My Head Is Buzzing

Yahoo! Buzz OK, I admit it. I’ve never understood how Yahoo! Buzz works. I’ve just decided it’s one of those things I’m not supposed to understand, like financial accounting. I think my math skills should transfer, but they don’t. Maybe Swaroop C H can explain it to me (Buzz, not accounting).

Given that, Buzz did something with blogs. I think. So “Fark” gets the top spot on Y! Search, but it’s only #5 on Technorati?

I’m sure there’s something cool and insightful I can glean from this. Maybe about the different demographic profiles of Yahoo! Search and Technorati users. I’ll think of it, I swear.

My Head Is Buzzing

TagCloud

Another cool little service: TagCloud. It uses the Yahoo! content analysis engine to search your RSS feed, analyze the content, then uses Javascript and CSS to produce a little cloud of clickable tags that you can embed on your blog (or wherever). I tried it on my RSS feed, but there’s not enough content here for it be useful (e.g. many terms it displayed only show up in the feed one time). FYI, here it is:

http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/bobpage/default

TagCloud

Yahoo! Mindset

You know how you try to do some research on the Web, and when you type in a term on your favorite search engine, you get a ton of links related to buying stuff? Bleh.

Totally randomly, I stumbled across Yahoo! Mindset, a demo from Yahoo Research Labs. It uses machine learning applied to the problem of text classification.

Check it out:

Notice how each search term has a little colored bar that tells you if the link is considered more shopping oriented, or research oriented. And you can twiddle the slider to re-rank the results, without a page reload. Sweet.

There’s a FAQ too.

Yahoo! Mindset