The most recent 30 posts to the Brighton Bloggers aggregated RSS feed
Master Of Science
A campaigner against Heathrow Airport’s third runway has attempted to glue himself to Gordon Brown at a Downing Street reception. Dan Glass, a member of Plane Stupid, was about to receive an award from the prime minister when he stuck out his superglued hand and touched his sleeve. Plane Stupid says Mr Glass, from north London, then [...]Paul Der Van - random thoughts and good questions
Paul writes a marketing blog that poses questions we should all be asking ourselves.read and comment. thankyouplease.
Are you a digital native?
Following a discussion i had with friends at the weekend about the merits (and lack of) of social networks in the workplace, i wanted to post something about Alan at Criterion's recent presentation on accomodating digital natives in the workplace.Just to clarify digital natives is the name given to the generation of young adults who have are growing up with myspace, mobile web and online gaming.
you can download notes from the presentation here. but my favourite parts include...
A historical backdrop
The Silent Generation (1925-1942)
The Depression generation, The sandwich generation.
Boomers (1943-1963)
Beatniks, hippies, mods, rockers, Generation Jones, The love generation.
Generation X (1964-1981)
Slackers, The twenty/thirty somethings.
Generation Y (1982-1992)
The corporation generation, Spoiled generation, Generation whY
Digital natives (1992-now)
Millennials, iGeneration, The MySpace generation
Do you speak the langueage?
Digital Aliens
Silent Generation. Latecomers to technology. The internet, podcasts, SMS, online gaming and wireless networks are largely alien concepts to them
Digital Immigrants
Boomers. Those who reached adulthood without digital technology. While many embrace new technologies, some do so reluctantly.
Digital Adaptives
Generation X & Y. Willingly embrace the technologies they saw evolve into consumer durables.
Digital technologies began to emerge in a mass sense during the teen years of GenerationX.
Digital Natives
Millennials have enjoyed the luxuries of digital technology their entire lives including the massive and lucrative video game industry.
You know you're a digital immigrant if...
â You say 'www' before web addresses
â You print out your emails
â You email, fax and post the same document
â You then phone to make sure it got there
The presentation goes in to more depth about recruiting and educating digital natives and is really worth a read.
Mind Hacks
Here’s a list of books I have in a pile next to my bed, which I’m either reading, have read, or am planning to read:
Non-technical:
1. ‘Hackers and Painters‘ by Paul Graham.
2. ‘Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers‘ by Geoffrey A. Moore. (I wanted to know what a disruptive product is… yes, this was an impulse buy on Amazon.)
3. ‘Subject to Change‘ by Adaptive Path (* partial review).
Technical:
1. ‘Flash CS3 for Designers‘ by Tom Green and David Stiller. I won/inherited this book at a Flash Brighton event over half a year ago.
2. ‘CSS Mastery‘ by Andy Budd et al.
3. ‘Bulletproof Web Design‘ by Dan Cederholm.
3. ‘About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design‘ by Alan Cooper.
4. ‘Designing Interactions‘ by Bill Moggridge. It’s extremely inspiring to learn about the history of the Graphical User Interface at Xerox PARC (among everything else in this book).
These lists should give you an insight into what’s on my mind right now.
Overall, I’m focusing on learning about web standards, which I have finally accepted are quite important. So, a new ambition is to write clear, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. I’m getting there. Learning to write CSS/XHTML that is also standards compliant helps me to understand how it works, which is the underlying motivation. That is what it is about for me: expanding the parameters of what I am able to do with CSS/XHTML.
Reading books about CSS, to my genuine surprise, has taught me a lot â I was skeptical that they’d teach me more than pure tinkering could. I’ve always known what good website design looked like, but I never had sufficient respect for the underlying code â even if I told myself I did. It’s a good feeling to actually understand what the code is doing, or to begin to understand.
