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Zakta Launches Social Search Engine

Zakta.com is a social web search engine. In addition to traditional searching, Zakta also allows users to edit their search results and build on the results of others.

Here are some of the features Zakta provides according to the press release:

Fully editable search results. Zakta's search results are completely editable and under the user's control. A user can delete results that aren't relevant. Drag-and-drop results to rearrange them, or add tags and annotations to any result.
Automatically saved searches. Zakta automatically saves all changes into a user's Zakta account so users benefit from their changes whenever they search again.
Tools to gather and save information from everywhere. Zakta provides tools like the Zakta ClipPad, the Zakta Plugin, and Zakta SearchPacks, to find information anywhere on the web and include it in the user's search process.
Easy knowledge sharing. Zakta enables users to share their results in the form of Zakta Guides.
Trusted collaboration. Users can invite other people they trust - such as colleagues, friends, or family members - to find information together and use a Zakta Guide as a living, collaborative document.

Posted on October 24, 2009
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Facebook Backs Off Content Grabbing Terms

Facebook recently put up new terms of service saying they could use and sell user's content and keep its user's content even if people deleted their accounts. This upset many Facebook users who have personal photos and other content on the Facebook service that they don't want Facebook to be able to use or resell. The anger at the new Facebook terms kept building to the point where Facebook finally had to retract the new terms. Facebook plans to post a new revision to the terms later which could anger Facebook users all over again. Rocketboom explains Facebook's terms and what it all means for users and content ownership in the clip below.

Posted on February 20, 2009
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Facebook Claims 150 Million Users

Facebook has been doing very well every since they decided to open the social network up to everyone. Originally, the social network was just for high school and college students. Facebook announced that they have reached the 150 million people milestone.

Today, we reached another milestone: 150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day. This includes people in every continent-even Antarctica. If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.

When we first started Facebook almost five years ago, most of the people using it were college students in the United States. Today, people of all ages—grandparents, parents and children—use Facebook in more than 35 different languages and 170 countries and territories.

The full potential of the web is to make the world more open, so everyone has a voice and can share what is important to them. With 150 million voices and counting, we can't wait for the rest of 2009, and we look forward to offering even more ways for you to connect with the people who matter most.

That's a huge number. We would be curious how many of these are active users.

Posted on January 8, 2009
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Facebook Privacy Tips

Here's some great tips from Gabe Mac at Mobuzz about how to handle the Facebook redesign. Gabe Mac shows you how to handle Facebook privacy how to select which friends can see which parts of your Facebook profile.

Posted on October 10, 2008
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Can You Scrub Away Your Digital Footprint?

Every social networking website you have used likely still retains the information you placed there even after you abandoned the website. For some the Friendster social network may be a website they used and abandoned years ago. Forbes explains.

You may have forgotten about Friendster, the once-booming social networking site that faded as American Web users flocked to MySpace and Facebook. But Friendster may not have forgotten about you.

It still remembers, for instance, that John Smith from Salisbury, Md., enjoys hobbies including "comic books" and "copulation." And any Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) user can read a glowing testimonial written to Brooklynite Sam Brown, describing his habit of walking around his apartment drunk and naked, as well as his talent for using a certain part of his anatomy as a puppet.

In fact, Friendster is a ghost town of detailed personal information: The site received only 2.4 million unique visitors in the U.S. in January, but has more than 10 million American profiles, many of which publicly display information that users would probably prefer to keep private.

The Forbes article called "How To Disappear Online" goes on to explain how to get informaton removed from Facebook and how information is not always easy to erase - especially if it wasn't created by you. There are also companies that will help you erase your personal data for a fee. Some companies also help to remove negative information. This process is sometimes called Googlewashing. This video from MSNBC explains how it is done. The video mentions some web services that claim to perform these services. They include Reputation Hawk, Defend My Name and ReputationDefender.com. One expert argues in the video clip that removing all negative information is not possible so it is better to counter the negative information by creating lots of positive information about yourself.

Posted on April 10, 2008
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Coffeenatic: A Social Network For Coffee Lovers

It's 2008. That means there is already a social network for everything under the Sun. Even coffee. Web Worker Daily reports that there is a new social network called Coffeenatic that is just perfect for coffee addicts.

