November, 2005 Archives | Homepage
Searchable Ads on TiVo
News.com reports that TiVo has plans to add a searchable ad service. This is possibly an attempt for TiVo to appease advertisers that are concerned that people are avoiding commericals.TiVo plans to offer advertising search this spring, via the user profiles its subscribers create on their TiVo set-top boxes. But it has yet to be seen whether this latest advertising technology appeals to users who hit TiVo's 30-second hidden skip feature to jet past ads.Whether people will actually want to search for commericals is another question. If the service is extensive enough they might. People do use yellow pages and watch infomercials.
"TiVo intends to capture the best of the Internet advertising model and create a unique advertising product for the television medium that will provide measurable results," Davina Kent, TiVo's vice president of national advertising sales, said in a statement.
Posted on November 30, 2005
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41% of Americans Use Search
News.com reports that a new Pew Internet study has found that the number of people using search engines has climbed rapidly from 30% to 41% since July, 2004.According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the number of U.S. Web users taking advantage of search engines has risen sharply since mid-2004--from 30 percent of the U.S. Web population in July 2004 to its current level of 41 percent, which translates to some 59 million Americans.Search is now the second most popular web activity. Email is still number one. The News.com article also cites a study that found Google dominates the search engine marketshare with 46% of the market. Yahoo is a dismal second with 23% of the marketshare.
The Pew project also found that those likely to spend more time on search engines tend to be in their 30s and well-off.
The report added, "Those who use search engines on an average day tend to be heavy Internet users. They are much more likely to have broadband connections than dial-up connections; to log on to the Internet several times a day; and to have spent considerable time online during the day."
Posted on November 29, 2005
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Review Whatever You Want at Riffs
Riffs is a new social review website that allows you to post reviews and share them with others. Riffs members can review anything from President George Bush to iPods. Members also get rated by other members for their reviews. Riffs refers to itself as a bliki:
A blog is your online journal. A wiki is an application that allows users to modify any portion of a document. A Bliki is a combination of these two things—the community, including you, decides on the content for any given item, whose reviews are the best, what things or topics are the most important to riff about, and how those riffs should be organized and annotated. You also have your own page, where you can organize your riffs and record your commentary about anything you go to, read, watch, play with, or even think about, sharing your voice with the riffs community.The bliki term may not catch on but the Riffs service looks to be pretty active and off to a good start. (Via B2Day)
Posted on November 28, 2005
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Thanksgiving Links
Thanksgiving is almost here so it is time for a roundup of related links. The History Channel has a televised special on the history of Thanksgiving and a website to go with it that provides historical information and information about the first Thanksgiving. The website includes a link section with a few other good resources like the Plimouth Plantation website and the Library of Congress resource which includes a Thanksgiving timeline. Scholastic also has a historical Thanksgiving resources with a timeline. Wikipedia has a Thanksgiving entry with information about the holiday. And don't forget to visit the parade websites like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (NYC), Washington Mutual Thanksgiving Day Parade (Houston) and America's Thanksgiving Parade (Detroit). Food wise there is All Recipes, VegWeb, EatTurkey.com and a Yahoo directory. Information about some of the after Thanksgiving Black Friday holiday deals can be found here. And our BloggersBlog.com site also posted some links to recipes from the blogosphere as well other Thanksgiving-related blog posts in the Blogging the Holidays section. Happy Thanksgiving!Posted on November 23, 2005
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Amazon Expands A9 Map Service
A9 has improved its mapping technology called A9 Maps. The service combines maps and driving directions from Mapquest with A9's BlockView feature. BlockView images show photographs of streets and buildings so A9 users can get a better idea of what a restaurant or service looks like. A9 users can also move up and down streets with BlockView as they use the right and left arrows to view photographs of different buildings. Posted on November 21, 2005
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AOL Upgrades You've Got Pictures
Publish.com reports that AOL has upgraded its You've Got Picture service into a free online photo sharing tool called AOL Pictures.
America Online, Inc. announced today the launch of AOL Pictures, a free photo sharing Web site with unlimited online digital storage in original resolutions, photo sharing and printing.Photo sharing and printing are good features but to compete with Flickr the service also needs features like tagging and interestingness.
"Available for free to anyone on the Web at AOL.com, AOL Pictures gives consumers a complete digital photo experience with benefits like unlimited, free photo storage and integration with the AIM service and our blogging tools," David Liu, General Manager and Vice President, AOL.com said in a statement Thursday.
Additional features of the new AOL Photo include an improved uploading tool with drag and drop functionality, mobile phone access to stored photos, an online print store, and slideshow and album-creation functions, as well as a sleek interface based on development platform AJAX.
Posted on November 17, 2005
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Personalize Maps With Wayfaring
Wayfaring is a website that allows you to create maps based on Google Maps that are personalized with your own favorite places. You can also look at maps others have created. For example, there is a San Francisco Golfers Map as well as personal maps like Will's map of places where he likes to drink beer and a UCLA student's map of her classes. When you create a map you can place notes and tags on the map and then share it with others when you are done. This page contains a list of some of Wayfayer's features. Posted on November 16, 2005
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New Yahoo Maps Beta Available
Yahoo has a beta version available for the next upgrade to Yahoo Maps. The new version includes more draggable and zoomable features including a box, called an overview map, that contains a smaller version of the map that can be used to quickly zoom in and out. Yahoo announced the beta in a post on the Yahoo! Search blog. Here are some of the features they noted.
