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Want to know who's bookmarking/tagging what and when? Spurl's Zniff.com, "the human search engine" just launched several new features, including the capacity to sort results based on time. To my knowledge, Zniff is the first social bookmarking search engine, delivering search results drawn from social bookmarks. Found the announcement at Pete of pc4media
I've been a beta member of Rojo for quite a while, but haven't really dug in until today, thanks to Cori's reminder the other day, which happens to coincide pretty close with their official launch today. I invited a couple dozen people into my network (ping me if you want an invite). This is actually the first time I've done an OPML export and import and it took about thirty seconds, all told. Very surprised, expected it to be a complex process involving me revealing to everyone how little I know about blogospheric jargon, code, etc. Given that it's that easy, I can see OPML going mainstream w/ all kinds of applications. Here's a Dave Winer podcast on OPML, btw.
Anyway, I'm off to start flagging posts at Rojo :)
... k, here are a few thoughts: The popular tags page looks just like Technorati's tags page. Is there a way of working together so that you can tag something at Rojo and it shows up in Technorati tags as well, or vice-versa. Or maybe this is the Technorati tags page and they're already working together.
During their initial beta, there were little flags that you clicked to show your friends that you recommended this blog-post for reading. I don't see those anymore. It shows them in the screenshots in the tour, but I don't see those icons above my posts (I'm in Firefox)... aha! there they are, you have to click on the little pointer to open up the post so that it shows those. I'd probably vote to make that more obvious (unless I'm the only one that's had the problem). Maybe I didn't see that b/c I was used to the flags. Now that I've got that figured out it's all very form-folllows-function. Nice! The easy way of adding tags is great, I don't have to create a URL tag or anything, you just punch in the words.
More soon, but I like it!
Stephen Carr, blogger at No Idea and Wondir regular answerer and advice-giver, gave me permission to post his thoughts on improving the service. My responses are in italics:
- First and foremost, you need to convert line breaks in the answers, also auto linking would be good for when people post reference urls.
- Yeah, you're right. We allowed html for a while, but got trolled/gooned with porn in responses so temporarily de-activated all html and formatting in responses. We hope to have some basic html and formatting back in there soon.
- Second, it would be really cool for the members to be able to track the questions that they have answered. I like to keep tabs on some of the questions I have answered and at the moment I have to dig around to find them.
- Definitely, stay tuned, this is in the works. Shouldn't be too long before we have this feature live as part of the profile page.
- URLs -- it would be nice to have a permalink button so that you can link back to a question from your blog or something. At the moment I have to open a question in a new window to get the correct URL.
- Yep, another we want to do. It's way to difficult to link to questions right now b/c of the frames format (we needed to use to have the on-site Jabber IM work). This is on the list too.
- When I have answered a question and the page auto-refreshes it does not update the content of the page, the question board seems to be a cached version of the board I looked at before I answered a question. I have to either click the "Question Board" main button or your built in "Refresh" button. This is confusing for novice users, as it looks like their answer did not get appended to the Question Board.
- Absolutely. This is a known-bug we're working on. Should have a fix shortly.
- ... many people hit the front page - see the big text area and think they are on a search engine. A lot of questions come through that are like search engine queries. I think something could be done with the layout and language on the front page that tells people this is no search engine, real live people will be answering. It seems you are underselling the unique fact that real people answer your questions on Wondir.
- Right. We actually are a search engine, in the sense that we give you a rich search results page after you ask a question, but we also post your question for others to respond to (which is the BIG THING at Wondir). Perhaps we can make this a lot more clear, as people may not get it. Will definitely pass your thoughts around. Thanks!
Cori points me to the RSS feed for Engadget, which displays AdSense ads below each post in your reader (at least in mine). The ads are very accurate in some cases as well. I think this is going to catch on, for better or for worse. Who out there is going to try this? I think I at least want to try it out. Here's a blog post at Engadget with the Google-ad below:
Peter Caputa had a thought in a comment below worth repeating:
I'd love to see some API's and some cross searching capabilities across zniff and wondir!
Indeed. I'm a fan of Zniff and since Wondir is part search engine (and part community), there is definitely some complementary overlap there. I love the direction that search engines are going, especially "the human search engine" slant Spurl's taking. Btw, are there any other social bookmarking engines? Is Zniff the world's first? Anyway, stay tuned...
Pubsub helped me discover Red Ferret today, run by Nigel Powell, a columnist for the Sunday Times in London and author of the Book of Computer Answers. Here's what he had to say about Wondir before quoting from (I believe) our press release:
Wondir. Ask a question, any question. And it may be answered. Or not. Or answer a question yourself and help someone out. It’s all free. Some of the questions can be surprisingly heart wrenching, though, so be warned. Very clever idea, by the way.
Cindy at Wondir found this post today on Livejournal:
So, there's this new thing. It's like a cross between Google and Wikipedia*. And I've been answering questions there, generally helping people as much as I can. Once a week they award a prize to the top ten rated answerers, who have been user rated on helpfulness. I got an e-mail saying I was in the top five this week - which made me pretty happy! So I tooted along to see where I came and hit the ranks page... I came First! I won another mug to drink tea out of! www.wondir.com
I've started listening to Dave's morning podcasts. Here's today's. I'd be interested to know if I'm the only one out there who listens to podcasts as I work on my computer, just clicking the links and letting my iTunes play them through my speakers. I don't have an iPod, I just like listening to podcasts on my system on the fly.
tag: podcasting, OPML
This is the 2nd time I've heard about this today. Who's using it? How can I try it?
Pete of pc4media has been spurling with Hjalmar, Spurl founder, who I've had an ongoing conversation with lately. Endlessly jealous of his Islandic headquarters :) Spurl is a breeze to use and cross-posts to delicious. It also has Zniff, the human search engine which keeps rolling out upgrades and features to the real-time social bookmarking results. I'm using it as my home page for a while and having fun with it's real-time aspects.
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