SOMEWHAT FRANK

Death to DRM, Future of RSS, AOL'Sphere It Widget, Zillow Relaunches, Blog Search Wars, Google My Maps & P2P Loans

Photo of the week: robobunny by Courtney Brooke. Happy Easter.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.08.07

DRM-Free Music
EMI announced DRM-free music earlier in the week and now Microsoft is hinting at doing the same. Is this the death of DRM?

500 million+!!! AOL'Sphere Goes Live
AOL and Sphere quietly turned on Sphere It in their AOL News, Sports and Entertainment articles. The Sphere It widget is great - I have one too on all my posts as it offers users the ability to find related content. Love it. If you would like one for your site be sure to check out the Sphere tools.

Google Personalizes Maps
Google Maps launched a new feature to its maps product this week (April 5, 2007) called My Maps with offers users the ability to personalize a Google Map. My Maps enables anyone to draw, plot or color a Google Map without having to know an ounce of coding knowledge thus bringing simplified personal mapping to the masses.

Yahoo Testing Alpha (Beta) Multi Search
Search Engine Land covers Yahoo's launch of Alpha a new search experience. Alpha is really more of a multi-search tool that submits your query to multiple sources. It really reminds me of AOL FullView Search.

10 Things You Can Do With Mixed Media RSS
Marshall Kirkpatrick, of SplashCast Media, presents a list of ways to leverage mixed media feeds produced by SplashCast.  He provides big-picture use-cases and explains how you can use other products I have previously reviewed like Tumblr, FeedBurner, ZapTxt and Rasasa to create some interesting feed mashups.

The Future of RSS
Read/Write Web looks at RSS today and asks if RSS is evolving into a tool for delivering complex, semantically rich information. A great article for anyone looking for information on RSS.

Technorati and the blog search wars
Mathew Ingram dissects Technorati's recent state of the blogosphere. It is still interesting to see how fast Technorati.com has been growing: over 9 million unique visitors in March, up 141 per cent in a single quarter, and double-digit growth every month in page views as well. Not bad.

Financing Web Work with Prosper.com
Prosper.com enables peer-to-peer loans for startups and anyone looking to do their own thing. If you are looking for funding you may want to check it out.

Zillow Relaunch - Adds Its Own Q&A Service
Every home in the Zillow database has its own dedicated page. Any user can now also add photos and information about any home and its neighborhood to the site. Users can also indicate if a home is for sale, and the asking price, as well as additional info.

Weblin’s Avatars Surf the Web with You
Kristen Nicole reviews the recent launch of Weblin, a program that lets you create a web avatar that travels with you on your web journey. According to the article when you come across a site where there are other Weblins, you’ll be able to see them and strike up a conversation. Chatting avatars on the web - interesting!

iminlikewithyou, an interesting new look at online flirting
iminlikewithyou is all about flirting, well, the art of flirting. Users sign up for the service and answer a few basic questions about themselves. Photos can be added as well as other personal information to be rewarded with valuable flirting points.

Widgets Arrive for the iPod
The iPod is still largely a closed development platform, but that's not stopping some folks from creating widgets that run on it. Steve Rubel points to two products from Kooloroo that bring handy information to the iPod.

IceRocket Resurfaces with Blogger Stats

IceRocket, a blog search engine that gets mentioned less and less in the blog search discussions, has begun to offer a new blog metrics feature which might attract bloggers back. Similar to BlogBeat, which was acquired by FeedBurner, IceRocket is offering blog metrics.

Offering bloggers metrics might help IceRocket to reverse the downward decline in traffic over the past year (shown below). I recall almost two years ago IceRocket was a rising star along side Technorati in a very open blog search race. Technorati has continued to grow and companies like Sphere have been created and stolen some of the spotlight. I remember getting lots of referals from people finding my content via IceRocket blog search and have mentioned IceRocket a number of times on Somewhat Frank. What happened to IceRocket?

It will be interesting to see if IceRocket can use the metrics feature to delieve blogosphere reporting on the state of the IceRocket tracked blogosphere. Or is too late to stop IceRocket's downward traffic spiral?

Socialmeter: Do a Quick Link Count

Socialmeter aggregates how many links are being counted in several of the social search web sites. Currently, Socialmeter is tracking del.icio.us, Digg, furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl, Technorati and Yahoo MyWeb.

Socialmeter could be a decent tool to get a quick idea of how many people are linking to a site. The number that is returned could be considered a measure of the popularity of a site. However, a link count as a measure of popularity can be slightly misleading since newer sites may be very popular but since they are new may not have as many links as older sites.

