Hula is an open source calendar and mail server. It was bootstraped when Novel open sourced NetMail.

It works, and it looks nice. I also liked nat friedman’s announcement.

I just found this: easyMusic.com. It’s not ground breaking. There are other sites that do exacly the same.

However, this looks like the right time (with podcasting popularity rising and the demand for “podsafe” music rising too). And Stelios has proven to be capable where others fail…

Keep an eye on easymusic.com…

I recently read The Incremental Web [topix.net]. Then rummors [InsideGoogle] about Yahoo! developing a blog search engine…

OK, is it just me or is there a pattern?

Podcasting is growing and it’s hot! I knew this but here is some more evidence:

- FeedBurner Weblog: RSS Metrics, Podcasting

- g-metrics.com report on podcasting

Ok. Google Maps were presented by Google yesterday. And it is just like the other times: they did what others do but the did it MUCH better.

Just like google.com was better than the other search engines even the time it first appeared. Just like gmail is better than all the other web mail services I’ve tried (btw, can’t IBM license the UI for Lotus Notes web client?).

Now its Google Maps. It does what it is supposed to do (and much more). It’s fast. It’s simple. It’s what such a service is supposed to be.

Yahoo! introduced Y!Q, what they call “context search”. It is actually a “search in the context of the current page viewed”, and an interesting idea I have to admit!

You may also be interested to read the story behind Y!Q.

There has been a lot of talking about whether rel=”nofollow” is good or bad, useful or usless (check
Bitflux Blog :: Why nofollow is useless )

However I think that nofollow is quite useful for a different reason than preventing spam: preventing search engine results shown on “third party” websites mislead the search engines themselves.

Here is what I mean: Take for example g-metrics.com. Most of the pages of this site display results (actually the top-10 results) returned by google for specific queries. To do this, g-metrics.com makes use of Google Web APIs. So when google indexes one of these pages, it would increase the pagerank (or whatever ranking system a search engine is using) of a URL just because it had high enough pagerank to show up in the top 10 results…

However, using rel=”nofollow” can prevent this. (I have started using nofollow in g-metrics as soon as I read about it).

Similar cases could become a big problem for search engines, as similar APIs become more popular (Google, Technorati, del.icio.us, Amazon/Alexa, etc…) The way I see it, similar services may oblige or encourage developers to use nofollow when presenting “their” results.