Yahoo! attacks Google

On the Yahoo! search blog, Tomi Poutanen from Yahoo! Social Search posted "Today we learned that Google Answers is closing. That's a shame because some great knowledge was created on that service by the Google Answers Researchers". Tomi invited Google Answers researchers to join the Yahoo! Answers community. I´m not sure if this is rather an inofficial invitation to former Google Answers Researchers (exGARs) to join the Yahoo! Answers team and work for Yahoo!!!

Google Answers vs. Yahoo! Answers

Yesterday, Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher announced that Google will soon shut down the service Google Answers. Later this week, they will stop accepting new questions and they will stop accepting new Answers to questions by the end of the year. The existing Qs and As will however be available.
This decision comes one week after Yahoo! announced the merge of Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Answers. I believe that the main reason why Google Answers didn´t succeed as compared to Yahoo! Answers is that it is a charging service. People are not willing to pay to get an answer to a question that they can get for free just by using Google or Yahoo! powerful search engines. This might explain the success of free question-answer services that mainly rely on users who can ask and answer each other questions (the wisdom of the crowd) such as Yahoo! Answers, its German version Yahoo Clever, or Amazon´s Askville.
I even argue against the success of the free question-answer services e.g. Yahoo! Answers. To be honest, if I have an open question, especially if it´s a question related to my work, I would not post it to Yahoo! Answers or Amazon´s Askville and wait for hours or maybe days and weeks to get an answer that might not meet my expectations. I would rather use Google or Yahoo! main search engine which are getting increasingly better to get a quick answer, or directly ask someone that I know s/he might have the answer. Additionally, I would not waste time to browse through the questions posted and answer them even if know the answer. I think Yahoo! is aware of this problem, that´s why they are hardly trying to give a push to Yahoo! Answers by e.g. including search results from the Yahoo! Answers page to the main Yahoo! search page.

Edublog Awards 2006 - nominations open

Josie Fraser announced the third international Edublog Awards , "the independently run, community-based awards programme which recognizes and promotes excellence in the educational use of social software".

"The main purpose of the awards is to demonstrate the huge variety of excellent practice going on across the world, to provide a showcase site for everyone interested using social software to support informal or formal education, and to have some fun along the way. If you aren't familiar with the awards, check out 2005's amazing roll-call".

This year there are ten categories:

• Best audio and/or visual blog

• Best group blog

• Best individual blog

• Most influential post, resource or presentation

• Best library/librarian blog

• Best newcomer

• Best research paper on social software within learning and teaching

• Best teacher blog

• Best undergraduate blog

• Best wiki use

Nominations are open from 8 November to 30 November and can be emailed to the awards address: 2006awards@googlemail.com. Head over to the awards blog for all the info.

Eclipse ATF Webinar

On November 30, 2006, the Eclipse community is organizing an Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) webinar. Presenter will be Robert Goodman, Eclipse ATF Project Leader. Register by emailing webinar-atf@eclipse.org.

" The Eclipse Ajax Toolkit Framework (ATF) provides exemplary tools for creating and debugging AJAX applications. These tools include enhanced JavaScript editing features such as edit-time syntax checking, an embedded DOM browser, CSS Tools, JavaScript debugger, a JavaScript console, and an embedded Mozilla web browser. The goal of ATF is to provide an ever-expanding set of high-function tools for AJAX developers. The AJAX Toolkit Framework is an extensible framework that supports using arbitrary AJAX runtimes through the Personality Builder function. This webinar will demonstrate how to use ATF to create, debug, and deploy an Ajax application on both Apache and J2EE servers."

Google Book Search and AJAX

Nathan Naze, Software Engineer at Google announced the upgrade of Google Book Search with new features for better browsing and other interesting changes. Naze mentioned JavaScript and DHTML as technologies used for these changes and I don´t know if he means AJAX!

• Zoom in on text and images. Here's a cool full-page sketch of a ship from an 1898 book on steam navigation. Looking for something less dated? Perhaps this colorful page of a room from a book on interior design. Want a better look? You can now zoom in and out — just click on the and buttons. Play with it until you find a size you like.


• One book, one web page. No more reloads! In one-page mode (just click the button), pages appear one below the other, like a scroll of paper. For full-view books, there's also a two-page mode () in which pages appear side by side, just like in a physical book (perfect for two-page images). In both modes, you'll be able to use and to turn pages.


• Scroll, scroll, scroll your book… using the scrollbar or your mouse wheel, or by dragging (in most browsers, you'll see a ). You can also use the keyboard (try the spacebar, page up, page down, and the arrow keys). Or you can click on a link in the table of contents or your search results to jump right to that page (like this photo from the 1906 book Geronimo's Story of His Life).


• This page was made for reading. We've tried to tidy up the clutter to leave as much room as possible for what's important — the book. We've put all the information about the book in a scrollable side menu. Still not enough room? You can put the screen in fullscreen mode with , so you can use the whole window for browsing. Try it with a nice illustrated book of Celtic fairy tales or, for some lighter reading, electromagnetic wave theory.


• More on this (and other) books. Find other books that interest you. Just click on "About this book" to find more books related to the book you're reading. If the book How to Draw Comic Book Heroes and Villains interests you, you'll probably like Comic Book Artist Collection, Vol. 1. We also revised our "About this book" page to provide better information for in-copyright books, from which you can just see short snippets or a limited preview.


• Explore citations and references. You can also find other books that refer to your book of interest. If scholarly works from Google Scholar have references to the book, you'll see them too. As an example, see what other works have referred to Aristotle's works or the 1922 book All About Coffee.