All in Search
While it is true that a platform such as GitHub is not really designed to be as user friendly as, say, Facebook, the fact is that the sharing of technical expertise among mid-level IT staff and data administrators in different governmental agencies has probably been at least as important to open data progress as the Administration’s top down support.
It’s fashionable these days to point to Facebook’s ascendancy as why Google-type search’s dominance of the Internet is over.
What Google is doing with Google Instant is beginning to expose some of the inner workings of its internal processes in real time. Making the fine tuning of this process more “social” and also responsive to realtime user tuning could be next and might be one way that Google Wave based technology finds its way into Search.
One year ago I published Balkanization of the Web - or Just Better Focus? There I expressed concern that the proliferation of specialized search engines — and the indexing to support them — would lead to a more fragmented web. I thought that gaining the benefits of specialization could ultimately reduce the benefits we experience from the nearly universal access to web based contents that we’ve been taking for granted.
Google announced on June 12 some additions to the new Google Analytics service. Chief among these is the availability of hourly updates, which allows for more realtime tracking, which occasionally comes in handy.
My web publishing service vendor Squarespace has finally added a site search feature as a standard “widget” that can be added via an extremely easy point-and-click install procedure.
It's amazing what you can find by searching the web -- if you know how to look.
I've been heads-down for the past few weeks on a client project, a strategic market analysis for an international outsourcing firm. I've been researching available public sources of sales and technology trends in a variety of markets. I've been aggressively pursuing a variety of web based research options as well as purchasing research documents in a few key areas.