Coffeenatic focuses on coffee products and recipes, with data coming from its users. Coffee reviews are get quality and price ratings, while recipes are sorted by quality and complexity. You can browse without joining the site, but to add your own content or comments you'll need to sign up for a free account. It's just recently launched, but already they cover some ways to enjoy the bean that I hadn't heard of before.

Slashfood notes that there are two other coffee-related social networks: Barista Exchange and Barista Connection. Now you coffee lovers have three sites to check out.

Posted on March 11, 2008
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5 Million Using Geni Genealogy Website

Geni is a new genealogy website that uses Flash and has social networking features like profiles and photo sharing. You start by registering your name as well as the emails of your relatives -- this has allowed the site to grow very quickly and viraly. According to Geni only the people in your family tree can see your tree and your profile.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch blogged recently about how the number of people in his family tree has quickly grown.

When genealogy site Geni announced that it had raised a venture round from Charles River Ventures valuing the two month old startup at $100 million, more than a few eyebrows were raised. For the last couple of months, people have referred to "Pulling a Geni" when they try to raise money at a super-big valuation immediately after launch.

At launch, Geni appeared to be like many other "family tree" websites, just with a better looking and easier to use (Flash) interface. The site is extremely viral. When I first created my account I added my mother and father, along with their emails. They added more family members, who added yet others. Seven weeks after launch there were 126 people in my Geni family tree. Today, Today, after 15 weeks or so, there are 305 people in my family tree. All but three, myself included, were added by others.

Geni looks like a very useful geneaology website. It has already reached the 5 million profile mark according to a this statement and press release from Geni. However, genealogy websites like Genealogy.com and Ancestry.com probably aren't going to let Geni get all the traffic without a fight.

Posted on July 3, 2007
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Izimi Offers File Sharing and Social Networking

Izimi is a combination social network and file sharing service that lets you share photos, documents, vidoes and music with others. Venture Beat compares to Avvenu, a file-sharing service they reviewed earlier.

It also creates a public Web page for you, which lists all the content you have created. Let's say you create URL for some videos to send to your sister. Izimi puts a link to the videos at your Web page too, so other friends can see what you've been sharing. That's where the YouTube-like element comes in.

In other words, Izimi has two heads: One is a straight-forward file sharing application, and the second is a profile-based social network (see partial screen shot below). You can add friends to your profile, for example, and click through to see their content.

Right now, everything is for public viewing. It is all searchable at Izimi's home page. You can't share things privately. However, that doesn't mean once you've published something, it is open for all to see forever. You can choose to "unpublish" something, and it goes away. Izimi says it is working on a feature to send things privately, to be released soon.

File-sharing services are starting to replace email for some Internet users. It is probably a smart idea to combine it with a social networking service. Private sharing will be popular once Izimi makes it available. The only downside is web users have to be concerned about security if they are allowing any kind of access to files on their computer or laptop.

Posted on June 27, 2007
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Twelve Music Social Networks

Everyone has heard of the big social networks like Facebook and MySpace buat some of the niche music social networks are starting to get very popular as well. Mashable has a post that describes what they claim are the twelve best music social network. Here is a list of the music social networks discussed on Mashable's post. Unless you are really into music you probably haven't visited them all.

Flotones

Radio 2.0 from Mercora

MOG

Sellaband

Last.fm was recently acquired by CBS and it is has 15 million users. iLike has generated a lot of buzz lately because iLike's widget has been very popular on Facebook. MySpace technically could be included in the list since it is used frequently for music and music was one of the main reasons MySpace became so popular.

Posted on June 23, 2007
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Find Out Who Is Sick

Every wonder if you are the only one who has an awful cold? Every fall ill with a stomach bug and wonder if you are not alone? There is now a website that attempts to answer these questions. Who is Sick? provides data about sick people and illness outbreaks near where you live. If you are sick you can also submit your symptoms. Who is Sick? says submissions to its website are kept anonymous.

Web 2.0 sites are only as good as the data provided. This particular site looks to have a pretty active user base. The more people that use the site the easier it will be to spot outbreaks.

Posted on May 28, 2007
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New Website Reports Rumors

A new website called Truemors allows people to submit rumors over the Internet or with an SMS message. TechCrunch reported earlier that popular rumors can make it to the homepage of the Truemors website in a Digg-like fashion.

