MATEOSQUARED’S iSEARCH

VideoJug is the best video site that you have never heard of. Why is it, in my opinion, the best? Well… it offers useful information that actually helps people become more productive. It is kind of a how-to video, Yahoo! Answers all mixed into one. The one thing that is missing is the juvenile stuff that has been plaguing most social Web sites.

They have created over a thousand films in 11 different categories:

• New Year
• Food
• Drinks
• Health
• Beauty
• Do-it-yourself
• House & Garden
• Pets
• Leisure
• History

There is also a category for people who have a useful tip or talent to post their video(s). My favorite is the history section, which offers several old films going all the way back to WWI.

The interface is clean and they offer top ten videos for the past hour, 24 hours, week and all time. They also have a theme section which is very random, but interesting. For example, ” Christmas: believe it or not, there can be downsides… ” some of the videos within this theme are:

• How to avoid family arguments at Christmas
• How to survive the shops at Christmas
• How to get rid of unwanted presents
• How to survive a family Christmas
• How to deal with a hangover
• How to avoid and cure indigestion

Very interesting…

Check it out and let others know about this by clicking one of the links below, or just e-mailing them the link to VideoJug.

One other plus, you can sign-up and manage your uploaded videos and favorites, but you do not have to tell the world your favorite color or your marital status like the majority of the other not as useful social sites. Great plus.

More fun, useless map sites are out there and wasting our time… in a good way. Well, depends if loss of productivity is good.  These map sites are addictive, and can suck away a lot of time, if you are not careful. They are of course social sites, and want you to login so that you can make more online friends. Good times.

They are:

• Platial
  
• Flagr
• Frappr

Great names, eh? I think they all mean something, but as we know the realy cool Internet sites have names that do not make any sense, but they offer a lot of feeling.  So, go make maps and make friends.

User-generated content and question & answer sites hit the Internet mainstream in 2006, and are already moving to the lowest denominator. The questions are for the most part useless, and the answers are even worse. Then again you ask a dumb question, and your going to get a dumb reply. What can be expected? I mean you open a free for all, and this is what you expect. Look at what’s on TV and the radio, should we expect the Internet to be any better? I think so.

There are now six Q&A sites out there, that if moderated and monitored to a higher specification could be very useful and help everyone involved.

AskVille - Recently released by Amazon, this Q&A site is still relatively clean and offers a nice interface. It has a cloud to show the most popular topics, and has people who are still wanting to provide relevant answers and ask quality questions. Four out of five stars.
AnswerBag - Contains a lot of juvenile questions and repsonses. The average age looks about 12, but you do get to determine how many points are awarded when someone answers your questions. Woo-hoo!  Two out of five stars.
Yedda - People sharing knowledge is their tagline. I think people sharing is about ten. I was on several times today, and the same questions were coming up. Someone asked about Google Ice Cream, really? Two out of five stars.
Wondir - Has a non Web 2.0 interface, and is hard to see the scrolling answers. It seems a lot of the questions involve parenting and other related topics. It is kind of clunky, and not as cool as the others. Then again a cool interface doesn’t mean quality. Kind of old school… Three out of five stars.
Yahoo! Answers - Is the best one of the group. They have messed up on a lot of social type Web sites over the past year, but Answers is great. It is easy to use, and the questions and responses are still really good quality. There of course is still junk, but the quality rises above the people looking for attention. Yahoo! even indexes the good answers in its search results. It must be good Oprah was answering questions a couple of weeks ago. Five out of five stars.
Live QnA - Microsoft is trying to keep up in the social Web, but just can’t seem to get past its clunky desktop office software.  The design is flashy, but the quality and ease of use is not at the same level of Yahoo!. Three out of five stars.
Google bailed earlier this year, so Yahoo!, in my opinion, is the winner of this category. The others of course can improve on what they have, but it will take a lot of imagination, since most of them do not have the cash to buy their way to the top.

Ultimately if you are looking for quality answers, the people on Yahoo! have what you need.

What Should I Read Next is a great Web site for people who are looking for the next great read. It has a simple interface with no advertising, and offers up fast results. When you go to the site enter your favorite book or books along with author and the site will show you recommendations based on other readers. The more books you enter, the more customized the results. You can also look at lists of other readers to see what they are reading. The best part is you don’t have to give away a lot of information, add a picture and tell the world about yourself. Just go in and search for books… no pressure.
I entered Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond and received ten results of other books that readers who read this book liked. Most of them related and relevant. It is kind of like Amazon’s book/product suggestion without the clutter. If you are interested in the suggested books, this site offers a link to Amazon. Nice use of an affiliate program??

If you like What Should I Read Next, you will also enjoy:

• LibraryThing.com - Enter what you’re reading or your whole library—it’s an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things.
• BookCrossing.com - Share your books with others.

FreshLogic and Microsoft Virtual Earth have teamed up to create Atlas, which offers several cool Google Map like features. These include traffic, movies, events, gas prices, WiFi connections and several others. All of these features are integrated with the map which can be viewed as aerial, road map or a hybrid of the two.

