TechnoCloud

Adaptive Blue have released version 3.0 of the BlueOrganizer social bookmarking tool, with a Firefox extension that is a contextual search menu linking you into the ’social mediasphere’. On first look, it brings to mind the Hyperwords project with its contextual browser extension for interacting in more depth with the keywords on a page.

After a brief install and browser restart, you can right-mouse and see a ‘BlueMenu’ either for a highlighted piece of text or for a page as a whole. The menu opens into all the poster children of social media, with stalwarts Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr and the rest just a menu click away.

In theory, this click takes you directly to the tag or results page relevant to your selected term, but it doesn’t always work in practice. It worked fine for me on del.icio.us and YouTube, but just took me to the homepage of Wikipedia and an ‘all tag’ page on Odeo for my chosen search of ‘media technology’.

Helpfully, it opens the page in a new tab allowing you to explore multiple choices without losing your original context. There are revenue models in place for the existing product, with paid placement possible in the menu of default options and affiliate links to take you through from your search for a film to buying the DVD.

Why are we waiting?

Ironically for a tool that is supposed to save you time, my biggest grievance is with the menu load times - on one occasion over 20 seconds and regularly more than 5 seconds. This needs urgent attention, if its to evolve from a bit of fun for early adopters into a genuinely useful tool. It appears I’m not alone in this (see comments).

Also the tutorials could be a lot simpler and shorter, if it’s going to gain a large audience. Better to focus on the basics and let users learn more as they become more familiar with it.

Certainly the idea of contextual search is an interesting one that has many potential applications, particularly when the user is able to customise their search menu, evolving it into a viable portable digital lifestyle aggregator.

Image 1: loading - you may be watching this for a while…

Image 2: the menu in action

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Here’s an interesting on-line tool. Zamzar allows you to convert from a variety of formats to a variety of formats. Being properly Web 2.0 it is, of course, in beta. The business model is ad supported, so the file conversions are free - the FAQ mentions a possible subscription model for bigger file sizes and longer storage of converted files.

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After many, many months using Bloglines, I was tempted by the hype about Google Reader and decided to give it a try to find a better way of managing my feeds. A weekend or even a couple of days holiday meant the backlog of articles soon built up to unmanageable proportions and I didn’t find the Bloglines user interface an efficient way of processing that information.

Despite my grumbles I was so used to Bloglines’ quirks that even the improved user interface of Google Reader took quite some time to become comfortable with. The ‘river of news’ available on the ‘All Items’ link is particularly helpful in managing the information overload. I like being able to consume bite sized chunks of articles rather than having to read all new posts on a feed in one go before they are lost. The number and variety of keyboard shortcuts have also proved useful once mastered.

However, today presented the first bug within Google Reader. As per the image below, on accessing my stories the article preview boxes were blank. If I rolled my mouse over them to automatically ‘mark as read’ the content appeared (see second image), suggesting the bug is related to the ‘mark as read’ mouseover functionality. It was the same issue whether reading the river of news or an individual feed.

The problem appears limited to Internet Explorer (I’m running version 6.0), with Firefox working fine.

Having had a fruitless quick search for others with the same issue, this may be a local javascript error, but I’d be interested if anyone has experienced anything similar.

Image 1: Viewing all items (no mouseover)

Image 2: mouseover a single item and it appears

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Microsoft have released a tech preview of Photosynth - an application that takes a number of photos, analyses them for similarities and displays them in a virtual 3D space. If you want to move around freely in the virtual space, follow these instructions.
OK, so the downside. The tech preview only works on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista RC1 and requires IE6 or IE7. Oh, and you need a graphics card that supports DirectX 9, has a WDDM driver, at least 128Mb of memory and suports 32 bits per pixel. And the installation is via an ActiveX control. For the rest of us, there’s a couple of videos to watch.

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It can be difficult to find photos you know you’ve taken. Most of us will by now have hundreds, if not thousands, of digital images strewn across hard drives. The more diligent among us will no doubt spend time carefully categorising and tagging each precious image. Some have even posted a power tip or two for speeding up this activity. For the rest of us, image analysis may help. Picassa should soon have image analysis (follow this link for more information.) Another potential solution is being developed that will be able to recognise elements in photos and videos by the Acemedia consortium.

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Visual search company Riya have unveiled Like.com a visual search shopping portal at present limited to high fashion items which is the talk of the blogosphere. Riya.com itself was impressive enough with its facial recognition technology, but Like.com shows several improvements. Users can search among the current inventory of jewellery, handbags, shoes and watches and through a ‘likeness search’ can query the visual search engine for products with a visual likeness.

Like.com gives searches the ability to find related objects of a specific colour, as well as by shape and pattern and rank their relative importance through sliders.

Coming soon will be the ability to upload an image, e.g. camera phone shot of an object you like, and then find its likeness, with the current example on the site being finding similar items to those celebs are wearing.

Furthermore, the technology allows you to zoom in on a particular characteristic of an item, e.g. a high heel on a shoe, and narrow down your search to items that share that characteristic. This particular functionality has wobbled here at TechnoCloud with some loading problems, but we can excuse that as alpha launch blues.

All in all, an impressive piece of technology, if not quite matched by the early doors limited product categories. The real value for this may lie in licensing the technology to third parties to allow them to improve search facilities and categorisation across a range of industries, from clip libraries to mapping/tourism (e.g. what building is that?) to myriad different shopping applications.

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In the reveal-all world of social networking, it’s no surprise to find a widget that allows you to share your TV viewing preferences on the web. The MeeVee listings service has developed a neat little Flash widget built on its listings and recommendations service. It works as a loyalty tool as well as a marketing tool for those with the debatable pleasure of discovering more about your viewing habits.

Unfortunately, it’s US only, so I can’t share the delights of my TV dinners here in London, so readers will have to make do with what I might be watching if I lived in New York. Fascinating, I think you’ll agree…

Geographical grumbles aside, it’s interesting to see that the service completes the circle by linking you through to a page to download the episode via iTunes or alternatives. It would be even more interesting to see this technology come to mobile to enable customised recommendations and downloads on the move. Now that would be something worth sharing with the world.

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Netscape have invested heavily in social software on their portal to try and reverse its decline from the heady days of early browser dominance. If you visit their homepage, you’ll see editor-generated content alongside Digg-style user submitted content, a signficant change from the me-too portal that came before it.

In the age of increasing content portability it’s interesting to see that a widget has been developed that allows you to display a rolling top stories widget (as seen below) which as ever you can plug into your particular flavour of space, be it social networking or media technology blog.

Nice enough eye candy with the pause/play button, but the real value would be in allowing you to customise this to your own news preferences.

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