Roland Tanglao's podcast mike.

Roland recommends the APEX 162 . Says it's "$CAN 15 at Long and McQuade for it in Vancouver, not $US 19!" and gives the description from  Amazon.com: Musical Instruments: APEX 162.:

QUOTE

Probably the most unique microphone in the line, the APEX162 is a true stereo mini condenser microphone designed specifically for use with minidisc recorders or portable dat machines. The 1/8th inch mini TRS connector is fixed directly to the microphone and mounted on a swivel base allowing the mic to be angled up to 90 degrees foreward when attached directly to a recording device. A 4.3 metre (14 foot) mini TRS extension cable is included for maximum versatility. The APEX162 requires 1.5-volt DC phantom power to operate. Ideal for event recording, Electronic News Gathering, ambience recording or for use in broadcast, the small and inconspicuous APEX162 is shipped with pop filters and a five-metre cable with TRS 1/8th inch minijack. Small and inconspicuous design makes the APEX162 ideal for use in any application where quality stereo recording is required, yet the microphone itelf needs to be virtually invisible.

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
10:48:08 AM    
  
Zimbra - Web/Ajax Based Outlook.

We saw that really well done Ajax web applications like Writely can open people’s eyes to the future of the computing and the place that web 2.0 has in that future.

When you first view the Zimbra demo you may have a similar experience. Zimbra is, basically, a web based outlook/iCal/Thunderbird application in the same way that Writely is a web based version of Word.

At Zimbra, our goal is to make e-mail, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies the best they can be. We believe that by opening the technology to the community we will insure that we can maximize innovation, scale and the ability to co-exist with existing messaging systems.

There are some core differences between how Zimbra and Writely approach their respective markets, however. Writely is a proprietary, hosted application (although they import and export in Word and other formats). Zimbra is an open source project, and is presented only in demo form at this point - if you want to run it you have to do so on your own servers.

So while Zimbra is not something you can immediately start using, you can view a hosted demo here and a flash demo here. The source code is available on the download page here.

Zimbra also integrates tagging of messages. It’s very impressive and quite beautiful.

Additional Reading

Solution Watch (thank for the tip, Brian), Ajaxian, batalion, Digital Hobo, Deep’s Home, Alice Hill,

Tags: zimbra, ajax, tags, tagging, outlook, iCal, Thunderbird, techcrunch, web2.0

[TechCrunch]
10:38:50 AM    
  
Google Blog Search - First Impressions.

Google Blog Search launched last night and hit the blogospere by storm. We’ve had a chance to bang on it for most of the night and morning and have a few things to report.

Overall, Google Blog Search is a very worthy addition to the ranks of blog search engines.

The Basics

The search is completely separate from normal Google search. It can be accessed in three ways, although the back end service is the same regardless of how you access it:

• blogsearch.google.com
• search.blogger.com
  
• The Blogger Dashboard

Advanced search options can be viewed here.

Blogs that use a ping server such as Weblogs.com (profile) have been indexed since June 2005, so older posts are not included in the index.

The engine generally points to posts only, although if there is a good match to your query for an entire blog, Google points to the blog above normal search results (see screen shot below).

You can used the advanced search features to restrict search to certain languages (35 supported languages).

Additional information can be found in the FAQs.

What Google Blog Search Does Well

The interface is clean. The engine is unquestionably fast. About as fast as normal Google searches. However, since their indes only goes back to June, it is unfair to compare it to existing blog search engines.

Google is indexing posts by crawling the XML feeds rather than the post html. This allows for significantly more structured data (date, author, categorites, etc.). However, if the XML feed only includes a summary of the post (as very many do), the full text of the post will not be indexed (and therefore cannot be searched). Relevant information will not be found.

Speed is a crucial issue and if they can maintain current search speeds over time, it will be a very large competitive advantage.

Search results can be sorted by date or “relevance”. Sorting by relevance is the default.

Areas to Improve

A few people are noting deficiencies in the current product. Richard MacManus says:

But… is it just me, or is Google Blog Search pretty tame/lame? I don’t think Technorati should give up its day job just yet, despite being hammered in the blogosphere lately.

David Sifry (CEO of Technorati) gives more detail, saying:

I’m sure that they’ll continue to improve over the coming months, perhaps including tags, recent images and links, zeitgeists, blogger tools, and other types of semistructured data. I’m sure that they’ll also start indexing the full-text of blog posts, not just the partial text found in most blog feeds.

Overall, significant room for improvement exists.

• Google should improve relevance - our initial test indicate that the relevance leaves much to be desired.
• Posts older than June must be included somehow
• Categories and Tags should be shown
• Images and links should be included
• Linking posts should be shown
• Full html of the posts should be crawled, in addition to XML feeds

Conclusions

Google Blog Search is fast and the ability to sort by relevance or date is an important features. However, Google search is not a category killer like the original Google search was. Competitors took a much expected hit today, but they are still standing.

Tags: google, googleblogsearch, search, blogsearch, rsssearch, rss, technorati, techcrunch, web2.0

[TechCrunch]
10:37:54 AM    
  
Yahoo Releases Instant Search.

Yahoo announced Instant Search last night (more info on this landing page).

Like Google Suggest and Snap, Yahoo has added ajax functionality to search.

It’s different, though. Google Suggest and Snap use ajax to suggest search queries based on what you’ve typed in so far, whereas Yahoo has integrated basic search results into the interface. This means you can get answers to simple and popular searches (like weather) without a page refresh.

Try it out. Yahoo suggests queries such as “Boston Weather” and “Wikipedia”. This type of search gives good results.

And Yahoo takes a small swipe at Google by saying ““Why feel lucky when you can be right”, a reference to Google’s Feeling Lucky button. John Battelle says “Meeeeyowww, the claws are out….” :-)

Additional Reading

Charlene Li, Google Blogoscoped, Brad Hill, Ken Leebow, Search Engine Roundtable

Tags: yahoo, search, google, googlesuggest, snap.com, snap, ajax, techcrunch, web2.0

[TechCrunch]
10:36:13 AM