The beta launch also includes some new APIs for mapping mash-up enthusiasts. These are also described in the blog post mentioned above.Multi-point driving directions. Get yourself from point A to B and on to C all in one map. Integrated Yahoo! Local. Includes our local search, a browseable interface, easy access to business ratings, reviews, and events. The new overview map (in the upper-right hand corner) helps you get your bearings. The little grey box representing your big map is even drag-able. Use it to move around rapidly without losing context.
Posted on November 14, 2005
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User Maintained Lexicon Website Launches
Whatdoesthatmean.com is a new wikipedia-styled website that focuses on helping different English speaking cultures understand each other. The site includes listings for different words that can be edited by the site's users. Each word entry includes the meaning, usage, definition, explanation and trivia. For example, the entry for the Australian stickybeak term says "someone who is more than usually interested in someone else's business, a busybody." Posted on November 11, 2005
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The Flickrs of Video
TechCruch has a post that compares the features of the emerging video tagging tools -- the flickrs of video. Flickr has emerged as the leader in photo sharing and tagging but who will emerge in video? The article mentions these websites: YouTube.com, CastPost.com, ClipShack.com, Daily Motion, Grouper, OurMedia, Revver, Vimeo and Vsocial.comSome of these you have seen mentioned here on SurfersSurf.com over the past couple months. In the comments section of this article are a few others including vMix, Vidilife, Seehaha and Vobbo. There is also an interesting discussion group mentioned for videobloggers.
Posted on November 9, 2005
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Website Aims to Review Every London Pub
A website called Fullpint.com is busy reviewing all the pubs in London. There are 300 review so far. The reviewers log their experiences at the pub and give the pub a score from 0 to 19.All Fullpint reviewers have taken the highly scientfic fullpint profile test. Scores on the test range from 0 to 19, with higher scores indicitive of a higher aptitude for Pub review work. One of the site's founders said about the test, "Score toward the very top and basically you like your pubs to have sticky carpets, a dart board and smelly old men. Lower numbers mean you like bars".A Google maps overlay has also been added to the site to make it easier for people to locate a specific pub.
Posted on November 8, 2005
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Surfers Love Research Resources
A recent Nielsen//NetRatings report found that use of online education and reference sites is booming -- a 22% spike this year. The report mentioned the following websites:WWW Virtual Library, RefDesk.com and the Librarians' Internet Index are also great research-related sites. More research links can be found here. Also, library websites tend to be excellent starting points for online research.
Posted on November 7, 2005
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Flock Browser Works With Web Tools
Flock is a new open source browser that works in conjunction with popular Internet tools like del.icio.us and Flickr. Flock also works with several blogging tools to help websurfers post to their blogs. A recently Associated Press article discusses more of Flock's features.Flock also gives you a way to easily tag the online bookmarks to help with sorting and discovery. Instead of placing a link for a site on "Lost" in an arbitrary folder, you can tag it "television," "Lost," and even "ABC."Currently Flock is in what is being called a Developer Preview status which is aimed at developers only. It is not recommended for use as your primary browser yet according to Flock's faq.
You can use Flock's "favorites" manager to see only links carrying a certain tag, or you can search through other people's Del.icio.us collections by tag.
Flock also has a number of features meant to help people post to their Web journals, or blogs. A built-in word processor lets you submit entries directly to some of the leading blog services, including Six Apart Ltd.'s TypePad and Google Inc.'s Blogger.
If you come across something you like on the Internet, you can highlight the text, right-click your mouse and select "Blog This." The word processor launches, with the text and a link to the site already filled in. All you need to do is add some comment, a title and click "publish."
Posted on November 4, 2005
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Security Fears Stop Some From Surfing Web
Wired reports that security fears, like identity theft, have caused some people to cut back on their web surfing and shopping. Shopping appears to be taking a bigger hit than web surfing.As identity theft has grown, so has fear of being victimized through high-tech means. A new study finds some computer users are cutting back on time spent surfing the internet. Some have also stopped buying altogether on the web.There are tons of software companies that offer products like spyware removal and anonymous surfing. Interest in these types of services may continue to increase if Microsoft and other browser software providers cannot prevent threats more easily.
The report from Consumer Reports WebWatch finds nearly a third of those surveyed say they've reduced their overall website use.
Some 80 percent of internet users say they're at least somewhat concerned someone could steal their identity from personal information on the internet. A majority of users asked say they've stopped giving out personal information on the web and a quarter say they've stopped buying online.
Posted on November 3, 2005
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Several Websites Focus on Sketches
There are several websites out there building websites based on sketching tools. SwarmSketch (via B2Day) is an ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses. Sketchplanet is a website that allows people to create, tags and store sketches. You can also add sketches from Sketchplanet to your weblog. And, of course, there is always the Etch-a-Sketch Online.Posted on November 1, 2005
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