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Tuesday, October 25, 2005 |
Sphere (Beta) - Blogosphere Search
Sphere (Beta) - Blog Search Done Better.
Spurred by early looks given to Jeremy and Om, I prodded Sphere CEO Tony Conrad to walk me through the beta of Sphere, his new blog search product (still in closed beta, but coming out in a month or two). It comes from a team out of Oddpost (Oddpost was planning to launch this there, but then got bought up by Yahoo. Oddpost founder Toni Schneider remains an advisor to Sphere, though he now works at Yahoo. Other advisors include WordPress dude Matt Mullenwegg and the irrepressible Mary Hodder.)
The financials: Tony has taken angel money from some impressive folks - notably KP partners Will Hearst and Kevin Compton, among others. I think perhaps the most important decision for Sphere, having seen it, is what to do with the money that folks will want to throw at it, but more on that later.
Sphere works better than other blog search I've seen, plain and simple. Why? It uses a combination of factors to do a more robust ranking methodology of blogs and posts. It pays attention to the ecology of relationships between blogs, for example, and it gives a higher weighted value to links that have more authority. This will insure, for example, that when a Searchblog author goes off topic and rants about, say, Jet Blue, that that author's rant will probably not rank as high for "Jet Blue" as would a reputable blogger who regularly writes about travel, even if that Searchblog author has a lot of high-PageRank links into his site.
Sphere also looks at metadata about a blog to inform its ranking - how often does the author post, how long are the posts, how many links on average does a post get? Sphere surfaces this information in its UI, I have to say, it was something to see that each Searchblog post gets an average of 21 links to it. Cool!
Lastly, Sphere uses content semantic analysis to help determine rank. This helps defeat one kind of spam (blogs that simply say "Tickets tickets tickets" over and over again), but it does not defeat the kind Joel wrote about. That kind of spam, however, is defeated by the ecology of links - the system will not rank blogs well that are not part of a larger ecosystem of linking.
In short, spam falls to the bottom of the rankings, and that's a great thing. Tony forwarded me early research his company has done which shows his results are markedly better than any other blog search engine out there. From my initial use of the system, I can say it most certainly is. This is not to knock Technorati or Feedster, but I calls em as I sees em, and in any case, both of those companies have their own differentiation: tagging and RSS, to be specific.
The service gives you ways to filter your results, which I like very much: By date, by relevance, and by language. I also got to see a new version of the service which had some neat interface hacks along the lines of a time axis. More on that as it comes live. As for business models, Sphere also surfaces related content on the right side, and Conrad is thinking of negotiating deals with those publishers, as well as the time honored sponsored links approach (they'd probably use Overture, as Toni is over at Yahoo...)
So back to the larger question. Great blog search is sure useful to folks like me, and to readers of Searchblog, who according to the survey you took a while back are a pretty bloggy crew (I'll have a link to those results soon). But will normal folks want blog search, and if so, how will it be delivered (Yahoo, for example, thinks it's within news results...)? Tony admitted that to scale his service he needs two things - many more machines (solved by money) and a lot more distribution (solved by a deal or selling to Yahoo, or Google, or AOL or....etc.). So what to do with his company? In short, should he pull a Flickr or Oddpost, and sell if the right offer comes? Or should he take some VC money and try to make it on his own, like Six Apart and Technorati?
Ah, to have such problems. Good luck Tony, the first look is promising.
[John Battelle's Searchblog]
10:32:50 PM 
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R. MacManus on WebDosBeta: Spain's Web 2.0 Conference
WebDosBeta: Spain's Web 2.0 Conference.  WebDosBeta is Spain's equivalent of the Web 2.0
Conference and it was held on 24 October in Madrid. I noticed it the other day in Technorati's Top 10 searches, but
at the time I couldn't find any English translations. Thankfully Yannick Laclau has come through for us
English-speakers and posted a fantastic
summary on his blog (hat-tip Rafat for passing
it on to me).
Yannick described the event as "an intense day of startup presentations and panel
discussions" and noted that more than 150 people from all over Spain attended. I enjoyed
Yannick's description of how WebDosBeta came about:
"This was a grassroots initiative started by Albert Armengol's post on the lack of innovation in Spain. Journalist Enrique Dans and
SixApart's man in Spain, Victor
Ruiz, picked up on this meme and the three of them kicked off, via the blogosphere
naturally, the idea to hold a conference."
Those of us who don't live in the US
could do the same in our countries. On innovation in Spain, Yannick wrote:
"It's alive! There are great hackers here, and totally cluedtrained entrepreneurs who
are as internet-addicted, tech-passionate, and buzzword-savvy as anybody anywhere. But I
guess the problem is that it's not a very large group, they're not clustered anywhere in
particular, and are desperately undercapitalized. Almost everybody presenting seemed to
be totally bootstrapped operations!"
