Steve Rubel points out some interesting resources which show how to extend the power of Google Reader.
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More human search
Human-aided search gets a leg-up as Amazon boss Jeff Bezos invests in Cha-Cha.
Yahoo! regroups in China
Yahoo! refocusses its China operations as a b2b search business, as intensive local competition forces yet another rethink in China.
Tags without Technorati
TagBuildr is an alternative to Technorati tags. It allows you to create tags (rather clumsily as you have to go to the site, generate the tag, copy the code generated, and paste it into the blog post). However, there is something interesting here: it conforms to the rel-tag microformat which defines a standard for tags wherever they are, pointing to a possible future where tags are genuinely cross-platform.
Google: APIs which bite
Google’s decision to start charging a fee for access to the Google AdWords API comes under scrutiny from John Battelle.
Venture investors would need to be aware of how open Google will be with APIs going forward. Any startup that is working on a mashup that would take information from Google via an API would have an increased level of risk. (What if Google begins to charge for the spreadsheet API, or the maps API?)
Small is beautiful
Steve Rubel, again, this time on the wonders of microchunking, microformats, and the consumption of smaller and smaller units of content. “Media brands that ignore this trend will become irrelevant in a world where aggregation is king,” he says.
Daylife in the spotlife
Steve Rubel takes a look at Daylife, a start up which Jeff Jarvis is involved in. This news aggregator pulls stories together into pages to give the complete view.
‘Web 2.0’ is Wikipedia’s Most Cited Term of 2006
John Battelle’s Searchblog points out that ‘Web 2.0’ was Wikipedia’s Most Cited Term of 2006.
Recruitment round up
PaidContent has some interesting ruminations on the recruitment space. The highlights: Hitwise reports that visits to the big three US sites, Monster, Yahoo Hotjobs and CareerBuilder has fallen by sharply; BusinessWeek suggests that Google is likely to buy either CareerBuilder or Monster; by the end of 2006 online recruitment was worth more than hard copy.
ePaper – not far from reality
PaidContent.org reports on the £100m venture funding received by ePaper start up Plastic Logic. The money is to be used to build a factory in Germany.
The company plans to improve the quality of its plastic displays from 150 pixels-per-inch, 16-shade greyscale in 2008 to 20 dots-per-inch, 4,096-color screens in 2010 and full video ability by 2012, says IDG.
Some blue chip investors are involved in the deal, including Intel, Bank of America and BASF.