In addition to learning CSS/XHTML, I’m playing tentatively with Processing, mainly to sate my curiosity. After tiptoeing around the programming pool for years, I’m now dipping a toe in… and running off screaming. But then coming back to it, with euphoria, grit, and determination! And why not?
It’s hard for me to avoid or ignore programming, as I work for a software company. I design interfaces for mobile software. One of my coworkers suggested I start learning Objective-C, which I just might. I liked this quotation from Paul Graham, which made the idea much more appealing to me:
“It’s odd that people think of programming as precise and methodical. Computers are precise and methodical. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh.”
It’s a Change of prey….
NON-FORMAT
Great new site and work update form Non-Format, I know it was everywhere some time last week but I’ve been on holiday so that’s how I’m justifying posting it up.
Pictured is the awesome sleeve for Black Devil Disco Club, Eight Oh Eight, released by Lo Recordings.
CÃME DE BOUCHONY
Some great Parisian print, type and motion to get your eyes round this morning.
Everything I ate this weekend
Saturday
Cheese and ham croissant
Cup of tea
Melon
Beef
Peas
Cheese and bread
Kiwi
Coffee
Chocolate biscuit
Pastis
Crisps
Cherry Tomatoes
Goats cheese and jam on savoury biscuits
Sausages
Lamb barbeque skewers
Spanish omelette (Tortilla)
Taboulé (couscous with vegetables)
Lettuce
Red wine
Coffee
Biscuits
Ice cream
Beer
Sunday
Baguette and jam
Tea
Apple juice
Crisps
Cherry Tomatoes
Crab flan
Salad
Fresh homemade mayonnaise
White wine
Broad Beans
Green beans
Lamb
Cheese
Red wine
Coffee pavlova
Raspberry pavlova
Champagne
Coffee
Sweets
Coffee
Chocolate
Chicken
Lamb
Fresh homemade mayonnaise
Green beans
Salad
Taboulé (couscous with vegetables)
Fromage
Chocolate desert
Hoegaarden
2008 objectives review
we are about half way through the year which makes for a good time to review my progress. at the start of the year i posted my personal objectives for the year here. some are going well, some are not. still plenty of work to do...2008 - This is what i've set out for the coming year.
1. Expand the creative team
No real movement here. As this is dictated by work demands. boo. must try harder.
2. Win at least one new client pitch
At the start of the year i ticked this off. we won a competitive pitch that has since been launched and is now developing in to phase two. we've also got some more creative pitchs lined up, so i aim to surpass this one.
3. Execute our marketing plan as scheduled
Everything is going pretty much to plan so far. One piece of press has been delayed as the client has yet to implement our work and one project has been delayed in trade organisation hell.
4. build a secure extranet for proofing and signing off work
This is well underway and will hopefully be up and running before the end of the summer.
5. develop the "15" project for 2009
Shhhh. This is my big future project that i intend on launching in 2009. It's going to need lot's of work this year. So my intention is to get complete buy-in from the whole company and get production and planning moving.
6. add copywriters to our freelance roster
really tough one this. i've met a few very talented writers that i will hopefully get the chance to work with soon. but i'm still lacking a concept developing, ad writing half of a creative team. the hunt continues.
6. Find a CD mentor
nothing official has been set up. however i did get the (eye opening) chance to meet up with james at attik in a mentoring capacity. i will continue to look for something regular though.
more, more, bigger, faster, stronger, more, more, up, up and away.
NLP Training - Anchoring Part Two
NLP Training - Anchoring In this chapter we will allocate a variety of techniques that can help you with learning and motivational states , and organise your environment from your inner mind out, rather like a director on a film set. We are going to look at this way of NLP Training and anchoring from [...]July sell out fast!
Check here which few holidays are still available.July selling out fast!
Check here what holidays are still available.July sell out fast!
