Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz is the new social news site of the week. It’s similar to Digg, Propeller, R-igg, and Mixx, in that users submit articles and posts they like, and the community votes on them. My favorite part of Yahoo! Buzz so far is that it is truly a democratic voting process, in that there is no “bury” or “down,” button. Users simply vote for a submission, or they don’t vote for it, and the posts with the most votes are pushed to the top. The scoring system is explained this way:

A subject’s buzz score is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read. Weekly leaders are the subjects with the greatest average buzz score for a given week.

For more detailed information, visit our FAQ

Anyone with a Yahoo! ID can sign-in to Yahoo! Buzz, and start using it. Unfortunately, at this time, the avatars are tied to Yahoo’s avatar system, and there is not an option to upload your own avatar - the one you use everywhere else. I suspect that will change, soon, since Yahoo! accepts user-generated avatars elsewhere. I like the feature that allows Yahoo! Buzz activity to be public or private.

This social networking option should be available on Wordpress Bookmarkify and ShareThis plug-ins shortly (I’d also love to see a toolbar option?), but for now, you can get the button for your blog posts here.

So far, we’ve submitted two Ft. Hard Knox articles to Yahoo! Buzz - one political, and one Sci-Tech, and haven’t been impressed with the traffic generated to FHK, yet, but the network is still very new, and has potential. The politics section is a bit sparse at the moment, but the Sci-Tech section is truly “Buzzing.”

Check it out!

Cuil not cuttin’ it.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked some friends to check out the new search engine, Cuil, to see if this might be a viable alternative to Google.

It has potential, after all, as it has been developed by some former Google employees.

Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there.

Cuil (”knowledge”) is developed and run by folks with years of web and search engine development experience (including inside Google), and is currently privately funded. It has some great features, including Drilldown, rollover definitions, and navigation suggestions:

• Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
• Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
• Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
• Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories

I haven’t received any feedback yet on the site (good or bad), but my own trial of the site has yielded less than spectacular results. For one thing, when I’m searching, I usually need to know what the latest news is on a topic, and Cuil has no way of sorting this info (or at least, I haven’t found it yet).

The other major problem is that the sources in search results are so obscure that I usually have to do a lot more additional research to even find out out if the source is credible for the topic I’m researching.

A third problem of slighly lesser importance I’ve encountered is that the search engine is not being picked up by any of my stats counters, so I do not know if I’m receiving any traffic from the site or not. But since I haven’t had a spike in traffic from any unknown sources, I suspect not. As a blogger, it is as important to me that a search engine drive traffic to my site as it is that I can find good information on the search engine when I need it.

So, so far, I am not as impressed with Cuil as I’d hoped. Has anyone else had a similar (or different) experience?

Midwest Unconference Chicago

Five days ago I published the Midwest Unconference website. When I took the website to a live status, I was hoping to pull together a group of tech minded, marketing junkies. I was hoping to build a true collaborative gathering that, unlike conferences that charge an arm and a leg, would allow for world class networking and sharing of ideas… free of charge.

And five days later, I can already say that hope has brought about success. You see, in just five days I managed to book some of the finest minds of the online realm, and fill 30% of the meeting room capacity.

My goal was to have 50 registered by September 1st, 2008. As of the the time I write this post, we have 44 registered, and we’ve confirmed Shoemoney to keynote the event. Thanks to this I have no doubt we’ll fill the 120 capacity event room in Chicago this October.

So what is Midwest Unconference?
The event is a result of an idea I’ve kicked around for some time now. I’ve been to a lot of events that are run like Barcamps, Meetups, Tweetups, etc. These events can be pretty decent, but they’re always significantly of lower grade compared to a major convention.

Now, I’m not asserting Midwest Unconference is going to be anything near the size of some of the super conferences, but we should have the quality, look and feel of a paid conference. The only difference is that we’ll likely be attracting a different crowd because we’re hosting in the Midwest, and we’re pushing for a much more intimate setting.

Plus, Midwest Unconference is interacting with those who are attending the event. Half of the current agenda has been designed by those who have signed up to attend. All of the speakers are volunteers and everyone is welcomed to apply to speak.

This is the kind of event that I think we’ll start seeing a lot more of in the future. And I’m glad to be a part of the movement.

For more information on Midwest Unconference, including agenda, venue, hotel information, sponsorships, etc… see www.midwestunconference.com

See you in Chicago!
-Eric Odom

Web 2.0 gains relevance - MSM loses relevance

On Friday of this week, something amazing happened. Since Freshy SEO is not a political blog, I will not get into the politics of the situation, but simply focus on the the roll of Web 2.O in the Republican Revolt in the United States House of Representatives.

On Friday, which was the last day of the Congressoinal session, there were a bunch of Representatives lined up to give their customary end-of-session five-minute speeches. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, turned out the lights, in an extraordinary move, turned off the microphones, and apparently even had the water taken away. The Republicans kept talking, in the dark, and calling for a vote on the Congressional ban on Drilling.

The only reason we still know about this, is because of iRadio, and blogs like Free Republic. As I said earlier, I’m not going to get into the political ramifications here - instead, I want to make the point that this is a real victory for Web 2.0. The Main Stream Media could not do a good job of covering the even t inside the capital, at all, and they have not done a good job of covering the event since then. However, thanks to live streaming via Qik, iRadio like BTR, and Townhall.com, and numerous blogs starting with BTR, we now know the story.

Go, Web 2.0!

If you would like to know more about the event, check out some of the links here, and here.

20 Kick Ass Linux Ubuntu Wallpapers

It’s Monday morning and I decided to try and add some Linux Ubuntu visual excitement to your day to help kick off the week. We normally don’t write this kind of post around here, but hey… it’s Monday!

I’ve had these images saved in my wallpaper folder for some time now, and after changing my desktop today I thought I would upload them all and host them for anyone hunting down quality Linux Ubuntu Wallpaper.

I’ve posted each thumbnail preview here, but you can click the image or the text link in the description to get the full size graphic. The graphics are in all difference sizes, so you might have to edit them to fit your resolution.

Enjoy! Continue Reading >>