search engine forums across the web: Filthy Linking Rich - Google Releases Desktop Search - Exit Page Statistics Query - 'Industrial Strength White Hat' Cloaking Questions - Content for Adwords - RSS Feeds as a Search Engine Marketing Tool
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Want your readers to see where they fit in among all your site's users? Check out this new widget.
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A new version of WikyBlog was released today with new support for content includes and 304 responses. WikyBlog is a scalable CMS/Groupware application with an AJAX enhanced tabbed interface enabling users to view/edit multiple files within the same page.    Additionally, this release includes a complete Turkish translation, a few database modifications,  a google maps bug fix and sidebar search bug fix.  WikyBlog Home:   http://www.wikyblog.com     Get WikyBlog:   http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wikyblog/WikyBlog-1.3.zip?download     WikyBlog Features:   http://www.wikyblog.com/Help/en/WikyBlog/Features
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What's new in search? Found in the forums: How Do Links And Traffic Find You; Starting My SEO Strategy; Quality Score Column; and more.