Check here which few holidays are still available.Metropole, Ferenc Karinthy
I seem to have committed myself to doing a few things here recently, like continue with my book list and review Metropole. So I shall start with the latter â my list is an indulgence, Metropole not.I had to look up Wikipedia to find out who Ferenc Karinthy, the author of Metropole, was. I quote:
âFerenc Karinthy (June 2, 1921, Hungary - February 29, 1982) was a novellist [sic], playwright, journalist, editor and translator, as well as a water polo champion. He authored more than a dozen novels. The writer and journalist Frigyes Karinthy was his father.â
[Do people author now instead of write? Makes you worry about the veracity of this statement. Perhaps Karinthy was, in fact, a polo mint champion.]
Metropole
is, and I acknowledge the danger of employing the term, Kafkaesque, at least in terms of its plot.
The whole premise of the story is based on a very slim thought: what would happen if you found yourself in a place where no-one could understand you and you could understand no-one. It doesnât take much imagination to allow that you would face a mixture of emotions in varied order, incomprehension, anger, fear, paranoia, resignation, to name but a few.Karinthy explores all of these, of course, and more, however it is the manner of his delving that makes this book a page-turner. Just as you find yourself in sympathy with the predicament in which Gregor Samsa, in Metamorphosis, finds himself despite the grossness of what he has become, you rage on the behalf of Budai, the hero, in his helplessness facing the stupidity and insensitivity of those around him.
There are many ways to read this book so I shall not inflict mine on you. Suffice it to say, and it may well be a cultural difference, Karinthyâs analysis and observations of the situation that Budai faces are fresh for an English reader, a better word would be foreign. It is, indeed, like being lost in a strange city.
Anyway, I probably ought to be keeping this confidential, but it turns out that this particular customer, who shall remain nameless, but who looked a bit like Christopher Lloyd in 'Back to the Future', used to work as a nuclear scientist at Sellafield. Apparently, and he saw this with his own eyes, there was a fire there a few years ago in one of the nuclear reactors (don't get it confused with the Windscale Fire - this one was all hushed up), as a result of which a toxic cloud wafted over Cumbria, settled on the ground, and infected all the grass.
The local sheep then ate that grass, and the result was the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis. The reason the government opted for mass slaughter instead of vaccination was apparently to wipe out all the evidence. I'm not sure what the scientific basis is for foot-and-mouth being caused by radioactive gases, but frankly I don't care - to me it all makes sense.
But it doesn't stop there. As luck would have it, our whistle-blower isn't just a nuclear scientist. Oh no. He's also a distant cousin of the Queen. Apparently he can trace his ancestors back to the House of Lancaster, and is practically royalty. So eighteen months ago he wrote the Queen a letter, detailing his blood line, announcing that he's family, and telling the woman that Her Majesty's government is guilty of a major cover-up, and is poisoning the population with plutonium.
A year and a half later, she still hasn't replied. Which apparently can mean only one thing:
She's in on it too.
I'd have found out more, but I needed to pop into Somerfield for some tomatoes, so I left at that point. But the good news is that the chap said he's planning to publish a website with more details, publicly naming the Queen as ring-leader of the radioactive foot-and-mouth plot. Which is no way to treat family. I just hope I haven't stolen his thunder.
Anyhoo, having bought Lisa's veg, I headed back up St James's Street, and who should I bump into outside The Bulldog (it's a gay pub - I wasn't stopping), but musical legends Right Said Fred! I've always considered Deeply Dippy to be a criminally underrated piece of art, so I was naturally quite excited. And having seen them up close, I can confirm that Richard Fairbrass really is too sexy for his shirt. If you like that sort of thing.
Ordinarily I'd have chucked my camera at Lisa and headed straight in for a photo (I didn't think twice last week with Robin Cousins), but sadly I was alone this time. And I wouldn't trust a stranger not to run off with my camera. The baby's been kicking Lisa around like a football for the past twenty-four hours, so she's currently attached to a bucket in the bedroom (Lisa, not the baby) and unable to leave the flat. I've tried to be sympathetic, but every time Lisa pulls up her top, she looks like John Hurt in 'Alien', and frankly I feel more queasy than she does.
