I was talking my my friend Adam the other day about Wink, and he mentioned the “Wink Answers” feature. This is a typically ingenious Web 2.0 functionality mashup of search + wiki + tagging. Apparently, Wink is a tag-enhanced search engine — but once you search, you’re offered “Wink Answers” in addition to tag- and Google-powered search results. Wink Answers are simply wiki entries keyed to search strings. Given that a string like “mov video converter” is much more specific than any of the single words contained therein, this could be more useful than, say, the Wikipedia entry for video formats. Neat idea. Apparently, someone else has already taken this to its logical endpoint and mashed wiki + URL to create “Shadows” — clearly insane, but not surprising.

In any case, there isn’t yet a _Wink Answer_ for “mov video converter”. Given the results of my search yesterday, I now have the answer. The question is, why would I stuff it into Wink? I can blog it right here, Google (and a thousand other spiders) will crawl it, and the next time you search for “mov video converter” on Wink (or Google, or anywhere else), my post will show up, if it’s a good one. The only reason I’d shove my Answer into Wink is if I don’t have some other way to hang it out where spiders can see it — and if I’m on the net searching for info about “mov video converter”, then I almost certainly do.

The same problem/solution applies to reviews, which I’d guess are the broadest and deepest user-generated content out there. So why do so many people take so much time to write detailed reviews and post them in single, walled off databases like Amazon, Yelp, sfsurvey.com, etc.? It all comes down to the value exchange. You provide the content, the site provides the UI, and specialized economy of scale. The amount of personal content/data/facts that you’re willing to embed/give to a site is related to the utility that the site provides to you, personally, with regard to that information. But, more importantly, it’s directly proportional to the extent that particular site can act as a proxy for your desired audience.

As broad search UI’s become more powerful, the need for specialized UI’s to act as proxies to specialized audiences is reduced. If I can search for “reviews San Francisco chowhound azie” — and I can — and get an aggregate thread of web-wide posts and information, including stuff that doesnt happen to be posted on Chowhound’s board, why would I want to wade through this? I don’t.

I think I finally understand why “blogging” _might_ be such a big deal.

Check back shortly for “wink answer mov video converter“.

I installed Google Desktop since it’s been updated to index (in particular) Thunderbird email… used it for a couple of days, and now it’s gone, gone, gone until they fix the performance issues. I was getting all sorts of delays opening and saving files, and just navigating around the OS. I have a gig of RAM and a fast PC, it’s not that - it was Google Desktop. I removed it and thank god, things are back to normal. Great functionality, but not ready for prime time. I think the big G blew it on this one and released too early. Even if it’s labeled “Beta”, people will form a negative impression. I’ll try it again when the next version is ready.

Rumors are flying about what will be the next Google service to launch. Some are betting on G-Cal, some on “Google Wallet” — which I for one am betting will be called GPay. That would be a nice little quasi-rhyme with eBay.

This comes up once in a while… I’d like an extension for Thunderbird that would allow me to hit “Send Later” and specify and date and time for the email to be sent out. This would allow me to compose emails destined for European clients on, say, Friday afternoon Pacific Time, and have them delivered mid-morning on Monday, GMT. If I send them out real-time, my time, they tend to get buried in the weekend pileup.

Aha… as usual, it looks like someone has tried to implement this: SendTools extension for Thunderbird. I’ll have to see how it works!

Update: it does work. Some other users have complained about the fact that it creates local folders to do its job, but I don’t see this as a problem. Thanks to AusDilecce for this.

Update: Last night I did have the problem that some others have reported with the extension getting hung up and sending multiple copies of a (huge) email. Ugh. I also don’t like how SendTools introduces a slight delay even when sending normally. It makes me doubt the reliability of sending email - not good. I think I’ll uninstall for now and see if the code improves.

Side note: A Google search didn’t really turn up good results for this, so I had to search within the Thunderbird forums — an example of how much of the ‘net isn’t yet indexed by search engines. Despite how massive Google seems, there’s another 90-95% out there.

I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal today. Of course, my name isn’t exactly Bowen Delle, but that’s pretty close — and not nearly as bad as some other corruptions I’ve heard.

So, why bother with “tagging”, or a service like del.icio.us? Who, you might ask, has the time to think up and key in a bunch of descriptive keywords for every bookmark. Just bookmark it and… forget it!

Exactly.

I look in on my old IE or more recent Firefox bookmarks very rarely. In fact, there’s only one Firefox bookmark that I use with any regularity (aside from those in my “Bookmarks Toolbar”) — and that’s for the status page of our WiFi router. I don’t use the others because I’ve simply forgotten about them - they’re buried deep in folders, locked on my hard drive, invisible.

Joshua makes a nice point in his interview with Jeremy Wagstaff: “Search is more associated with the recall, whereas tagging is more associated with the storage.” Quite right, because of course an individual doesn’t really have much opportunity to “store” things in general on the internet - after all, your blog (if you have one) is just one of several billion web pages. Search is broad yet shallow, in terms of personal differentiation. Bookmarks, whether on your hard drive on with a service like del.icio.us, are narrow but much deeper, richer, more satisfying on a personal basis. You can’t find anything and everything on the internet in your bookmarks, but you can (hopefully) find those things that you care about most.

So, why use del.icio.us (or one of the others) instead of your browser’s own bookmarks?

1) Central storage: A online bookmarking service is accessible from anywhere you use the internet, not just one PC. This applies to any of the services, including toolbar-based bookmark services like Yahoo and A9. Del.icio.us can be intergrated into Firefox with Foxylicious and various bookmarklets. Someone could also easily build a del.icio.us toolbar.

2) Personal and global view: An online service lets me see not only my own bookmarks, but those of other people. In data-architecture terms, I can pivot on any one of at least three axes: person, URL, and tag. Just for starters, I can see who else has bookmarked the URL that I did, what other URL’s that person has bookmarked, and what other bookmarks have been tagged with the same tag. This is social networking with some real utility. Friendster is fun and all, but once you’ve gotten all your friends to sign up, there’s not much reason to go back unless you’re looking for dates.

3) Integration: Like many other new-school web services, del.icio.us has open API’s, which allows people to build services that talk to and leverage del.icio.us. Contrary to the prehistoric thinking of some developers, your worth is not measured in how much you keep others from knowing — it’s measured in often what you know is used. Check out some of the experiments floating around del.icio.us.

4) Tagging: Although I came upon the idea by way of del.icio.us, tagging can be applied to almost any application, including browser-based bookmarks. The advantage with an online service is that I can pivot on tags not only within my own data, but across other people’s bookmarks and even across other services.

More on this later…

PS - AAPL is up to 73, which means I’m almost to my Mini. Now lookee there — I wonder if Apple chose the name in part for the affinity with the other Mini. In the meantime, I’m reading up on Mac software… Also, they’re not exactly rare any more, but I have plenty of Gmail invites - let me know if you want one.