The company has partnered with Spinvox to allow people to leave rumors by voice. Spinvox then converts them to text for posting on the site.

You can call 1-650-329-2020 and leave your own rumor, if you wish. Text messages should be sent in the following format: Text "2020" to 55022. Rumors can also be posted to post@truemors.com.

Once rumors are on the site, other users can leave comments and vote it up or down. Like Digg, all new postings are listed for people to review and vote on. If enough people think a rumor is interesting, it makes it to a top list (the equivalent of the Digg home page).

Truemors also has categories for the rumors posted to its website including politics, business and even crap. Truemors was launched by blogger Guy Kawasaki.

Posted on May 21, 2007
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Internet News Twitter

We have launched a twitter profile which provides Internet news. Twitter is a microblogging service and communication tool that allows you to post short 140 character updates. To get our updates on Twitter you need to join Twitter and then follow our Twitter profile.

You can keep up with news about Twitter by reading BloggersBlog.com's Twitter news section or by following the BloggersBlog.com Twitter. Examples of some of the other news Twitters available include business news, celebrity gossip, sports news, tech gadgets, jobs, green news, video game news, health news, tech news, fashion news, politics and virtual worlds.

Posted on April 17, 2007
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Traffic Up at Yelp and Insider Pages

Traffic to local social networking sites like Yelp and Insider Pages has climbed over the last six months. Traffic to Judy's Book, a local shopping site, has not jumped. These websites all combine local information with user reviews.

This week Insider Pages was acquired by the Citysearch division of IAC. Hitwise data shows that the market share of US visits to Insider Pages was up 34% in the past 6 months (August 2006 vs. February 2007). The market share of visits to Yelp, another user-generated local review site, was up by an impressive 91% in the same period. Judy's Book did not show an increase, although traffic jumped in September and October 2006 when it received a substantial increase in traffic from Local.com, suggesting a content deal that was turned off.

Hitwise also looks at traffic to Local.com, Yahoo! Local and Live Local Search in the post and finds that traffic for these sites has not been growing. So the growth in this categry has mostly been occuring at social local sites like Yelp and Insider Pages.

Posted on March 2, 2007
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Del.icio.us Reaches 1 Million User Mark

Del.icio.us blogs that Del.icio.us has reached the 1 million user mark shortly after passing its third birthday.

Not even a week after turning three, del.icio.us has just passed the mark of 1 million registered users! That's more than triple the number of users we had just nine months ago. We can hardly believe it ourselves (although the smell of smoke coming from the server rack seems to eerily confirm it). Thanks to each and every one of you for making all this possible. Now we have one more thing to celebrate at the party next week...

Quick Online Tips has more about the Del.icio.us milestones.

Posted on September 27, 2006
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New Web2.0 Directory Launches

Go2web2.0 is a great new directory of all the Web2.0 applications. The directory displays a pages of Web2.0 logos. You simply click on the logo to find out more about each Web2.0 application. You can also sort the directory by tags or search for a specific listing.

Go2web20 is an application that builds for users to have easy access to Web 2.0 services. Services in Web 2.0 are defiantly putting accentuation on their company logo design what makes it easier to remember what the service is all about by looking at the logo.

Simply click the logo and read some information about the service you choose (on the right sidebar) then click the link to access the site or read more reviews about it from the blogsphere (technorati) that will appear below. Perform your search by tags or free text.

The blog for Go2web2.0 can be found here. (via Somewhat Frank)

Posted on September 20, 2006
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Del.icio.us Redesign Includes Thumbnails

The popular del.icio.us social bookmarking website has undergone a redesign. The website now shows thumbnails of the webpages people are bookmarking. The update was announced on the del.icio.us blog.

Along with our usual round of backend upgrades, patches, and bugfixes, we've released a new frontpage design that incorporates feedback and ideas from our previous design. The main change is that we’ve added thumbnails for the top links on the hotlist. We've also started showing popular tags again, which we think is a great way to find interesting new links.

It does make the front page of the website look more exciting than before. (via Solution Watch)

Posted on August 17, 2006
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Del.icio.us Traffic Keeps Growing

del.icio.us, the first bookmark sharing tool to become popular, has doubled since it was acquired by Yahoo in December, 2005 according to data from Hitwise.

