Talking of Google - search engine personalisation?

Google allows us to personalise or to be more exact - to build our own search engines now.

Here you go:



I like personalised web, but I need to start using it to see if it works better than genral Google search. Try it out and let me know what YOU think!:)

Google and Yahoo - fail:( what about code of ethics?

Google failed to work out common advertising agreement with Yahoo. Is this the reason why I cannot see any mentioning of their planned code of ethics?

Anyone?

Monitter and other Twitter tools I'm using

Someone asked me recently what are the Twitter tools I am using and as I started list those I realised there are too many. It's difficult to decide upon the most crucial ones by due to the tight schedule of blogging nowadays I was forced to choose a few ones:

TweetDeck - helps me to follow the conversation on Twitter and see my direct messages, messages, tweets from my friends and others - all those in four categories on one screen. It also allows me to find users, follow new ones and of course - tweet and respond to messages. All in few seconds!

Advanced Twitter Search - is good for specific searches, mainly when I am writing posts on a specific topic and need more info.

TweetBeep - I could not live without it, as much as I cannot imagine living without Google alerts. Using this tool I can get all the relevant information (with or without URLs) into my gmail inbox daily and read through it during lunch time for instance.

Twitterlocal - useful in locating fellow users, mainly before and after events.

Tweetstats - time to time I like to look at the trends and doublecheck (in responses column) if all my responses were noticed. For some reason Netvibes and web still come up as my main Twitter interfaces, whereas I am using Tweetdeck and HelloTxt, no idea why:/

And last one, quite a recent discovery - Monitter - brilliant for finding real-time tweets on three different keywords.(see below)



Well, I guess that's it. I bet my fellow bloggers are using much more, but for me those are main tools, and as for now, I am quite happy using them. Unless you have something better for me;)

Trying out lifestreaming with StoryTlr - 'new' social media?

Lifestreaming has been around for a while. I tried a few options, but never really got into it seriously and I think it's time and I have found a tool simple enough not to discourage me (lack of time is killing me). So here it is, Sylwia Presley on StoryTlr. Lifestreamblog posted about it this week, but it's actually Lolly who showed me how it it works and how user friendly it is! Already established services like Popego, Jaiku, Tumblr always took me too much time to set up, and StoryTlr took 15 min to register, customise and set up feeds. Brilliant! I had another few minutes to look around and I must say - it's simple, but all I need. Go and check it out.

We had this conversation in the office few weeks ago - is lifestreaming a blog? This service seems to be heading towards YES answer, some of us might stay sceptical. Me, as rather an open-minded person I will say - yes, I think it's blog. It does reflect basic blog characteristics - diary, personal content (for personal blogs of course), reverse chronology...just the technology behind it is different. If you have no time to write long posts, but create let's say visual content - you can easily direct it to one site and show to the world in a  friendly form.

BTW make sure you use the 'stories' option, it's very cool. (I promise to 'write' a visual story too, first one comes from Twitter:P). Looking at my StoryTlr site made me realize how text based my web content is....and I am not sure I am happy about it. Let me think about it;)

Update: Lolly's post on it here.

Geotagging in general, GeoVisualisation for Twitter, Platial

Geotagging is one of the aspects of social media that I just start to get involved with. Quite late, I know. Walter Rafelsberger from University Vienna's Department of New Media Technology is working with wonderful tools for Twitter GeoVisualisation (few examples here), his geosketches encouraged me to think about it more. We think globally, but we also live globally nowadays. I myself got into the trap of that thinking due to the fact my friends stuy, work, live all around the world. Still, we have a great potential of networking with extremely interesting people in our own town/city!

One of the tools I want to use to network with blogging Poles in the UK (Bar Mleczny project) is Palatial (snag-it above). It helps you to create your own Google Maps-based maps, customise them (with ful range of symbols for each type of location) and embed on your site (WP friendly!). It also has a search option, and recomendations!

Twitter allows you to search by location, but you can also use Twitterlocal and I bet it's just the top of the ice-berg...And let's not forget about Google Earth. If we also add sites like Panoramio where you can upload your pictures and geotag them we end up with quite a clear view of who blogs where, what and how we can find them.

Whole new world is opening to me;) So do send me cool links!