semanticvoid

Something which was bound to happen. After all even Google has to rely on human intelligence to do some of its work. Google Coop helps people contribute their expertise (in other terms bookmark links) by adding labels (categories) and annotating (description) them. But it goes way beyond the del.icio.us mode by using this information in improvising search.

In all the forums I visited I came across this one point again and again: “Google Coop is susceptible to spammers“. I don’t agree. Like any other social app which is fuelled by the people, at the first glance it does seem susceptible. But it is the social factor that seems to ward of spammers. Quoting a FAQ from Google Coop:

Who will see my labels?

Users who subscribe to you will see your labels for relevant searches. As your labels become higher quality and more comprehensive, and as more users subscribe to you, your labels may start surfacing to more Google users than just those who explicitly subscribed. A number of factors help determine how broadly your labels appear — such as the number of subscribers you have, how many websites you’ve labeled, and, most importantly, how often your labels make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.

Google seems to have realised that it can achieve a lot more by utilizing the human intelligence, Intelligence which is the core of the Web 2.0. After all the ubiquitous search is also based on human knowledge (creation of links between pages).

After two years of loyalty to Blogger I seem to have broken free from its shackles. Although I have moved away from it, I will always remember the fabulous web service which introduced me to the magical blogosphere. As a wonderful blogging platform, it has all one needs for beginners but lacks certain features for advanced bloggers.

Over the past two years I have grown as a blogger and so have my needs from a blogging platform. Therefore I decided to switch to a privately hosted WordPress platform (Privately? Well thats another discussion altogether). And to tell you the truth, I haven’t looked back ever since, infact I’m loving it (-:.

What does the Blogger lack?

Blogger has always been the first choice due to its affiliation with Google, but although Google may be the God in search…not quite though here.

• To speak of the UI, WordPress is fairly much cleaner and organized. Blogger is cluttered and less user friendly. With all the AJAX, movable divs, and coloured highlights thrown in WordPress definitely rocks.
• One vital feature lacking in Blogger is the ability to create categories. I just so couldn’t do without this feature that I decided to write a hack for it.
• WordPress always dynamically generates its pages, so you never have to regenerate pages unlike in Blogger.
• Blogger is not open source, WordPress is. Open source means that everyone and anyone contributes. Just to illustrate, Blogger has become stale. It has not released any new features lately, the last I remember was the blog search. With Google around this was something expected. But yet nothing worthwhile to facilitate blogging. WordPress on the other hand has countless plugins with many more under development.
• Blogger has no password protection for posts. A well thought feature of WordPress, which lets me password protect individual posts. Quite useful when you have a personal daily blog where certain posts are too personal for strangers to read.
• Switching to WordPress from another platform is easy as hell. The import blog feature is definitely cool. I don’t remember Blogger having something like this.

Every blogger has his own reasons for sticking to a platform, but for all those still stuck onto Blogger try a switch. Trust me on this.

With all the speculation about Google hosting Wikipedia pages and Google Reference, the question everyone seems to be asking is ”Why Does Google Love Wikipedia?“. The Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is maintained by the people, it is for the people to use and is of the people i.e. has no central authority governing it. Its an collaborative effort where everyone contributes.

Currently Google bots crawl the abyss of the internet, parsing and indexing information from pages. All of these pages might not be useful or its content accurate or reliable from the user perspective. On the other hand the Wikipedia is moderated and maintained by the people themselves ensuring accuracy. Although the facts on Wikipedia cannot be guaranteed to be accurate but public moderation ensures that false data will be removed eventually.

Hence Google’s interest in Wikipedia is evident from the fact that the people would themselves act as data sources. It is like every individual is a Google bot, feeding data right into the Google Indexer. Google would also gain from the fact that this data would be accurate which is not the case for the web crawler.

This is how I perceive Googles interest in Wikipedia. What are your views?

I’ve been using Blogger since a long time due to its association with Google. I’ve also tried out other blogging platforms like WordPress etc. But the most important feature I missed in Blogger was the categories. I have a whole bunch of posts each belonging to different topics It was all too messy and cumbersome to get them organized without categorization.

If theres a problem there has to be a solution to it. There are many solutions to this category problem but I’ll be explaining only one of the cleanest approaches.

First of all you need a main blog where you need categories to be implemented. Secondly you’ll need a mail account with good filtering features like in Gmail. Thirdly you’ll need to create a blog for every category that you want. You’ll need to the follwing set up as explained:
For example consider a main blog named ‘Da Tek ee‘. Set the ‘Mail-to-Blogger Address‘ to whatever you want like datekee.XXX@blogger.com. For every category blog like ‘Da Tek ee > Google‘ set the ‘BlogSend Address’ to the mail address you’re using for filtering purposes. In the mail account set up a filter to forward mails containing the subject “Da Tek ee > Google” to the main blogs ‘Mail-to-Blogger Address‘. You just finished setting up your first category. This can be done for as many categories you want.

So now whenever any post is published in the category blog it is forwarded to the email address provided. Due to the filter created in the mail account the post is in turn forwarded to the main blog where it is published. Each post has link to the blog where it was originally posted (link to the category blog in our case) e.g. ‘Posted by Anand to Da Tek ee > Google‘.

Happy blogging until Blogger eventually comes up with the category feature (-;.