The rumors were true, Twitter has acquired Summize, and not only that, they also launched a new search page for you to play with.

Summize is a popular service for searching Twitter and keeping up with emerging trends in real-time. Like Twitter, Summize offers an API so other products and services can filter the constant queue of updates in a variety of ways. The Summize service and API will be merged with our own and integrated under the Twitter brand.

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Adobe is making Flash searchable, in partnership with juggernauts like Google. ReadWrite/Web writes about it, and is writing up Adobe’s online activity overall, like AIR and Acrobat.com. I think they are spot on, Adobe is really focusing on online these days, and they are doing it well. Think about all the AIR apps, for instance.

However, with Flash being searchable, one thing that strikes me is the possibility of a blogging platform, much like WordPress and Movable Type, but in Flash. read more

Twing.com is a new search engine, geared at forums and online communities. They’ve been around since January, and as the site shows, it is still very much beta. Not only the actual service, but the site as well - the how to use page is lacking, for example.

Nevertheless, it looks like an interesting service that might fill a void. This from a press release recently sent out:

“Online forums are an established medium people have been using to communicate since the early days of the internet, even predating the web. The number of users of these forums has been consistently growing year over year, and recent estimates of U.S. users alone exceeds 50 million,” said Kevin Shea, General Manager for Twing.com. “As more users become active, more forums have been created and this trend is continuing. Our goal is to help these internet users to participate in discussions, ask questions, get answers and offer advice by providing a resource that organizes this category of online content and uncovers the discussions that interest them. We expect Twing.com to be an invaluable resource for forum users and owners.”

Check out Twing.com, and tell me what you think of this service. Are they filling a need, or is Google enough?

While researching information with a client regarding integration of WordPress and a popular educational, proprietary software package, we were stunned at the number of bad reviews, horror stories, and frustration with using that program - let’s call it ABC.

Finding such negative information about ABC was not our goal. We were looking for technical articles and had to wade through post titles like Overcoming ABC Frustrations, If You Want Technical Support Don’t Ask ABC, Why Teachers Hate ABC, When ABC is More Trouble Than Your Students, The Battle to Convince the School Board to Not Use ABC, Why We Hate ABC, and so on.

Frustrated with using the program herself, my client was stunned by the number of public complaints and negative rants. Stepping back to reconsider, she finally said, “Let’s change our parameters. Let’s research if WordPress integrates with a similar program, one without the bad reputation.” Once she returned to her office, she would put my project to develop a proposal to stop using this very costly program for her university and transition the school to a better program.

All because of an unrelated simple keyword search, ABC would lose over a hundred thousand dollars a year from this university now convinced that this isn’t the way to go.

While this huge economic decision was influenced by search engine results, results which may not truly reflect the quality and integrity of the program, online reputations are made and broken by what people uncover through their searches. Are you paying attention to your online reputation for your blog, business, and life?
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A reader recently asked me how he could repeat the traffic magnet power of a post he wrote a year ago featuring the logo of a local football team. He told me that he gets continuous traffic to that post daily, and he wants to repeat it, bringing even more daily traffic into his blog.

Traffic magnets can be fleeting or consistent over time. We aren’t talking about exclusive pictures of celebrities or the Digg-effect blog post that brings in thousands of visitors in one or two days, then traffic drifts off to nothing. Traffic magnets continue to be draws to your blog over the long haul - one, two, even four or five years after publishing.

While many believe that any traffic is good traffic, traffic magnets come in two very distinctive audience groups: one-shot deals or easy conversions.
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Inquisitor is a cool plugin for Safari, and now Yahoo owns it. The developer, David Watanabe, won’t be joining Yahoo, but will continue the development.

I look forward to assisting Yahoo! in refining and extending the Inquisitor user experience beyond where it is today. I truly believe that Inquisitor and its users can only benefit, both from Yahoo’s resources and attention, and from the product integration possibilities that would have been impossible to pursue on my own.

The idea behind this is, of course, to tap in to the search market coming from Safari, which uses Google per default.

Hat tip: Liquidicity

Now in the 10am session on Social Search in the Corporate Environment here at Minnebar.

Presenter is Rich from Honeywell Labs - he built the first websites for Honeywell back before the graphical website days when most folks were browsing using Lynx and other text online web browsers.

Original blogging platform at Honeywell was Movable Type under their commercial license approach - we’ll find out in a bit if he’s still using that internally. Session will be focused on social media and search within a large corporation.

Honeywell using alot of open source based software within the firewall for social media and social work.

Appears that they are using Connectbeam for social media search inside the firewall - and also using a Google Search Appliance for internal search. Mmm, I’d love one of those at some of my clients.

Connectbeam integrates with Exchange Server, if that’s your poison, and integrates with internal Google search appliances as well as external Google searches as well. It’s not an issue integrating services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and others into the Connectbeam platform. Interesting..

Unfortunately, his projector is not working so we may go without any live examples…

<5 minutes later> PROJECTOR IS NOW BACK UP. Yay

Connectbeam appears to integrate directly into Google Search and other search engines - displays bar on the right with related internal content and tags…

10 licenses for $1k - rather cheaper than what I would have probably expected.. upcoming versions will have RSS feeds and an API…

Confluence is their wiki platform - $3k for a license… 16,000+ users are contributing to their wiki..

Wiki has a tag cloud already associated with it - plus can be tagged for use within ConnectBeam..also has a Sharepoint 07 tie-in.. very semantic web connections here… looks like the goal is to provide discovery within the enterprise..

Honeywell has tried for years to build a skills database to let folks connect with each other - the tagging within Connectbeam has really fulfilled that function.. Senior leaders (direct reports of CEO) are using the system to some extent - and want to foster more connectivity amongst individual contributors throughout the company…

Using some simple windows based feed readers inside the firewall - doing this to read competitive intelligence feeds and other RSS feeds within the corporation…

technical library showing information on various pre-built RSS feeds on key topics for research to keep team members and employees informed on their competition, etc.. using Compendex Plus for some of this (license fee involved)…

Honeywell running daily rss searches/google searches on the names of key engineers at their competitors

Rich’s blog is at eContent.

Last weekend at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam I spoke with Anton Johansson and CEO Martin Källström from the new blog search engine Twingly. They present themselves as a new spam-free blog search engine with a strong focus on the conversational nature of the blogosphere.

Lorelle VanFossen recently addressed the issue of spam in blog search engines and keeping their index spam free is one of the main objectives of Twingly. On top of that they focus on conversational search in the blogosphere by partnering with traditional media. They have closed several deals with major newspapers in Europe which provide links to the blogs that reference them. This is another step in showing the two-way links between blogs and online newspapers. Their main competitor in this area is of course Sphere but Twingly focuses on different markets. Read all about their ideas to start another blog search engine in the following interview and grab a special Blog Herald beta invite code while you can!

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According to a Wall Street Journal article, “The Coming Ad Revolution”, get ready for your web host and Internet Service Provider (ISP) to start bringing ads your way:
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Earlier this week, I introduced you to the Clusty search engine, with tips on how it can be used to brainstorm and research blog content. Today, I want to showcase the KWMap, a visual keyword map search engine.

KWMap is different as it graphically charts out relationships to your search term or phrase. It’s invaluable for exploring those relationships for brainstorming and research, giving you a new perspective on your search.
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