Some uses of Google Web Alerts
- keeping current on a competitor or industry
- monitoring references to your name or company
- finding out when people link to your site
- discovering new websites on a certain topic
Get changes in search results sent to your email.
Sad news. New Zealand historian and author Michael King died with his wife in a car accident yesterday.
I have been in the process of reading his book, “The Penguin History of New Zealand”, primarily in an effort to understand the relevance of New Zealand’s past to race relations issues New Zealand faces today. The book and recent television interviews revealed King as an intelligent and interesting man, who cared deeply for New Zealand and New Zealanders.
New Zealand will surely miss King’s wisdom and knowledge on race in New Zealand.
The book …
From SitePoint Blogs : Dynamically Typed: PHP5 In Depth
Links to several articles at Zend on PHP5.
One of the latest buzzes/fads on the Internet is social networking. The basic idea as it is developing on the Internet is that the implicit trust that comes with established personal relationships is a good and important conduit to make new contacts and share information. In short - I am likely to find important commonalities with my friends’ friends.
This is relevant in relation to networks of linkages between websites. The web is based on links between sites. I guess we might call these relationships “information networks” or “authority networks”. In looking for relevant information we often make use of the linkages in a haphazard way. You find a site through a search engine query that has relevance to your query. Often you then browse to the sites which that site links to, as often these sites are also relevant to what you want to know.
Search engines already take links between sites into account when ranking sites. What I am proposing is that they should allow the searcher, once they find a relevant site, to search the sites it links to or rank results based on the initial site’s linkages. These sites may be more likely to provide relevant information than some unconnected site.
I know the various search engines often offer a “similar/related sites” option, but in my experience this rarely provides much in the way of relevant results.
In terms of an example, my site osCommerce Watch may illustrate what I am trying to explain. I often see in my stats people searching for quite specific technical support issues related to the osCommerce shopping cart software. If someone finds my site as useful - they may also be likely to find useful information at the sites I link to (e.g. those on the osCommerce Links page). A systematic way to search or rank based on the link relationships between these interlinked sites would seem to me to offer relevance faster than a haphazard browse.
I guess those sites linking to mine might also possess information relevant to the search.
Advanced Information Networks Product Range
Advanced Information Networks is a company formed by the partnership of Attitude Group and AEC Electronics.
The AIN site has just been updated to provide information on the full range of products AIN offers. Attitude has worked on the web connectivity of the XE-8000 SMS Controller. The XE-8000 allows wireless control, monitoring and logging of remote and mobile devices. The XE-8000 can be configured from the web and log data back to the web.
An example probably makes this more clear. Here is a demo of the SMS to Web Technology, which shows hourly temperature readings being logged back from the AIN offices in Christchurch. Anyone with web access can view this data. We can download the raw logged data. Alarms to mobile phone or email can be triggered based on particular temperature conditions.
In addition to the XE-8000, Attitude has worked with Advanced Information Networks to offer machine to web gateway services, including email event logging and datalogging to web.