Traffic to del.icio.us has more than doubled since Yahoo! acquired it in December 2005. According to Hitwise data from its sample of 10 million US Internet users, the market share of visits to del.icio.us was up 122% from January 2006 to July 2006. This is impressive growth, but social bookmarking has a ways to go before reaching the mainstream - in July del.icio.us ranked at number 6,793 among all sites in terms of visits.

del.icio.us is a great tool and there is no reason the site can't double again in the next six to twelve months.

Posted on August 11, 2006
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StumbleUpon Now Available for IE

StumpleUpon, the popular Firefox tool for discovering and sharing new websites, is now available for the Internet Explorer. TechCrunch believes StumpleUpon will now explode in popularity.

The wildly popular Firefox extension StumbleUpon released this morning a toolbar for Internet Explorer users. The service lets you browse around web sites that have been recommended by friends and other users with interests similar to your own. Users can also write reviews of sites. The end result is a very compelling user experience that's likely to explode now that it’s working with the market dominant browser.

StumpleUpon users share websites by downloading the StumpleUpon toolbar and then clicking on "I Like It" when they find a website they enjoy. StumpleUpon saves members reactions and reviews of each website on a special page that shows the users icon and lists reviews of the website. For example, here is the StumpleUpon pages for this website. This page shows some of the top stumblers.

Posted on July 24, 2006
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New Social Network Targets Music Lovers

A new social network called MOG has debuted that unites people based on their tastes in music.

MOG is a new social network that helps people find other people that have similar tastes in music. If you look at some of the random MOG shots on MOG's homepage it shows a photograph of the person and lists a few of their favorite bands. You can learn more about MOG in the faq.

Social networks have been expanding at a quick pace lately. Recently, new networks have launched in specific categories like autos, kids and soccer. Even Martha Stewart's company has a social network in the pipeline.

Posted on June 22, 2006
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Yahoo's MyWeb Gets an Upgrade

Yahoo has improved their MyWeb social search tool. The B2Day blog has an interview with Yahoo MyWeb product manager Tom Chi. The interview lists some of the improvements Chi wants to make.

He wants to make shared bookmarks, tagging, and social search more mainstream by simplifying the service and offering more entry points for the average user. For instance, now you can search all publicly bookmarked pages instead of just your contacts' pages. MyWeb will be more open than it has been. You will be able to export your bookmarks to any browser (or import them, as well as from del.icio.us). There is a tag cloud with the most popular tags, as well as an "Interesting Today" feature (akin to Flickr's "Interestingness" sorter) that ranks links by how interesting they are to MyWeb users (as measured by how many times a particular link has been saved over the past 24 hours). The site will have more Ajax hooks (like all of Yahoo these days). It also will identify the most active taggers for any given term and let you add those people as contacts. So you will be able to find experts and, in effect, subscribe to their public attention streams without actually knowing them.

There are many social bookmarking and tagging sites these days so the tools that people coming back to will have to be feature rich. It sounds like Yahoo is moving MyWeb in the right direction by offering more and more features. The most difficult part for any successful link sharing or memedigger type of tool will be filtering out spam.

Posted on June 19, 2006
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Share Drink Recipes at Extra Tasty

Extra Tasty is a social website that allows you to search and shark drink recipes with others. Each recipe is tagged just like photos are tagged on Flickr. One very cool feature of Extra Tasty is that you can select a few ingredients and mixtures (limes, oranges, liquer etc) and a type of booze (vodka, gin, rum, whiksy, etc) and then press a button to see what drinks can be made with them. You can also add your own recipe if you don't find it on Extra Tasty. (Via Social Software Weblog)

Posted on February 3, 2006
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Study Finds Internet Can Increase Social Bonds

People spend hours on the Internet are often thought of as being unsocial but a new study says that the Internet can provide a "social glue" for people. A BBC article reporting on the PEW study called The Strength of Internet Ties says the study found Americans often use the Internet for help with illness, careers and financial advice.

"When you need help these days, you don't need a bugle to call the cavalry, you need a big buddy list," said John Horrigan, associate director for research at the Pew Internet Project.

The internet is providing Americans with a path to resources, whether it be dealing with family crises or finding a new job.

The reliance and accessibility of the web is creating a new social phenomenon according to sociologist Barry Wellman.

