Every attention breadcrumb can serve as something you tell a story about, or as a basis for conversations with your network.

This is similar to how I described an alternative web-only use of Jaiku yesterday, as an attention aggregator, but Dandelife excels at memory beyond the present.  While I’m biased as an advisor to Dandelife, you can probably see how this will augment your Twitter use at the least and I’ll be using both.

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As we’ve pointed out on several occasions at the Internet Marketing Monitor, Yahoo generally has much better results for searches based on current events.

And then:

But it’s hard to argue that, strictly as a search engine, Yahoo is behind. But the best way to see which you prefer is simply to test them. Do identical searches on Google and Yahoo…

And that struck a chord with me because of something that happened just yesterday.

A friend had mentioned something about a movie we had seen winning an Oscar. So hit Ctrl+K (change focus to the search box in Firefox) and typed in "2007 oscar winners" in the hopes of finding the list of winners.

Well, I could go on to describe how I didn’t find what I was looking for, switched to Yahoo! Search (something I hadn’t done in a long time), and found it right away with the same query.

But I decided to ask myself "What Would Jon Udell Do?" and then made a little screencast (3MB Windows Media format) to demonstrate this instead.

Disclaimer(s): It’s my first "real" screencast. You’ll note the lack of sound. I tried to find some suitable music but got distracted by other things. I also tried putting it on-line as an embeddable flash video, but the quality sucked. So you get the full-resolution version. Also, I know about Google News and Yahoo News, but I like to use web search when I think it should work.

Making screencasts is fun. I’m gonna do more of this.

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The screencast shows the latest version. (The last one was done in June.) In addition to the normal run through of the product features shown in the last screencast, this one has a short introduction that positions the product and adds a few minutes of demonstrations of the work flow, Live View functionality, embedding on other web pages, etc. For example, it shows viewing a consolidated report, clicking on a link to a divisional report, logging in to view that page, clicking “Edit This Page” on that report, making a change, and then viewing the updated consolidated values. It also shows using a normal web page with a form to call up another page with an embedded spreadsheet that includes calculations that are based on values provided by the form.

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

Users of Yahoo MyWeb may wish to take note of the latest news from the company. It looks like MyWeb will come to an end soon:

>
The development teams for the Toolbar and Bookmarks products provided a summary of the new features made available with the release of those beta versions:

If you have come to love video online, be sure to check out Tom Chi’s screencast describing the features in Yahoo Bookmarks. TechCrunch noted that Chi created the nifty backing music track for the demonstration.

(See if you can spot the unfortunate spelling error displayed in the My Folders section of the Bookmarks page shown in the screencast.)

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Until now, my main experience has been with Microsoft Project. Yet my experience with that has been reflected by others with whom I’ve been using the tool: complex and not easy to use. So I tend to use tools like Excel and Access to keep track of things. Unquestionably the wrong types of tool but they’re relatively easy to use. Not very collaborative, though.

I’ve even tried using wikis. Not good for project management in my experience.

I’ve heard a lot about the Basecamp online project management service, although I’ve not tried it out. It’s a hosted service and you pay for it (the free option is too limited: only one project).

Then I heard about activeCollab a few weeks ago:

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. Set up an environment where you, your team and your clients can collaborate on active projects using a set of simple, functional tools. 100% free!

This isn’t hosted – you install it on your own server. That appeals to me. Free? That appeals too, of course. Plus some good reviews about it so far. And a great screencast explaining what it is and how it works (and with an interesting account of how activeCollab came about).

Then I saw that Dreamhost, my hosting provider, is offering activeCollab as a 1-click install. That decided it. So I’ve installed activeCollab on my server. One click and it’s set up. (It requires PHP5 to run, so I also had to upgrade the PHP installation on my server from PHP4. That was almost a 1-click install as well, done in less than 5 minutes.)

I’ll be trying it out on a couple of projects. My 20-minute walk-around with it today shows me that this is a very promising collaboration tool.

Will it help me become more organized and efficient? Clients and other collaborators, too? Time will tell.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Basically, its a little script that lets you copy structured data from website to another, like copying a contacts entry from your address book and pasting it in an ecommerce site, with the live clipboard, placing the data in the proper form fields. Take a bunch of friends from Facebook, paste them into Windows Live Local, and get all their locations mapped out.

Basically, if you have two sites that understand the same type of data, its annoying that you lose the data because you can only copy text. With the XML-based live clipboard, if things are set up properly, you retain the data and get to reuse it on the target website.

I love the idea of being able to move data as you please, and getting websites to act a little less like individual islands. Obviously, there are some issues, like getting websites to use the system, making sure it works in most browsers, various security issues (like sites accessing the data without your permission) and making it work with as many types of data as possible. Still, I think its a great start.

O’Reilly has a transcript of Ozzie’s speech. Ozzie’s blog has more elaboration, including a demo, a screencast, and explains the Creative Commons license.

Also:

Alex Barnett
Dave Winer

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.

Others (myself included) don’t like the idea of Google adding links to my page-for the sake of making money-that I didn’t intend to link to.

InfoWorld’s Jon Udell is out with another one of his terrific screencasts, this one a four-minute look at Autolinks and the issues that underlie whether it’s appropriate or an abuse. Udell doesn’t have an answer, but he does ask everyone to chill out for a while while we figure out what the rules should be. By way of explanation, he gives us a brief look at a bookmarklet he created so he could find books in libraries based on their listing in Amazon. There’s a relationship between Web content and Web services that is complex and intertwined, so where to draw the line becomes equally complicated.

Udell deserves credit and thanks for making the effort to produce so concise and thoughtful an analysis of the situation that’s so easy to digest.

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

If you’re not sure what they are, you can read this definition on Wikipedia.

Better still, you can watch three 9-minute video presentations that will take you through explaining what they are, how they work and how to set them up.

Created last month by Jim Edwards and Thomas Pierce.

Now, do you use del.ico.us, the social software web service for sharing web bookmarks? I do, but if I didn’t, that dry description (from Wikipedia) wouldn’t help me understand what a useful tool del.icio.us is.

Luckily, there is now a 5-minute screencast presentation that explains in simple terms how to use the service in a highly effective way.

Great work, too, from John Udell.

Thanks, you guys, for your generosity in time and knowledge to help others learn!

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

and it solves a core database search issue, at least for me: you know there is the right answer for the query you are entering, but damned if it isn’t escaping you, due to the blunt nature of structured search.

LInk: Battelle – Grokking Transparansee

He’s referring to Transparensee‘s Discovery Search Engine. He did a decent job of explaining what it is, but it’s really one of those “you really have to try it before you’ll get it” technologies.

Luckily Steve Lavine (the founder and CEO of Transparensee Systems) walked me through a few demos some time ago. As their site indicates, the technology can be applied to a variety of “vertical search” markets:

It’s pretty cool stuff. I expect that we’ll see a lot more of this in the coming months. Searching structured databases really shouldn’t be any harder than searching the web, but it often is. The “fuzzy” searching capabilities their technology adds does a good job of closing that gap.

The more I think about it, I realize that this is the perfect case of a product that could benefit from a screencast. I’ll mention that to Steve.

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.