GMail’s AJAX Spell Check Evolves Further

Disclaimer: I do not love Google. I may use its websearch all the time, it’s blog search too, its news and image search, it’s maps – etc. but I am not in love with it. There are so many alternatives. See, for example, Jux2, Clusty and Feedster. Heck, MSN Search gets great results and offers RSS feeds for every web search. Beat that! Well, a great spell checker is pretty cool.

Is it just me, or is the GMail spell checker not only one of the best things online but also built with AJAX? And it appears to have just been updated to become way more functional. Like in the last 10 minutes it was updated!

That’s rad. I already use it as my default spell checker for all that blog software out there that doesn’t have spell checking built in. Now it’s even groovier. Check it out, or if you don’t have a GMail account and would like to try one of the best email services available – send me an email and I’ll send you an invite.

Update: I wrote this late last night, and this morning it appears that the spell checker is back to its previous version. The new version allowed you to continue typing in your email after clicking “spell check” – instead of freezing everything in blue like it does now. There were a number of other small, additional features. Knowing Google’s habit of throwing up new services and then taking them down, I should have grabbed a screen shot. It was cool though.

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Dynamic Blog Lists and Promo Work

Doing some promo work for a client (Sustainable Energy in Motion Bike Tour) I’m going through the Technorati Blog Finder list to pitch for coverage. Looked at my “sent mail” folder to see where I left off yesterday, but I notice now that the list changes every day! Default view is ranked by “authority” (by number of inbound links indexed by Technorati). That ranking changed since yesterday and all the sudden my list is catywompus. Should have gone through the list alphabetically or Furled it, where I’d get a cached copy of the pages I was looking at as they appeared when I first found them. I was told to email the ones with the biggest audiences first, so Furling the list would have been the best idea.

Just thought I’d post that in case you find yourself in similar circumstances.

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A Review of Web Site Change Detection Services

Update: So Gary Price at Search Engine Watch has given this article huge link love, and that’s probably why you’re here. I’ll be posting an interview I did with Gary later today (1/4) over at the blog of Net Squared. We talked about the same subject of this post, as well as RSS, teaching search and how ResourceShelf is maintained.

Ok, so every once in awhile I come upon a web page that 1. doesn’t change very often 2. doesn’t offer an RSS feed and 3. I want notification from any time the page changes. Most recently this has been like pages that say “this service is not accepting new accounts right now. we hope to reopen the service to new accounts when we get more servers.” Or, some time ago I was hired by someone concerned about the expansion of a nationwide retailer competing with them and I wanted to know of any little change made to the company’s List of Stores around the country. All too often I find press releases or calender entries on sites that have no RSS feeds and bad link structure, and are thus unscrapable by FeedFire.com. The following works for things like that too.

So, what can you do in such circumstances? You can set up an account with a web site monitoring service. But which one should you use? I found the following via the excellent site Fagan Finder’s URL Info, a boatload of site analysis tools.

Watch That Page
ChangeDetection
ChangeNotes
TrackEngine

Here’s my reviews:

Watch That Page
Offers email notification of changes that have occurred, will send changed text itself or notify you of broken pages. Can be sent daily or weekly at a set time. Offers a bookmarklet you can click on to add any page to your list of pages monitored. Will filter for certain words, but appears to only work across all pages or none, not for particular pages. Basic use is free, but they ask for a $20 donation for priority and professional use. No native support for RSS, but if you could use the following options: 1. an email to receive the notifications that offers RSS feeds of the inbox (GMail does this) or 2. Have the notifications sent to MailFeed. I know that RSS is the only way I’d want to receive any substantial number of these notifications!

So the good news about WatchThatPage is that it will send you the actual text that has changed. This is a widely used service that seems pretty darned reliable.

ChangeDetection

This site is old-school. It only notifies you that things have changed instead of delivering the change to you. It’s targeted towards web masters who want to add a “get email when this page changes” button on one of their pages. Don’t do that. You can do the same thing and lots more with WatchThatPage.

The one advantage to this is that it is very, very easy to use. You don’t have to create an account. You just tell it what URL you want monitored and what email to send notification of any changes to. This could make it nice for some purposes, and I have used it when I was too lazy to go to the trouble of signing in to other services that I forget my username and pw for. But I always end up unsatisfied that I’m not told what it is on a page that has changed.