The Eiffel tower, Paris
The Eiffel tower is perhaps the best known landmark in Paris and arguably all of France. It was built in 1889 and was at the time the world’s largest tower.
It was built by engineer Gustave Eiffel for the Exposition Universelle similar to the Belgians building the Atomimum for Expo ‘58.
Eiffel originally designed the tower to be built in Barcelona, but the Spanish council decided it was too expensive and did not match the aesthetics of the city. So Eiffel entered his design into the Parison contest for an entrance arch to the Expositon Universelle, part of the design brief was that it had to be easily deconstructed as the structure was only temporary, 20 years. Luckily it became an invaluable communications tower during the Battle of the Marne, so it was decided not to take it down.
The official tour Eiffel site has a great pdf of all you need to know.
It’s cheap for entry to the tower, the actual cost depends on which floor you visit, obviously the top is the most expensive at â¬12,00.
The view was amazing at night time, and was definitely worth the 2 hours queuing to get to the top! You have to queue to get the ticket, and queue between floors for the elevators but it was totally worth it.
Copyright 2007
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Death to 'sovereignty'
Arab nations 'agree Sudan action', is BBC's upbeat message.ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has asked the court for a warrant for [Sudan President] Mr Bashir on suspicion of masterminding crimes against humanity in the troubled Darfur region.But here's the Arab League's response:
Mr Moreno-Ocampo accused Mr Bashir of running a campaign of genocide that killed 35,000 people outright, at least another 100,000 through a "slow death" and forced 2.5 million to flee their homes in Darfur.
In a joint resolution issued at the end of the meeting, foreign ministers of the 22-nation Arab League said the ICC move was not acceptable and undermined Sudan's sovereignty.Screw solidarity, and screw sovereignty. What I look forward to is a world where the level of power one exerts over a population is proportionate to the level of punishment due to that person when the population suffers at their hand, or due to their neglect. A world where politicians (almost literally) live in fear of their people, not vice versa; and where sovereignty is invested in populations, not in greedy, corrupt, murderous, propaganda-wielding regimes.
"The council decides solidarity with the Republic of Sudan in confronting schemes that undermine its sovereignty, unity and stability and their non-acceptance of the unbalanced, not objective position of the prosecutor general of the Internal Criminal Court," the resolution said.
I'm not condemning patriotism, or suggesting that 'national identity' is on the wane, just that the price people pay for their state operating a distinct set of political values, for politicians who look and sound like them, and for restrictions on their moving from one state to another, varies from the merely expensive at one end to impoverishing and brutalising at the other. State sovereignty is simply too high a price for people to pay, even if they did have a choice.
So I propose powerful international institutions that have precedence and authority over all national governments, that adhere to universal values, offer universal human rights, and which are prepared to use all means at their disposal - those of their member (ex-?) states, and the international corporations present within them - to overwhelm and subsume those states that defend their own rights over their people (a bit 'Things to Come', I know).
Far-fetched, perhaps, but is it any less plausible than the establishment of the alternative economic system that socialists look forward to?
So who's with me? Clearly not the Eurosceptics - that is to say, the bulk of the Conservative Party; not the kind of people who think democratising, say, Cuba is dangerous lest it become 'westernised' / a friend of the USA; and we can probably also exclude those who cite the 'homogeneity' of global capitalism. What would that leave: perhaps a couple of people out of a hundred?
A quote from Danny O'Brien
If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as weâve come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC2 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.
Our mission: save the world
Me and James are playing spies - I’m Pink Spy, and James is Blue Spy..
handmade dresses
Thought I'd post a photo of these nice dresses, which my mum made for my girlfriend this week; they're simple but very lovely and there's something really great about knowing that they are handmade and one-offs - no-one else in the world has them. Great.
