I’ve made a fuller post at
my other blog, but the gist of it is that I’m going on vacation starting next Wednesday - and I’m also moving. So, although I’d hoped to be able to keep up with posting right until the last minute, I’ve simply run out of available time in the day! So, this blog will be, essentially, on hiatus until approximately the beginning of August.
There’s some possibility of an occasional post, but it’s very unlikely. For three weeks of that time I intend to vacation with a vengeance - and for the next week I’m going to be just too busy!
The beta version of a fairly substantial new competitor in the search realm, Kosmix, has recently expanded their vertical search categories to offer search in Video Games and Finance, in addition to the Health, Travel, and Politics verticals they’d launched back in February.
Tied to their Video Games vertical is a newly launched search engine, Gazerk. Besides the fact that the domain name demonstrates very clearly how the world seems to be running out of real word domains, this powered-by-Kosmix search engine should be appealing to the video game geek world. The color palette used by Gazerk is awful, by the way - pink text on a black background is definitely not a design with me in mind.
The US Politics vertical, which I hadn’t seen before, is quite useful - Kosmix’ categorization technology gives you the ability to organize the search results according to viewpoint - currently only Liberal, Conservative, or Libertarian, so it’s only a very general breakdown, but the idea may have potential.
Hat tip to Nadir at SEO Principle for noticing the new vertical search engines.
From Top Tech News, Jay Wrolstad reports that Digg.com will incorporate current events in their social news network. The new version of the site will be launching on June 26th, and will apply the traditional "Digg" ranking to new categories including general news and video clips.
The article also reports that Digg will be increasing their social-networking aspects, adding the ability to pick and share your category preferences with friends or add personalized input to what appears on the pages. Although, from the description, I must admit I’m not really clear what "add their input to what appears on the Web pages" may mean.
This is, of course, rather interesting when you consider that AOL’s recent launch of Netscape.com as a user-rated news source includes a number of these additional options.
It’ll be interesting to see what impact these new options may have on Digg. First of all, the front page itself may change significantly. There’s only so much room on the very first page of a site; and the percentage of tech news is likely to decrease. Despite the fact that Digg’s audience is currently almost exclusively people involved with or interested in the technology industry, this may very quickly expand to include others with interests solely in comical videos or in celebrity news. To me, this would be a serious diminishment in the value and interest I’ve received from Digg.
But, maybe this won’t happen - it’s also quite possible that Digg’s new push will fail to escape from the tech crowd, and the new categories will tend to populated with geek favorites such as Star Trek clips.
My personal feeling is that the expansion into current events and other news categories is great - although it reduces the overall focus of the site, these are interesting and potentially fruitful ways of retrieving information you may not otherwise see. However, I think that the incorporation of video may be a mistake. This detracts from the otherwise (mostly) serious information and articles available on Digg, supplanting it with popular media and pointless video clips. These have their place; but I feel that the inclusion of video is likely to seriously diffuse the newsworthy content available on Digg.