Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Search Engine with a difference!

With Google making it big in the search engine space for more than 5 years now. Many technocrats are trying their best to make a difference in the same space which Google dominates now. And one of them is Vivismo.com.

Its interesting to see categorized and clustered results for a given search keyword. I search for the keyword Google on Vivismo and in return a well laid out and categorized results is displayed as shown on the screenshot below. This helps the user avoid dropping in to any unknown or irrelevant site. I think its very cool.

click to enlarge screenshot[opens in new window]
click to enlarge screenshot[opens in new window]
The pain area that I see here is information overload for the user. To many options will only let the user to wander and not get to the target. Well! can't get everything you want in a bottle, can you :)

The other search engine that I looked upon is Snap.com, its like any other regular search engine with a little difference. The results are shown in farmesets on the left and the screenshot of the website onthe right pane of the frame.

click to enlarge screenshot[opens in new window]
click to enlarge screenshot[opens in new window]

Here as you scroll the search results is updated on the fly.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Flock - the social web browser

With many file sharing tools/websites, communities/forums and Blogs popping up all over the web, here is another new app which made its entry to make information sharing easy over the web.
Its a browser called Flock - the social web browser, here the user can connect to other users, share files and so on. The interesting feature of this browser is the drag and drop feature.

Personally I like FireFox better and it wont be too long with Fire Fox's next browser release featuring the same features integrated to it.

WEB 2.0 browsers?

Please check the browser and post your experience using the browser.

Link: http://www.flock.com/

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Accessibility for the web!! What's that?

Click to enlarge pictureThe internet has BOOMED the doors of heaven for the tech savvy people in this world. What has it done for us you may ask, well to start with I would say Information at your finger tips. Any normal person who feeds on information through the internet would love to see what he looked for on the screen. But hey! not all of them are normal in this world. What am I trying to say here? Its all about enabling people with disabilities of various kinds to access the same information with ease.

The internet Gurus and the Techno geeks have come up a long way innovating and implementing new technologies and techniques to have any website/application accessible to people with disabilities. Disabilities can be due to poor vision, no vision at all, physically challenged, hearing impaired and so on. There are screen reading software like JAWS, very popular around the world, which helps people with no vision to listen to the content read by the application.

Being a techo crack myself, having developed a couple of international websites of popular brands, I never thought of having accessibility compliant websites in the past. Its not the same now with any web developer or designer. I have started exploring the International Standards of Accessibility and practically started implementing the same to my work.

I'm no expert in this domain at the moment, but it excites me when I think that Iam helping someone reach out and grab what he/she wants just like other normal people on cyberspace.

- Vikram S

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Blogging World

Yes Iam part of the blogging world too now. Bloggers are all over the internet and its good to see the rapid growth for Blogging and people coming forward to share their news and views. But is that all what this is all about?

Does Blogging help us think at a broader perspective and improve our Analytical thinking capability? Well according to some researchers they do. Well I do agree that we are exposed to a whole new world of information that are available through Blogs these days. There are Blogs on Cars, Technology, Travel, Gourmet etc etc you name it you got it. There are many Forums in existance, dedicated to topics of various interest that are already saturated around the web. Hey Iam not against the blogging world or technology here, just curious to know How, Why, Where the Blogging concept got its importance.

More thoughts on Blogging please...

-
Vikram S