Introducing Ubiquity

I can’t believe i missed this. Its all about having the web at the tip of your fingers.

Read the information here or see the demo.

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity.

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines – ReadWriteWeb

I keeping looking up RWW for alternate search engines. I admit i’ve been interested in KartOO but maybe i’m just not savvy enough to get it so i dont use them as much. Definitely something i’ll keep coming back to when i get ‘wiser’. Also read the rest of the articles for other concepts

Perhaps Google’s most glaring and egregious shortcoming is their insistence on displaying the outcome of a search in an impossibly long, one-dimensional list of results. We all intuitively know that the World Wide Web is just that, a three dimensional (or “3-D”) web of interconnected Web pages. Several search engines, known as clustering engines, routinely present their search results on a two-dimensional map that one can navigate through in search of the best answer. Search engines like KartOO and Quintura are excellent examples.

via The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines – ReadWriteWeb.

Yahoo! Search BOSS – YDN

Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index.

via Yahoo! Search BOSS – YDN.

Photosynth : Microsoft Live Labs

Developments in artificial intelligence… a growing field

You can share or relive a vacation destination or explore a distant museum or landmark. With nothing more than a digital camera and some inspiration, you can use Photosynth to transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Anybody who sees your synth is put right in your shoes, sharing in your experience, with detail, clarity and scope impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos.

Synths constitute an entirely new visual medium. Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to build a model of where the photos were taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos.

via Photosynth : Microsoft Live Labs.

Evernote Has Been Busy! – ReadWriteWeb

Now i like the concept behind Evernote and i’ve tried SimplyBox. Can’t say i used SimplyBox as much and the UI didn’t appear to be too intuitive to me but i can be pretty dumb.

Anyway, there have been changes at Evernote and i think i’m going to like the support for various clients. Time to check it out.

Evernote Has Been Busy! – ReadWriteWeb.

New York trip and requirements training

So i was in New York this week attending requirements training from EBG Consulting. It was quite different from the ones i’ve been to before. The focus was more on how to elicit (instead of gather) requirements using various models, tools and techniques. Pretty good stuff.

I think we inherently use some of the models without giving it too much thought but its good to put some formal process/methodology around it. All good…

The question i have in my mind is… what happens when i get back to work and start “eliciting” requirements? Will i use these models? Or will I simply continue doing what i was doing before? I would like to think that I will use some of them. For example, I can see myself doing the stakeholder categorization like i usually do. To add to that i will probably list features. The features combined with stakeholder analysis, i can see myself doing some form of event response analysis to quickly capture requirement one liners.

Now lets see… what i would i do to build on that? I can see myself picking some pieces of events and building a data model around some of the information but that seems like a stretch right now. If all i was expected to do is capture the user level interaction requirements – I don’t see the need to do this.

We already have schemas that describe the data. We have databases that have models. So that leaves us with only new content types that need some modeling.  I don’t see me doing much of that. I totally agree that data is key to everything but I think I just talked myself into keeping this at lower priority for now.

So… will having event responses based on interviewing stakeholders be sufficient? I can see me doing some process maps and state diagrams to understand some specifics by doodling on the wall or something… but i don’t see me documenting any of this. More on this later.

About the trip – New York was great. Was sick for the first couple of days so i stayed in the hotel but last night i walked all the way to Time Square, tonight was out walking around. Its always great to be here for a visit. I can’t see myself living here but who knows what the future brings.

Alright that’s it for now. I’m excited to be heading home back to wife and kids tomorrow.

Twitter topic trends

Over the last few weeks i have been looking into how various search engines determine topics and gather information around topics. Ran into this article on RRW – Twitter search and trends

Facebook’s Response To Twitter

Quite interesting take on changes being made with FB in response to Twitter. I know i use both services but Twitter not as much as i would like to. If FB really does do a lot of what Twitter does then i wonder how much i’ll use the latter…

Facebook’s Response To Twitter

British Search Engine ‘Could Rival Google’

So hears another semantic search engine wolframalpha.com that’s apparently launching in May 2009.  Should remember to check it out.

So how does Wolfram|Alpha intend to surpass current search engines in terms of relevance? Or does the team believe it can offer something completely different and innovative?

Wolfram|Alpha is designed on the principle that current search engines rely too heavily on their vast databases of indexed pages; they simply make a best guess based on search criteria and serve up some hopefully relevant results.

By working with a search engine that understands natural language instead, Stephen Wolfram intends to closely understand people’s questions and answer them directly. He remarks that, “It provides extremely impressive and thorough questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers—it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.”

Search Engine Marketing Tips & Search Engine News – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Reading material for those who are into it

Search Engine Marketing Tips & Search Engine News – Search Engine Watch (SEW).