TechnoCloud

Google often tests variations on the search engine results page locally before releasing them to all users. Today I noticed one such variation with ’searches relating to’ appearing at the bottom of the search engine results page.

Others have reported seeing this earlier in the year, but it’s the first time I’ve come across it as a UK user.

The results are not the search suggestions that Google provides on the likes of the browser toolbar, but contain some tangents, e.g. ‘dogpile’ under a ’search engines’ query.

I’m not signed into Google, which was my first thought, but clearly Google has records of users searching for ‘x’ who then search for ‘y’, possibly due to failing to click on a search result. This would explain why the results are found at the bottom of the page and highlight yet again the importance of being on the first page of results.

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Great reminder of some of the video gems to be found in user generated content, starring a highly creative street performer in Germany using a combination of skis and bottles filled to various levels…

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Hats off to the New York Times’ David Pogue for this highly original piece of reporting on the iPhone hype.

To the tune of Sinatra’s famous ‘My Way’, take it away, David…

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Mashing is heading for the mainstream. YouTube are set to rollout their Adobe-powered remixer, Photobucket released more Adobe-powered functionality in early 2007, not forgetting of course Jumpcut’s purchase by Yahoo last year and a number of start-ups, including Eyespot and MuveeMix.

Even with MySpace’s (FIM) purchase of Photobucket earlier this year, they still also invested in the more advanced functionality offered by Flektor, no doubt wanting their own in-house software to complement the existing Adobe deal with Photobucket.

Despite all the activity from the big players in the market, start-ups are still emerging and innovating. Among the new entrants are JamGlue (tutorial here) with an intuitive music mashing tool, similar to SpliceMusic mashing tool. It’s a familiar mixing interface, with layered timelines and drag and drop editing points, plus some handy right-mouse options in Flash to repeat and cut layers.

The community is slowly establishing itself with a reasonable level of user generated clips and samples up there to embed into your remix, plus evidence of rights management.

It’s fun and relatively easy to use, albeit sometimes frustratingly slow to load, and offers more advanced music-mashing functionality than the more video focused offerings above, suggesting it may have enough of a niche to survive.

Either way, mashing is heading for the mainstream.

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Interesting to see that BBC News is trialing the use of a Flash player which will allow users to embed video clips into their web pages (T&Cs plus code for the video below here). So, in the spirit of a trial, let’s give it a go using a report on the current UK alternatives to the ‘i-Hype-Phone’.

Easy to do for anyone familiar with embedding code and works fine for me in Wordpress and on MySpace. Work OK for you?

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Another oh-so-handy reference list from the recently list obsessed Mashable, profiling the increasing ‘How to’ video niche.

While YouTube and its many clones try to be all things to all people, these How To sites are proving that there is a market for niche video communities. The best of these sites are more focused, easier to navigate and are proving themselves able to co-exist alongside the traffic phenomenon that is YouTube.

This trend carries over to the series of niche social networks that cater to every topic from the environment, to pets, to writing and everything in between, some more successfully than others, alongside the traffic giants of MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.

Let me be (ahem, among) the first to categorise this sector: social nicheworking. Let’s see how well that phrase catches on…

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It’s not often these days that you see a piece of technology that makes your draw drop, yet Microsoft have done that to me with Microsoft Surface. If there’s a better piece of gadget eye candy I’d like to see it (although Scoble saw it two years ago the showoff!).

Microsoft Surface is a touchscreen computer that allows you to interact with pieces of digital content as if they were physical objects on the table - to move, expand and even transfer content between physical devices, to create a music playlist through drag and drop using your fingers. It even recognises physical objects on the table and allows you to interact with them, from a wifi camera to a beer glass (so you can order another).

Check out the video below to see it in action.

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Good post from Danny Sullivan breaking down what Google’s forthcoming Universal Search means in visual and descriptive terms.

In short, Google will be incorporating into the default search engine rankings page results from across it’s various search engines, e.g. video, images, books… This presents all kinds of challenges in terms of user interface, information overload and access to the nugget(s) of information you were searching for in the first place.

Web users have seen these changes coming in various guises for some time as Google has tweaked the interface in various markets. At different times I’ve seen images, maps, blog and news results dripped into the results page. The next evolution looks to make those tweaks live across the search engine.

It’s Google’s own version of the wider widgetisation of the web where different data sources are pulled in from across the web customised to the user’s individual needs and preferences.

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Hot on the heels of the impressively silly Twittervision comes the Flickrvision mashup. This combines the latest geo-tagged Flickr images with Google Maps to show images being uploaded in real-time on a world map.

It’s a good visual way of getting a sense of the global community that powers Flickr. There’s also plenty of potential to make this tool more useful by increasingly the levels of personalisation, for example, creating a slideshow of your favourite tags or locations over the last 24 hours.

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Now you can add TechnoCloud as a widget to your blog or space courtesy of Widgetbox’s Blidget. Widgetbox also comes with a built-in stats package which allows the publisher to see not only subscriber numbers, but also the number of views of a particular widget. The widget can also be customised in terms of size, colour and function.

As a test, I’ve just setup TechnoCloud as an RSS feed using the Flickr toys broadway poster image from earlier in the week. To get it click on ‘Get widget’ at the bottom of the widget.

One initial observation. I originally installed the widget on my sidebar, but couldn’t help noticing that the page took much longer to load, so decided to restrict it to this post. Perhaps I’ll be sticking to straightforward RSS in the future…

If it’s taking an eternity to load, let me know in the comments and it’ll be consigned to the widgibin.

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