The User

Google has recently launched a new service which is in beta version: blog searching.
I believe it is such a great asset. Especially as a blogger and a researcher I have to read a lot about different services and web functionalities and where I could better find the information if not on blogs. Great tool for me and lots of others like me! Well Google, you must have read my mind!

I especially enjoy the fact that you can order the posts by publishing date, which is truly important because I always find relevant and interesting information and then I realize that it is from a couple of years ago.

There are lots of people who don’t blog and some are a little bit against blogging. Some pretend they are not interested in such activities , other consider it totally useful for their job or life. For those who would like to start and don’t know what blogging is here are some golden rules. May them turn out to be useful to you.

12 Golden Rules of Blogging

1. Speak in your own voice. Get your ideas though.
2. Write about what really interests you. Don’t think of broadcasting to an audience, think of having a conversation with a small group of people. Expect them to join in.
3. Don’t try to answer all the questions you raise. Let the users answer some of them or debate around the answer.
4. Worry less about quality and more about relevance.
5. Be brave. Say what you think.
6. Link out. Point at other stuff you think is good. This is how networks of trust are formed. Find other bloggers who are interested in the same things as you. Visit them regularly, add them to your own blogroll. This not only serves you well, it also serves those who visit. They are interested in what you are interested in – that’s how they found you.
7. Only share things with your community if you think they will find them useful. They’ll think less of you if you don’t (if you just spam them with product plugs, for example…) (more…)

The winners of the first competition to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces are:

• Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): Integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.
• CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): Content management system.
• FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): Photo editor.
• PRISMAprepare by Océ (The Netherlands): Print shop software.
• Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignBox (USA): Hostess-stand reservation book for restaurants.
• SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): Database performance monitoring and diagnostics.
• SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): Synchronizing files across multiple computers.
• SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (The Netherlands): Creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.
• Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): Online forms, surveys, invitations, and payments.
• Xero by Xero (New Zealand): Accounting for small businesses.

Of the winning applications, 70% are Web-based and 40% are locally hosted.

The winning designs are revolutionary, but there’s nothing revolutionary about the usability methods employed to ensure their quality.

Does having a good system administrator payoff? Well in this case it does!! )

We all have seen how the new Antena 3 website will look like due to a really small s

ecurity breach.

The new layout looks like this and here and here are the comments from the agency which has done the project.

Thanks Ruschi for the info.

I’m back!!! Well I’ve been on holiday and after weeks of being offline I have finally took the time to post.

When I was away nice things have happened. Like the launch of a new search engine name coil.com (it is pronounced cool – how cool is that?!?:) ). The engine is run by former Google employees, who want to challenge the search engine giant with results based on content, not inbound links. The idea of grouping the content together under a tab with a nice thumbnail is following a current trend in refining information retrieval and the ease with which a unqualified person can find the appropriate information in a pool of billions of results.

The new search engine claims to have the biggest search engine database of content and announced with pride that they avoided the so claimed Google PageRank, which can be a subject to search engine spam through inbound link manipulation schemes.

We’ll have to see whether it will have the same success as google has and maybe some day we won’t say google it, but instead well say “cool it”!