Charles Hudson’s Weblog

I would not describe myself as a power user of Twitter by any means, but I continue to be fascinated by the amount of energy and time people spend building tools on top of it and generally commenting on how it’s the next next new thing (double nexts were intentional). I do, though, use FriendFeed [...]

I was checking out tweetmeme today and I thought it was pretty clever. Twitter is its own community with its own dynamics, but I have lately been itching for a service that would help me get value out of the status updates that my friends are constantly posting. I just came back from a trip [...]

Update – A few readers pointed out that the Alexa stats for some of the sites here look a lot stronger if you take a U.S. rank as opposed to a global rank. This is especially true for Trulia, Yelp, Kayak, and Indeed. It’s a point worth noting.
I have been doing a lot of thinking [...]

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about Q&A systems lately, largely because I think it’s an opportunity that’s becoming interesting again. In thinking about what can be done to improve the quality of Q&A systems, it appears to me that all of the systems out there (perhaps with the exception of Yahoo!) [...]

For the past week I have been talking with a bunch of people about vertical search business models. I have a pretty bipolar perspective on vertical search; some days I think there is a business there and some days I don’t. After many enlightening conversations, my general thoughts can be summed up in the following [...]

The last SearchSIG event I attended was really good and the lineup for this next event looks interesting as well. Presenting companies include Edgeio, Google, and Oodle with others to be added later. Sounds like a good list of presenting companies — it would be great to add someone from Craigslist in the mix.
I worked [...]

I have been experimenting with Wink for about two weeks now and I really think it’s useful provided the target of your search meets one of two categories:
1. The content you are trying to locate is something of interest to the current universe of taggers (breaking news, technology topics, poltiics, etc.)
2. The data sources that [...]

Earlier this evening I attended the SDForum’s SearchSIG event on tagging, social bookmarking, and tagging. One of the great things about living in the Bay Area is the easy access you can get to newsmaking companies and topics. I am sure that there will be many interesting transcripts, podcasts, and summaries of all of the [...]

Okay, when 4 people I really respect and find interesting tell me that they are going to attend an event after work, that’s enough to put it on my radar. The event in question is being put on by SDForum’s Search SIG. The focus of the event appears to be tagging and search and will [...]