ChangeNotes

This service does send the actual changed text, which is key. There is a bookmarklet here too. Registration is very, very easy. Just an email and a new password twice. There is also an interesting feature that supports customization for sending change notification to email lists! While I don’t encourage the use of email lists (RSS is way better) it’s a fact of life that many people still use them. After giving it a close look for the first time in awhile, I think this is a really good service.

TrackEngine

Bookmarklet, keyword inclusion and exclusion filtering and best of all – the whole page sent to you with the changed content highlighted in color! Nice! Other options are available too. This is by far the most professional looking service of those reviewed here. A free account is limited to monitoring 5 pages and only checks once per day at most. Now I got pretty excited when I saw that hourly checking for changes was an option. Then I saw that hourly checks were an option for paid users. Then I found out that “Hourly Watch Packages being launched soon – SPECIAL Promotions for folks who express their interest before the launch. Do so now (link to email).” And guess what? That’s what this page on the site said 3 years ago! The wonderful Internet Archive is made for checking up on claims like this (“coming soon!”).

One way or the other, I think TrackEngine still looks like one of the best services available if there are very few pages you anticipate tracking. The color coded highlighting of changes is pretty hard to resist!

Conclusion: Here’s what I’d do. If I was only very rarely finding a page that I really wanted to track changes to, and that is the case for me, then I’d probably sign up with TrackEngine. But both ChangeNotes and WatchThatPage are pretty fair options, and are a better idea if you might end up tracking more than 5 pages. For some of my clients I’m going to subscribe to, for example, antiquated events calenders that don’t have RSS feeds, have the change notification sent to MailFeed and then plop that feed in with the other feeds I’m subscribed to.

Final note: Bandwidth, storage, computing power – these are all things that are way cheaper today than they were 3 to 5 years ago when these services were the hot new thing. The technological changes have opened up a world of possibilities – that’s a big part of Web 2.0. So why, oh why then is no one offering me a service that checks hourly for changes to a web page? I’ve been told by some folks that anything online that’s worth looking at has an RSS feed now. I don’t agree, though I understand the cynicism.

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MP3Blogs and Playing Sound From Inside Your Site

Here’s an intro to the wacky world of MP3 Blogs and info on how YOU can have one-click audio played from right inside your blog or website. Woo hoo! Want to tell people about a cool podcast? Or a nifty song? You can make it easy for them to listen with this tool described below.

So it’s been a pretty busy day so far for me, but not as busy as these folks! The coolest thing I’ve found online today has been this awesome 1975 musical performance titled “Postal Workers Canceling Stamps At The University Of Ghana Post Office.” Give the little play button a click and check it out as you read the rest of this post!

Postal Workers Canceling Stamps At The University Of Ghana Post Office

Isn’t that awesome! I found it via on one of many MP3 Blogs now available online, this one called Aurgasm. The post for this song itself, with comments etc. is here.

Other MP3 Blogs I’ve found (via my awesome brother Tom) include The Hype Machine and Elbo.ws but there are lots and lots online. Del.icio.us contains 607 items tagged “mp3blog,” though at least some of them are probably directories of mp3blogs. The most popular items in that tag space are here and include The Hype Machine, Aurgasm (so my brother knows what’s hot) as well as sites like 3Hive (looks very cool) and music.for-robots.com.

These sites are on less that fully solid legal ground, but they are pretty darned cool if you ask me. Standard practices include posting links after every song to buy the album from the artist, a message on the sidebar urging you to pay for music at least some of the time and a note to anyone who owns copyrights on any of the music posted saying “just let me know if you want me to take your song down and down it will come – no problem.”

Snip… out goes the discussion of competing theories of intellectual property rights.

Anyway! So you might be wondering, “how do these sites put little play buttons that enable me to play these files without leaving the page?” Like these:

Rhythm’N’Brass by The Special Guests
Via 3Hive

Galaxies, by Laura Veirs (very beautiful song!)

Via music.for-robots.com

I don’t even have these songs on my server! And you can listen to them without leaving my site – wow!

