Archive for 2007

I saw a post by Joe Dolson pointing to a thread at Cre8asuteforums called "When lots of your visitors go straight to site search". The thread contains some speculation about what drives people to search - including poor navigation, and a large site. Another driver we see is some people are just search focused - they look for the search box on a new site when they first visit - it is (or should be) easy to find when scanning a page.

The original poster said that he put a second search box at the bottom of his navigation. He found 5% of people used it vs 25% for the one at the top. This is a good idea - it provides easy access to the search for the people that have scanned the page and not found what they were looking for.

I spoke to analyst Robin Bloor from Hurwitz and Associates today. Going by his blog post today - At last, a Self-Education Search, Robin agrees with the approach we take with our Learning Search. He describes a recent bad experience of searching on Newegg (which I believe is powered by Endeca) which perfectly captures the importance of having a good site search and highlights the difficulty of implementing site search well, even when you have bought expensive software.

The source code for http://www.tafiti.com/ is available!

What is Tafiti? It is a search visualization website which brings a new user experience to researching (searching and storing results). It was originally created by Microsoft to demonstrate Silverlight and the Windows Live Search APIs.

Today the Windows Live Platform team announced the release of the Tafiti Search Visualization source code to CodePlex which means any developer can download, modify, and resell the code (see MS-PL License for all the details).

Tafiti has been released as a Windows Live Quick Application via CodePlex, which is a set of demos developers can download and use as reference implementations or starter kits for the Windows Live Platform.

You can see Tafiti running at http://tafiti.mslivelabs.com (or see the original with the Halo3 skin) and to understand how to use it read the walkthrough or watch the video (4.5 minutes).

For more information see the announcement on dev.live.com or on Angus Logan's blog.

Thanks!

OK, I cheated. I don't really speak Chinese. But I know a bot that does, and we're releasing it today together with number of other translation bots. For those not familiar with bots, a (ro)bot is a piece of software that acts as a chat contact and provides some fun or useful functionality.

If you want to try it, just add en2zh@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use it as an interpreter in your group chat, or as a pocket translator in your Google Talk client for BlackBerry.



For more languages, just add any of the 29 23 other translation bots. They're named using two-letter language abbreviations as "[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com", and the supported language pairs are: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. So, for French to German translation, talk to fr2de@bot.talk.google.com.

For those of you into programming, why not build your own bot? Maybe a weather service or a rock/paper/scissors game. The Google Talk service uses an open protocol called XMPP, and it's easy to find client libraries and code samples that will give you a flying start. For Java users, check out Ignite Realtime's Smack library. Please note that the Google Talk service enforces traffic limitations on user accounts, so if you want to support more than a few thousand Google Talk users on your bot, connect using the server-to-server protocol (either by making your bot act as an XMPP server or by hosting the bot on your own XMPP server).

Jonas Lindberg
Software Engineer

Update: Our initial list of available bots included some languages that are not actually available. There are 24 bots currently available: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. As some have guessed, this is a 20% project, and while machine translation isn't perfect, we hope these bots can be helpful in bridging language barriers.

The source code for http://www.tafiti.com/ is available!

What is Tafiti? It is a search visualization website which brings a new user experience to researching (searching and storing results). It was originally created by Microsoft to demonstrate Silverlight and the Windows Live Search APIs.

Today the Windows Live Platform team announced the release of the Tafiti Search Visualization source code to CodePlex which means any developer can download, modify, and resell the code (see MS-PL License for all the details).

Tafiti has been released as a Windows Live Quick Application via CodePlex, which is a set of demos developers can download and use as reference implementations or starter kits for the Windows Live Platform.

You can see Tafiti running at http://tafiti.mslivelabs.com (or see the original with the Halo3 skin) and to understand how to use it read the walkthrough or watch the video (4.5 minutes).

For more information see the announcement on dev.live.com or on Angus Logan's blog.

Thanks!

Finding a good Google Talk picture can be a real chore. It's hard enough to find a photo of yourself where you're smiling and looking intelligent, without all the additional hassle of cropping, exporting, and manually uploading your picture. So I devoted a few cycles to solving this problem in a fun way. Today, we're launching a way for you to take your Google Talk picture directly from your webcam.

From the Google Talk gadget, click on your Google Talk picture, and select the "Take Photo" option. You'll see the image from your webcam appear, and you'll be able to take and retake pix to your heart's content. When you get that perfect shot, just click "Save" to set it as your picture.