Threads
Saturday
Oh what a dayI'll just say some activities
Guitar Hero On Tour, that gave me RSI like straight away tho, alrite if you're fingers are comfy and that, can be hard to get in a good position, but i'll prevail
Computer crap
Paper catch-up. Longest delay of looking at Thurs Argus jobs ev-er
Bit of reading. Dexter innit
Bit of novel writing
bit of lying
I didn't mention i got a powerball the other day. You probably won't know what one is.
mine's orange, not blue.
I couldn't fucking do it for ages, but now i can do it for yonks. Some flash nice lights. I wish mine did. Tis pretty cool
A couple of weeks ago I said I didn't really wanna get a job, cos I didn't wanna leave wio. I think I'd rather have a job now XD
loose change
Confession: I'm absolutely hopeless with loose-change. Or rather, I'm brilliant at collecting it, but utterly hopeless at spending it. A couple of years ago, despairing of the little piles of coins all over my flat, I started depositing them in a mug - and this is not just one and two pence pieces, but smaller silver coins too. Before long the mug was full and I switched receptacles, moving on to a milk bottle, a better size for my burgeoning collection. Not that long ago I despairingly poured its overflowing contents into the lid of a bumper spool of DVDs, about the size of a small waste-basket. Things were clearly getting out of hand.So today I loaded my rucksack with coins and headed over to Sainsbury's, having realised that they have a machine which automatically sorts and logs your coins before presenting you with a beautiful slip of semi-translucent paper, which can be traded for notes (or a deduction from your shopping bill). The machine is amazing, a large contraption with a big coin tray which resembles a basket from a deep fat fryer. One simply pours the money in and watches the sums totting up on screen, several years worth of coppers being stacked and itemised. The noise is tremendous, a great wall of noise comprising the clangs and whirrs of the mechanism and the sound of a thousand coins bouncing off each other. I was, naturally, dementedly excited, and pouring in coins at such a rate that the machine eventually, desperately, pleaded with me to stop, its display changing to a screen which read "My, you have a lot of coins. Please give the machine a moment to catch up". I love the use of that 'my'.
Eventually I was shocked and slightly appalled to discover that I had fifty quid's worth of money lying around my flat!! Far more than I anticipated, although I admit that when it got to the mid forties I started feeding in a few pound coins from my pocket, too, desperate to get over the half-century, and reluctant for the fun to stop.
So the net result is that a food shop amounting to fifty seven quid actually cost me six pounds and forty pence. And although I am ashamed of the extent of my ridiculous hoarding, I'm secretly yearning for the day when I've built up enough coins to go back and see if I can break the record...
Adelaide Crescent Summer Garden Party
Congratulations to the Friends of Palmeira and Adelaide for an excellent summer Garden Party today. An enjoyable afternoon in Adelaide Crescent was enjoyed by all, and the weather just about remained fine.Distortion
What you get when you wave the iPhone around while taking a picture.The benefits of accessible YouTube videos
Videos are an important facet of the myriad entertainment options offered by the internet. They can offer hours of enjoyment for the typical web user; but are disabled users able to gain the full possible benefits of video portals such as YouTube?
The simple answer is no. Google, who purchased YouTube - the internet’s premier video sharing portal - back in 2006, is usually a great innovator of accessibility and aims to prevent discrimination on the web. But could YouTube be lagging behind when it comes to catering to users of varying abilities?
YouTube’s videos are not accessible to users of all abilities.
Example
Put yourself in the shoes of a deaf user. You would be able to watch the video, but can you take the full value from its contents? No.
This is where transcripts come into play. The W3C (World Wide Consortium) suggest in Technique G159 that if any video content is used within a page, an accessible alternative to the video presentation must be provided.
In order to make YouTube more accessible, it seems all the portal would need to do is allow a user to provide a transcript when posting a video. This simple addition to YouTube’s current video portal would allow many users to gain more from videos.
Working Example - have a look at a video posted on YouTube by bigmouthmedia staff : bigmouth christmas
Transcript
Doorbell rings
Door opens
A bunch of Carole signers appear
“We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christ, we wish you a merry Christmas, and a happy new year. To this world we bring, full search marketing, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.”