How did I do it? Hours of painful toil! No, it wasn’t that hard actually. I just viewed the source code of the Aurgasm buttons, copied and pasted them into my blog post here, and changed the URL of the song being pointed at. Wow! It’s all made possible via Fabricio Zuardi and Andre Cardozo’s awesome open source XSPF Web Music Player. To learn more about this rad tool, check out this page and this page, both on the open source community site Sourceforge.

You don’t need to know about that stuff though just to use the tool. I am going to try to figure out how to make a bookmarklet for this code, but I don’t have time right now. But you can copy and paste the code from my site, replace the parts here with the mp3 filename you want to play and the title, and paste it into your own site.

It’s taking me too long to make the code appear as code in this blog post, so just go up to your browser’s View menu and “view source code” for this page. I’ll surround the code you want with asterisks and you can copy and paste it into your own blog posts or site.

Just look at the letters and symbols right around the file URL real close before you paste over them. You can do this! It’s not really very hard. Feedback: My brother just emailed and reminded me that it would be a good idea to include a direct link to the file that this tool streams, so folks can download it too.

Does this have you totally pumped up or what? (I’m stoked.) Well here’s something else to listen to, my Net Squared coworker Britt Bravo explaining how volunteers can plug in to the Net Squared community. Maybe your enthusiasm will spill over and you’ll go profile a non-profit group or two.

Britt Bravo on how you can help Net Squared (6 mins)

While you listen, here’s Britt’s blogs at NetSquared and at her Big Vision Career and Project Consulting.

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Tagging Bookmarklets – Not Just for Technorati Anymore

Full text search doesn’t always bring back the most relevant results available; just because a word in used on a page doesn’t mean that’s really what the page is about. Hence the practice of tagging texts with subject level metadata. There are many ways you can search for blog posts and other items that have been given a certain tag. The best known is via a Technorati Tag Search. Perhaps because this is the most well known option, people often refer to the tags at the end of their posts as Technorati Tags. On one level they may be that, but on another important level that is inaccurate.

The secret of these searchable tags is the rel=”tag” part of the code. The rest of the code in a blog tag is just a link to a Technorati tag search for the tag you are applying to your post. You don’t have to link to Technorati in order for your post to appear in a Technorati Tag Search! If you are pinging Technorati (should be automatic, I use Feedburner) and if your site is easily index-able – then Technorati is going to find anything you link with rel=”tag” in it and it should include that in its tag search results. Except Technorati indexing is kinda wack – as in it isn’t 99% reliable.

Nonetheless, it is good to tag your blog posts. People will find your posts and site that way. Here are two bookmarklets below that you can drag and drop onto your browser’s toolbar to create tag code for your posts. The first is for traditional “Technorati Tags” and will create links to Technorati Tag searches for your tags. The second bookmarklet may as well be called a “Tag Central Tag Creator” as it will create links to a search for your tag in Tag Central. Both will get your tags indexed in Technorati!

The pros and cons of using Tag Central? Pros: it pulls in results from a greater number of tag supporting platforms, including Upcoming.org, a social calendering service wherein events get tagged. Tag Central brings in all of the same sources as a Technorati Tag Search – and more. Tag Central also makes the RSS feeds for your tag in each platform very easy to subscribe to. The down sides? Tag Central is slow and ugly. But it’s still the best way to search the tagspace.

If the use of these bookmarklets is unclear to you, my friend Beth Kanter has made a video screencast about how they work.

These bookmarklets could easily be tweaked to link to any tag search for your tags: Icerocket, Eventful.com, Blinklist – anything! And no matter who your tags link to, Technorati should index them just because there’s a rel=”tag” in the link code.

If you want to tweak these bookmarklets, just drag them into a text editor, fiddle away, then put in a blog post or web site and they will be draggable just like these ones.

Here they are!

Update: see also this page for a more refined TagCentral bookmarklet.
TechnoratiTags

TagCentralTags

And for this post…
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Interview with Peter Brown of Immedi.at

I am totally in love with Peter Brown’s Immedi.at service. With one click you can monitor any RSS feed and receive an IM whenever it changes. I use this all the time. Last week I wrote about different ways that immedi.at can be used. Peter has been very nice about responding to my queries and even took the time to do the following IM interview with me this afternoon.

