Have a good new year!

Searchmash is a search engine owned by Google which searches the web, images, blogs, Google Video videos and the Wikipedia. The vast majority of these features are already available on Google; but are scattered around.

Searchmash shows standard web results, images, videos, blog results and Wikipedia results in one page. The site uses a lot of Ajax to do this; and interesting it gives results which differ from Google’s. For example, a search for my name on Searchmash brings up this guy’s IMDB profile before this blog.

They also implement an interesting method of playing Google videos. You hover your mouse over a thumbnail of the video and then click a small play icon; the video then plays with loading another page, through an Ajax interface (see below).

The search engine is very good. It displays results in a light, simple but Web 2.0 page somewhat similar to A9’s.

Have a good new year.

Thanks Ed for the tip

Tags: search, search engine, searchmash, google, web2.0, ajax, web 2, web 2.0, web 2

YouREP, You Represent, is a photo sharing site which appears to have launched as a competitor for products like Flickr. They’ve attempted to implement a Web 2.0 design, but it’s gone horribly wrong. Nonetheless, YouRep provides a fairly large amount of storage space (2GB) and has some features Flickr lacks, such as revenue sharing.

YouRep’s design looks fairly Web 2.0, however many of its characteristics are Web 1.0. For example, look at the site’s logo:

It has a nice Web 2.0y reflection howeverthe colours used aren’t very web two point oh. The colours seem to darker than the vast majority of Web 2.0 colour schemes.

Moving onto the site itself, over its design.

The site allows you to license photographs under the common, no pun intended, Creative Commons licenses (not obscure ones like Founders’ Copyright). This feature is also available in Flickr (and to a much better degree in Wikimedia Commons).

Imaging uploads is fairly simple, and is done through Ajax. The process allows you to give an image a name, tags and to specify a copyright. You can also put them in folders (which is a much more conventional approach, over Flickr’s sets). You can also add a description, but this must be done post-upload. You can also send it to groups, geotag and add notes. Sounds familiar?

The bottom-line is that YouREP is a Flickr clone with a few added features, such as revenue sharing, but with a design which is mediocre at best.

Tags: yourep, flickr, image sharing, photos, photography, web2.0, image hosting, hosting, web 2, web 2.0, web2

Mashable is the biggest blog about Web 2.0 - not TechCrunch. Or at least that’s what Feedburner and Compete statistics suggest.

One would think TechCrunch is the biggest, as it gets more comments and has a higher Alexa rank. Compete disagrees; it shows Mashable gets more than twice as many visitors as TechCrunch (at least from its US-based members). Feedburner also shows Mashable has around 415,000 subscribers to its RSS feed (which I believe is somewhat unrealistic; I doubt that many people have an interest in Web 2.0) while TechCrunch has 126,000 readers.

So here’s what I wonder. How come Mashable doesn’t host massive parties or get into controversies or create needless version in other languages (or indeed dialects)?

My guess is Mashable’s author, Pete Cashmore, keeps a much lower profile than Arrington.

Tags: techcrunch, mashable, web 2.0, web2, web2.0, web 2, blogging, blogosphere, blogs

Merry Christmas!