Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Mike Arrington kicked off a new round of buzz in the blogosphere yesterday, with his review of the aptly-named Sphere.  Sphere, for those not in the know, is a new blog search engine. 

I’ve been on the Sphere beta for some months, but not used it much.  My impressions:

• Sphere It! is a genuinely useful feature.  From any web page you are reading, you can punch the Sphere It! button, and see all the related commentary in the blogosphere.
• I like the idea of Featured Results, but I don’t understand the selection criteria.  Is it manual, or is there an algorithm?
• The graphical custom date range seems to not work for me.  I am not sure whether this is a browser security setting, or something else.  More investigation is needed.  In general, I would say Sphere’s knowledge of dates is flawed.  For instance, just a few moments ago I wrote about Chris Anderson’s musings on Time and the Long Tail.  Sphere indexed it very quickly, but thinks it was written 18 hours ago.
• Creating a feed which is ranked by relevance doesn’t seem to work.  I queried sphere for Voice 2.0, and then fed the proffered RSS feed to Bloglines which produced a very different set of results from the Sphere page I had just been looking at.

Sphere has lots of promise, and has earned a place in my toolkit for the "Sphere It!" feature.  It seems unfinished, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get a lot of value from what’s there already.

Chris Anderson is at it again, this time talking about Google and the "Long Tail of Time".  His observation is correct: unlike a newspaper, Google tends to favour archive heavy searches.  Syntagma oberves that this is a side effect of how blogs automatically file things by date. 

Some markets are hit driven, but it seems as if Long Tail markets wouldn’t be.  Far be it from me to correct the inventor of the Long Tail concept, but isn’t the lack of time sensitivity simply one of many features of Long Tail markets? 

BTW, the most popular "old" posting on this blog?  Yup, you guessed it right! From February 11, 2006: The Voice Long Tail.

Mark Goldberg is on his way to Ottawa today for the CRTC’s hearings on Do Not Call.  He wants to ensure that "charities and their related organizations, have a cost effective way to reach out to the community."

This is one area where I will disagree.  I hate to sound niggardly, but we really don’t want the calls. In our household we research the causes we give to and we budget to support those causes.  The most a telephone caller can expect from us is a small donation, and even then, we are unwilling to give out credit card information to a stranger calling on the telephone. The exception might be taking a call from a known organization that we already support.

Like many block / don’t block scenarios the issue of charitable organizations and good causes is not a black and white issue.  It is a nuanced issue, by individual and household.  That is the reason I oppose blanket exemptions from the Do Not Call list.  That’s also the reason I believe that the only sensible solution is better technology — a spam filter for my phone.