I came across this blog. Their problem?

Many eBay UK shop (store) owners are complaining their traffic is massively down in the last 6-8 weeks since Google’s Jagger 1/2/3 update apparently removed millions of eBay items from the SERPS.

It could be for real or just a hoax. But it brings up a subject rarely discussed: As search engines become more dominant and are able to influence economy, politics and culture in a straight-forward way depending on their ability or interests, people will want a share of this power. This is not something new, it has happened over and over throughout history. People (probably Internet users and merchants in this case) will want to “democratize search”.

A year ago, I brought up the idea of a distributed query system. This is not an original idea -people have long talked about distributed search engines. I’m pretty sure some of the suggested models are much better designed than what I suggested -even though Amazon’s OpenSearch is amazingly close to this model.

What’s important is the vision of a search system that will allow every publisher (as small as an unknown blog or as big as Google, Amazon or Ebay) to contribute to it, and users to decide their “search neighborhood” (in a way this is what Yahoo! is trying to do with Yahoo! Mindset and Y!Q). It seems that Adam Bosworth has something like this in his mind too.

I really don’t know that the most suitable implementation of this “thing” could be. But I’m sure that as we moved from directory services (the original Yahoo!, and DMOZ) to search engines, we will be soon moving to a new, “decentralized” or “democratized” search engine model.

The future is green. Find it here: Treehugger.com.

Songbird is a complete desktop media player or “jukebox” with a uniquely open approach to Internet digital media network services.

Some nice screenshots are out, the preview release will be out in December.

I think this will be more than :another media player”. Stay tuned.

I was reading Inside AdWords: Use Google Maps to target your customers about Google letting advertisers geo-target AdWords campaigns using address and distance radius.

This is a great feature by itself. But it is something more. It’s one more step to consolidate Internet’s “virtual” reality with real world’s “actual” reality. It means that you can put Internet ads “on this street”. On the other hand, you can use tools (Google Analytics is one of them) that can show you “how many people on this area read your blog”.

Imagine this. You turn on your laptop, you get in your car and as you drive across the country you connect to different wifi hotspots. Each time, you reload the same web page that contains ads from Google. Then you realize that depending on where you are, the ads change. Much like the view from your window. In a way, through your browser you see something that “belongs” to the location you are in, just like the mountain on the horizon, or this funny building across the street. The Internet becomes part of the scenery.

Think of it for a minute. The moment you geo-tag a piece of information (be that a photo, a blog-post, a video or audio recording, or whatever kind of media) you link it to an actual location. Right now, we are usually able to find the location associated with a geo-tagged piece of information. Soon, given the right tools like mobile Internet and smart location-based services and apps, we will be able to access this information (literally) “on the spot” -see or hear or read it just like you would see the sunset, hear the noise from a nearby factory or read the sign across the street.

Richard MacManus has an interesting article about Web 2.0 Products We Need (But Which Don’t Exist Yet). Regulars of this blog will already know my list, but here it is in titles (all 3 of them!):

1. A service that will let us mix feeds according to user-defined rules.
2. Wider use and services that take advantage of geo-tags.
3. A microformats-aware search engine.

A couple of days ago I was in Rome with my girlfriend, Elina. Typical tourists as we were, we kept shooting photos with our digital camera. Storage is no longer an issue, I had my 20GB iPod photo with the camera conector. Most of the photos were shot in crowded places, some of them nearly packed with other tourists shooting their own photos and video.

“Have you ever considered how many photos around the world are you in?” Elina said.

I guess a lot, but there is no way to find them, is there?

Then I realized that had I bought the portable GPS receiver I wanted to (in order to geotag [1] my photos), me and others could search for on-line photos with the GPS coordinates and date of my journey. Something like “search for photos taken at the Coloseum on 2005-11-21 between 13:00 and 13:30″. If people geo-tagged their photos, I’m sure I could play my personal version of “Where’s Waldo” with some success…

I do not think that this could be done now, I do not know of a service that would allow me to query using GPS coordinates and date (or is there?), but wouldn’t it be realy cool if Flickr, Google, or Yahoo! supported such a feature?

BTW, you can find a photo of me here. If you were in Rome during the last weekend and you think I’m in one of your photos, it would be fun to send it to me!

[1] Read How-to: easily geotag your Flickr photos, HOW TO GPS Tag Photos: Flickr, Mappr, Google Earth….

I liked Webjillion’s Will Your New, Favorite Web Application Last?, straight to the point.

Web services is all about building value on top of services you do not (usually) own or control. Does this make sense? Is there a (development/business) model that could make such services more viable?

It looks like more and more people are ready to pay for services provided through the Internet -something a couple of years ago sounded like a blasphemy.

Burning Questions, the official FeedBurner blog features an interesting analysis today. What they say is that feeds are not just about blogs anymore -and they are right.

Traditionally, feeds (RSS, ATOM and RDF) have been used to distribute a website’s content. Subscribe to a site’s feed and you get the “headlines”, a stream of items usually composed by title, publication date, abstract and main body.

What most web developers know is that this simple “schema” fits well enough not just “news” but other kind of data too. Take for example Flickr “photo streams”, where instead of a “body” you get the URL of a photo, del.icio.us bookmarks where each item is a user’s bookmark, or podcasts where each item “encloses” an audio or video “attachment”. One of the nice things about RSS, RDF and ATOM is that they are flexible enough to support uses like the above and (by design) are not limited to “news” items. Nowadays, almost everything is published as a feed -add wish lists, alerts, personalized search results and much more to the above mentioned.

Users tend to think that a feed derives from a web page content, when usually they are both representation of the same information that reside in some sort of database. The main difference is that usually web pages are focused on presentation, when feeds are focused in structure. As mentioned above, a feed has an inherent structure that makes it ideal for other programs or services to “consume”: parse, understand and extract “what matters” per case.

FeedBurner already gives some of these services. You can easily “mix” your blog news, with your Flickr photo stream and your del.icio.us bookmarks. You can even mix them in different ways, say gather all your weekly del.icio.us bookmarks in one single post in the new feed generated. Or you could create your own “video channel” of videos indexed by Yahoo! and tagged with a certain keyword, like “funny”, or “football”. Or automatically post your del.icio.us bookmarks as a single post in your blog on a daily basis using yadd. Or combine a GeoRSS blog feed with geo-tagged Flickr images. Or upcoming.org events with rsswether.com…

I’m quite sure (and Burning Questions’ article point to this direction too) that we will see more of this “rip-mix-burn feeds” trend in the close future. We should expect to see new tools that allow us to extract, parse and combine information from feeds into new feeds, as well as presenting those new feeds in new ways, generating unexpected results, services and added value.

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UPDATE. Check out this article too: The Second Coming of Content and RSS Feeds

It was one of my first thoughts when I saw Google Base: why not endorse microformats? BuzzMachine has a more detailed article on the same subject Google Base v. microformats, and some interesting comments by readers.

A long weekend at Rome. What a nice break…

We stayed at WRH Suites. Realy nice and stylish rooms, 5 minutes walk from the Termini Station (main train station, metro station and where most busses leave from) AND free Internet in the room (they even had a laptop in the room you could use)! Good value for money, the guy at the reception was always happy to give information and hepl us plan the day. If you are looking for a nice place to stay in Rome, check them out.

We just arrived in Athens, but here are some of the last photos I shot at Rome (Fiumicino) Airport:

Excuse me for being bitter, but the way I see it nothing should crash in an airport…