Word of the Week - Cuil

Pronounced "cool", Cuil is a new search engine built by Anna Patterson, a search engine wiz who used to work at Google. While there was a lot of hype and excitement about the launch of the site, those seeking an alternative search engine might have to temper their enthusiasm a bit.

While there are some interesting new features in Cuil, it has had a tremendously difficult time in maintaining relevancy and the meaningfulness of search results (no TravelOregon.com for an "Oregon" search for example!). Moreover, following the wake of their PR push last week, their servers have been overwhelmed and users have experienced significant downtime. As our friend Paul Wille notes in his blog, Cuil has four notable features:

1. Relevancy Approach- Unlike depending on the quantity and quality of links, it "drills down" into the pages they link to and analyze the content for relevancy

2. “Article”-based search results - Rather than the usual list of text-only links, photos and paragraph snippets of content are returned as part of the search results (Similar to Ask.com)
   

3. Dynamic Faceted Searching - Faceted searching is the concept of narrowing search results based on multiple “facets” or aspects of your search results; for example when you search for "Oregon", you can narrow your results based on categories such as "regions of Oregon", "real estate" etc. etc.
   

4. Privacy - Cuil promises not to store search history of search engines
   

Read the full review on Cuil

Top 5: Our Favorite Posts

Since the Travel 2.0 blog just celebrated our one year anniversary, we figured a quick look back...for all you new readers...at some of our favorite posts, thoughts and stories was in order.

So, in no particular order, here are 5 posts that you should read.

...and for those of you who skipped out early that one Friday like 7 months ago, you should read these too.

Top 5:

1. Word of the Week - The Long Tail
2. When Fewer Clicks Are A Good Thing
3. Travel Trends - .travel, JetBlue, Privacy
4. Bloggers? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Bloggers!
5. Who's Been Clicking On My Banner?

Ah, so many great posts...hard to pick just 5.

Enjoy!

Word of the Week - Google PageRank

Google PageRank is an algorithm used by Google to determine the weight of a set of linked (or hyperlinked) web pages. It is one of the (assumed to be) primary pieces of the larger Google Search algorithm which determines order of appearance in a keyword search.

A larger number of quality links from high PageRank sites will increase your PageRank.

Of course, that is the condensed version, for a complete and technical explanation of PageRank, I would recommend the PageRank article on Wikipedia.

Word of the Week - Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a form of website navigation that displays information to the user as to the depth that they have navigated to within a website, or section of a website.

For example, a common breadcrumb could look like:

Home > News > Local > Phoenix

Which would show the user that they have navigated through the News and Local sections to get to the Phoenix news section as well as provide an easy way to return to those other sections.

Word of the Week - Folksonomy

A means of classifying and categorizing data on the web through collaborative efforts from the online community. Commonly known as (though not strictly synonymous to) ‘tagging’.

The basic idea behind a Folksonomy is rather than save files in a typical folder structure, you simply apply a tag to that file ('Budget' for instance). And then, when you need to find the file, you search for 'budget'. No need to click-thru that giant list of folders. Or, at least that is the basic idea.

Unfortunately, folksonomies won't improve your organizational skills.

Word of the Week - Mahalo.

No....we're not on vacation in Hawaii! Developed by a start up led by famed tech tycoon Jason Calacanis, Mahalo is billed as a "human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms. Our search results only include great links."

For those of you that have been on the "net" long enough, yes, this is a throwback to the old Yahoo! directory days or Mozilla directory days. Mahalo is betting that because its search results are "prepared by humans, sifted and sorted and condensed for maximum relevance," search users would no longer be faced with pages and pages of spam results generated rogue SEO agents. For a fill profile on Jason and his thinking behind Mahalo, check out the latest edition of Fast Company or read about it online here.

Coming next week - Can Mahalo kill Google? A conversation with Portland area SEO professionals.

Word of the Week - Spider(s)

A Spider (also known as a web crawler or web (ro)bot) is an automated software tool used by search engines to travel throughout the internet collecting information which it then returns to the search engine’s indices. This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

Word of the Week - Vlog

A video blog (vlog) is a blog that is primary comprised of video. Regular entries are typically presented in reverse chronological order (exactly like a blog) and often combine embedded video or a video link with supporting text, images, and other metadata.

See our 'Word of the Week - Blog' post for a full definition of a blog.

Word of the Week - API

A very technical term, but one that is thrown around all too often by people who do not know what the word means. While the term can have several meanings, in a simplified 'Web 2.0' context, API or application programming interface, is talking about a single entry point that one computer system uses to 'talk' to another computer system.

Good examples of an API in use are the recent Facebook programs that have been created by outside programmers. These programmers can view the API or code and create computer systems or programs that will 'talk' to the Facebook site. Google Maps also is a good example of a widely used API.

APIs are the foundation upon which 'Mashups' are created. Without APIs, there would not be any mashups.

Word of the Week - Creative Commons

A San Francisco nonprofit group chaired by Stanford law Professor Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons also describes a new type of copyright -- one with "some rights reserved," enabling artists, authors and others to share their works freely with the world at large. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses.

Word of the Week - Widgets

A widget is a term that can be used to describe two different applications: a web widget and a widget engine.

A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page. Popular examples of this type of widget are promotional movie photo galleries that could be incorporated into your MySpace page or blog.

For example, here is the NBA Finals scoreboard widget, taken from the NBA site and updated daily from the NBA:

In computer software, a widget engine is host software system for physically inspired applets on the desktop (also known as desktop widgets). Two commonly referred-to types of widgets are the Yahoo! Widgets and the Dashboard widgets of Apple Macintosh computer users. Widgets, in this case, are downloadable interactive virtual tools that provide services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather, a dictionary, a map program, sticky notes, or even a language translator, among other things.

Word of the Week - Facebook

Facebook is a social networking website. It was originally developed for college and university students but has since been made available to anyone with an email address. People can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.

As of February 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 25 million members worldwide (also from non-collegiate networks).

The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks that colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff depicting members of the campus community.

Word of the Week - Blog

A blog (short for web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.

The easy of use and structure of blogs provides users with the proper tools to create, maintain and publish blogs…as opposed to simple ‘homepage’ sites such as Yahoo Geocities, which could require HTML knowledge from the user.

(See this site as an example)

Word of the Week - Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks. On a Social Bookmarking system or network, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists can be accessible to the public by users of a specific network or website. Other users with similar interests can view the links by topic, category, tags, or even randomly. del.icio.us, reddit and Digg are some of the more popular examples of social bookmarking sites.

The major breakthrough with this type of site, versus just bookmarking sites with your internet browser, is that having your bookmarks within a network will allow you to discover other sites that other users, with similar bookmarks, may also have bookmarked. A kind of exponential site discovery begins to happen as more users contribute more bookmarks.

Word of the Week - The Long Tail

The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. Typically used when referring to actual product sales from a retailer (such as Amazon), the idea argues that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.

For example, the user-edited Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has many low-popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found in a conventional encyclopedia such as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Word of the Week - RSS

RSS is a web feed format used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news items or podcasts. RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes.

(You could 'subscribe' to this blog via an RSS reader, such as Atom or Google Reader.)

Word of the Week - Wiki

A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content, typically without the need for registration. It also allows for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring.

The most well known example of a wiki would be Wikipedia.org. (http://www.wikipedia.org/)

Word of the Week - Mashup

A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. For example: using Google Maps and realtor information from Realtor.com to show houses for sale in Phoenix on a Google Map. (http://www.housingmaps.com/)