I took this video of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, at a GarageGeeks meetup. The image is bad but the sound is good. Enjoy.
Jimmy Wales speaks at GarageGeeks – October 2009 from Eyal Sela on Vimeo.
This is a guest post by Ann Smarty, a social media and search blogger and online entrepreneur.
Real-time search is the latest achievement of web 2.0. Never before was it so easy to speak to the whole world and to be instantly heard. This post overviews the 4 most popular search engines capable of generating fresh results.
It is hard to compare them to choose the best one: there are no winners in this game. They all have some benefits and should be used in particular cases:
| Real-time search engine | Data source | How old are the results? | Most important benefit |
| Twitter discussions | Instant | The huge service popularity and thus a large index of data | |
| Facebook discussions | Instant | The huge service popularity and thus a large index of data | |
| Google web index | One hour old | Plenty of search opportunities | |
| Friendfeed | Most social networks + all user-added feeds | Instant | Multiple data sources combined |
Google reader is probably the best RSS reader available today. Here are some tips and practices for power users (hopefully, you) to help you better manage your RSS reading time and leverage it, tweak Google Reader to use first and second level categorization, and optimize you RSS subscription list.
At a certain point you've probably realize that it is just not possible to read all of the new items you get. One possible solution is to use folders to categorize your feeds. Once you categorized all your feeds, you can read prioritize your reading by urgency level. For example, I use a folder called 'Immediate' where I put feeds that I want to read the moment they publish something new because it is important for me to know about them as soon as possible. These could be work related or new trends, usually things that if no read within day or two (sometimes less), they became irrelevant. Other folders I use are 'friends', 'Podcasts', 'Premier Blogs', and some more. I also use a 'must read' folder for things that I want to read sometime, but it doesn't really matter when (such as family blogs or new WordPress plugins).
Continue reading “Google Reader Tips and Practices for Power Users” »
I’ve recently added a new tool to my information searching arsenal – Aardvark. I use Google, Google Reader, Twitter, my chat friends and other tools to find information. But Aardvark fills a gap these tools leave open.
At the end point (your side, as a user) all that Aardvark does is take a question you submit, find someone who can answer it and send you back the answer. It does that by searching for a user that is online and has knowledge in the field of the question you asked (and preferably, is from your network on Aardvark). Than it sends him or her question. The answer is sent right back to you, usually within few minuets. Often, you get more then one answers from several different people.
If you are not satisfied with the answer you got, you can easily resubmit it for other people to answer it or asked the ones that already did to elaborate.
Continue reading “Aardvark – Get High Quality Answers in Real Time from Real People” »
Every day we read, hear, and see tens of web pages if not more. How do you process the useful and interesting information you find online? Do you send it to yourself via email? Do you star it in Google Reader or add tags? Or maybe you just rely on the good old brain to retrieve the right information at the right time?
To participate, write in the comments what are your online information processing methods.
Next month I’ll post a summary of all the answers.
image by kevindooley
Facebook has just announced it has acuired Frindfeed. Frindfedd says in thir blog that:
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.
Facebook’s offical press realse:
PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 10, 2009 — Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.
“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”
“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”
Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.
“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”
FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.
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