Meme Tracking Hits the Sports Market

A few weeks ago Sports Illustrated published an expansive feature article (subscription required) about how citizen sportswriters are changing sports journalistm. Obsessive and often posting about events in real time, these sports bloggers are spreading rumors, arguing and just generally feeding their sports addictions 365/24/7. Sometimes they even break stories....

Diving into Online Storage

Like a lot of people, I work from multiple computers. I have a personal laptop, a work laptop, and randomly find myself using different machines when going to meetings, traveling or visiting friends and family. So I have a problem getting files from one machine to another. I have a flash drive I use on occasion,...

Live.com Search Has Serious Usability Problems

Joel Spolsky, the guru behind Joel on Software, has a straightforward and on point definition of usability:

“Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.”

By that definition (and just about any other), the beta web search currently available off of Microsoft’s Live.com website isn’t usable....

Adventures in Image Searching

Here is the first result if you query Microsoft’s new image search engine for “bill gates“:

Here is the first result if you search Google Images for “bill gates“:

Searches were done at 5:00 pm EST on Saturday, March 18....

Wired News: Man Vs Machine in Newsreader Wars

There is a good article on Wired News about the different approaches being taken by Web 2.0 news sites like Digg and Tailrank to solve the information overload problem. With the explosion of blogs, its gotten harder to wade through the hay to find the needle. These sites attempt to find the most popular stories on the Internet at any given time,...