What is an "open" API anyway? (case YouTube / TotLol)

TotLol is a membership-based site that aggregates YouTube content for kids. What’s interesting is its background story and how it went from being ad-based to almost non-existent to membership-based.
The author’s version of the story is interesting. Harshly compressed: He claims to have created a service that was one of the first on YouTube APIs. Then [...]

December 30, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Web  No Comments

Bing beats Google in finding me first PDC09 breakfast

It’s a coincidence I’ve been so Bing-oriented lately, but there will be other topics soon enough. Even at the risk of sounding like a Bing fanboy, I’ll post this.
Good morning, LA! It’s 6 am and I haven’t been sleeping for a while now (ten hour jetlag doesn’t really help). So breakfast time is approaching [...]

November 15, 2009  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Web  5 Comments

Bing’s next wave of services rolling out

Looking at Bing’s new search features, I can’t help wondering if the attachment to Google is like using the console instead of windowed applications: I’ve always done it, and it gives me more raw data. Do I really want raw data?
Google is great at searching, and Bing’s quest to catch it seems impossible, particularly in [...]

November 13, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Web  No Comments

Google starts showing anchor links on pages

Sometimes long pages need additional navigation and anchors get introduced. Google recently started pulling your table of contents to the search results.
As announced in the Official Google blog:

As you can see, the start of the Wikipedia article’s table of contents has been pulled in as the four links above the URI. It’s interesting how vaguely [...]

September 29, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Web  One Comment

The anatomy of Bing search results

Microsoft recently published Bing White Paper for Webmasters and Publishers. While offering little in the actual SEO sense, it does provide other interesting viewpoints, especially for usability guys and web site developers.
The anatomy of a Google and Bing SERP (Search Engine Result Page) are definitely different. Google’s result on “Helsinki” is reasonably simple:

On [...]

June 29, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Web  No Comments