Currently, this feature only works in the Google Talk gadget, but will set your picture across the Google Talk network, including in Gmail.

Have fun, and let us know what you think here.

Justin Uberti
Software Engineer

We appreciate all the hard work swickibuilders have poured into their swickis over the past two years while we were in beta. Over that period we experimented and played with a lot of ideas and tactics, and so did our builders.

Most of the swickis we see being built are great - focused and trained on an interesting topic, aimed at surfacing meaningful and relevant content to an existing or growing audience. We are honored and excited to share them with the world.

Now that we have left the petri-dish-that-is-beta, the quality and relevance of the swickis that we host is more important to us than ever. Irrelevant, abusive, neglected or otherwise malicious swickis are not only a poor use of our product, they tarnish the reputation of swickis everywhere.

So to help the great swickis really shine, starting today we are more strictly enforcing our terms and conditions and are extending our initial swicki review cycle to a program of regular editorial reviews.

Only swickis that continue to meet our standards of quality and relevance will be shown in our directory, enabled to show custom HTML to their swicki templates, or activate revenue sharing.

We are also adding a link to all swickis allowing users to flag them to our reviewers as abusive or spam. We have always immediately deleted swickis that we find abusive, malicious or just plain spammy.

If you feel that your swicki has been unfairly affected by our policy, please contact us.

Eurekster is currently nominated for two prestigious Web awards: Mashable.com's Open Web Awards and The Crunchies Awards. You can vote for us by clicking on any of the below links, which will take you to the voting pages.

The Crunchies Finalist Nominations:

1. Best International Start-up
2. Best User-Generated Content Start-Up
3. Best in Internet Technology and Innovation

Mashable Open Web Awards Winner Nominations:

1. Favorite Social Search Site

Thanks to all who have already voted!

We're in Chicago attending the first-time-round SES Chicago show now run by Kevin Ryan and Kevin Heisler. Still curious about how the new format will be received, but so far, the vibe is good and people I chatted with are quite excited. When we ran into Kevin R., he seemed pleased with the turnout as well.

Steven Marder, our CEO at Eurekster, participated in the "Actionable Social Media" panel, along with folks from BuzzLogic, iCrossing, Search Engine Guide and Wildfire Strategic Marketing. The room was filled to capacity, indicating a pretty strong interest in this track they call "Fundamentals."

Based on the diversity of businesses these speakers represent, it was interesting to see where Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink was guiding the discussions. The agenda promised we'd be looking at "community-driven sites that allow content sharing via tagging and can be a great way to tap into links and search-driven traffic." The question really was how marketers and publishers can leverage social media services and strategies in an appropriate manner.

Todd Parson of Buzzlogic was kicking things off by providing a few impressive numbers on blogging and the huge amount of UGC out there. Did you know 57 million Americans read blogs, 60% of which want to get an opinion? He also brought up the concept of editorial vs. acquired linking, which led to one of the key themes in this talk: authenticity.

Adam Lavelle of iCrossing talked about how we were "social animals" who use content to connect, which personal networks make social. His golden rule was "listen and be useful". (Amazingly enough, he did manage to go through 35 slides in under 5 minutes).

Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide elaborated on the different benefits of image tagging, specifically using flickr as an example, such as a deeper level of community engagement, as well as traffic growth.

Tamara Kremer of Wildfire highlighted del.icio.us as an example for social bookmarking and the opportunity for creating a deep and rich resource library to be leveraged for marketing efforts.

To wrap up, Steven outlined the change in media from 1.0 to social media, and search 1.0 (such as Google, Yahoo and Ask), and the next iteration: Social Search. He described how social search leverages the characteristics of social media, such as de-centralization, participation, and such, and how this allows for the publisher to create a guided and branded, yet community-powered search experience. Best of all, Eurekster swickis can be built for free and actually make you some money, as Anne clarified after Steven's intro.

When asked about what mistakes were being made, the key concepts discussed in this panel were re-iterated: stay authentic, focus on the conversation, don't think of this as a quick fix, and, as Steven pointed out and Anne reinforced: R-E-S-P-E-C-T your customer.

MSCOM has been running IIS7.0 in production since June 12, 2007. On November 27 we did a webcast entitled: How Microsoft IT Is Providing an Improved Web and Applications Platform with Internet Information Services 7.0 in Windows Server 2008 In case you...(read more)