Light Posting

My postings were few the last week. I am not allowed to use more Internet this week. I reached my 100 hours this month.

Eurekster

This search service notices that you are looking at a specific page. If you stay away from the search result page long enough (more than 1 minute), it will remember those results. The next time you do the same search it will put those results on top. This stored behaviour is shared with other users. Thus everybody together will give the best results. And indeed some of the popular searches do give good results.

The service seems to work pretty good. Now they have to build up a database of behaviour. It reminds me a bit of how Ask Jeeves has implemented its behaviour database. If you are looking for the most popular sites, this seems to be a good service.

[via BoingBoing]

Furl

This service allows yo to save URL’s you visited. In this way you will get an history of your browsing behaviour. It is also possible to categorise and rate a URL.

I am not sure that this is an interesting service. It is very close to the features of a web-browser: history and bookmarks. The possibility to save is nice to have though: it is a personal permanent cache. Anyway I will not use it. I have already a whole procedure for remembering and saving interesting URL’s. And I rather have it on my own computer!

[inspiration ScriptingNews]

Personalized News

Findory offers a personalised newspaper. The service presents the user with news and blog items and learns from the users reading habits. The user can also perform free searches.

The user can subscribe to various RSS-feeds. One of them is a personalised feed.

• Structured MicroContent - YES, blog items;
• Data Outside - YEs, the news and blogs are outside. You can submit your own blog, but it is unsure whether it will be added;
• Licenses - NO;
• Feeds Galore - YES, personalised feed and feeds per topic;
• Web API’s - YES;
• Desktop Integration - YES through standard RSS-newsreaders;
• Single Identity - NO;
• MicroWeb - NO;
• Wild Structure - NO;

tags: service; findory;

Barcode Phone

Now the software has come available that turns your camera-phone into a barcode scanner. The interesting is naturally what the service will be behind it. It seems that nobody has yet stepped into this realm. I hope however that the services will be separated from the barcode browser. Sometimes I want to have a coupon from a competitor, sometimes some product information and otherwise some other offers. Maybe something for Google to step in

[inspiration SmartMobs & Wired]

Google’s hidden features

Aaron Schwartz points out some hidden features on Google. For instance look at the US Area Code (90210) or an UPC Code (073333531084 ) or flightnumbers.

It is still a bit US oriented, but a very nice: a single place to find anything.

WikiTravel

This service offers information for travellers around the world. The interesting thing is that site is Wiki-enabled. Anybody can be an editor. It is possible to edit other pages and add your improvements.

Wiki is always an interesting way for collaborative work. It might also be a good way to prevent stale information. There is always somebody interested to add information. They seem to have created a good structure for adding travel-related information. I will add some info on the region of France, where I live currently and see where is goes.

[inspiration SmartMobs]

News images aggregator

This aggregator presents only the images it has found in the RSS-finds. Then you can browse though the images in order to find the interesting news (click op Plaatjes).

It looks pretty interesting. Browsing over images is much faster than text browsing. But is it interesting enough?

[inspiration Adam Curry]

Tracking Service

This service allows you to track the geographic position of anything that has a GPS Mobile on board. It seems to use a GSM-phone in combination with a GPS. A special client allows you to see the location of the GSM-numbers that you are tracking. The client has several other options as well.

Interesting application. I do however not get the idea that this is very open. I would like to see it as a separate web-service of the Telecom-operators. Users of a GPS-phone can then enable this web-service. Interesting to create a Geo-moblog of your travel pictures. It would lead to many more interesting services

[inspiration Smartmobs]

Photopheed aggregator: pheed

This service aggregates XML-feeds from photographers. The service presents photographs from several photographers.

Nice to see a specialised aggregator on the scene. I tried to signup to one of the feeds, but I do not see any photographs. So this is not very useful at the moment.

[inspiration Lockergnome]

Blogroll visualisation

This is a small service that visualises the geographic location of blogs in your blogroll. Here is the visualisation of my blogroll. You see the blogs as red dots on an image of earth. The earth is cool with a moving night shadow.

This is really a gimmicky service, which you might find fun to use once a year.

[inspiration Lockergnome]

Directory Published

Today I published my directory of online services (follow the directory link on the left). I transformed my information into a publishable and easy maintainable format. I am not yet happy with it, so things will change the coming months. But now I can dedicate my time to improving the directory and other chapters I want to publish.

Jenny the Librarian

Dave Winer keeps on thinking about his feed page. My feeling is that he goes into the direction that I find most interesting. He intends to create a digital librarian, who will tell you what are most like the feeds that interest you. And that would indeed be an interesting service. If only to give you hints on new feeds. Now I find new feeds via entries in weblogs. If people refer to interesting articles, I might end up subscribing to the corresponding feed.

Panorama Backpacker

One one of my feeds I found a reference to the Panorama Backpacker client (for Windows and OS-X). The client accesses an online database with panorama images. These panorama images give you a 360 degrees view. The images were shot all over the world. They seem to be mainly made by Hans Hagen. You can search the panorama database through a list, search, thumbnails or a presentation of the world. Move to the intended spot on the world, select a country and see a list of available panorama’s.

Yet another web-application with its own client. I like the special client, but the browsing of available panorama’s can be improved. A separate pane in the main window would be a good idea. For the moment this seems to be a personal effort by Hagen. It would be nice if it could grow to a community project. Where anybody can add its panorama’s. Thus you would able to have a look at many places in the world. It could be part of the Earth-browser: scroll over the earth to the spot you want, zoom in and select an available panorama.

Search service plus: Vivísimo

I am not always happy with the results of a Google search. The most popular site is not what I want. So I am on the lookout for other search providers. Vivisimo offers an interesting option. It clusters the results into hopefully meaningful clusters. This would then focus your search.

For my purpose it is not good enough. I want to know all the web-pages that contain reference to persons with the last name ‘Leene’. This query is pretty is pretty easy to define, but not to perform. Vivisimo does a pretty good job. It does remove unwanted results. But the results that I want end up in many clusters. So I have to check them out all anyway. The clusters seem to be to small for my purpose. But there is a cluster Arnaud Leene. So if you want to find references to your name it works well.

[inspiration Wired]