Two widgets, both provided by major companies have some discrepancies in their data and the election hasn’t even started yet! I’m not sure who’s wrong here, Google or Microsoft, but either way someone’s data isn’t accurate. When it comes to something like an election - accuracy is very important. As best I can tell, Hawaii is the last poll to close and from the even hour discrepancy, it seems to me someone didn’t account for daylight savings or a timezone somewhere.

Screen grabs taken at the same time

The live widgets for both companies are below. (more…)

I’ve been thinking a lot about topic specific search lately. Google has a product that lets you search within a specific vertical, for example Linux, for content that’s evergreen. This used to be more open so you could define your own search, although the link eludes me right now. This of course updates with Google’s typical frequency, which can vary depending on how popular your site is. But what about time sensitive content. What about items like Twitter feeds?

Sure there’s search.twitter.com, formerly Summize, but what about including Plurk, Yammer or any of the other life streaming content into it? Friendfeed attempts to bring all this content to you, and does a good job, but what about other verticals? What if you knit and what you care about is yarn. A quick Google search for ‘yarn blog’ brings up some blogs; some are even about knitting, but generally lacking are good portals about all things yarn.

While portals have fallen out of fashion over the last 5 years, they’re purpose is not lost. Tech Crunch is certainly an important technology portal, even if it’s just called a blog. Mike Arrington has gathered one of the most comprehensive dataset about web startups and hardened internet companies around. So what about those knitters who are constantly looking for new information about yarn? Where can they turn for quick, one stop shopping, reliable information, industry trends and other bits about yarn? Nowhere! There are blogs, ecommerce stores, even industry news sites, but nothing that brings it all together as a good 1990’s .com would have.

At very least, I’m sure some tech-savvy knitter is out there putting together a nice search engine to leverage the Google (or perhaps Yahoo!) search results to create a single destination for knitting or yarn, or perhaps even needles. Is it possible to create a search engine, on the fly, for every possible vertical? Is it possible to create a portal that has content specific to every need, but only that need? The google search I ran for yarn was good, but there were people who were telling tales, often called yarns, on their blogs. Once I’ve selected the appropriate subset, I’d like to see the correct information, not all data - and the most important and most recent information at the top.

Photo by LollyKnit, courtesy of Flickr

Surprised by this one from @ev tonight, seeking a date for a “friend”. This @ev guy, for those who don’t know, is quite the catch. For silicon valley and anyone looking to be well connected, you would do well to be in his book. He did afterall sell a company to Google and is a founder of this odd little company called Twitter.

This interesting story about how one man was able to make a huge profit off of software that did nothing. TechCrunch humorously covered the story yesterday but it had been removed before I could even see it in the app directory. Of course, without $1,000 to buy it or an iPhone/iPod to run it on, I wasn’t going to be giving any hands on demos anyway!

Imagine how much people would pay for an application that actually did do something… the sky is the limit!

Found this one on Slashdot this morning, and article from The Standard which looks at 10 stars of the 1990’s and where they (or their technology) are now. Personal favorites Pets.com and eToys which was a site I actually used and liked a whole lot better than anything out there today.