Free

Technorati

Technorati is a search engine, but has a limited search realm: only blog space.

The basic search service allows a user to do a free search (with booleans) in the blogs they aggregate. Interestingly also the bookmarks from del.icio.us/furl and the images from flickr are presented in the results. The results from del.icio.us/furl and flickr are however based on the tags related to those microcontent types. This search service is also geared towards MicroContent as one can search just for tags (or multiple).

A variety of predefined searches can be carried out: the most popular, tags, related tags, popular blogs, books, news, movies.

On the publisher side they have an interesting feature that allows them to close the loop: claim your blog. This allows publishers to add a photo to their blog.

The results are presented in inverse time order: the most recent items appear first.

• Structured MicroContent - YES, it uses blogs, images and bookmarks, but they also recognize reviews for books and movies;
• Data Outside - YES, all the data is aggregated either from users of third party service providers;
• Licenses - NO, they only have a license for the whole site;
• Feeds Galore - YES, the user can create a watchlist from any query and get it delivered through rss;
• Web API’s - YES, developers can interact in a variety of ways;
• Desktop Integration - YES (reluctantly), it is just standard blog-format, so any RSS reader can be used;
• Single Identity - NO;
• MicroWeb - YES, it uses the tag-field in three MicroContent types to bring it together;
• lc Structure - NO;

tags: microcontent; service; search;

Zniff.com

This Service Provider offers a free search service into the aggregated bookmarks of Spurl.net. A search query covers the url, title and description of a bookmark. It is however not possible to specify which fields must be included in the query or how. It is possible to specify boolean queries.

The results list the title, the description, the url and the number of times it was bookmarked. The results can be ordered by relevance or time. The results can also be viewed as RSS-feed.

Due to the existence of RSS-feeds, it gets a Web2.0 rating of 1/10.

tags: microcontent; type; bookmark; zniff;

Scuttle

Scuttle is an intermediairy site in that has two types of customers: publishers and viewers. The service revolves around bookmarks.

The viewers are offered a guided bookmark services: recent bookmarks, recent tags. The results can be sorted by date, titlke or url. It is also possible to view the bookmarks of a publisher. And on a publishers bookmark-page it is possible to do a free search on that page. As a registered viewer it is also possible to watch bookmarks (although I did not find out what it does).

On the publisher side a user can add bookmarks or import them from the desktop or del.icio.us.

• Structured MicroContent - YES, bookmarks;
• Data Outside - NO, although it is possible to import;
• Licenses - NO;
• Feeds Galore - YES, it is possible to various RSS-feeds;
• Web API’s - NO, not that I am aware of;
• Desktop Integration - NO;
• Single Identity - NO;
• MicroWeb - NO;
• lc Structure - NO;

tags: microcontent; type; bookmark; service; scuttle;

Del.icio.us

This Service Provider combines various services into an intermediairy service. It services publishers and viewers.

The basic services is an Enabling one: it allows users to publish their bookmarks on the Internet. A bookmark consists of a title, a url, a description and a set of tags. The bookmarks are published to the entire internet under a license set by the publisher. A viewer can thus see what an individual publisher publishes.

The service aggregates the bookmarks that it is publishing and offers various services to view the bookmarks of the entire community. A free and guided search function are offered. The free search function allows to search through the tag-field of a bookmark. A user can also define a subscription on one or more tags. The predefined search function includes: the latest published bookmarks, the most active tags, todays most popular bookmarks, todays most popular tags, related tags, bookmarks per author. One can subscribe to feeds of all these predefined queries.

Web 2.0 analysis:

• Structured MicroContent - YES, bookmarks. A permalink is however lacking;
• Data Outside - NO, there is no service to either import or subscribe to bookmark feeds. This would be useful;
• Licenses - YES, the user can set under which Creative Commons License his bookmarks are published;
• Feeds Galore - YES, there are a lot of feed possibilities;
• Web API’s - YES, there are several interfaces availablef;
• Desktop Integration - YES, for MacOS-X there is a client that uses the Web API’s;
• Single Identity - NO;
• MicroWeb - NO, the service does not integrate with other services;
• Wild MicroContent - NO;

tags: microcontent; type; bookmark; tele-service; enabling; publishing;