ResearchBuzz

Yahoo had a quick post in their blog about an open hack day that led to a handbag/pedometer/camera hybrid that takes pictures every x steps and uploads them to Flickr. You can follow the handbag and see all its pictures at http://www.blogginginmotion.com/. Frankly most of the pictures look like they were taken by a handbag. But they’re clear enough that you can get an idea of what’s happening. From what I can tell the handbag messes around with hardware a lot and occasionally goes out for walks and visits other handbags.

You can get a full list of the winners at developer.yahoo.net. Unfortunately not everything has a URL. I’m sad; I wanted to play with shill.icio.us.

John Krystynak dropped me a note to let me know about his new Amazon Prime Finder, but it was already in my queue thanks to the most awesome Amazon Web Services Blog. If you have an Amazon Prime membership you’ll appreciate this search. You’ll even appreciate it if you find yourself wading through a lot of marginal/unavailable items in your search results.

Basically, Amazon Prime, at http://www.bigscreenprices.com/amazonprime.html , searches just for items covered by Amazon’s Prime membership, their all-you-can-eat-two-day-shipping program (details at http://www.amazon.com/gp/subs/primeclub/signup/main.html.

Running the search gives you a plain list of results with links to additional results in various categories. Clicking on one will take you to the appropriate Amazon page, while clicking on a category name will open up another list of results within Prime Finder.

I don’t use Amazon Prime and I have no plans to. But I do find myself searching for things on Amazon and constantly running into results where items aren’t available, or are only available from an obscure third-party merchant, or will ship in 4-6 weeks. Prime Finder cuts through a lot of that gunk. Maybe he’ll tweak up another one that forces Amazon to be more precise in its search results — if I try to do the slightest-bit of general searching I end up feeling overwhelmed. And hey, maybe a way to sort by availability?

Writing up all the things I would do differently with Amazon’s search would take me about six hours….

The latest news directory on the block is Newgie, which offers both aggregated news and an RSS feed directory. It’s available in beta at http://www.newgie.com.

The front page looks very spartan, with no summaries, no sources, no story times, just headlines divided into categories. Mouseover the headlines, however, and you’ll get popup windows with summaries from the news stories (it looks like Newgie indexes only news stories with RSS feeds, so pretty much everything has a summary/the first 20 words/whatever.) Full stories open in new browser windows; for each story you can add a comment, or if you have an account you can add it to your Favorites or Recommend It.

Newgie’s particular brand of ranking is called “IntelliRank”. Newgie takes user actions into account when ranking articles, along with other aspects like age of article, etc. (You can get a explanation of IntelliRank at http://www.newgie.com/content.asp?pageid=63 .)

In addition to the front page, there are a large number of categories and subcategories available; you can get a complete overview at the category page. The RSS feed directory is available at http://www.newgie.com/rssfeeddirectory/; it’s divided up the same way that the category pages are and show what feeds power which categories. That’s pretty smart. Unfortunately less than 2000 feeds are currently indexed, so this directory’s going to have to grow a lot.

Newgie has done a lot to integrate community functions of discussion and recommendation right from the start, and I like how the feed directory parallels the news categories. But I wonder if maybe a little bit too much information is being left to the mouseover popups. Perhaps at least the source could be included on the front page? A would like a little more data to filter what I’m looking at; I would rather not have to mouseover EVERYTHING.