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Thursday, Jun 26 2008

Oh writers. No one has time to read what we write anymore. Even more reason to make what you do write concise, clear and effective.

Writing for the web, no matter how many times we say it, is different that writing for print. Readers are not likely to read every word. They’re going to glance, skim and scan their way through your content, most likely with a cup of coffee in hand or checking email simultaneously.

With such a wayward bunch of users, what’s a web content writer to do? Chris Nodder, user experience specialist at Nielsen Norman Group thinks you simplify content to make it as accessible as possible. Most users are visiting your site through a search engine rather than going directly to a site’s home page, so why not make it easy to find what they want.

Nodder offers up some “Sign Posts” indicating “where else readers can go for more specific information and related resources such as white papers”.

Thursday, Jun 19 2008

The 4th annual Gilbane Conference kicked off in San Francisco yesterday. The three day conference devoted to all things content management started things off with a special keynote session devoted to search headed up by Google’s VP of Engineering, Udi Manber followed by a discussion with Dan Farber of CNET and Denis Brown of the SAG group, moderated by Frank Gilbane, CEO of the Gilbane Group.

Thursday, Jun 12 2008

For awhile now Google has offered businesses a hosted site search they can use to enable search on their websites without purchasing some expensive search engine. It was called Google Custom Search and it was good, but basic. Now they’ve come out with some enhancements to this search that will improve the quality of the search results along with a change in the name.

Thursday, May 22 2008

Apache’s Lucene search engine has just picked up some multilingual, natural language support with the recent integration of Teragram Linguistic Tools.

This integration gives Lucene the capabilities to compete with some of the bigger search engines on the market today.

Monday, May 19 2008

Intranet search is appalling because people don’t want their content to get found, and the organization does not value the importance of finding.

Thursday, May 8 2008

Ahh, our insatiable need to spend hours viewing online video, whether it be our favorite episode of The Family Guy, or that hilarious commercial on YouTube. Yes we definitely are a world of watchers. And organizations are getting smarter everyday figuring how to use this vice to their advantage.

Online video search engine provider, blinkx, aims to help those organizations by providing the blinkx Advanced Media Platform, a video content management solution that will “unlock the potential of video assets and maximize their monetization”.

When Xobni was formed in 2006 by two graduate students, it sought to improve, enhance and otherwise fix Microsoft Outlook.

Now, it’s taking its efforts even further with a new tool that plugs into Outlook. Their software, free and downloadable, indexes all the e-mail in Outlook and makes those messages easily searchable and readily available.

Wednesday, May 7 2008

Quantcast this week launches a service which enables searching of websites according to key readership demographics. The new facility enables marketers to enter a list of demographic parameters, and returns a list of websites whose readership matches those criteria. As an example, if a marketer is targeting black male readers, over 40, with an income over $60,000, then Quantcast’s new service serves up a list of websites which attracts that audience, and also tells you whether or not the site accepts advertising.

Better yet, the service is free. Just sign up and target away.

Wednesday, Apr 30 2008

It’s now official, Microsoft has finalized it’s tender offer for Fast Search & Transfer. They’re pretty excited over at Microsoft these days knowing this deal is done.

FAST will operate as a Microsoft subsidiary and will have a dedicated research and development center in Norway.

John Markus Lervik, FAST CEO will be transitioning to the role of Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. He gets to work with all the latest and greatest Microsoft search technologies like MS Search Server Express 2008, MOSS search and FAST ESP — the end result potentially being a single enterprise search platform.

The FAST product will retain it’s own FAST sales, service and support teams, they’ll just have a wider range of products to sell and support.

Open Source enthusiasts fear not, Microsoft is still very pro-proprietary. According to Kirk Koenigsbauer, General Manager for the SharePoint Business Group, “We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice.”

Now Microsoft can renew it’s full focus on Yahoo! — if it isn’t already too late.

Tuesday, Apr 29 2008

The open social party is apparently the place to be. Even old Microsoft just announced LiveMesh). Now Yahoo, who’s Flickr photo sharing site is the second most popular used API on the web, has rolled out a limited preview to the developer platform they announced in February called SearchMonkey.

Monday, Apr 28 2008

For those attending the upcoming Gilbane conference who are more on the geeky side of the spectrum, get stoked: Udi Manber, a Google Vice President of Engineering, will start off the annual San Francisco conference on June 18th at 8:30am with a discussion on Google’s search quality and continued innovation.

While Google’s success is generally thought of as being a result of their use of link activity and PageRank to supplement keyword search, this is in fact just one of many signals that help provide users with most relevant results. Udi Manber will share valuable info on improving search that should be relevant to everyone in the tech industry.

“Udi Manber is the engineering vice president in charge of this ongoing, and necessarily secret effort (on improving searches). What Udi is able to share about improving search will be interesting to all, but especially valuable to knowledge workers whose need for quality search is critical,” said Gilbane Group CEO Frank Gilbane.

The Gilbane Conference, now in its fourth year, has gained a reputation as a forum for bringing together vendor-neutral industry pros that share and debate the latest information technology experiences, research, trends and insights. Topics to be covered in depth will include enterprise search, text analytics and content globalization and location.

Details on the Google keynote session as well as other keynotes and conference breakout sessions can be found here.

Wednesday, Apr 23 2008

The people have spoken and what they have told us is that they love online video. But besides that one friend we all seem to have who loves to send us link after link, what are the other ways people have of finding their latest cute pet video?