The open source weblog has found a sweet Firefox extension that will let you see all your tabs at once on the fly Mac OSX style. I like it. Get foXpose here.

firefox, extensions

OpenSearch is an A9 technology licensed by A9 under the creative commons license and enables websites to allow search engines to do a better job of searching their site.

The richest content can�t be adequately indexed by one engine alone. Different types of content require different types of search engines; most of the time, the best search engines for a site are the ones written by those that know the content the best.

If your site has search capability then you might want to consider OpenSearch. It’s being adopted even by Microsoft: IE7 will be able to discover if OpenSearch is available on your site and give users the ability to search it from their browser search box.

The requirements are simple:

You�ll need to produce RSS or Atom formatted search results with some small additions, and then write a simple OpenSearch Description file.

It can’t hurt if you have the resources. Maybe it will improve your site search and your traffic.

a9, search

Tech.memeoroandum is depository of information and discussions pertaining to technology:

The Web is humming with reports and opinions on technology. tech.memeorandum is page A1 for these discussions. Auto-updated every 5 minutes, it uncovers the most relevant items from thousands of news sites and weblogs.

They have a feed available. Looks like a great science related resource, and many people seem to know about it already: almost 2,000 subscribers to the feed I chose on bloglines!

science, information, research

Postgenomic is a life science web log aggregator, but it does more than that:

Postgenomic collates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data.

For example, it allows you to get an instant picture of which web sites are being heavily linked to by researchers in the medical sciences, or which papers are being cited or reviewed most often by bioinformaticians, or which buzzwords are being used the most frequently by evolutionary biologists.

Sounds interesting. It has three feeds you can subscribe to: recent top stories, recent reviews, and recent hot papers. I found out about this via The Social Software Weblog. They report that it’s currently limited to 155 blogs, and that it’s been up for less than a week. The creator of postgenomic is an anonymous scientist named ‘Stew’ who’s working on the project anonymously for fear of losing his job!

life, science, research

The Internet Outsider doesn’t believe that the new Ask.com revamp (new design, no more Jeeves, better search?) will do much for Ask. He says the search industry is not like TV. It’s a utility service, and people who probably don’t even know if Google is any better at search than other search engines will probably not switch to Ask or Yahoo Search regardless of what those other providers do to improve their search. Google has become synonymous with search and it is unlikely, the argument is made, that people will switch away from it unless Google’s search results becomes glaringly deficient.

Paid Content has also something to say on the issue:

Ask.com has some heavy lifting to do — acquire more than its 5.5 percent U.S. market share, serve as a hub for and integrate tools with other IACI properties, drive more traffic to its sibs.

If Internet Outsider is right, it may seem like Ask.com is in for more than for it can handle.

For more information check out SearchEngineWatch’s take.

ask, search, corporate

Molly points out that some types of standard proponents stand in the way of standardization. She singles out three types of ‘Standardista’s’ that are going about standardization the wrong way: “The Bitch and Moan but Never Does,” the “I’m a F***** Up Human in Need of a Tribe,” and “I’m Better than You Because my Site Validates.”

Here’s an excerpt I appreciated on the last type:

The Better than You standardista finds it pleasurable to insult people who are struggling with the learning curve despite their willingness to learn; berate those who are misinformed by virtue of circumstance rather than chosen ignorance; and who poke fun at people who make decisions based on environmental issues rather than just following Web standards because they think standards are good.

What type are you? I admit sometimes I’ve been guilty of falling into everyone one of these categories.

standardization