Living in Houston, traffic is a very useful feature that allows me to see what traffic looks like before I head home after work. Atlas will will show where the wrecks and slowdowns are along my route. It looks like it is tied in to Yahoo!’s new traffic maps. They also will show gas prices based on zip code. Very cool if you you are interested in saving a couple of pennies, or if you are unfamiliar with an area and looking for a gas station. This also applies to their WiFi feature.

Atlas works faster than Google Earth, and has a lot of cool features that do not seem very buggy. Nice for a mash-up.

Over the past couple of months I have attempted to tell people about Web sites out there that will help improve time spent on the Web. To help make time more productive and enjoyable. Hopefully you are using a few of the sites I have mentioned, and have found that they do make the Web a better place.

LifeHacker.com, the Productivity and Software Guide, takes productivity and time well spent to another level, and now they have a book: Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day.They have put a lot of their great ideas into a easy to read book in order to help all of us become more productive.

From the Back Cover
If your hard drive is your outboard brain, you’re a lifehacker — someone who loves to tweak your computer for optimum productivity to make it an ally instead of an adversary. Life hacks apply technology creatively, reprogramming your personal workflow to save time and effort. This book serves up 88 of them, outlined step by step and categorized by cost, platform, and level of geekiness. If you’re overwired, overwhelmed, or totally tangled in the very technology that is supposed to simplify your life, this book is for you.

A dozen ways to turbocharge your day

• Hack 3: Develop your digital photographic memory
• Hack 8: Permanently block time-wasting Web sites
• Hack 20: Automatically empty your digital junk drawer
• Hack 30: Send and receive money on your cell phone
• Hack 34: Carry your life on a flash drive
• Hack 40: Back up data to your iPod
• Hack 50: Script repetitive e-mail responses
• Hack 56: Securely track your passwords
• Hack 63: Quick-log your work day
• Hack 76: Take your browser configuration with you
• Hack 79: Capture Web clippings with Google Notebook
• Hack 87: Resurrect deleted files

If you don’t want to buy the book, at least bookmark or add their site to your news aggregator. They have great new tips everyday.

I had mentioned Otavo in a previous posting as one of the next disruptors of Internet search. That may be a little misleading since Otavo is not really a search engine. At least not in the way we are accustomed to. It is actually a community of seekers, “questers” or whatever you want to call people looking for stuff online. Sounds like fun, but if you are really in a hurry when looking for a pumpkin pie recipe, you may want to go somewhere else.

Otavo is homey and has a very comfortable feeling, it is not edgy or flashy like a lot of sites. I think that is cool. It is a place where you can make more online friends, and commune with others. Who isn’t doing this? What if I have all of the friends I want in the real world, and I just want answers? Will not my LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Yahoo! friends get jealous if I am off galavanting around with another social network? Why can’t they sell this as a group of people with a goal of finding quality information, instead of this whole I’m lonely and need online friends.

Otavo is a cool concept, but really needs to scale if it is going to provide relevant information. Besides asking questions on Otavo, you can also have “Quests” that deal with getting your life organized, as well as Quests for achievement. Why not just put your goals on a piece of paper or your PDA? Google Docs is available. OK idea, but I don’t want to share that kind of information with my “online” friends.

Ultimately I just can’t get excited about another social site that doesn’t really provide real value, and takes a lot of effort to get going with little return.

Four new sites will help define how we search the Internet in the upcoming year. Jookster, Yoono, Gravee and Otavo are all new community based search engines that use people to define the best results, and to share them with others. They are kind of like MySpace and Digg with a good search feature.
I think people forget that ultimately, the Internet is millions of people looking for stuff to either make their lives better or to entertain themselves. These four new sites help foster this. Google, Yahoo!, and the other search engines are fine for static searching, but do not really get people together and harness the collective knowledge off all of the people on the Web. These four new sites are trying to do that. Do we need four sites with names that do not mean anything, and are hard to pronounce? Most likely not. One of the them will prevail much like Google did to the benefit of almost everyone. Google changed how we use the Internet. One of these will do the same someday.

The Internet is useless without people. We will see in 2007 how useful the Internet becomes.

If you are travelling anytime soon try out FareCast. This site will help you find the best flight and best time to travel through a prediction tool that it has created. They claim to save, on average, $40 a flight. Good if you have a cheap flight, not a big deal if you are flying to Australia.

Farecast.com is the first airfare prediction website. We help online travel shoppers save money by answering the question; should you buy now or wait? In our beta version, we now offer airfare predictions from over 75 U.S. departure cities to top domestic destinations.

They are able to see if fares are rising or falling, and based on the numbers they will provide a recommendation. FareCast has a very cool graphical interface that will allow you to compare several destinations at a time and allow you to see the best days. At the end of the day it is a great travel search engine that will take you to the site with the best fare. At the end of my trip on FareCast, I ended up at Orbitz.

Ten Minute Mail offers disposable e-mail addresses to help you fight spam. They will provide you with an e-mail address that will last for ten minutes and then self-destruct. So ,next time you register for something, and don’t want to be spammed try it out. Then again why would you register for something, and then not want to be contacted in the futre? People do weird things on the Internet. Good thing there are services such as this.