Web Worker Daily

Bing: How Useful Is Microsoft’s New Search Offering?
A Digital Nomad Survey
A Typical Twitter User
PBworks Introduces Project Edition
3D Graphics/Animation App Blender Gets an Upgrade

Bing: How Useful Is Microsoft’s New Search Offering?

Posted: 03 Jun 2009 04:00 PM PDT

Windows Live Search didn’t go over too well with the online masses. Few, if any, moved from search industry leader (that’s an understatement) Google. I remember the worst part about doing a fresh Windows install was changing IE’s defaults from Microsoft’s Live services, and replacing Live Search with Google as the default search engine was first priority. So how does new search offering Bing stack up, especially from a web working point of view? You may have already formed your own opinion, but here’s my take.

Basic Search

Before looking at some of its more advanced features, let’s compare it in terms of a straight-up, simple keyword search on a subject close to my heart. Finding information on Apple is a part of my job, and I run Apple-related searches on an hourly basis, if not even more frequently, over the course of the day.

Searching just for the keyword “Apple,” I found the results fairly telling. Bing returned mostly product pages and sub-sections of the official Apple site. While useful to some degree, these pages are not generally the kind of thing that I’m looking for.

Google returns far more context in the first page of results, including Wikipedia results, news results, the Apple store, Apple Developer Connection, and Slashdot pages relating to the subject. This wider view provides much more material for actually accumulating knowledge about any particular subject.

No Blog Search

Bing looks a lot like Google, and it has a lot of the same features, in the same places. Along the top, you have different search options. A news search is available, along with videos, images, and something called “xRank“, which displays the most popular search results.

Notably lacking, though, is a blog search like the one Google has. The news results page in general is far less powerful and detailed than Google’s, and less easy to navigate. There are blogger rankings in the xRank results, but these appear to be more of a popularity contest and less of a useful feature.

More Advanced Searches

Using keywords to try to deliver instantly useful results for things like travel and quick calculation is definitely something that comes in handy in a search engine. Looking up “travel boston” returned nearly identical results in both search engines, though I did appreciate Bing’s “related searches” in the left-hand column. You can turn on related searches in Google, but they’re more hit or miss than Bing, and they’re switched off by default.

Performing a local search showed another vast gap between the two engines, though. Entering “restaurants near” followed by my postal code returned a long list of actual restaurants and a map displaying their proximity in Google, while it just returned a regular list of results, and not particularly useful ones at that, when entered into Bing.

Bing does calculations just as well as Google, though neither search engine provides a really smart or intuitive way to do currency conversion as of yet, in my opinion.

Verdict

For now, Microsoft still seems to be playing catch-up. Maybe it should stop being so concerned with name/branding changes, and start trying to make leaps in usability instead. This web worker is definitely sticking with Google, at any rate.

Will you be adding Bing to your search toolbox?

A Digital Nomad Survey

Posted: 03 Jun 2009 01:00 PM PDT

Written by Simon Mackie.

Web working enables the digital nomad/neo-bedouin lifestyle — working from a different location every week and enjoying new cultures and experiences. As this mode of working is still fairly new, it’s hard to get a picture of the typical digital nomad: who they are, what they do, where they work, and how much they earn.

To try to answer these questions and more, Location Independent and Free Pursuits are currently running a Digital Nomad survey — if you consider yourself to be a digital nomad or aspiring digital nomad, please help them out by filling out the survey.

A Typical Twitter User

Posted: 03 Jun 2009 01:00 PM PDT

Written by Dawn Foster.

I often need to remind myself that the way I use Twitter is probably not typical when considering the population as a whole. Like many of you, I am online most of the time: sitting at my computer or checking in with my iPhone when I’m away from the laptop. Since I’m always connected and usually working in some form or another, I read tweets frequently and post many times per day.

According to some new Twitter research published on the Harvard Business Blog, my usage is unusual:

A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue — Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

I suspect than many of us fit into that top 10 percent of users who contribute the majority of the content, but I’m a bit concerned about the conclusion that Twitter might be more of a one-to-many publishing platform rather than a community of peers interacting with each other. I’m not sure that the data shown in the blog post leads to that conclusion. I do worry about all of the brands jumping on Twitter to broadcast their marketing messages and tell people about their products and services without really engaging in the conversation. However, there are also many people and companies who engage effectively in the conversation by becoming a part of the community. @replies and retweets are part of the community-focused culture of sharing content that is also a part of Twitter.

As a freelance consultant, clients often ask me about using Twitter, and it can be difficult to get them to understand the conversational nature of Twitter to shift them from thinking of Twitter as a broadcast medium to Twitter as a community of people holding conversations. It’s also important to remember that most people are not likely to be using Twitter as obsessively as I do, which makes techniques for mining and monitoring Twitter even more important for the average Twitter user.

(As an aside, the Harvard Business blog post also contains some interesting observations about gender and Twitter usage that are outside of the scope of this post, but are definitely worth a read.)

What are your thoughts about Twitter as a conversation vs. a way to broadcast content?

PBworks Introduces Project Edition

Posted: 03 Jun 2009 09:00 AM PDT

Written by Simon Mackie.

PBworks (formerly PBwiki) today introduced PBworks Project Edition, a modified version of the collaborative wiki software that incorporates some project management features.

Simple project management functionality, like workflow management, task assignment and milestones, is built right into the tool, so there’s no need to use a separate app like Basecamp to handle simple project management. This makes PBworks an attractive option for teams looking for a tool for collaborative project tasks, like document authoring, requirements gathering or design review. Task management is kept together with the actual task itself, which makes a lot of sense.

This idea of providing task and project management functionality in apps that are used for the tasks seems to be gaining popularity; we recently saw Box.net add task management features to its file-sharing service, for example. Including task management functionality within an app should help many teams handle project management tasks themselves, reducing the need to have a designated project manager on simpler project. (PBworks calls this “organic project management.”)

PBworks Project Edition costs $20 per user per month, with “guest” licenses (for clients and contractors on a particular project) available for free.

Have you tried PBworks Project Edition? Let us know what you think in the comments.

3D Graphics/Animation App Blender Gets an Upgrade

Posted: 03 Jun 2009 07:00 AM PDT

Written by Samuel Dean.

In early April, I wrote about Blender, a free, robust open-source application that can be used for 3D modeling, eye-catching logos and other still graphics. As we covered on OStatic, Blender is now out in a much-improved version 2.49. You can find announcements of the many new features here, and videos of the new features in action here. There is a lot to like.

Blender is an excellent 3D modeling tool. You can find a gallery of the types of still graphics that Blender is capable of here. It has even been used to create full-length animated movies. There is also a free, online book on Blender that will give you a good sense of whether it may be a useful application for you. Many people use it to create splashy logos for use on web sites and blogs, including animated logos. Here’s a good tutorial on using it for logos, including illustrating how to create the logo seen in the screenshot above.

The new version of Blender includes Projection Painting, which lets you paint directly onto 3D models you create without taking the intermediary steps that were previously required. Blender has always had a healthy set of extensions, and for the new version, you can get many scripts written in Python that automate graphical tasks in the application. Also, if you use Blender for video tasks, there are a number of video improvements. The new version also supports the high-quality JPEG2000 image format throughout the application, and is noticeably faster than the last one.

In addition to being a useful addition to anybody’s graphics arsenal, Blender is a lot of fun to use. You can download the new version here.

What do you use Blender for?