Marshall
 how do you describe immedi.at when you first tell people about it?

Peter
Depending on the person I am talking to, I usually say something like: It lets you see the Internet as it happens. Whenever something of interest is updated, you get a message telling you about the update.

I also often describe how we have such a static view of the internet, even though its this living breathing thing. immedi.at lets people see the internet evolve in a way

Marshall
I’m sure different people use it in many different ways – what are some of your favorite examples?

Peter
there are a bunch of people using it to get notified of when and where xbox 360’s are on sale … They get a messaging saying: XBOX 360, on sale at this store for this much RIGHT NOW

other people monitor craigslist and ebay. A lot of news stuff. some comment threads on blogs

we just added a new feature that actually lists the top ten most monitored feeds

http://immedi.at/feeds/top_ten

Marshall
cool!

Peter
click a link to add it to your list

Marshall
do you mind if I ask what sorts of things you use it for?

Peter
I use it to test if its working!

Marshall
me too, and lately it’s been great!

Peter
No, I monitor most of the RSS feeds I used to read in NewsWire or ROJO

I find that I would forget to visit the news reader or be too busy and miss stuff that I actually care about.

so for me its replaced my old readers … but I may be extreme

Marshall
was that your motivation for creating the service?

Peter
originally actually it was annoyed that i had to constantly check back with sites of interest to see what’d been happening. I found myself sometimes going back to my newsreader 10 times a day. Lacking anything that allowed that to push to me, I created immedi.at

really it was when I got into blogging. I wanted the ability to respond immediately to new stories on high traffic blogs because … i thought it would help the traffic of my own blog, which it definitely did. also, to be able to follow important comment threads.

Marshall
well I think it’s fantastic.

Peter
Thanks!

Marshall
can you tell us how it works?

Peter
it turned out to be more complicated than I originally had thought … On one end there is software that tries to detect changes in feeds by comparing the current feed with the last one every few minutes.

on the other end is software that can communicate with all the IM network protocols

the really tough part has been first inconsistent use of the Atom and RSS protocols and second strange quirks in the way all the IM networks operate

Marshall
it seems that you’ve really improved how well it works lately.  What sorts of ongoing problems remain unsolved?

Peter
Thanks. We’ve been hard at work. One thing is that some sites will modify the way a title is worded for a particular feed entry, even though its basically the same entry … we’d like to use some kind of a checksum to detect if an entry has changed ENOUGH to warrent transmission out over IM

also we want to add support for Yahoo Messenger and we’re looking into SMS and Email components as well

Marshall
any chance you’ll roll in notification of changes on sites that don’t publish feeds?

Peter
probably not. We think that the vast majority of sites worth monitoring offer feeds and those that dont — like ebay — have sites that do it for them

Marshall
what sort of business model are you envisioning?  I have a secret fantasy that immedi.at will be bought out by Feedburner.  Would something like that sound good to you?

Peter
Perhaps. We’re looking at a couple of different options, one of which is well suited to what feedburner does. namely charge content owners for extended services … or charge them to offer extended services just to their users who use immedi.at

we envision being able to earn money on both sides … charing users for extra services — perhaps sms — and charing content owners. But we’ll NEVER advertise.

Marshall
well, it certainly seems like you’re getting good reviews all over the web.  Immedi.at sure scores high on the wow factor.  

I really appreciate the time you took to discuss the problems I had with the service last month.

I’ll be excited to follow its development.  I use it all the time now myself.

Peter
thank you and cheers for the great coverage

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News Flash? Google + AOL= $

Just for those who didn’t know: Google just plunked down another billion dollars for a chunk of AOL. It equals a 5% share in AOL, yet some people believe it will change Google. For Immediate Release has said they think there might be banner ads and preferential treatment for Time Warner AOL sites via Google because of this. I doubt it. I’m most interested in what’s going to happen to AOL’s efforts to go content-centric for their value to users. What a change that’s been from their old days of trying to lock you in to a walled garden of limited content! I am waiting to hear from my friends at the Social Software blog on Weblogs Inc. (an AOL property as of a few months ago) on this. No word yet.

The Washington Post on the Google/AOL deal.
ZDNet on Google/AOL.

There’s two angles…make up your own mind. Does this mean anything?