DavePress

Pleased to see that at last this blog registers something on Google’s toolbar for PageRank - 4/10 which isn’t too bad. Much better than nothing at all, anyway!

I’ve been playing about quite a bit with Google CSE this weekend, firstly seeing how it would work with Twitter (as mentioned here previously), and secondly now with wikis.

There is a load of great information out there on the various hosted wiki services like WikiSpaces, pbWiki, Stikipad and WetPaint to name a few. But how do you find these wikis if you want to contribute, or just to read stuff from them?

So, here’s theWikiFinder. It searches every wiki hosted at those mentioned above, along with Wikia and Wikipedia too. I tested it with the phrase “social media”, which brought up the wikipedia entry first (naturally) but second was David Wilcox’s Social Media Wiki on WikiSpaces. For some reason I feel this justifies the effort putting it all together - it works!

On my Vista-running laptop, I had FeedDemon installed, a super desktop based RSS aggregator. I’ve always been more comfortable using this type of app as opposed to a web based solution like Google Reader or Bloglines. When I don’t have my laptop with me and I need to use a public PC or a mobile device, I can still use the NewsGator onlie service, which syncs up with FeedDemon so I don’t end up having to read stuff twice.

When I got my MacBook, then, it was an obvious choice to download NetNewsWire, NewsGator’s desktop app for the Mac. I hoped it would be the equivalent of FeedDemon, but sadly it isn’t, for me. This is surprising, because both products are developed by the same community, and I would have thought that some of the innovations of FeedDemon would have filtered through to the Mac app.

Here are some things I’d really like to see added to NetNewsWire, that are already in place in FeedDemon:

• The ability to hide subscriptions with no new items: FeedDemon let’s me ensure that the only feeds that appear in view are those with something new to read. I can’t find this option in NetNewsWire, and it means I have to scroll through loads of empty feeds to get to the new stuff
• Newspapers: these are the different ways you can display feeds. For example, the way you look at a Flickr photostream feed is different from a standard text based blog. FeedDemon lets you set just how you want stuff presented. NetNewsWire, as far as I can tell, doesn’t
• Panic button: OK, so this is a very new feature to FeedDemon, but it’s super useful. If you have a huge backlog of feeds, the panic button lets you mark a certain amount of them read, leaving you with the current stuff. NetNewsWire needs this!
• Attention reports: FeedDemon provides you with loads of stats about what items and feeds you pay the most attention too. Useful stuff. Can’t find it in NetNewsWire

Any other NetNewsWire users out there? How do you find it in comparison to other apps?

Now, this is depressing news. Brace yourselves.

I downloaded and installed the Google toolbar this evening, just so I could check the PageRank of my site. Yeah, I know there are third party sites out there that do the same job, but I wanted the information from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

I wish I hadn’t bothered.

My PageRank is zero! Nought! Nil! Nothing! Nada! Zilch! You get the picture.

(For those that are unaware, PageRank is the system by which Google decides the priority of sites turning up in search results. It’s passed on by linking: getting linked to by a site with a high PageRank score can dramatically increase your own, thus netting you some serious search engine visability. As always, if you want to know more, Wikipedia is your friend.)

I really don’t understand how this can be. I mean, I am not expecting anything too dramatic, but a solid 4 surely wouldn’t have been out of the question? I even have the Google Sitemaps plugin installed, and everything!

It’s not like I don’t appear in Google at all anyway - as this search shows. So maybe there’s an argument that who cares?

The trouble is that I do.

Google’s customised search engine service is really cool, useful and dead easy to use. It’s what I used to create LGSearch, which is one of the most successful bits of online work I have done. What Google CSE does is allow you to create a ‘whitelist’ of sites you want to limit your search to, so it’s a way of guaranteeing relevance in search results.

Another use of it is to replace your default blog search functionality. For example, it’s better than the WordPress standard search because it searches pages as well as posts; and it allows you to run contextual ads next to the results - taking people away from your blog but providing you with a little income, which is always nice.

The functionality is improved even more by using the new AJAX results overlay, which means there is no need to create a results page. Try it out on DavePress using the search box on the top right.

To get this on your WordPress blog, all you need to do is head over to Google CSE, create your search engine, remembering to only add your blog’s URL to the whitelist, and then copy the search box code into a text widget. Easy!

While I was in the customised search mood, I thought it might be useful to have one for the upcoming barcampukgovweb. Click the logo below to jump to it.

There has been a flurry of largely negative postings about the newly launched alpha of Wikia Search - Jimmy Wales’ human powered search engine. I’ve bookmarked quite a few at del.icio.us, which will pop up on this blog around midnight tonight.

Phil Bradley has a nice little summary though:

Results are fairly basic, with a title, summary, URL, cached version and some sort of rating. Here’s the one for the top ranking site relating to Web 2.0 - see if you can work out what it means! That is so going to keep the SEO bods intrigued. There’s also a star rating system, which you can click on, but you get a message saying that they don’t actually do anything yet. Please - either make them do something or take them away until they are ready to do something.

Seariki (a conflation of search and wiki) is a new China based search engine which provides a way of finding information in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia search itself can be slightly frustrating, in that if it can find an exact match for your search term, it takes you straight to it, rather than returning a list of potential results.

Seariki provides a very Google-esque interface, and returns lists of results just as you would expect. It also provides a directory approach using categories on the home page. It’s also possible toview cached previews of content by clicking the “scrape” button next to a result.

It’s a pretty useful addition to ways of finding information within Wikipedia. Interesting that there are Google ads down the side of the results - people are finding ways of monetising Wikipedia content even if Jimmy Wales refuses to.