(via tech.memeorandum) Google is testing two new services that promise to change what we do on the web (again).

One is personalized search history. If you have a Gmail account, sign in and on your Google home page (http://www.google.com/ig) you can find your Google Search History in the top right nav bar, at this address (http://www.google.com/searchhistory/).

Personalized Search History is important for privacy issues. We’ll trust Google more if we know what information they’re keeping about us. Folks are are getting leary about what Google knows and what they would potentially use it for. This is a great way to increase transparency and alleviate public fear. And who knows, if they provide RSS feeds for this…someone will come up with some really cool way to aggregate it.

The second is a way to provide feedback about search results. They’re testing a new feature designed for giving feedback when you get spam in your search results. Presumably, over time Google would be able to offer a better search by gathering this sort of feedback from users.

Search Feedback is huge because it’s including users in the filtering (architecture of participation). In addition to giving page links weight, this would be a more community-involved way to refine search results. Just yesterday I wrote how I think filtering is incredibly important right now. I think this feature is the tip of the iceberg.

This is incredibly big news! I can’t wait to see where it goes from here…

Here’s a recommendation for a book recommendation system: What Should I Read Next?

On your first glance at the tech.memeorandum home page, you won’t see anything all that special. You’ll see some links to blog items down the left-hand side labeled “Top Items”, and some smaller links to the right labeled “New Item Finder”. It looks like a hundred other blog aggregators being released nowadays…no big deal, right? […]

Continue Reading: Tech.Memeorandum’s Filtering Illustrates Web 2.0’s Most Important Skill

Pubsub linkcount is confusing. I have no idea what it means. One day bokardo gets 3 inlinks and its ranked 1,691 (in the top 4% of something). The next day it gets zero links and drops down to 91,755. The day after that its gets 6 inlinks and rises to 14,617. It would seem that the rank is based on the activity of other sites somehow. Is this just counting the number of links on a given day and ranking by that day only?

Does anybody know what this means?

By now you’ve heard why Ajax is great for web-based applications:

• It is standards-based
• It is degradeable with unsupporting browsers
• It is relatively easy to implement
• The benefits of a one-screen interface (no disruptions for page refreshes)

The Side Benefit of Ajax

But there’s another side benefit, that I think might be as influential as any of the above. When you build an Ajax application, you need to break down your server calls into smaller chunks. You’re no longer requesting complete web pages when you hit your server, you’re requesting information via a simplified API that you create (something as simple as a PHP script, perhaps).

This is yet another step toward microcontent, or pieces of data that live on their own and are called together to form applications screens or web pages. If you weren’t planning on accessing your content in this way before you decided to use Ajax techniques, you will definitely have to if you move that way.

This seems to be an overall trend, however. First we gain granular access to our own content for our own needs, and then we provide public access to others after we see how useful it is.

Doc Searls has a nice writeup of Blog Search engines, including the new Google Blog Search, IceRocket, PubSub, Technorati, Blogpulse, and A9.

He answers the question: What’s the difference between a Wide Web Search and a Live Web Search?

The difference? Syndication. I wonder how long that distinction will last.

If you’re a PHP programmer, check out Joe Stump’s article on Understanding MVP in PHP. Ever since I started doing things the MVC way, I’ve become much more productive…

(via Infodesign) In The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems Scott Golder and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs examine folksonomies. From the abstract:

“Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.”

I now have veritable proof that Web 2.0 as a term is working to describe the changing web. How do I know? People told me so. Last night I led a talk for the Macromedia Boston Users Group called “Web 2.0 Interfaces, the Future of Design”. I used Keynote for the first time, and I […]

Continue Reading: Talking about Web 2.0 with Designers

This has the potential to be very popular: a project called Ajax pages has just been released, with the intent to allow people to embed Javascript code in HTML like we do with PHP, ASP, and JSP.

It’s not server-side, though, from what I can tell. It’s simply a way to manipulate things client-side in a familiar way.

Here’s an example:

<html>
<body>
<% var hello = "Hello World"; %>
<%=hello%>
</body>
</html>

Check out the tutorial to see how it works.