See: http://www.opthink.com/, for a product review search engine. I tested this out by searching for product reviews for some 42 inch LCD TVs, and found that it did a pretty good job at finding and indentifying product information. This could be a useful tool for individuals, as well as companies monitoring their online reputation and brands.

Techcrunch recently announced (http://www.techcrunch.com/) receiving funding for expanding and marketing the DNN platform. See also: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryId/2095/DotNetNuke-Raises-Venture-Capital.aspx for more information.

Looking to waste some time? Check out HULU (www.hulu.com) or South Park Studios (www.southparkstudios.com). Hulu certainly is growing in popularity ... where else can you find old Lost in Space Episodes? Give HULU a try ... would be interesting if/when some of the satellite providers get into this action, or partner with them ... I'd love to be able to view the HULU stuff on my TV (without having to rewire the house).

A quick rant ... comments on the blog (positive, negative, indifferent) are great ... as long as they don't personally attack anyone, I'll generally approve them. But don't think that you can post a brief comment with a link designed to get you referral $$$ and expect them to be approved. Sorry, just isn't going to happen ... host your referral stuff on your own site.

Wow! That's my initial impression of Viewzi (www.viewzi.com), a new web search visualization site that does some really cool things with websearch. Basically, Viewzi does away with all of the text links, replacing them with well-designed and intuitive results pages ... with a visual flair. Try typing in a company name, then choosing the Google Timeline view ... suddenly, you can get a quick picture of that company's activities in the past few months. Add to that custom news displays, video, audio, shopping and others ... this could be a game changer, if people adapt to the new modes of search. I'm going to evaluate this site further during the upcoming weeks, but I'm really liking what I see so far. Hopefully they'll be able to build on this beta release ... I can see uses for not only personal users but business users as well.

Well, PC Magazine just announced their 100% transition to a digital version, due to take place next year (see: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2335009,00.asp for more details). They will offer a digital edition that is portable, deliverable via email and other methods, and will continue their network of websites.

This isn't surprising, and we should see many more magazines shifting to this delivery mode, as the prices for printing and distribution continue to rise ... and the willingness of people to pay for content decreases (possibly the largest factor in these transitions). 

Check out www.paperofRecord.com, an online repository of newspaper articles (most from Canadian papers), complete with full images of the original product.

One of the best utilities for debugging and testing web apps is Firebug (http://getfirebug.com/). I use it to debug CSS, Javascript and to test load times for sites ... this is an extremely useful Firefox plugin ... anyone who does ANY development work needs this tool!

Check out BlogScope's tools for visualizing content from over 30 million blogs and 520 million posts. The site (http://www.blogscope.net/) currently is in preview/beta release, but has some nice tools allowing you to track the popularity of a search term, as well as running a comparison against two search terms (see below for an example). BlogScope also allows the embedding of their charts in other content ... such as blogs.

 

Overall, this is a good tool, it will be interesting to see if they develop additional analysis modules, as they could begin competing against some of the larger buzz monitoring outfits.

Despite my reluctance to spend $$ these days, I just might have to upgrade to Blackberry's Storm touchscreen PDA. Initial looks are promising, with Iphone like functionality promised, plus it works with the Verizon network. Also heard from another techie that I could use the phone as a wireless modem, freeing me from having to access unsecure wireless networks. Read more about pricing at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=492&tag=nl.e539. 

AT&T just launched a new video search engine "VideoCrawler" (http://www.videocrawler.com/), bringing yet another player into this crowded space. Like others, VideoCrawler allows searching, rating, tagging and sharing of video plus audio, Internet radio, Internet TV, games and ring tones.

Check out a great article by Risa Sacks, a fellow AIIP member and phone researcher extraordinaire. I've frequently turned to phone research (especially when doing government or industry research), and generally have had good luck, once I've connected to the right person.

Read the article at: http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/oct08/Sacks.shtml. 

Note to self; check out Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) before the end of the year. They now offer SQL Server 2005 support, which you can couple with Windows 2003/IIS to develop .NET applications. Since Microsoft's Azure is not yet ready for prime time, Amazon's services might be a good alternative.

Interesting article, especially the renewed focus on clay as a training surface. Read more at: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/tennis/2008-11-05-USTA-overhaul_N.htm. Also interesting is their focus on finding players earlier ... 9-10 years old? Not sure how well that will work, as the player who is a phenom at 9 might get burned out, fail to grow, or get injured.

You spend over an hour attempting to figure out why a "DIV" tag displayed on IE, but failed to display on Firefox, only to realize that you're testing Firefox on your staging server, not the dev server where you were making all of the changes. (Note to self ... look at the address bar!!!)