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Search With a Little Help From Your Friends

The Buzz: Yahoo's My Web 2.0 is borrowing a page from the social software movement to sharpen its search efforts. Here's how it works: You save, label ("tag"), and comment on Web pages you view, and then you share that information with a community of your choosing--friends, colleagues, or all My Web users. Other people do the same; then, whenever you search, Yahoo personalizes your results, weighting them to take into account what your community has identified as most useful. It's the same principle that drives Amazon's product recommendations, networks like Friendster or LinkedIn, and bookmark services like Del.icio.us.

Bottom Line: Search is rapidly evolving from blunt tool to finely tuned instrument. Witness not only My Web 2.0, but also localized search and personalized search services from Google and others. Yet I still can't ever find my keys.

Longhorn and RSS

The Buzz: Details of Longhorn, Microsoft's next operating system, keep trickling out. The latest nugget: RSS support, built right into the OS itself. RSS--or Really Simple Syndication--lets content providers (Web sites, bloggers, and others) deliver headlines, news, links, and even multimedia "enclosures" to subscribers via an RSS feed (basically a text document). With Longhorn, subscribing to RSS feeds in Internet Explorer 7.0 will be much easier; simply click the iconic 'XML' button on the page, and you'll get the feed delivered to your browser. A common feed list will make those subscriptions available to other applications such as e-mail and scheduling programs.

Bottom Line: By making it easy, Microsoft removes a major impediment to RSS use. Looks to me like RSS is about to get some R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Big Storage in Small Camcorders

The Buzz: It's about time: Everio G camcorders from JVC replace conventional tape or removable disc storage with gel-encased 20GB or 30GB hard drives. The tiny 0.7-pound cameras can hold 5 to 7 hours of DVD-quality video, or up to 30 hours in lower-quality mode. Priced at $800 to $1000, the models come equipped with either a 640-kilopixel or a 1.3-megapixel CCD and with a 25X or 15X optical zoom, respectively. And butterfingers can take heart: The drives have drop protection, so you won't lose data if the unit falls off the table.

Bottom Line: Just imagine: 30 hours of home videos. If my Uncle Phineas (with his four kids) gets one of these, I'm leaving the country.