ResearchBuzz

You know, the late 90s and the bubble were a long time ago, yet whenever I see some overblown press release talking about revolutionary new paradigms or some other such nonsense I still want to go hide under something.

I suspect with this site I’ll be spending a lot of time hiding under my desk. Killer Startups, at http://www.killerstartups.com/, reviews over 2 dozen new sites a day. It looks a lot like Digg, with spaces for Diggs (only they’re called “Killers”) and reviews of each site.

You can browse the sites by date, search by keyword, or browse about a dozen categories. I looked at the Search category, of course, which has 97 listings at this writing and included sites like TheMolu and ZitGist, but also older sites like Exalead. Each site listing has an overview, a description of the site from the site itself, and a brief review from KillerStartups. KillerStartups also notes why the site in question might be a killer, but also asks some questions about the veracity of the startup (that’s the difference between the late 90s and the late 00s — there is some attempt to pop the bubble.) Each listing also has a “Killer Data” box that attempts to show contact information, traffic data, etc. — but the data boxes I looked at were mostly empty.

There are RSS feeds, of course. Feeds cover all startups, today’s, and the top ten. Sadly I could not figure out a way to get a feed by category (I want to see what this site finds in the way of search; I’m less interested in ecommerce, marketing, etc.) Still, it’s frequently updated and the site reviews aren’t breathlessly excited. Worth a look.

There’s a metasearch for everything else, so why not. yoName, at http://www.yoname.com , allows you to put in a username, e-mail address, or first and last name, and find people across several different social networks. It’s in beta.

I first tried the search with a friend’s name. I know he’s on MySpace. yoName ran the search across several networks, including Xanga, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster. Here’s the funny part — yoName announced potential matches on a few of the networks but for MySpace, announced confidently that it had found my friend. It hadn’t — it found somebody else with the same name. I didn’t see a way to say “Wrong one, try again.”

It gets even more complicated if you’re using a more general keyword. I know a lot of bands have spots on MySpace, so I tried doing a search for Wolfmother. Sure, I got Wolfmother’s MySpace page — and tens of thousands of other pages that mentioned Wolfmother, videos by Wolfmother, etc etc. So unless you search for a very specific name, you might get some extraneous results.

Enough crabbing, let’s talk about the good parts. When you get a set of results from yoName, you have the option to quickly preview the first ten results in-page. It doesn’t look like you can view all the results though — and if you’re only looking for a single person, why would you want to? Sometimes the previews are a little misaligned because of banner ads, etc, but they’re easy to read.

I don’t use MySpace, but just by doing some experimental searching with yoName I got a sense of the huge cross-section of people (and musical groups) that are on there. Possibly frustrating if you’re trying to do an absolute search, interesting as a browser/explorer.

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I’m still trying to find the ideal Linux distribution to use in Internet access terminals at work. I have tried Ubutunu (too slow), Xubuntu (couldn’t get it to work), and Puppy Linux (great but it refused to recognize any of my USB devices.)

Reader DM suggested I take a look at Damn Small Linux, available at http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ . Damn Small Linux (which is also called DSL, and isn’t that nice and confusing) is a 50MB download which is designed to fit on a mini CD, a USB pen, flash drive, or whatever.

I downloaded it and recorded it onto a CD, and ran it as a LiveCD. It ran at least as fast as Puppy Linux, and accepted my USB devices with nary a complaint, so in that respect it was great. It also automatically configured my ethernet connection, which Ubuntu did but Puppy didn’t. (In Puppy’s defense, it was really easy to set up the ethernet connection and took about 30 seconds.)

Using Damn Small as a terminal, I don’t expect to have any problems — it’s going to be used for Firefox and Firefox only. If I were using it for anything more extensive, however, I’d be nervous. I am a Linux newbie and didn’t find it friendly at all. There’s no menu bar, which makes it difficult for me to figure out what’s going on. If you’re an intermediate Linux user, you’ll probably like it a lot more than I do.

Here’s where I am right now Linuxwise. If it would run my USB devices, I would be sticking with Puppy Linux. If I could figure out why it runs so slow and fix that, I would be trying to put together an Ubutunu Linux computer for my mother. And once I get some more Linux experience under my belt, I’ll be taking a closer look at Damn Small…