del.icio.us bookmarks for August 15th through August 24th
Saturday, August 25th, 2007- Blog Maverick -
- The World Accoring To Mark Cuban -
- Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Rise of the wikicrats -
- Social Media White Paper âTracking the Influenceâ (Factiva of Dow Jones) -
- gründerszene -
- Firefox DNS Cache abschalten - Firefox - Visualhype - Webentwickler und SEO Blog mit aktuellen Artikeln zu Suchmaschinen, Webprogrammierung und Internetmarketing -
swicki: social search service
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007according to Read/WriteWeb, Eurekster just upgraded their social search service swicki. a swicki is a user-created mixture of customized search engine (think Rollyo) and wiki, allowing its users to tag and promote search-results up & down, as well as adding their own results. sounds a lot like what Jimbo Wales is going to create with Search Wikia…
YouTube: new & experimental features
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006with Quick Capture, YouTube has been adding a very interesting feature to their service recently. Quick Capture allows users to record & upload videos straight from their website, without the need of using any additional editing-software. by capturing any connected (web-)cam through a flash-applet, this feature greatly reduces friction in contributing online-video. my guess is, that Quick Capture isn’t primarily aimed at original content creators (those will miss editing-features - which on the other hand could quite easily be integrated later, in a Jumpcut-kind of way), but at people wanting to create instant video-comments on existing clips. YouTube could further support that usage, f.e. by automatically cueing up all video-comments after the original video. however, Quick Capture will certainly accelerate the growth rate of YouTube’s video-stock. plus, it’s simply fun 
The second feature introduced is currently only available in YouTube’s beta-sandbox, TestTube. Streams allows users to cluster related video-clips on a topic on a single page. other users can join any existing Stream, contribute their clips into the public cue and exchange chat-messages in realtime. as far as I understand, video isn’t played back synchronously among all participating users, which for me kills the most interesting aspect - watching & chatting about the exact same image-frames as my peers - of Streams. however, by implementing synchronous playback, I think Streams could really become a very hot trend in “social video consumption”… (via TechCrunch’s Arrington, who wasn’t to fascinated by Streams either).
Swivel: social data-sets
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006in yesterdays exclusive preview, TechCrunch referred to Swivel as the “YouTube for data”. though the term might not seem very easy to grasp per se, it really describes the web-application, which launched into public beta today, in a nutshell: Swivel allows users to upload & share arbitrary data-sets, containing all sorts of information organized in records (like f.e. a spreadsheet-data). data-sets can be shared, visualized, rated and mashed-up against each other. Swivel includes basic tools for statistical analysis like calculating correlation between two data-rows. for an example graph, check this comparison of subscriber-growthrate in Second Life and WoW.
Swivel’s data-import works pretty well (though their servers seem to be a bit overloaded at the moment, I’m receiving plenty of 500-errors). users can upload local .xls- or .csv-sheets or enter data into a html-form directly. features like importing .pdf/.doc-files and syndicating data from other websites obviously aren’t deployed yet - I figure a flexible XML-/RSS importer would be really nice too. while it’s easy to get your data into the system in a meaningful way (including common web-techniques like tagging), the user-interface needs a bit of polish in some other areas. in particular, I found it rather challenging to edit and filter data-sets or even to create graphs upon uploaded data (my guess is, that Swivel takes some time [hours?] to pre-process uploaded data, but there wasn’t any hint in this regard, hm). again, the application throws errors on certain actions (f.,e. hiding data-fields), but I guess that’s why it’s called a ‘preview’.
besides teething problems, Swivel seems to be one of the most innovative webapps I’ve tried out lately. for me, the biggest caveat seems to be the inability to assure data-integrity & -quality (in the end, what stops me from uploading, lets say, faked crime-statistics of Vienna?). assuming this way of sharing raw data takes off in a Wikipedian-way, Swivel will have to show us some innovations in this area too.
