Furturemark has released their newest 3DMark06, but it may be hard to tell at first. They seem to be taking a cue from the popularity of game patches that add HDR lighting to existing content. This year’s 3DMark is little more than last year’s, re-released with some upgraded visuals. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m going to endulge in a bit of a nerd rant here, folks.
For the past, oh, few months or so my opinion has been growing more and more negative of Google. Typically I would have posted my thoughts before now, but like everyone else, I wanted to give Google a chance. Did they have something useful in the works that they simply weren’t ready to unveil?
No, that doesn’t seem to be the case, so I’ll just say it. Google today simply sucks. Their search results aren’t so hot, their services are lame and look terrible, and they’re trying to stuff their various products and advertisements into every nook and cranny that they can find. Google Desktop, Google Talk, Google Toolbars, Google Pack, and now they’re jumping into radio to get their ads into that medium.
Why spin it? It’s really all just a bunch of bunk.
I really, really like the Hemingway theme. It focuses on the content, it’s organized, and just as importantly, it makes use of most of the available screen space. Just what is the strange obsession with blog themes to squeeze everything into a central little reading window, anyway? Read the rest of this entry »
IMPORTANT:
Make a back up of your .htaccess file. You can do this by downloading the .htaccess file and then copying it, not moving it, to a new folder on your computer.
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What it’s supposed to do:
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The address http://www.shadowsinmotion.com/feed/ was supposed to automatically redirect to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShadowsInMotion , but unfortunately that wasn’t happening. The /feed/ URI was still pulling directly from WordPress.
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The fix that I applied:
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Okay, I’m pretty excited about this one.
How would you like to control which keywords will return a specific site in a search? Better yet, how about you, the user, being given the ability to flag any site returned as spam, thus giving the community the power to get rid of those crap sites that love to clog search results. Excited yet?
Let’s say that you’re searching for information about coffee but your search results are only returning sites trying to sell you coffee products. Finally you find what you’re after. You click “Add More Tags” and toss in a keyword that you know will work better for the site that you found, then maybe you add a comment in the search engine that anyone who finds the site can read, and then you go about your business.
Or perhaps your search for coffee information is cluttered by a bunch of squatters. So you click once, maybe twice to confirm, and you flag the website as spam. You, along with the rest of the community, eventually make these squatters vanish from search results.
Thandora, a new “Web 2.0″ search engine by AdventNet Inc allows you to do all of that. In some respects it’s similar to Digg.com, but it’s missing the community-driven ability to boost a site to the front page. I would really like to see the ability to vote on tags added to Thandora. Theoretically, this would be used instead of complex algorithms to determine how relevant a website is to people’s searches.
The catch? Thandora, for now at least, it is limited to being a yellow pages for businesses, but I can easily see this (or a spin-off) exploding into one of the primary search engines on the web. Services such as Google, Yahoo and MSN may eventually appear archaic compared to the new tag powered, community driven search services.
As a business, you will be glad to know that submitting your site to Thandora is a very simple process that is also powered by tags. You enter your website’s name, the web address, a description, your email for verification, and you give your site what you think are the best tags to associate with your business. Here is a screen shot of the site submission screen:
Your site is quickly and automatically added to the search engine after you click on a verification link in the email that’s sent to you.
There of course are concerns with this new approach to search engines. Spammers will no doubt exploit the comment feature and I wouldn’t be surprised if they find a way to exploit the tags, as well. Companies may start to flag their competitors as “spam” in an attempt to get rid of them, or at least in an attempt to kick them to a distant page. If the community did have the power to boost a site to the front page as I suggested above then spammers would surely try to take advantage of that, as well.
If they can misbehave then they certainly will misbehave, but despite the technical hurdles I am very excited about this. This is a service that I’ll be keeping my eyes on.
I’ll close with a couple of additional screen shots of Thandora. As always, click them for a larger view.
Links for this article:
~Mysk
Technorati Tags: web 2.0, tags, tag powered search
Nothing special here, I’m just eating a bit of crow. Awhile back I was invited to use and review a web service called PM Tracker. I wasn’t feeling the best at the time but did respond saying that I’d give it a once over and post my thoughts here. Read the rest of this entry »
edit: I changed the title of this post so that it would hopefully be less confusing to some.
This is a quick note to everyone to say that I ran into the recent WMF exploit while browsing through Google image searches. I simply clicked on the image as I normally would and suddenly Avast anti-virus popped up with its virus warning. I had a brief moment of confusion before I realized that the problem was an exploited WMF file.
A very close call. Read the rest of this entry »
Google has made a couple of major announcements, and I’m sure that more information about all of this will be coming soon.
First, Google will be offering a service to watch or download prime time television shows and similar offerings. At the time of this posting it’s uncertain if you will download the video to your hard drive or if it will be restricted to streaming video. Considering Google’s current video service I would not be surprised if it’s limited to streaming, but on the other hand, who’s going to pay for something that they don’t actually own?
If it’s restricted to streaming then it would be better to call it a rental service rather than saying that it sells the video. We’ll just have to wait and see how this turns out! Read the rest of this entry »
Have you ever made a negative comment about an AJAX web application and then received the predictable response of, “Then go make your own”? Wouldn’t it be nice if it were so easy?
With ZohoCreator it may well be that easy someday, and perhaps sooner rather than later. This service is still in closed beta in public beta under heavy development, but as I think you will see, it has a great deal of promise.
Think of this web application as something like a Visual Basic for web development. It allows you to create your own AJAX applications from within a graphical enviroment. You first create and name a form (think of a form as a clean slate) onto which you will add the various objects of your application. Text fields, email fields, options, numbers, date fields and so on.
Here is a screenshot of the first form that I created. In this shot I am tinkering with the menu of items that I can add to the form: Read the rest of this entry »
What is this? This is a search tool that allows you to search for anything related to anime or Japanese culture, from study aids to pleasure aids.
The anime and Japanese merchandise search plugin for firefox allows you to search for anything related to anime, Japan, or even hentai… if that’s your thing. Mind you I will never know what you’re searching for, and that’s quite alright with me.. it’s none of my business!
Some examples of what you can use this plugin to search for are: Japanese study aids, their amazingly useful lunch boxes (bento boxes), anime figurines, magazines (mangas), anime toys, Japanese snacks and gum, stylish shirts, outfits, region free DVD players, wacky items and more. Read the rest of this entry »