As a non-professional blogger (ha! couldn’t ya tell..) and sometimes screencaster, maybe I’m completely unqualified to judge, but I think a new Top 100 (or an old Top 100 for that matter) completely misses the point of blogs, podcasts and the web…
The power of the internet is niche information. Build me a better search and recommendation engine and I am invincible!
Blogged with Flock
Have you ever tried out Google Image Labeler? I had never heard of it, and I’m not sure if it’s new or not.
Doing a quick image search on something, I was presented with the question at the bottom of my results asking whether or not I wanted to try it. Curious, I clicked the link to find out what it was. According to their web page, Image Labeler is:
“…a new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images to help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.”
So you get paired up with a partner and for two minutes you are shown a variety of images. As each image is presented, you (and your partner) enter plausible labels for the image. When you and your partner match up on a given label, you move on to the next picture. At the end of it, you’re presented with a score and ranking.
It’s no surprise to me that Google has given a neat way to help improve their search product and involve the user in the process. They don’t hide the fact that yes, they are using you to improve their search. I took a few minutes out to do it and it was quite fun to see how high I could get my score. It didn’t bother me in the least. How effective it is at improving their product I don’t know.
[note: I’m assuming you need a google account to use Image Labeler – not entirely sure]
I was checking out the newer, faster, better, Technorati today and did a search on ‘inkscape’ to see what new things people were doing. I noticed quite quickly that my YouTube hosted screencasts are there in all their glory but no mention of my blog at all. I didn’t expect it to see it under the ‘posts’ tab since I haven’t tagged anything ‘inkscape’ in the last few days, but I do have probably 20 or 30 posts tagged ‘inkscape’ on my blog so I kind of expected it to show up under the ‘blogs’ tab.
Hmm. I thought the Blogger(tm) labels were like any other blog tagging system and that they’d be picked up by Technorati. Maybe I’ve got to add Technorati specific tags to my posts like Kent does?
I signed up and ‘claimed’ my blog there a couple years back, but maybe I’ve got to be doing more to be visible there?
Anybody care to educate me on this?
Someone please tell me how this is supposed to work.
Just another test site 