Entries tagged with social web - Channel 10

U Rank: A Social Search Experiment From Microsoft Research

sarahintampa — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:56:00 GMT

A new project from Microsoft Research (who by the way, is doing the coolest things these days), is a social search experiment called U Rank. The current U Rank prototype is a social search engine built on Live Search that lets you organize, edit, and annotate your search results as well as share them with others.

Essentially, the way U Rank works is by letting you move the search results around – either higher or lower using drag-and-drop while also optionally adding notes to the results or deleting them entirely. In other words, you can create the perfect, personalized search results instead of relying on an algorithm to do it for you.

This could be a great tool for research purposes as you could keep lists of search results along with meaningful notes about the sites you visited. It could also be a better alternative to bookmarking – a process that could become overwhelming if you’re researching a large topic and saving numerous pages. Instead of having to tag bookmarks individually, you could just save your search results themselves. That list could then be shared with other friends, colleagues, or anyone else who might be interested in your findings.

Because the site is just a prototype, participation requires you register your existing Windows Live ID in order to test it out. At the moment, the site is a little slow, but throw some more power behind it and you could really have something here.

New From Live Labs: Political Streams

sarahintampa — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:56:00 GMT

The Live Labs team has just released a new project, Political Streams, and just in time as the U.S. Presidential election draws near. The site mines social media from across the internet, including blogs, newsgroups, and web sites, in order to track what stories are popular and if that popularity is increasing or decreasing.

When you click into an article on Political Streams, you’ll see a snippet of text from the article’s start and a link to the source if you’re interested in reading the complete story. Beneath this text are charts and graphs that show the attention the people and places mentioned in that particular story have seen over time. On the right, you’ll also see links to related information like other articles on news sites and blogs as well as links to people and places. Those people and places are generated by leveraging the API from the online open database project, Freebase.

The Political Streams site was built on the Social Streams platform, a platform that mines the social web for data. BLEWS, an earlier project by Microsoft Research, was also built on this platform.

Dashwire 2.0 Launches: Backup Your Phone and Sync Content To Social Web

sarahintampa — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:19:00 GMT

On Tuesday, mobile phone app Dashwire released Dashwire 2.0, a much improved version of their mobile phone backup and sync service. With Dashwire 2.0, you can backup your phone’s content – like photos, videos, text messages, ringtones, bookmarks, speed dials, contacts, and call logs – to Dashwire’s site on the web. This syncing is done automatically, so if you make a change to your phone, that change is reflected on the web, and vice versa. In addition, the app lets you share your content across several social networking sites. You can easily and automatically send photos and video to flickr, Facebook, bebo, and Twitter and you can also update your Twitter and Facebook status from the app. The Dashwire website also offers you a public page where you can share your mobile uploads with others who can then leave comments on the items. Dashwire 2.0 is free for Windows Mobile users - just go to m.dashwire.com from your phone’s browser to sign up.

Social Bookmarking for the Tech Community

sarahintampa — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:14:00 GMT

To help members of the technical community bookmark useful pages and share them with others, both the MSDN and the TechNet teams recently released a preview of a new social bookmarking tool designed just for their sites. With this tool, you can browse, filter, tag, and manage your bookmarks in a way that’s very much like using the social sharing site del.icio.us or any other online bookmarking service. You can click to see what the most popular bookmarks have been over the past 7 days and you can filter the list of links to display the bookmarks that came from forums versus those that are just from regular web pages.

To get started using the social bookmarking service, you can visit any of these sites:

MSDN for Developers http://msdnbookmarks.com
TechNet for IT Professionals http://technetbookmarks.com
Expression for Designers http://expressionbookmarks.com

After signing into the service, you can use a browser bookmarklet like the one from TechNet available here to begin tagging and saving your links.

There’s also a crazy Silverlight-powered app called TICKER that offers a way to visualize the bookmarks that others are tagging via the social bookmarking system. The links float by on the screen, color-coded as to whether they originated from TechNet or MSDN. If you hover your mouse over the bookmark, it will pause and allow you to save it for yourself.

CeBIT '08 - Meet People on Every Website

lorigros — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:13:00 GMT

I spoke with Nikolai Roth from zweitgeist at the CeBIT in Hannover a couple of weeks ago. He showed me their product called Weblin, which is software that enables people on the same web page to see and communicate with each other. While you are surfing, you and others on the same web page are visible to each other as small avatars and you are able to interact and chat with each other. The idea behind Weblin is to make the Internet come alive and create the largest virtual world of all. Nikolai filled me in on how Weblin works and what kinds of features are available.

For more info about Weblin, check out their website…
http://www.weblin.com

German version of video…
http://www.on10.net/blogs/lorigros/CeBIT-08-Weblin/

CeBIT '08 - Weblin

lorigros — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:41:00 GMT

Auf dem Microsoft Stand in dem Partner Bereich habe ich eine Startup-Firma gesehen, die eher untypisch für die CeBIT ist. Ich habe dort mit Nikolai Roth von der Firma Zweitgeist gesprochen und er hat mir ihr Produkt, weblin gezeigt. weblin ist eine Software, das macht Menschen im Internet als kleine Avatar-Figuren sichtbar. Während du von Seite zu Seite surfst, kannst du andere Avatars sehen und auf diese Weise kannst du andere Leute treffen, die genau dasselbe zur selben Zeit tun. Auf jeder beliebigen Webseite, kannst du deine Freunde oder neue Leute online treffen, die auch ähnliche Interessen haben. In diesem Video, erklärt Nikolai wie weblin funktioniert und zeigt mir viele von den coolen Features. Um anzufangen, musst du dich anmelden und ein Client herunterladen. Ein weblin ist für alle kostenlos.

weblin Webseite…
www.weblin.com