Door closes and glass smashes.
Not only would the simple transcript above make YouTube much more accessible, it would also aid YouTube’s organic results. This would happen because the content within the transcripts would be visible to search engines, while audio files wouldn’t. We all know that content is a key ranking factor, and the additional content that a transcript could provide would really elevate YouTube’s rankings.
Developments
YouTube has made slight developments to encourage users to provide video transcripts. In early March 2008, YouTube was made available via Google’s API, which meant users could efficiently embed the video content onto a page. If a transcript was then presented, a sprinkle of simple AJAX would enable a user to mark up parts of a transcript with a time relating to the video. The user could then click on a section of the transcript, which would take them directly to that timestamp within the video, rather than having to watch it all the way through.
How can Google further help accessibility within YouTube? Google is the webmasters favourite English language search engine. This is because Google has the ability to drive large amounts of qualified traffic to a website. Google currently allows users to create a XML video sitemap that contains specific information about a video. Google then uses this data to populate its video search feature. Within this XML video sitemap, there’s the ability to add additional data such as a description of the video or a landing page. This data is then used by Google to help them match search terms with videos.
If Google wanted to make YouTube accessible, they could update their current approach in XML video sitemaps and include an additional field for a transcript. The transcript, along with the description, could be used as the typical ranking factors of the video. This would not only increase the accessibility of the videos but the transcript would also provide far more information about a video than a limited description could.
In conclusion, Google’s YouTube currently has the power and the ability to increase the accessibility of their video portal, but have not taken advantage of all possibilities yet. Hopefully, the needs of users everywhere, whatever their abilities, will be a priority to all facets of internet development - from YouTube and Google to any number of other online applications.
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Microsoft lashes out at Google-Yahoo! deal
On Tuesday, Brad Smith, senior vice-president and general counsel of Microsoft, told the US Senate committee that chief executive of Yahoo!, Jerry Yang, had told him face-to-face that the recent deal between Yahoo! and Google would squeeze Microsoft out of the market.
The deal, which means Google and Yahoo! will collaborate in a joint advertising scheme that will see Google ads displayed beside search results on Yahoo!’s US and Canadian sites, has caused Microsoft to speak out against the two best-loved search engines and claim - quite truthfully - that their coalescing could mean a monopoly over the search advertising sphere.
Smith’s recollection of Yahoo! CEO Yang’s words regarding the matter will add weight to his argument. Smith told the Senate: “Jerry Yang said, ‘Look, the search market today is basically a bi-polar market.
“‘On one pole there’s Google and on the other pole there’s Microsoft and Yahoo competing. If we do this deal, Yahoo will become part of Google’s pole, and Microsoft will not be strong enough to remain a pole of its own.’”
It was then quipped by Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer that the move would then become a “monopole”, playing on the word ‘monopoly’ because of the resulting 90 per cent market control Google and Yahoo! would then possess.
The issue is a powerful one; US competition laws dictate that firms growing to such an extent that they dominate the market must not use their power in any way that could damage consumer interest. Microsoft has jumped on this issue to help support its bid to fight the recent union, and by claiming that Mr. Yang was in the full knowledge that the deal would form a monopoly that could be damaging.
However, not only did the meeting occur in July, but Yahoo!’s general counsel, Michael Callahan, was also an attendee of the meeting and decided against commenting on “Smith’s characterization of Mr. Yang”.
The ascending levels of the squabble come as a result not only of the Google-Yahoo! deal but also due to Yahoo!’s continued rejections of Microsoft’s takeover bid.
However, when speaking of monopolies, It’s hard to forget the seemingly effortless domination of the operating system and internet browser industry by a certain software company in recent years. Is all fair in love and digital wars? Maybe it depends which side you’re on.