That could very well describe any country outside of the US! And even in the US,
outside of Silicon Valley.
... more at  [Read/WriteWeb]
10:23:04 PM
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snow from the datacloud
The End of Autumn. As I worked on getting the last of the firewood moved from our drive and into our basement and stacked, large, wet snowflakes landed all around me, and on me. The National Weather Service, typically vague, predicts between 3 and 10 inches of snow.... [datacloud]
9:29:40 PM
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VideoEgg News
VideoEgg News.  VideoEgg is a web-based publishing service that allows users to capture video content from virtually any device and format and publish it to the web. We profiled it on September 21, 2005, just after they launched at DEMO.
Michael Bazeley at SiliconBeat writes today that VideoEgg is moving the company from New Haven, Connecticut to Silicon Valley. Michael also reports more interesting news - that VideoEgg has launched a partnership with Six Apart that allows TypePad users to post video to their blogs using Videoegg technology.
VideoEgg, which is incredibly easy to use with just about any video device, is now directly available to a huge blogging base. My hope is that someone creates a wordpress plugin next.
Congratulations to the VideoEgg team on this partnership. I’m looking forward to having you in the neighborhood as well. :-)
Tags: videoegg, video, vlogs, techcrunch, web2.0, web+2.0 [TechCrunch]
9:23:49 PM
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Mediaburn Personal Ad: Jim Moore Looking for David Korkosz
Looking for an old friend named David Korkosz, lived in Belmont MA, worked at Sun Micro... Somehow I've lost touch with an old friend, and he seems to have slipped under the Google radar as well, unless by some weird trick of my aging mind I am miss-spelling his name (shame if I am). He is an awesome, fun, smart guy, last I saw him was at a protest march on against the Sudan genocide, the day of Kofi Annan's commencement speech at Harvard--more than a year ago.
If you are out there David, I'd love to hear from you! Anyone with info please write to me at websuperservices(at)yahoo.com
Thanks, bloggosphere members! I will report whether this works (might try Craig's list too, and compare results..)
[Jim Moore's cybernetics, politics, emergence, etc.]
7:20:37 PM
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Canon Wi-Fi Camera Revealed
Canon Wi-Fi Camera Revealed.
 A Canon PowerShot with built-in Wi-Fi will be launched in December in Japan: Canon showed off Wi-Fi controls without a specific product plan or timetable earlier this year. Since then, Kodak and Nikon have released Wi-Fi-equipped cameras that have distinct drawbacks and quirks in how they transfer files and use Wi-Fi networks.
Canon's first entry will be the Canon PowerShot SD430 Digital Elph Wireless. Elsewhere, it's called the Digital IXUS, according to Engadget. The notes for the camera state that you can only use wireless features with Windows XP SP2.
 The camera includes a feature I've suggested to Kodak: auto-transfer as photos are taken. It can even multi-task and allow you to continue to shoot while photos are being transmitted. Windows software can control the camera remotely over Wi-Fi as well. No FTP or other support is mentioned or documented, which is a crying shame.
The camera uses 802.11b and supports WEP and WPA-PSK (TKIP or AES), but only supports WEP for computer-to-computer connections, but it will use AES with its wireless print adapter. It also has USB 2.0.
It's a five megapixel sensor with about a 3x optical zoom. It supports SD cards up to 2 GB in size. It can create 640 by 480 pixel movies at 30 frames per second or smaller movies at 60 fps.
The camera will cost ¥50,000 or about US$435 in Japan. The UK launch will be in January at a cost of £399 or US$712, which seems like too big a spread. [link via Engadget]
[Wi-Fi Networking News]
4:18:53 PM
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Preregistration of Copyright
Preregistration of copyright. From the Federal Register:
The Copyright Office has issued interim regulations governing preregistration of works being prepared for commercial distribution. Preregistration will be available, by means of applications made online on the Copyright Office website, www.copyright.gov, commencing November 15. The Register of Copyrights has determined that preregistration will be available for the following classes of works: motion pictures, sound recordings, musical compositions, literary works being prepared for publication in book form, computer programs (including videogames), and advertising or marketing photographs. To be eligible for preregistration, a work must be in one of these classes and applicant must certify that the work is being prepared for commercial distribution and that he or she has a reasonable expectation that the work will be commercially distributed to the public.
For more information, go to www.copyright.gov/prereg/rulemaking.html
[Cinema Minima: Personal Digital Cinema. News service for movie makers]
12:03:48 PM
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© Copyright 2009 Gary Santoro.
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