Social Search Web 2.0 Sites Categorized

With the evolution of social media, social search has been taking a shape of its own. There are a number of social search products that have emerged and become very powerful in a very short period of time. Search Engine Watch recently published a two part series written by Chris Sherman which first describes social search and its history and then introduces all the various types of social search products currently available. The second article breaks the social search products into six categories:

Shared bookmarks & web pages
        Del.icio.us, Shadows, Yahoo's MyWeb, Furl and Diigo

Collaborative directories
        Prefound, Zimbio and Wikipedia

Taggregators
        Technorati, Rojo and Bloglines

Personalized verticals
        Eurekster, Rollyo and Yahoo! Search Builder

Social Q & A sites
        Yahoo Answers, Google Answers, Answerbag, Wondir, Yedda
        and Live QnA

Collaborative harvesters
        Digg, Netscape, Reddit and Tailrank

I would highly recommend checking this article out for more detailed analysis of each of the six categories. 

Swicki & Rollyo Here Comes Yahoo! Search

Yahoo released a new search builder tool today which could directly compete with the Eurekster Swicki community search product (shown in the right rail) and Rollyo which allows you to roll your own search. The Yahoo Search Builder product will enable the production of a customized search results.

The release falls in line with the social or community direction that Yahoo! has been moving and makes sense. With Eureskster Swicki and Rollyo as the most direct competitors to the new Yahoo Search Builder, I find it ironic that Swicki uses the Yahoo search API on the back-end. So would Yahoo! consider gobbling up Swicki to gain some of Swicki's technological advantage over the past year? Eurekster was named one of the hottest startups! Rollyo recently launched a blog search feature which further differentiates itself from the field. I wonder what Jennifer Allen at Eurekster thinks of the release of Yahoo! Search Builder?

Topix Unveils New Design, Search Feature

Topix.net, the news and blog content aggregator, has launched a new fresh design for the layout of its homepage. The design includes a new logo as well as a new layout for the page. The old design is shown below on the left and the new design is shown further below.

In addition to a layout upgrade Topix.net has also released a very interesting historic search sliders that can be accessed by doing a search in the top search box. It appears Topix has been in contact with search guru, Danny Sullivan about the updates and wanted to get them out in time for the Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose. The new slider presents the live web search results for over 1 year. It reminds me of the slider that blog search engine Sphere currently uses to sift through blog search result by date.

These changes come on the heels of the Inform.com deal I highlighted last week. Bottomline: Topix.net offers a more esthetically pleasing product than Inform.com and the redesign amplifies that point.

Study Reveals Shift in How We Interact with the Web

A new browser study performed by University of Hamburg researchers found a shift in how we interact with the Web - moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. The report examining navigation by tracking page reloads, web site viewing patterns and screen size dimensions. According to the report:

"With the increase in new windows and use of AJAX, the back button has dropped from over 35% to less than 15% of all page transitions. Overall the trend reflects an increase in interactivity and form submission, with a corresponding 50% drop in the use of the back button for web navigation."

The complete rather lengthy but very interesting report can be found on WebsiteOptimization.com.

Technorati Turns 3: Redesigns Homepage

Technorati, the popular blog search engine, has turned three today and has launched a new homepage design. Technorati is more than just a blog search engine it is a "live web search engine" and offers a number of different features that make it a destination more than just a search search engine. It has positioned itself to look similar to the Yahoo! homepage which makes me wonder how long it will be before someone acquires them as I have mentioned before.

Check out the latest changes in this post which includes a video walk-thru of the updates, by Technorati CEO, David Sifry. David also had this to say:

• Technorati is 3 years old!  What an amazing trip so far.
• The World Live Web is all about people - We're here to help make sense of all the interesting stuff we do in real-time.
• Technorati's rolled out a major update to our site and to our back-end systems.
• We've made some major speed and accuracy improvements in core search.
• Link counting is a lot more accurate and timely.
• We've personalized the homepage so you can get a look at all the stuff you care about on one page.
• While we love expert bloggers, we've also spent a lot of time making Technorati understandable to normal people.
• We've added in lots of features to help you make sense of the blogosphere, including Discover, which is topic-based, Favorites, which gives YOU the power to pick your favorite blogs, and Popular, which algorithmically derives the most linked-to items in the last few days.
• We've made some big changes to blog profiles - allowing you to get stats about any blog that Technorati tracks, including the tags used, posting frequency, traffic, and Technorati ranking.
• We've made things easier for advertisers and partners, and we've been overwhelmed with demand. We're building out our capabilities, and if you're interested in advertising, drop us a line.
• This is just a start - there's more to come in the coming weeks and months, including better charts, more real-time spam detection and elimination, more real-time media indexing, microformats integration, and additional localization and language support.

The update looks great. Happy birthday Technorati!