Tele-Services

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Gigablast

A search service specialised on blogs. It did no see my blog, so I am not impressed.

Zoto

Zoto is a image hosting service. I was drawn to this service, as they support geotags. So I subscribed and uploaded my geotagged photos. The interesting thing is that they use Google Maps to draw positions of the photo’s I made. Quite nice. I get the impression though that I have to check the locations, which I took from maps.

Zoto allows a user to add tags to an image. I am not sure about the interface for tags. It is easy to add an existing tag, but cumbersome to add new tags. The user can browse his images by tag. It is possible to add your blog to Zoto. I am not sure what this does, as it does not work for my blog-system. It seems that Zoto can work as blog client.

A user can upload photos either by pointing to a photo on the PC or by using a uploading client.

There are limited possibilities to look for images uploaded by other users. There are categories for featured, most popular, newest, top rated and geottaged images. Also the most active and newest users can be seen.

tags: microcontent; type; images; service; zoto;

Judy’s Book

I had a look at this service from a MicroContent point of view. See for another review TechCrunch. Basically this service is about creating reviews for products or services. Judy’s Book forces the user into a product hierarchy for selecting a category. Then it helps the user to find the product from a list. I am not sure where this list comes from, but it helps to normalise the reviews.

Then the user can add his review consisting of a rating, a title, a description, a price/value indicator, the pros and the cons of the product. This is a fairly standard review, although four fields have been added.

The service does not seem very web 2.0 compliant. I did not see any RSS-feed possibilities, no export facilities, no API’s. I guess I will start to give web 2.0 compliancy ratings. This one gets 1 star: it allows the user to delete his reviews.

tags: microcontent; type; review; service; judy's book;

Tagsurf

I had a look at the tagsurf-service. I had the corresponding window open in my browser for a few days, as I did not see the original thing of it. On the one side the service allows the user to create blog-posts. The format of a blog-post is pretty common with fields such as title, message (think description), tags&links (why in a single field?), license (creative commons) and language.

On the other side the service detects threads based on trackbacks (or just reply to a post) and sorts them based on common tags. And that is the original thing. WHy creating all kinds of subject hierarchies (such as in Usenet), when you can just use the tags? And the service has added the possibility to follow a tag by RSS.

It is a bit early to see whether this approach works well. More posts are needed. And I do no see why Technorati or one of the others can not copy this quickly.

tags: microcontent; services; tagsurf; type; blog; threading;

CommonTimes

Techcrunch notes this service. They call it a news bookmarking services. Any news item that you think is relevant can be bookmarked here. Just note a title, the URL to the news item, some comments, check a category and add some tags. Users can browse news by category, user, user groups, etc.

Web 2.0 compliancy:

• Structured MicroContent - YES, as shown above;
• Data Outside - NO, although the news is outside, the user generated content is inside and not controlled;
• Licenses - NO;
• Feeds Galore - YES, there are a lot of feed possibilities;
• Web API’s - NO, not that I am aware of;
• Desktop Integration - YES, it is just standard blog-format, so any RSS reader can be used;
• Single Identity - NO;
• MicroWeb - NO;
• lc Structure - NO;

tags: microcontent; service; commontimes; type; blog;

BackPack It

This service allows the user to create webpages based on Lists of various kind. It is a new sort of homepage enabler.

Whizspark

A service that helps you to publish and find events.

Plazes

This is an interesting Social Network Service with another twist. It lets you meet people that are close to you in space. I must say that I find that interesting. It tries to detect your location (place) and if it is new you can add the specifcs of the location. You can add many more places as you find them when on the road.  You can search for peolpe within a certain distance of your place. And you can set a link to your FOAF-file. The service tries to guess your geographic location. It got mine wrong by some 10 kilometres. It might be nice if you can enter the location as well.

Alas nobody yet close to my place. Have to comeback later.

[Inspiration Joi Ito]

Personal Homepage

David Brake asks on his weblog what a personal homepage is. In my taxonomy anything that is published on the Web and which offers a reading, listening or viewing experience, is in my opinion a Publishing TeleService. I still want another word for publishing as this a providers viewpoint and I want a usres viewpoint.

Nevertheless David opens another viewpoint, which started me wondering about possible subsets of my service category. It is clear that a personal hoempage can have more services than just a publishing service. Whether the webpage is maintained by an individual is not important, as that says nothing about the service that is offered. And whether the webpage offers information on the job (i.e. dentist) of the person, is not very interesting either. It is still the publication of information. Here you see mainly the purpose of the information, i.e. advertisement or curriculum vitae. I think that it will become more interesting if the information gets more formalized and formatted. For instance with the publication of a FOAF-file or a OpenReview, the publisher (person) gets into a enabling service. Such a FOAF-file or OpenReview might be used by other services. If also a human readible version is published I might call this a more specific publishing service. The essential point is that the purpose of the published information follows a standard format.

As you see I take a viewpoint opposite to David Brake. I use the users viewpoint to determine the category and not the providers’ viewpoint (maintainer, publisher). And that is the problem with the word Personal Homepage. It tells something of the provider and not much of the service.

Local-i

Local-i offers users to search for restaurants. You can find restaurants by keyword search or by guided search using metadata. With keyword search you enter the relevant keywords for your, such as clean and good. This will result in a listing of restaurants. Each result entry contains the name of the restaurant (as link), the restaurant type, the neighbourhood, the rating, the number of expert reviews and the comments. It is possible to sort the results by name, price or rating. The guided search allows the user to select from a cuisine, a neighbourhood, an ambiance, price, rating or feature (award-winning, brunch, catering, etc.). It is possible to narrow (refine) a query using metadata. Clicking on a restaurant title reveals the address, a link to directions and links elsewhere on the web. Each link is presented by a title, a description and the URL. The links are divided in expert reviews and comments from diners.

I call this a geographic metadata search tele-service. It is not clear how the keyword search works, i.e. how the keywords are translated to results.

Pubsub

This service was not clear to me the first time. I would call it a search service. They call themselves a matching service. You formulate a search query and the results are then delivered as a RSS-feed. This implies that when new search results (matches) are found, you will get them as am update to the feed.

[inspiration: Doc Searls]

IceRocket

This is a new metasearch engine. The service allow you to search for web-pages, news, images and friends (dating). The find friends query is a metasearch on several dating services.

The service seems pretty good. I get the right answers for my standard queries.

[inspiration: John Battelle]

Startcamera

Startcamera is a service package combing a print-service and a online photo album. You can create an album and upload your images and later have them printed.

This sounds like a reasonable service package. Viewing the homepage however, I get a very commercial feeling. The emphasis seems to lie on printing. Why would you want to put your images here? I would prefer a good publishing enabling service, which I can use for publishing anything. This service does not impress me.

[inspiration eMerce]

NewsIsFree Visualisation

The NewsIsFree service has an interesting visualisation of the news. They categorised the news in eight categories and you can visualise each category separately. The visualisation presents a large rectangle and each news-item has a square. The location in the rectangle. its colour and size of the square is used to analyse the news-item. You can choose your own code based on popularity, age and source. Mousing over a square shows a summary of the article.

It is not the first example of such a visualisation service and I still doubt whether it is useful. I like the possibility to see the news in a single view. I however prefer the news as an order list, possibly with some popularity ranking. If you want to do tracking and want to discover what is new, important or popular, this is a good way to go.

[inspiration Om Malik]