Google Maps added Street View

NetSmarter @ 2007-05-31 22:59 (News)

Google Maps has just added a new featured caled "Street View". For some places on the Google Map, you can see photos of that street. The street-level photos are 360-degree navigable. Currently this cool feature is not available for all streets. On a Google map, if you see a street is outlined in blue, that means you see "Street View" of that street. The photo I showed above is a street view of 222 Castro Street in Mountain View, California.

Category: News

Web 2.0 Series: Social Bookmarking

NetSmarter @ 2006-03-23 09:27 (News)

Below is the defination of social bookmarking in Wikipedia.

Social bookmarking occurs on web based services where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed. Social bookmarking sites generally organize their content using tags and are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging, and inferences drawn from grouping and use of such tags. Both social bookmarking and tagging originated with the launch of a web site called del.icio.us in approximately 2003.

In such a system, users store lists of Internet resources, usually out of a personal interest in these resources. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, although some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a bookmark by bookmark basis. They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Such a system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will "rank" a resource based on its perceived utility. This is a more useful metric for end users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

For example, imagine two resources: the first has many hyperlinks pointing to it, but is of limited use; the second has relatively few hyperlinks to it, but is of much more use to end users. Traditional search engines such as Google would tend to rank the first resource higher, while a social bookmarking system, whose rank is based on user evaluation of a resource's usefulness, would rank the second higher.

Since the classification and ranking of resources is a continuously evolving process, many social bookmarking services allow users to subscribe to syndication feeds (see RSS) based on tags, or collection of tag terms. This allows subscribers to become aware of new resources for a given topic, as they are noted, tagged, and classified by other users.

There are drawbacks to such tag-based systems as well: no standard set of keywords, no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g. singular vs. plural, capitalization, etc.), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, highly unorthodox and "personalized" tag schemas from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g. a site might be labeled as both cheese and cheddar, with no mechanism that might indicate that cheddar is a refinement or sub-class of cheese).

The separate (but related) tagging and social bookmarking services are, however, evolving rapidly, and these shortcomings will likely either be addressed in the near future or shown not to be relevant to these services.

Category: News

Google to become Yahoo?

NetSmarter @ 2006-03-22 16:11 (News)

"The finance section Google Inc. unveiled Tuesday continues a philosophical shift that's turning its once-pure Internet search engine into an all-purpose Web site that seems increasingly interested in getting people to stick around instead of sending them elsewhere.".

Category: News

Yahoo! Publisher Network Added Advertising in RSS feeds

NetSmarter @ 2005-11-15 18:01 (News)

Today I received an email from Yahoo! Publisher Network:

"Dear Publisher,

We're pleased to announce another method for you to maximize your revenue and bring value to your content properties: Advertising in RSS feeds is now available through the Yahoo! Publisher Network.

This new product feature allows you to place Yahoo! Search Marketing ads within your RSS feeds. The ads that appear may be relevant to a specific article or post, or to your content in general.

For more information on Ads in RSS or to activate ads in your feeds, please visit https://publisher.yahoo.com/portal/AboutRSS.php (requires account log-in)"

It seems like YPN has started allowing ads in RSS feed. Will try it out.

Category: News