Co-author of the report, he identifies what he terms as the rise of networked individualism - where users of modern technology are less tied to local groups and increasingly part of more geographically scattered networks.

"This creates a new basis for community. Rather than relying on a single community for social support, individuals often actively seek out a variety of appropriate people and resources for different situations," he said.

Social tools like blogging, forums and social networking services have made the Internet a place where it is often easier to find people to talk to do on just about any subject than it is in the real world.

Posted on January 30, 2006
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Surf the Tagosphere With Wink

Wink is a new search tool for searching the tagosphere, which includes tag-related search and bookmarking tools like de.icio.us, Digg, Slashdot, and Yahoo MyWeb. You can also install a Wink bookmarking tool to your browser so that you can quickly tag links for Wink. There are lots of tagging and social bookmarking tools that have launched in 2005 but Wink has a little more buzz going for it than some of the others. (Via B2Day)

Posted on December 26, 2005
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Experts Can Create Lenses on Squidoo

Squidoo is a new website looking to capitalize on the blogging trend by letting members set up lenses where they can enter information about a specific subject. Here is how Squidoo defines a lense.

A lens is one person's (lensmaster's) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It's a place to start, not finish.

Squidoo says it is not looking to replace blogs or websites. Instead Squidoo says it can be used to boost traffic for webmasters or bloggers. Squidoo also sells advertising and says lensmasters can make money on Squidoo. The even have a university called SquidU where Squidoo members can learn how to become a better lensmaster. Squidoo also has a blog.

The India Times calls Squidoo a cross between "About.com, Wikipedia, blogs and social networks."

Cross About.com, Wikipedia, blogs and social networks. What you get is — Squidoo, the new service launched by author and online marketing guru Seth Godin which allows you to create, manage and maintain web pages or mini guides on various topics. These pages, which he calls 'lenses', put a magnifying glass under a topic, and hopefully filter the information into the perfect starting point for researching a given topic.

"I believe that when you go online, you don't search. You don't even find. Instead, you are usually on a quest to make sense. That's the goal of most visits to Google or Yahoo! or blogs or the Wikipedia. How do you make sense of the noise that's coming at you from all directions?

That is a pretty good description. Squidoo will probably get better if and when some of the better "lenses" become more obvious.

Posted on December 12, 2005
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Digg to Expand to Include Non-Tech Items

Digg is a website that lets readers submit and vote for stories. The more popular a story is the more it moves up in ranking and the more likely it is to be seen by other Digg users. A MediaPost article about Digg refers to this process as an "editorial collective" which is a pretty good explanation of what goes on at Digg.

Digg's editorial process is based on its thousands of readers "digging" a story--or voting that it be moved up in the rankings. The more votes a story garners, the further up in the rankings it goes, creating an editorial collective that votes on what stories users see first.

Adelson's hope is that the method will end up being faster and more reliable than both the wholly automated search engines, and the wholly people-powered sites like Slashdot--which relies on human editors to push stories to the front page. "It's incredible how fast it [Digg] is growing. I think one of the reasons why is because it revealed one very serious advantage over those older models," he said. "That is, it's much faster. If you're looking for fresh data, current data, or very dynamic data, a search engine relies on the crawling technology, an editorial board takes days to process and publish."

To date Digg has focused solely on tech-related news items which helped make it a very popular website with the tech crowd including the blogosphere. The MediaPost says Digg plans to expand out of technology into new areas like sports and business news.

Adelson said the site has now reached a "critical mass" of users that can sustain entry into categories broader than technology -- sports and business news, for example. "Whatever we choose, we've got good access to a critical mass of people," he said.

It sounds like a good move for Digg. As they expand they will be competing more and more with the social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and Furl.

Posted on December 5, 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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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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Kaboodle Enters Crowded Social Bookmarking Marketplace

A Reuters news story says Kaboodle has entered the crowded collection of websites offering bookmark tagging and sharing.

Kaboodle (http://www.kaboodle.com/) -- short for "whole kit and caboodle", a collection of lots of objects -- allows users to create Web pages to manage personal research, do comparison shopping, make wish lists or plan travel.

"The process is pretty clunky of trying to look at a whole bunch of information by going from site to site," said Manish Chandra, Kaboodle's founder and CEO. "Each Kaboodle page represents a custom search result you have created," he said.

