ResearchBuzz

I’m a confirmed text-crawler — but I can see the writing on the wall. Rather, I can see the large pie chart representing the contents of the writing on the wall. It started in 2006 with the big emphasis on mapping but I believe 2007 will be the year of visual representation — using graphs, maps, and animation (and tag clouds) to show popularity, activity, or focus. For better or for worse.

To look at a better example, check out Stack, from Digg Labs, at http://labs.digg.com/stack/. Stack is an evolving graph of what’s popular at digg. In the default configuration 100 stories at a time march across the screen as small vertical lines. Small white squares representing diggs from users fall on the stories. The yellower the line, the more dug the story is. (You also have the option to show only popular stories, or only newly-submitted stories.)

Hold your mouse over a line and you’ll get a bubble with the story title. Click on a line and you’ll get a popup window with the story title and description, number of digs, and number of comments. You’ll also get a static graph of the number of times the story has been dugg over the last 48 hours. Click on the story title and a popup window will take you to the Digg page for that story.

It’s sometimes a little tough to click on the exact story you want as 100 lines go marching across the screen. That’s what the pause button is for. You’ll need to use it — even when I checked out this site at 2:30 in the morning the lines were flying across the screen (That’s even more true when you look at the most popular stories.) You can also zoom in so as few as ten stories at a time are showing on the screen.

Two thoughts arose as I played with this site. Thought 1) Wouldn’t it be nice to have a constantly-changing tag cloud at the same time? Thought 2) This would make an excellent screen saver (though it’d probably keep me from getting any work done!)

In case you didn’t notice, the Internet has a new top-level domain. .mobi is for sites which support mobile devices, not for sites which are All Made of Stars. You can see the Wikipedia article on the .mobi timeline and companies who supported it here; I got curious about what sites were already using it (.mobi has been open for general registration for less than two weeks) and did some experimenting with Google.

The way to get page counts for any top-level domain in Google is to run this query: inurl:tld site:tld, where site is the top level domain for which you’re searching. Therefore I ran inurl:mobi site:mobi, and got over 42,000 results.

(Actually the inurl: site: trick will work for an amusingly-large number of text strings. See inurl:montypython site:montypython for a fun example.)

I didn’t recognize the top few results — companies involved in the development of .mobi and .mobi-related technology. Then I saw several companies I recognized in new .mobi formats — BusinessWeek.mobi, CityGuide.mobi, and several .mobi sites from mobile phone companies (duh.)

A few more generic sites were also available (diabetic.mobi) and oh look, there’s live.mobi, Windows Live in spanking new .mobi format. However there must be something I’m missing, otherwise the nice live.mobi site wouldn’t be giving me the giant Nextel ad. (All the other .mobi sites I looked at were clearly designed for cell phones and other small-screen devices.)

Towards the bottom of the first page for Google search results, if you’re getting 100 results on a page, you’ll see a square ton of parked .mobi pages, including skype.mobi, jobs4u.mobi, and one that’s really planning ahead — www.2012londonolympics.mobi/ .

If you’re interested to watch how a newly-released TLD is growing, put in a Google alert for inurl:mobi site:mobi and watch how the numbers change and see what domains get parked (and how quickly Google indexes ‘em!) Hmm.. I wonder if ImAVeganAndMyNameIs.mobi is available?

I got back from Web Search University late Tuesday night and since I went to work early the next morning I didn’t really have time to write up my thoughts. This was a very whirlwind WSU for me; I got to the hotel fairly late on Sunday and left on Tuesday afternoon shortly after my last session, taking just enough time to sit down with Gary Price and look at some new Ask.com features (which I’ll write up next.)

The two sessions for which I was primarily responsible were both about RSS; one completely, and one partly. When I first starting mentioning RSS at Web Search University in 2004 I got a lot of blank looks. And while there were still some people who didn’t use RSS and were trying to understand it, there were also plenty of people who “got it” and used it.

In fact, based on the questions I got after the sessions, the RSS shift seems to have moved from, “Okay, what exactly is this again and why should I care” to “This is really great, I’m using it a lot, how to I introduce it to my coworkers/patrons/clients without making their heads explode?” Which is an excellent question. I think what I would recommend is showing people individual RSS feeds using a tool like Grazr to highlight the kind of content available. From there, create a list of feeds relevant to your company or institution and show some of the content available. If c/p/c’s show some interest, offer to set them up with a really basic reader like the one available from My Yahoo, or use a tool like RSSFwd to show them how they can get updates by e-mail. Encourage ‘em to notice those little orange buttons all over the place.

Alas, I didn’t have any spurs to create tools like I did last year ala Kebberfegg, but I still have not been able to digest all the questions I heard and think over all the resources I learned about. Stay tuned.