John Battelle’s Searchblog: Collarity Launches Personalized Results Engine

Collarity CompassT, launched Monday, is a search engine that automatically ranks search results based on an individual’s interests. By tracking the search terms, url choices, and selections of users and visitors, Collarity responds to a user’s ‘hot spot of interest’ (i.e. query) with sites visited by expert-users in that area.

Google is moving into newspaper advertising sales. The company will expand its computer system, which already auctions off advertisements on millions of Web sites, to take bids for newspaper ads as well.

Steve Rubel posts about his favourite widgets and looks forward to a time when everything can be done from his start page.

Last week there was a lot of attention paid to worries by the “inventor of the web” Tim Berners Lee about what was happening to his invention. Later he clarified things on his blog. He says people have always complained that there is a lot of junk on the web but he points to blogs and FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) networks are really good examples of techniques which can beat the junk. He says:

In a recent interview with the Guardian, alas, my attempt to explain this was turned upside down into a “blogging is one of the biggest perils” message. Sigh. I think they took their lead from an unfortunate BBC article, which for some reason stressed concerns about the web rather than excitement, failure modes rather than opportunities. (This happens, because when you launch a Web Science Research Initiative, people ask what the opportunities are and what the dangers are for the future. And some editors are tempted to just edit out the opportunities and headline the fears to get the eyeballs, which is old and boring newspaper practice. We expect better from the Guardian and BBC, generally very reputable sources)

Still, as he says at the end of his post:

fortunately, we have blogs. We can publish what we actually think, even when misreported.

From PaidContent.org:

Gannett is rolling out a new newsroom template for its newspapers. It’s called the Information Center and has already been tried in part at eight papers and in full at three more: Des Moines, Sioux Falls and Brevard.  Gannett CEO Craig Dubrow explains in a staff memo (via Romenesko), describing a platform agnostic, 24/7, local-oriented, crowd-sourced enterprise: “What they found is remarkable: Breaking news on the Web and updating for the newspaper draws more people to both those media. Asking the community for help, gets it – and delivers the newspaper into the heart of community conversations once again. Rich and deep databases with local, local information gathered efficiently are central to the whole process. The changes impact all media, and the public has approved. Results include stronger newspapers, more popular Web sites and more opportunities to attract the customers advertisers want.”

According to the BBHub blog the New World College Dictionary word of the year is “crackberry”.

Wired has bought social media site Reddit, according to PaidContent.

“Our goal will be to build Reddit as an independent company by collaborating with Wired through the integration of its core technology, and by offering partnerships to allow other companies to do the same,” says Wired.

PaidContent says Wired’s parent Conde Naste has already used the technology to launch Lipstick.com

Here’s a nice AJAX application which shows Google’s acquisitions over time. It’s done with Simile, created by MIT. Could be some really nice applications for displaying histories on sites.

John Battelle reports that YouTube was about to invest in FAST technology to power its (aweful) search. He speculated that the deal might be off now….

Business 2.0, the poster-child magazine of the first dot com boom, has launched a blog site. Meanwhile, Karl Schneider pointed me to ZDnet which has just redesigned to put more Web 2.0 features to the fore. Both use videos to explain what’s going on and both, of course, have the word “beta” in their logos…