Kaboodle joins a host of rivals in an area known variously as collaborative search, social tagging or social bookmarking, where people point out interesting sites and help put the information found on them into meaningful categories.

The shared search craze recently reached a pinnacle on Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), a site that has struck a chord with users keen to know where others are surfing on the Web. Other examples include diversified Internet companies such as Yahoo, with its MyWeb service, MyJeeves from IAC's AskJeeves and newer players such as Wink and JetEye.

One of the unique features of Kaboodle is that it allows users to create web pages of multiple bookmarks and then share these with others. An example is this Christmas Presents for Me page that someone created.

Posted on October 26, 2005
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Del.icio.us Adds Keyword Search

Del.icio.us, the popular bookmark sharing tool, has now added a keyword search feature. Del.icio.us also has seen a ton of new competitors launch recently year including Shadows, SearchFox and RawSugar. A recent article at PCmag.com takes a closer look at a few of the tools. (Via Search Engine Journal)

Posted on October 25, 2005
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Web Surfers Are Building the New Web

BusinessWeek has an interesting article that says the new web is being built by you -- the web surfer. The article talks about websites that are powered by users like MySpace.com, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Meetup and Wikipedia.

And this time, it's Your Web. No longer content to be merely viewers and consumers, people increasingly are taking an active part in creating their online lives. With its longtime tagline, "The network is the computer," Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) made the case that computing transcended hardware. Sun President Jonathan Schwartz thinks another crucial shift is under way: "The network is now your computer."

At many new Web sites and services, the creative energy of countless souls virtually crackles off the screen. They're cobbling together their own services from customizable Web sites and Lego-style pieces of Web software. By the millions, they're gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized article and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search for on the Web site del.icio.us. They're producing their own entertainment on video, social-networking, game, and photo-sharing sites such as Yahoo's Flickr. At MySpace.com, some 21 million monthly visitors spend up to several hours a day sharing their thoughts, photos, and music with friends on personalized home pages. Ditto at Cyworld, which claims almost a third of South Korea's 48 million people as members.

"The Web isn't so much a place anymore," explains Ross Mayfield, CEO of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based startup Socialtext Inc., which offers services to create collaborative Web sites called wikis. It's more of a doorway into services, from the user-written reference site Wikipedia to the community organizing service Meetup to the folksy classifieds site Craigslist. As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, "They Google (GOOG ), Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share. In other words, the Web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs."

The article also says that the web will continue to develop more services like the ones mentioned above and new programming tools will make the web even more user-friendly and customizable.

Posted on September 19, 2005
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RawSugar is a New Social Bookmarking Tag and Search Tool

RawSugar is a new social bookmarking type of tool that allows people to share and tag favorite webpages. RawSugar also allows these tagged pages to become a personal searchable webpage. The site also has other features like rss feeds, top ten lists, linkblogs and importing from delicious. The best place to learn about new RawSugar features is on the site's blog. (Via TechCrunch.com)

Posted on September 18, 2005
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Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine

Rollyo is developing a new search tool that allows users to build their own search engine. Users can select with blogs or websites they want to include in Rollyo and Rollyo will search these websites. The site is currently only in beta testing. NextStepsCorp blogs that Rollyo was started by Dave Pell of Davenetics.com.

Posted on September 7, 2005
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Shadows is a New Social Bookmarking Site

Shadows is a new social bookmarking site, like del.icio.us and furl.net, that allows visitors to share and store their favorite websites and webpages. Features of Shadows include tags, comments, ratings and invite a friend.

Posted on July 13, 2005
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Judy's Book Combines Yellow Pages With User Reviews

SearchEngineWatch.com reports on a new yellow page website that is built with user submitted reviews called Judy's Book.

Judy's Book has local recommendations from most medium-to-large size cities in the U.S. The site is free to browse; to add a post or ask a question you need to register, but registration is free.

The site was inspired by a "little green book" of trusted sources kept by "Judy," the mother of one of the Judy's Book founders. The book contained a list of the best service providers in the Seattle area, according to Judy.

The website is ready for entries in medium to large cities and currently features listings for Seattle, New York and the Bay Area on the homepage. The website also has social networking tools that allow members to develop relationships and form groups.

