Fri 30 Mar 2007
Graduate student Mark Zeman from Massey University, New Zealand recently presented his social search engine, searchbots.net for his Masters in Design class. He reached out to Techlife, as part of our “Review Me” program.
We always encourage educators, as we recently featured Dr. Wesch’s Digital Ethnography, we thought “Social Search” with a personality sounds fun. Upon arriving we were right. The site lets you build a custom robot. Who wouldn’t want to do that? The visuals are stimulating and fun, while still easy to use. I would have liked a few more choices for robot parts, but as you can see my bot is still pretty cool looking. Nice Job Mark.
Then you fill your bot with some logic, adding in keywords you care about, and things you are knowledgeable about. Notice our favorites? Then Mark begins to lose me. He offers up mod search chips which seem cool, at first. But I couldn’t get them to do all that much. The “feeds” mod searchchip didn’t even work in Firefox. I tried asking a few questions, with the “ask question” but the search results to simple queries weren’t immediate. The “tags” mod searchchip worked nicely, providing 8 results to a few different queries. But it took a few seconds to realize that if those 8 weren’t good enough then I had to click my searchbot to try a new query.
Overall Thought: A fun and engaging time can be had building a colorful and stylish robot. If it continually develops with stronger and more searchchips, as Mark hints I think he has a winner, but as it stands right now I can’t use it everyday.
Call for submissions: Do you have a web project, software, gadget, technology that you would like to have reviewed? Techlife is always looking for unique products and services all it takes is an email. reviewme [at] dkworldwide [dot] com Of course, we review how we see fit, but you trust your products right?
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April 26th, 2007 at 7:32 am
[...] Cue the time machine as the question above was not the start of our conversation. It all started when Neal asked if I could review a new site that was part of the GeekBrief.TV family, Dear Cali, a Tech Answers and Advice blog by Cali Lewis host of GeekBrief.TV. I get asked this all the time in Techlife. Now by review, he meant provide him feedback, make suggestions, critique and generally give an impression of this new site, some companies call it beta testing too. I wrote Neal a nice email pointing out various small and large observations, suggestions and even a new business idea! He was floored. He thanked me and mentioned how impressed he was with the detail of the feedback. I told him it was no problem I do this for a living, which led to the question above, I know what you do, but what….do you do? That sparked two ideas. The best way to tell someone how I can help their business is to show them. I decided to build a quick case study into the world of my consulting practice, dk worldwide, inc, using Neal and his email. [...]
April 18th, 2008 at 11:47 am
[...] This was a crazy “location” month for Techlife, starting with the request to translate the column into Japanese. Quite an honor. A student in New Zealand used our reviewme [at] dkworldwide [dot] com email for his creation, Searchbot, and we created “Techlife-a-tron”. We posted unique instructions on exactly how to get from New York to London. We were also contacted by Joost out of Europe and reviewed Chick Chick Boom designed by a German company. And that leads us to the two stories that actually made the cut, which also focused on location, one in real estate and one in the online mapping area. This was huge month for visitor’s comments to Techlife, visit the site and see all the smart comments made by your fellow readers. (part of the syndicated print column’s writing process exposed to online readers) [...]