Google Acquires Metaweb To Make Search Smarter - I’m almost getting sick of noting every time Google buys a company I really like.
This one worries me a bit, as a lot of their work involves open data, and I hope that isn’t impeded. Metaweb’s Freebase was essentially started as a response to Google Base being a closed system. I guess we’ll see.
I announced Quizify recently, but I won’t usually be writing much about it here. I’ve created a separate Quizify Blog for anyone interested.
Back in early 2005 I hacked up a quick web app to help me study for the Arthropod Zoology course I was taking in university. It helped me so much that in 2006 I decided to remake it in a non-ugly and usable way and I demoed it at BarCampWaterloo in 2007.
There it rested, my “current” yet abandoned project until around September 2009 when my friend Ben began to refactor all the code.
Lately I’ve had the time to work on it more seriously. I’ve moved it to Quizify.com and it is now ready for the general public.
Functionality today is fairly simple but quite useful, at least in my opinion 
. Input a URL that includes a definition list (as in a <dl> in HTML) and it creates a flashcard-like quiz with the data.
I plan to continue improving it, but in the meantime, feedback is welcome. Oh, and the NLP APIs I was blogging about recently was related to this project, but for a feature that won’t be ready for some time.
I’ve had this draft post about Aardvark for about two weeks now. Now that they’ve been acquired by Google, I guess it’s about time to finally publish it.
I first heard about Aardvark via the Seattle Tech Startups mailing list and eventually got around to trying it. Few things get past my initial attempt, but I’ve still got Aardvark. It’s a question-and-answer service where you can ask questions yourself and answer questions of others.
What I’ve enjoyed the most about Aardvark (beyond it’s ability to send questions to the right people) is how easy to use and friendly it is. I interact with it via instant messenger, and every message it sends me includes all the instructions I need, in a friendly way, without being too verbose either. It’s impossible to not understand how to use it.
Recently they published a paper - Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine (the name is a reference to a famous Google paper) - which I found quite interesting. I was expecting more statistics about the usefulness and value of Aardvark than the paper had, however the interesting part is that Aardvark turned out to be far more sophisticated than I’d realized. As I read it I’d think of a way to make it even better, and later on in the paper, find that they’d already done that. One astonishing graphic in the paper is their graph of users over time; that’s some impressive growth.
Now that Google’s bought them, I only hope that they’ll allow the founders to keep doing the good job they’ve been doing… I’ve seen too many excellent products wither after acquisition (e.g. dodgeball and jotspot).
Blogdigger Dev Blog: Blogdigger Acquired by Odeo - very interesting news. Back in March 2003 Dave Winer blogged that perhaps there should be a search engine based off data in RSS feeds. Three people started coding that weekend, Greg Gershman, Scott Johnson, and François Schiettecatte, forming BlogDigger, Roogle, and RSS-Search.
Scott’s “Roogle” launched by Mondayish, was Slashdotted to death, and and became Feedster. Scott and François both decided to make a company out of their ventures, and realizing that they lived in Boston, merged into Feedster. Greg later incorporated BlogDigger, but didn’t take quite the same route. I became online friends with them all to varying degrees, got to intern at Feedster in 2005, and also met Greg during that time. Although it never really attained the prestige that Feedster did, BlogDigger was always cool to me. Greg added searching by category (now generally called tags these days) thanks to my suggestion. His geo-based search is pretty nice, despite the fairly small number of geocoded blogs.
Feedster is 404ing these days, later PubSub died. Technorati eventually added searching to their backlink features, but they are struggling to some extent these days. The likes of Google Blogsearch hardly help. At any rate, Greg hung in there, and it is great to see it living on even further, and I hope him the best at his new job.
I ran into Terrill yesterday at a Waterloo UX group event and it occurred to me that I hadn’t read anything of his lately. So I check and it turns out I wasn’t subscribed to his blog. Whoops. There’s a ton of interesting stuff in the last twenty or so posts that I’ve had the energy to look at.
It makes me think that I should really blog a lot more myself, since I do it so rarely these days. I guess I’m just lazy… a lot of stuff I bookmark on del.icio.us, but most things I just keep to myself, really. Or in some cases I complain to tons of people in person (such as about my school’s LMS software, which Terrill has written a great criticism of).
Terrill actually posted a screenshot of him using Quizify, a tool I made last year (and haven’t properly announced since it’s not quite ready) and keep trying to convince myself I will get back to working on shortly. I really want to, ‘cause it could be so darn useful, and I’ve got pages of ideas for it. I just need to get on it. Since I’ve already got a job (oh, by the way I will be joining Microsoft in Redmond around September), I’m thinking that at some point before then I will probably just open source it, so it has some chance of succeeding… I dunno.
