MATEOSQUARED’S iSEARCH

Here is something for everyone who is concerned with the massive deforestation of 3rd world countries. Tree Nation is a group out of Spain, who is trying to plant millions of trees starting in Niger. It looks like they acquired some land with the help of United Nations Environment Programme to get this idea of the ground. It seems legitimate.

Here is how it works:

Stage 1:
the trees will be planted in local nurseries for the initial period until they reach a suitable point of growth to be planted in the park. This varies depending on the type of tree that you choose.
Stage 2:
your tree will be planted in the park location that you have virtually selected where it will receive continual care and maintenance.
Stage 3:
our local experts will nurture the tree (providing water and nutrients but no chemical fertilizers) on a regular basis using agro-forestry techniques in order to maintain its condition.
Stage 4:
our local experts will manage the harvesting of the fruits and medicines that the tree provides.
Stage 5:
your tree grows happily and the local community benefit from its produce (gum, fruits, alimentation, medicines, etc)
Stage 6:
finally, a hug a day and the tree will grow! You will be able to follow its progress through photos and through the hi-tech facilities on our website.

They have a very interactive site, where people can discuss their tree with others, see how their tree is doing, and get others to join. Tree-Nation offers four different trees that can be purchased, at a very reasonable cost. Check them out at least for the cool site, then at least tell someone about it.

Leave it to a design group out of Italy to come up with the ultimate readers chair. It would not fit in my house, but it sure would look cool at the local coffee shop or library.

The Bibliochaise is an armchairlibrary for who likes to be immersed in deep reading. It contains 5 linear metres of books and thanks to a special fitting structure is easily disassembled.

I may put this on my Christmas wish list…

I like looking at homes, working on my own home, and talking to people about their homes. This probably comes from my days in high school and college where I worked for a home building contractor. It was so cool to be able to use my hands to build something and see the finished product. I guess this is why I think Home and Tell is great new site for people who like their homes. It gives people the opportunity to “show-off” their homes, projects and ask for advice about what to do with their home projects.

It is of course another social site, but it doesn’t have the same adolescent feel as most other social sites. People load up pictures of their house or home project, and then discuss with others about their projects.

I live in a suburb in Houston, TX, so it is nice to see houses that have original design and took some imagination to build. The site is also very inspiring to start other home projects.

PreFound is a search engine that does not use algorithms and other “fancy” technical tools to find content on the Web. Instead it uses people to find stuff. Novel idea…but I think the amount of people needed to “index” the Web will be very hard to get for such an endeavor.

What worries me about search engines such as this, is that they very similar to Digg or Wikipedia. A small group of pedantic users ban together, and make it really hard for someone else to enter their sites into the index. I think the same thing will happen here. We all know there are biases in algorithms based on the developers and the search engines, but the scale of content that is indexed keeps it from being to obvious, and gives most everyone an opportunity to show up in the results. Another fear is that marketers will get involved and start promoting their own sites, and really bias the results. They may even pay people to “index” content. I know we have never seen that before.

The most annoying part of the site, is the bouncing demo of the bald guy. Every time I went to the homepage, there he was bouncing up and down. Geez, come on… its not 1997.

To continue my Web 2.0 search engine write-ups, I would like to tell you about Whonu. Whonu that search could be so complicated?

If you want to truly find what you are looking, and have a lot time to get there, use Whonu. Their tagline is “be amazed at what you discover”. I would have to agree. Whonu will find you about anything you need, but it takes some work. It is the antithesis of the Google homepage. There are more buttons and links than the new Yahoo! interface, but it is worth the overload once you learn how to use their system. They do offer an intro movie to learn about how to use the site which is helpful.
A quick example of the complexity of the site. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Clusty and MySpace all have a presence on the home page, and under each one is the functionality for each search engine. For Google this includes: web search, web search +, get lucky, images, images b&w, video, news, maps, blogs, directory, groups, scholar, calendar events, and notebook. It is insane…

Go try it out, it truly is worth your time if you are looking for relevant results.

BooksFree.com has been around since 2000, and unfortunately I only came across them today. Unfortunate because I could have been using their service for the past seven years. BooksFree is like NetFlix, but instead of DVDs they rent paperback and audio books, at a really low price. I signed up for the two-at-a-time option for $8.49 a month. For someone who reads a lot, this is a great price. They also offer several price options which you can find on their pricing page.

It seems that you can keep the books as long as you would like without any fees, and if you like the book enough to buy it you can purchase it at a discounted price.

Their explanation.

After signing up, browse the Web site and add titles to your list by clicking the red Rent button. We automatically ship the number of titles your membership plan allows. The remaining titles on your list will be queued up for future orders. We recommend keeping at least 10-15 titles (this does not include title that have not been published yet or are older, rare titles) on your list at all times for the greatest enjoyment of our service. You may keep the book(s) as long as you’d like, there are no due dates or late fees. When you return books in the provided prepaid return mailer, we automatically ship your next
selection(s).

This has to be one of the better sites out there. I don’t have to tell my favorite color and music, there are no random pop-ups or slick interfaces. It is just a clean, user friendly site that allows people to do what they want to do. Find and read books.

As we have all figured out by now, search engines allow us to find things on the Internet. Some are helpful, and most are a waste of time. Over the next several days I am going to review several new search sites that could be offering the next big thing, or just another fly-by-night search engine that is looking to be purchased by Google.

KeoTag, not sure who they want to be but they seem to be targeting people who like tagging. Isn’t that just searching? I mean, a tag is a keyword or words, and you type the tag into a search engine. Are we not just searching?

I guess what they are doing is a little different, they have actually indexed the stuff that people have tagged on social sites, blogs and news sites like Digg, Reddit, Technorati, Infovine… Which is cool, but can’t we just search for it by using keywords? Are not tags, just keywords for stuff you are looking for?

So you search for a tag, and then all of these little icons for their respective sites show-up. Click on the one that you like the best, and you will see the search, I mean tag results for that site.

KeoTag also allows visitors to generate their own tags, and to create social bookmark links. Woo-hoo!!

You decide looking for a Google buy-out or serious contender to be the next big thing in search…