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Delverâs social media search
Bigmouthmedia yesterday reported the launch of new social search engine, Scour, which allows users to vote and comment on search results from major search engines. Today we bring you another service, Delver, which has been described as a “social search engine”. Delver is now in alpha testing and could more accurately be described as a social media search engine.
Sign up to Delver and it correlates your various identities across social media sites such as Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Linkedin and MySpace, making one list of your friends and your friends of friends. That’s pretty cool to start with but what it does next is even better.
When you search for something using Delver, it gives precedence to links and content from your friends and their friends. For example, if you searched for a record shop in London, the results would include shops that your friends vouch for or at least ones that their friends like.
This sort of online collaboration and customisation of results is getting bigger all the time on the web and is a taxctic that both Scour and Delver have decided to persue. The advantage that Delver has over Scour is that by scraping information from other social media sites, it has a huge database of information ready to go. Provided you have social media friends already, you’ll get personalised results straight away.
Delver doesn’t stop there though; it has numerous other interesting features. If you don’t have a large circle of social media friends then you can choose someone on Delver to be your “search buddy”. Doing this will provide you with the search results that they would normally receive, so it’s best to make your buddy someone you have a few things in common with.
On the downside, the site doesn’t yet index Twitter or Bebo although there are plans to group Twitter posts together in future and add them to the index. The results are not perfect yet either but are likely to improve during alpha testing and as more people use the service.
The social search market is starting to warm up and there are now a few sites doing similar things. To become dominant, one will have to do something different. Something better. Delver is not only providing personalised search results but is bringing together user profiles from different social media sites. For now it uses the information in these sites to power its search results but the internet has been crying out for a site where all your social media profiles can be controlled from a single place. With a bit of foresight and ambition, Delver could eventually become that place.
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Twitter gets search friendly with Summize
Is Twitter 2008’s answer to Facebook? The micro-blogging service, which allows people to post updates on their activities, has enjoyed a huge rise in popularity since the start of the year, not least due to the flurry of activity from prominent posters like Barack Obama.
And in a deal that’s had Silicon Valley insiders shaking with delight this week, it’s been revealed that Twitter has acquired the search engine Summize, a company who launched their own comprehensive Twitter search facility earlier this year.
Earlier this week, a post on the official Twitter Blog stated: “We’re excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Summize - an extraordinary search tool and an amazing group of engineers. All five Summize engineers will move to San Francisco, CA and take jobs at Twitter, Inc. this is an important step forward in the evolution of Twitter as a company.” Summize’s CEO, Jay Virdy, however, will not be joining the Twitter gang.
According to the team at Twitter, Summize “significantly improved on [the] idea of filtering and search” on Twitter and the Summize API, which lets users filter through twitter updates, will also be merged under the Twitter brand. As a result, Summize has now become Twitter Search and the URL summize.com redirects to search.twitter.com.
Through the search facility, users will be able to search for Twitter users or themes, and are even able to set up an RSS feed for the query or create a twitter post with the results. But Summize is certainly not the first such Twitter search engine; the likes of Tweetscan, Twittertroll and Twellow.com also offer similar services. However, by acquiring Summize, Twitter is seemingly solidifying its position in the social media sphere and possibly foreshadows the development of a paid search advertising scheme operated via the search facility, potentially rivalling the likes of Facebook and MySpace for a piece of growing social advertising revenues.
Nevertheless, it’s important to put Twitter’s popularity into context. Searches for Twitter on Google have doubled since early 2007:
But this is still very limited in comparison to the massive traffic that the likes of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo experience.
And with competitors like FriendFeed also growing in stature by the minute, it’s going to be increasingly important for Twitter to ensure that its acquisition of Summize and any future moves it makes are geared towards winning new members over, as well as pleasing its existing loyal fan base.
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Russiaâs Rambler sells ad unit to Google
Rambler Media, the British-registered
owner of Russia’s Rambler Internet portal, said on Friday it
has agreed to sell the Begun advertising agency to Google for
$140 million (70.3 million pounds).
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