Speaking of getting on stuff, back in March I had an idea for a Web Clinic at the University of Waterloo, where I book a computer lab for a few hours at the same time and place each week, and anyone who works on web stuff (any skill level and specialty) can show up, work on their own stuff, and help each other. Basically there is almost no web community at this school, and thanks to Jesse and a few others who started BarCamp here, there is something now, but I felt it needed a lot more. So this week was the second week of the Web Clinic. I’m proud of myself for actually following through with something (for once), and for trying to start a community (way harder than starting a website for instance). It is still just starting of course, and could easily collapse, but the turnout so far I’ve been happy with.
I’ve already met people I didn’t know at this school who are working on neat things. It’s funny how things come to you once you start things. Someone I didn’t know at all emailed me out of the blue to talk about his startup. I’m getting a couple of inquiries about people looking for employees, volunteers, etc. So hopefully before I finish school in April, this will have morphed into a real thing that can survive without me.
I think there are two web companies in the last few years that I’ve really wrote here about how great I thought they were, JotSpot and Feedburner. Now 2/2 acquired by Google… of course, let’s hope this purchase goes better for Feedburner than it appears the JotSpot one went for them.
BarCamp / BarCampWaterloo - went to the third BarCampWaterloo today, it was pretty cool. It’s always neat being able to talk to people without first mentally determining how to explain it, where you can throw out words like microformats and OpenID without getting confused looks.
This time there was actually food (thanks to Tech Capital Partners), which improved matters greatly. Turnout was small to begin with (hmn, Saturday morning), but overall was not bad, with a record two females. It would have been nice if more people had presented, but it wasn’t hugely deficient, and I got to learn about ham preservation.
I showed off my Quizify tool (no link, it’s still not quite ready), and it seems like people liked it. Larry liveblogged some of the event, and in the crowd photo, I’m just too far to the right side to be in the shot 
I’ll miss the next BarCampWaterloo (I’ll be in Seattle), but hopefully can present or at least attend the one next fall. Thanks to Jesse for putting all this together.
Quizlet › The End of Flashcards - so this is interesting. I’ve been working a bit on a new project of mine called Quizify, and I was hoping to blog about it for the first time when I get a couple of crucial features done. So today, via del.icio.us, I find out about Quizlet, which has both a similar name (well, fair enough), and to some extent, a similar purpose and methodology.
I definitely think Quizify is and will be sufficiently different from Quizlet, but one thing in particular is that they’ve built out a whole bunch of infrastructure pieces that I haven’t done yet, but have planned or at least thought of, such as a system for sharing these quizes. So I think that having discovered this website, I will probably very slightly alter my course, but overall I’m still committed to the same basic plan. The question is, can I get the quizes built with Quizlet to work with Quizify? It will certainly work the other way ’round.
Wow. Upon closer inspection they have an import mechanism identical to plans that I had and rejected. Their export mechanism is to save it as a file, so that means import into Quizify will be available but not seemless. Very interesting… especially, I’m sure, for those of you who I haven’t spoken to about Quizify and wonder what the heck I’m talking about…
Official Google Blog: Spot On - Google has bought JotSpot; this is big news to me (and far, far more interesting than YouTube).
I’ve considered applying to work at JotSpot in the past, but one of the reasons I didn’t is that their stuff seemed so good I wasn’t sure if I had anything to add. I first wrote about JotSpot in October 2004. Crazy.
This doesn’t bode very well for Microsoft, that’s for sure. If Google plays their cards right, that is.
TechCrunch » Rumor: Yahoo Acquired Jotspot - I don’t usually report on breaking news rumours but this one is very interesting, because Jotspot is such an amazing company/product.
I never do quizes. And political party ones are innaccurate, of course. nevertheless
and of course, in Canada you vote per-riding, not for the party leader (well, unless they’re in your riding). oh, and since I don’t live in Quebec, I couldn’t vote for the Bloc. Although the riding I’m voting in also has Green and Marxist-Lenninist and an independant. Via mattt
New Kids Search � Interface Enhances Access to EBSCO�s K-6 Databases - “oh, so they’ve decided to pay attention to kids,” is my first reaction. Then I see the screenshot. My suggestion: don’t call it “kids search” in huge letters at the top. Kids don’t want to be belittled, is what I think. Via Resourceshelf.
This is a very significant move. Need I say more? Events and calendaring are gearing up to be huge. Does this deal have anything to do with the Google Calendar rumours? Via Software Only.
This isn’t even a rumour, just speculation. it occurred to me that Navteq is probably on Google’s radar for possible acquisition.
