Just came across an interesting site: musicovery.com
Musicovery enables you to discover music that fits your mood. There’s music available for every genre (from rap to disco) and after you’ve selected your current mood, musicovery will suggest some tracks. It’s not only fun to play around with the nice visual interface, you also discover lots of new artists and music that you may want to download buy.
Just packed my stuff… I’m heading to London for the Future of Webapps. Bunch of great speakers so I’m looking forward to it. Just noticed that the conference is sold-out so I guess it will be crowdy.
Maybe I’ll see you there!
Wow, Google seems to understand that the opinion of webmasters does matter! As of today, it is finally possible to retrieve a nice list of urls that are linking to your site.
Many of you will probably know that the ‘link:www.website.com’ command in Google doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to do. According to Matt Cutts this is mainly caused by technical limitations. Personally, I think that it might have some other reasons as well. Well, it’s still broken, but now Google allows you to see a much larger spectrum of backlinks to your site when you use their Webmaster Tools.
I’ve just checked out this new feature, must say that I like it! My first observations:
– Google apparently indexes links within PDF-files, these are reported as inlinks
– Webmaster Tools offers the possibility to export your inlinks as a spreadsheet, nice!
– The new tool also lists nofollow links, what does that tell us about the Google-interpretation of rel=’nofollow’?
Very interesting idea of JY, why not put advertising in captchas:
Google could even create content-matched captchas for adsense publishers! The big advantage is that every visitor is forced to look at it!
I took some time this evening to compile a list of interesting conferences which will be held in 2007. Not that I’m in the illusion that I will be able to attend every single one of them, but at least a couple would be nice. I’m sure that most conferences will be extensively covered in the blogosphere, so put these dates in your agenda:
Search Engine Strategies UK ~ Februari 13-15, London.
Features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion.
Future of Web Apps ~ Februari 20-22, London. (I’ll be there)
Three days of inspiration and insight where speakers will be discussing the future of the web industry, Web 2.0, emerging technologies and standards, and how it will change the way you build applications.
Search Engine Strategies NY ~ April 10-13, New York.
I guess kind of the same as what you can see and hear in London, just a bit closer to home when you live on the NY-side of the ocean.
Xtech 2007 ~ May 15-18, Paris.
The theme of the conference is “The Ubiquitous Web�. A keynote will be delivered by Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing�.
In this post of Andy Beal, Yahoo is being accused of dirty tactics to switch the default search provider when people install a new version of Yahoo Messenger. I totally agree that Yahoo is not behaving very well here, but hey… all the big search engines do exactly the same! So why would we point the finger at Yahoo?
Don’t get me wrong here, I absolute hate the software installers that are messing up my preferences in their own advantage (it should be forbidden). But ever looked at the installer of MSN messenger? It tries to modify your default homepage, seachprovider etc. And Google Desktop? Exactly the same. A recent version of the Java Runtime Environment even comes accompanied with the Google Toolbar.
I think that we can conclude that the big battle has started. It’s commenly known that most internet-users are not very loyal to a brand or product. When something better shows up, the switch is easily made. That’s exactly why the big players are now trying to be present in your every-day-live (since that’s something you won’t put away that easy). Messengers, Desktop search, toolbars and free email accounts are perfect examples. I think that most people don’t even realise that the above is happening, which is good.
There is however only one place where the big money is made: on the resultpage of the search engines. If you are a search engine, you want as much people as possible searching with you. In my opinion, there is only one good way to achieve this: just be the best and become even better. People will continue searching with the search engine that made them find what they were looking for. The big three (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) however think that it is necessary to push people in the ‘right direction’ by changing some of their preferences. Wrong. If I did not explicitly asked Google, Yahoo or Microsoft to be my default search engine, then I don’t want them to suddenly show up when I perform my next search. And if they do, I get annoyed. You know what happens when I get annoyed about a particular product? I throw it away a get another one.
Keeping the above in mind, Google and Microsoft must be absolutely delighted about the rumor that the Yahoo installer caused. It made Yahoo look unreliable. I’m not really feeling sorry for Yahoo but I don’t think it’s fare to only point our fingers at them. It’s a good development that people are made aware of the tactics that these companies use, hopefully the next Google installer will cause an evenly amount of discussion.
Mmm, I think I should just promote this place to be my new office:
If you might wonder what I’m doing: I’m over at my parents in France this week and thanks to France Telecom I’m able to do my work just like I would at the office. I must say, I like it!
Just got myself a Picooz! A what? A tiny RC helicopter which, I think, is very funny to play around with during the holidays. Check this:
Now you want one too don’t you?
I’ll let you know if this tiny gadget is as much fun as it seems to be.
Great new tool developed at MIT:
This thesis proposal has a detailed explanation.
Via ajaxian, I read about a new working draft from the W3C: Widgets 1.0.
Everyone and their mother have created their own widget specifications, and now as a developer you need to make choices. Do you want it to work on Dashboard? Vista? Google? MSN? Yahoo!?
This draft is similar to the opera widgets implementation, but it also has info from Apple’s Dashboard, and the auto discovery support was based on the work in Atom Autodiscovery.
This standard will live and die by the support that it gets. Now is the time to give feedback, and see where this train goes.