Search as gatekeeper

I absolutely agree with John Batelle. Being found is essential for any business, author, whatever. So preparing your you service, content for being found is a very good measure. I am a bit amazed that the search services do not give any guidelines for being found.

Services removal

Scripting News mentions the applications Ad-aware and Spybot. These applications remove hidden functions in clients.

I am aware of this problem, but I do not seem to have the problem under MacOS-X. Or am I missing something.

Blogware

I am not sure if I understand this service. Blogware is a service that allows you to edit and manage your blog. They however do not host the blog themselves, this is done by other service providers. But is this an alternative management service or not. The only way is to try out. So I signed up with blogmedia and got this blog.

However when I now go back to Blogware, I can login, but I can not find my posting page nor my weblog. And the help pages point me to a page, which does not work for me. So I am stuck. I get the impression that my blogmedia page will be similar to my blogware page. This would imply that Blogware offers a blog management service to blog publishing services. But I am not able to track this down. Do they just offer admin-services or also hosting. The number of domains makes it difficult to find out. Can blogware offer me an enabling services?

[inspiration Marc Canter]

RSS to Atom conversion

I did not realize this in my previous post on RSS to Atom conversion. You can use the URL as a client to this service. Try for instance the service of Cavedoni. But it also works with other services.

[inspiration Decafebad]

WiFi Lamp

Usually we only think of PC’s (or maybe mobile phones) as clients of services. But what about this? A WiFi lamp. It can react to emails and the content of the email might change the colours of the lamp. How it can be programmed is not quite clear. It seems to b touch sensitive as well and you might send a message to influence other lamps.

A great client.

[inspiration Engadget]

Service upgrades

The latest upgrade of Movable Type by SixApart made a lot of fuss (725 trackbacks) around the Internet. The main fuss centred around the new pricing scheme (from free the paying for the main product). I agree with some comments that you should pay for software that you like. Everyone wants to make a living. Non-paying customers hardly have a reason to complain.

This discussion however shows the delineation between free and paid-for services of a portfolio. What should you give away and what should you pay for? I get the impression that SixApart made a reasonable decision here. They use however a tiering structure, which makes life a bit difficult. The tiering structure depends on the number of weblogs and the number of authors. They created a whole new scheme of problems on the billing and fulfilment end. There are other ways to do this (pMachine), but I do not know if there is a best way. And it is much more difficult to measure usage for software than for online services. Maybe they should add a service component, so they can measure the usage.

From a services perspective this event is very interesting. This event outlines what a service upgrade can entail. John Gruber says that any upgrade should imply new features. And bug fixes are not new features. Sounds good.

Balance Sheet sells

AlwaysOn had an interesting piece on ASP’s, Web Services or whatever you want to call them. There is another business reason for outsourcing services: it makes your balance sheet look nicer.

WiFi in the car

WiFi planet reports that Atheros will be building a WiFi network on a 60 km stretch of road in Japan. This network is mainly for telematics purposes and will be a showcase for the technology.

I guess that especially the technology to handle hand-overs will be tested. The aim to offer this service to government agencies, but I get the impression that other customers will be targeted as well. Interesting to see how such a service will evolve alongside 3G in Japan.

[inspiration: Engadget]

Atom2RSS

A service which allows you to convert Atom feeds to RSS-feeds. So we can now subscribe to Blogger weblogs.

Dodgeball

This is really an interesting service. It tells you where your friends are based on their mobile phone. Once a friend comes in your neighbourhood you get a SMS. And it finds your friends through one of the Social Networking Services (Orkut, LinkedIn or Tribe.net).

A pity I can not try this. This really adds useful value to these SNS’s.

[inspiration: Joi Ito]

Mobile TV

Eric Lin of The Feature reports on the fact that Docomo will be experimenting with television on a mobile phone.

Is this really the best platform for mobile television? There used to be those small TV-sets that can pick up terrestrial television signals. But I guess that is just another device to carry. And paying for television on your phone might interest some users. But then users keep amazing me.

Videophone

I am not sure who talked about this before (Om Malik?). but it seems that Microsoft is introducing a videophone service for their Xbox Live users.

Finally Microsoft becomes a telco?

[inspiration Engadget]

Web Bugs

Dan Gillmor reminded me of the existence of web bugs. Web bugs are (mostly) invisible images on a web-page, often only 1x1 pixel, that are used to track the loading of pages.

I wondered how you can see these in term of services. Each time a a page is loaded a record of the loading of such an image is stored somewhere. And these usage records can be analysed. In this sense it is a tracking service. The owner of the web-page might offer this service to another party, i.e. I open up my webpages and allow you to add web bugs, so you can see what users do. This sounds a bit silly. It is easier to sell your web log records. A webbug is only useful if it is combined with an asset in the web page, such as an advertisement. But then why not track the advertisements themselves? Well if you want to disconnect a specific advertisement from a more continuous profile of a user for instance. A web bug is also useful if you want to do independent tracking. [see the FAQ]

Thus a Web bug is the ingredient of a tracking service for publishers.

Any Questions Answered

In the UK a number of services have started that allow a user to ask questions via SMS. And you can really ask any question, for instance “who is the best superhero?”. An answer costs 1 British pound.

A nice example of a search service that uses a different communication method (SMS, i.e. store @ forward). And it also shows that there is money in search, at least that is what I hope for them.

[inspiration: Carlo Longino @ ]http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100628]

BlogPulse

At first glance this is just a search service, which only searches through blogs. I am not sure how it discovers these blogs. The result page lists the relevant blog entries. For each result the title as a link, the blog URL, posting date and a snapshot is shown. It seems that the entries are ordered by recency (Last post first). The fact that the posting date is something that is specific for blogs is also seen in the advanced search, which allows you to specify a date range.

What is interesting is that you can also have a look at the trends. Each trend shows the change in the number of posting with respect to some keywords. BlogPulse set up some trends of their own, but you can perform your own analyses as well. You can also investigate the top 100 of popular blog entries, links, phrases or people.

Interesting service. It surely shows that the blog search services can evolve even further. And the date of blog entry can be important metadata in order to find trends.

[inspiration Lockergnome]]http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/archives/services/010247.phtml]Lockergnome[/url]][/url]