Posted on July 11, 2005
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Gataga.com Searches Social Bookmarking Sites

Gataga.com is a new search tool that searches several social bookmarking websites. The search engine, which is currently in beta mode, currently searches the following social bookmarking tools: del.icio.us, blogmarks, blinklist, jots, spurl, furl, simpy and connotea. (Via BloggersBlog.com)

Posted on June 19, 2005
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Spurl.net Updgrades Zniff Search Engine

Spurl.net says their Zniff.com search engine has been upgraded. Zniff uses data from Spurl.net, a social bookmarking tool, to find and rank web pages. Spurl.net claims the new version is faster, more stable and allows you to sort results by time and subscribe to query results via RSS. This is beta #2 of the Zniff search engine. When there is not enough data from Spurl.net, Zniff uses results from Yahoo! Search.

Posted on May 26, 2005
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Backfence.com Provides Local Communities

Backfence.com is another citizen journalism type of website. The site allows visitors to post classifieds, share news and photos and publicize events specific their location. So far, the site has communities for McLean, Va and Reston, Va.

Posted on May 4, 2005
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Yahoo Launches MyWeb

Yahoo has launched a beta test of its MyWeb personalized search engine. You can get to it from the main Yahoo Search page. In the Yahoo Search blog Kevin Akira Lee describes MyWeb and what it can do:

Specifically, My Web enables you to find the information relevant to you, save it, share it, add your own notes to it, and easily find it again, whether it's three days or three months later.

The idea is a simple one -- we provide a "Save" button on our search results, on the Yahoo! Toolbar (for both IE and Firefox), and, in the future, anywhere you might find useful info on the Web. When you hit the "Save" button, My Web grabs that page and makes a cached copy which is fully searchable. Anytime you need that page, all you need to do is search My Web.

Posted on April 29, 2005
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Open Media Network Launches Beta

The Open Media Network (OMN) says it is a free public service network that will give users worldwide access to public television and radio programming, movies, podcasts and video blogs, while fully protecting the producers' copyrights. Open Media Network (OMN) was founded by Internet pioneer and Netscape veteran Mike Homer and includes Marc Andreessen as an advisor and board member. Blogspotting has more news about the OMN launch. This site follows recent launches of citizen journalism and user video websites like Google Video, Vimeo, NowPublic.com and OurMedia.org. There will probably be plenty more launching of these types of websites launching over the next six months as well.

Posted on April 27, 2005
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BlueHereNow Launches Citizen News Portal

Blogging about Incredible Blogs has mentioned two new grassroots websites for citizen journalism: Ourmedia andNowPublic.com. We discussed OurMedia in this blog entry last month. NowPublic.com is an open source news website form BlueHereNow Technologies, Inc., a private Vancouver-based company. BlueHereNow describes the website as a place where bloggers can "convert their work into photo assignments, recruit local volunteers and even set budgets for material they would like to feature. The NowPublic community votes to prioritize assignments and filters real time coverage emerging from eyewitnesses and people close to the real story. Photographers can submit and circulate their work while safely managing their images using NowPublic's smart media format. Readers of NowPublic get a fresh look at events and can compare real time, breaking stories from the blogging community to coverage from other news media." There are already a number of news stories as well as a number of assignments posted to the website which is running in beta mode.

Posted on April 18, 2005
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Consumerpedia.org Launches User Built Consumer Resource

Consumerpedia.org has launched as a "consumer information resource everyone can help build." The site, which looks like a cross between Wikipedia and Epinions, allows users to rate and discuss topics -- and also to create and define the relationships between the different topics. Currently, new users are suggesting topics on the site like "carpet" and "HDTV." The website is still in its infancy, but it already has a blog to keep bloggers and users up-to-date on its progress. First reported by Joho the Blog and Micropersuasion.com

Posted on March 29, 2005
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Gnomz.com Lets Members Create Comics

Gnomz.com is a new online community that lets you create, publish and vote from comics. Boing Boing notes that the service was offered in French before this new English version launched. On the French version 20,000 comics were created in the last year alone.

Posted on March 24, 2005
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Amazon Invests in 43 Things

Amazon.com has invested in the start-up company behind 43 Things, a new social networking type of website that allows people to connect with one another based on their goals and dreams. You can find more news about 43 Things here and here.

Posted on February 12, 2005
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