Ok, I’m probably late to notice this, but I just did a Google search for daylight savings time and noticed that over on the right hand side of the search results page, where AdWords ads normally appear, there were search results labelled “Blog Results »»” (click the thumbnail below for a full sized view of the page).

Yes, I know that blog posts show up in Google’s regular search results, but I’ve never seen them clearly labelled like this before. Has anyone else noticed this?

For me, as a long time blogger and somewhat of a blogging evangelist, when a search engine the size of google goes out of it’s way to let searchers know that “These results are from blogs” and also places a link above the results the searcher can use for further blog searches (even though that link leads to results on their own blog search service), it’s a massive hat-tip to blogs, bloggers and blogging as a whole. It helps legitimize blogging to a higher degree.

Good onya Google. Bravo, and thanks, sincerely.

Update: I just tried to replicate the same results so that I could add a link to my post above and the blog search results did not show up this time. Which leads me to believe that they are testing this feature in a limited way.

So Google, when will we see this go mainstream? Matt? Anyone?

So while the rest of the web2.0 crowd is trying to define communities, I looked up communities on Wikipedia:

A community is a social group of organisms sharing an environment, normally with shared interests. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

That sounds about right to me.

I guess the others would like to have first crack at re-defining what a community is, so they can better define themselves and where they fit in.

Check out the times (circled in red) of the twitter reports below about the current whitehouse fires.

Now it helps that Jim Long (twitter.com/newmediajim) is a journalist and camerman in the DC area who covers a lot at the whitehouse, but it also helps that he’s a rabid twitter user who happened to be on the whitehouse lawn at the time the firs broke out.

Where else can you get breaking news that quickly?

In your face twitter doubters!

whitehouse fire, twitter, cnn

It used to be that you went to Google.com, dropped in a keyword or two and you were quickly whisked away to the page out in cyberspace most relevant to what you were looking for.

That’s changing, dramatically.

Go to Google today and do a simple search. On your search results page, you’ll see links to YouTube videos. You’ll see product listings from Froogle (or whatever the heck they’re calling it now), you’ll see links to pages on Google-owned blogspot.com, etc.

What you’re seeing is a closed loop where the search results are no longer sending you off into the wilds of cyberspace, but to Google’s own content. And with the announcement of Knol, their newest foray into becoming a content provider rather than just a content discovery engine, that loop is getting tighter than ever.

From the Official Google Blog:

“A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.”

“We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.”

Other bloggers are calling Knol a Wikipedia killer. Some think Google is going too far. Another blogger wonders how Knols will organize it’s info better than blogs do, or how attributing authors is better than what wikipedia is currently doing.

So at what point does Google’s closed loop become a noose? Time will tell.

knol, google, antitrust

I just finished installing the WP-OpenID plugin here on the blog so now, if you have an OpenID account anywhere, you can use that same ID here when you make a comment.

The plugin was painless to install, but you’ll need php5 on your hosting account in order for the plugin to work on your blog.

Earlier today, I logged in to the HP software update service (I have an HP Pavillion dv2160ca laptop) and went through their updates… and there were drivers ready for the broadcom wireless cards. Apparently, the drivers were downloaded onto my machine that support wireless N.

Cool, now do I need a new wireless card? heh.