Latest Upgrade from Quintura Visual Find Engine – Social See and Find Online!
Posted on Mar 6, 2007 | Categories: General Interest, Knowledge Tools, Personal KM, Productivity Tools, Social Computing | 1 Comment
(Previously, on elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog at ITtoolbox)
Tags: Quintura, Quintura for Kids, Search Engines, Google, Knowledge Management, KM, Content Management, Alternative Search Engines, Tagging, Tags, Innovation, Visual Search Engine, Search Tagclouds, Social Search, Search 2.0
If you remember, a couple of months back I created a weblog entry over here about one particular search engine that was making its way into becoming one of my favourites for the way in which it was getting to display search results focusing more on the visual aspects of it rather than on some kind of linear display of those same search results. Yes, indeed, back then I was talking about Quintura. And today, a few months afterwards, I am going to be talking about it again because, in case you may not know, it has just released a new version worth while exploring, to say the least.
Yes, I know that most of you are going to say that you all depend pretty much on Google for all of your searches. Same over here, of course, but do you actually have got alternatives. Do you play with them? Do you make use of other search engines and find out that the results provided by Google are somewhat different than whatever those other search engines provide? In short, do you actually trust Google to provide you with accurate results all the time?
Well, I used to. And very much so. Till I opened up to see what other search engines were doing and found out that sometimes Google is not keeping up with the same standards it used to at some point in time. Perhaps one indicator of the issues that imply diversifying your product line. Either way, that is why lately I have actually been using a number of different search engines to see what other options are there for those times where I feel Google fails to provide me with what I want. Over at the fine Read/WriteWeb weblog you would be able to find an impressive entry where you can find Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. Lots of great choices in there. And, of course, several of my favourites are listed over there as well. Quintura being one of them. Worth while a read for sure.
However, and ever since Quintura has launched a new version of the online search engine in the last couple of days there have been a whole bunch of folks who have been commenting about the new version and what it actually does. And quite a lot of interest from the past is also coming along, including the superb attempt to make it closer to kids the usage of search engines. Yes, indeed, who said that searching the Web could not be just as much fun for kids, eh?
This is just one of the many things that I like about Quintura. Not the fact that it is providing a good solid alternative to Google and other popular search engines, nor the fact that it has put a nice set of new features as part of the upgrade, nor the fact that they are trying to reach out to new markets, but the fact that they are always on the verge of pushing their limits and see how far they can go. And that is just exactly what they have done with this latest version. A commitment to keep pushing for innovation in a space where we all thought it was all written down for everyone else. Well, not the case apparently.
Last night I actually got an e-mail in my Inbox with the press release that was put together and, instead of me detailing some of the key innovations that Quintura has put together, I am actually going to quote a couple of paragraphs from the press release that are quite descriptive of the new changes coming along with the upgrade and what you can expect from it:
"Quintura offers an intuitive way to refine and narrow a search. The innovative graphical user interface of Quintura presents search results in two panes – the left pane contains a preset interactive tag cloud and the right pane lists search results. The intuitive nature of the cloud allows web users to refine their search by clicking on tags that appear in the cloud. Holding a mouse cursor over a tag in the cloud causes new, related tags to appear surrounding an original tag and search results to change in the scrollable right pane. Clicking a tag in the cloud the web users can easily refine a search and navigate through visual clusters of search results.
Quintura is the first to display graphical images (favorite icons) next to tags (search terms) in the tag cloud. The icon is associated with a URL that corresponds to a search term. Clicking the icon users can visit web pages right from the tag cloud making Quintura easy to use for simple search queries."
Don’t tell me that after reading through those two paragraphs of text you don’t feel intrigued enough to actually go and check it out. Yes, I thought so. I have actually been taking it for a spin ever since I got first alerted about it from the Techcrunch weblog entry and so far I am really enjoying the experience. It surely makes my searching habits much more visual and appealing to the eye to just go along with those tags till I find what I am looking for on the right panel of the displayed search results. I knew I was off to a great start when I was first exposed to it back in November last year, but what they have just done with this particular release is push forward innovation really hard in a space, Web Search Engines, that I bet we all thought it was all invented already with Google.
Well, think again because that is not the case. If you are looking for an alternative search engine, there is probably no better place to get you going than Quintura. Whether you want it for yourself, or for your kids, this is one of those search engines that it surely is going to help you surf the Web in a breeze and much more intuitively than whatever else you may have experienced in the past. I must say that if their innovations keep going at this pace Quintura will be winning enough points to make it for my default search engine. It is probably not there just yet, but I suspect it will be some time soon. How about you? Found your own alternatives to Google, yet?
Social Networking and ThinkPlace – Why Communities Still Rule the Innovation Space
Posted on Mar 6, 2007 | Categories: Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise2.0, IBM, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Tools, Social Computing | 2 Comments
(Previously, on elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog at ITtoolbox)
Tags: IBM, ThinkPlace, Innovation, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Software, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Collaboration, Communities, Robin Bloor, IT-Director, Lotusphere2007, Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Critical Mass
Goodness ! I cannot believe that another week has gone by already since I last posted a weblog entry over here ! WOW! I guess I have just been through one of the worst weeks I have ever had as far as workload is concerned and I supposed all of my weblogs have noticed a slight hit here and there. There is not much more that you can do after having attended 6 to 7 hours conference calls almost every day rock solid ! Yes, I know, just too many meetings and conference calls. And you are right, for sure. But there is just so much going on that it is sometimes difficult to let it all go, just like that. So, instead, I try to make it to all of those events that are worth while following up on, so that I can then come over here and start weblogging about them, because thus far most of them have proved to be very helpful and enlightening, to say the least. But I guess one step at a time.
First things first. Catch up with my RSS feeds, which is what I have been doing lately around the world of weblogging, apart from sharing the odd weblog entry in either of my other two weblogs as well. And while I was doing the usual catch up, so that I would get a glimpse of what is happening out there, I have bumped into an interesting article published by Robin Bloor, over at IT-Director.com and whose title is quite intriguing, specially if you do not know really what Think Space is: Social Networking and Think Space.
Well, to gets things started it is actually not Think Space, but ThinkPlace. But that is another story. Let’s have a look at what the article deals with.
Robin basically provides a quick overview of the Lotusphere 2007 event that he attended back in January sharing a bit of his impressions on some of the different announcements made back then. Yes, the ones I have talked about over here quite a bit: Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. While he believes that they would provide some potential value to large enterprises and corporations alike, he is actually wondering if they would both work within the SmB market since there may not be a significant critical mass to make it all work.
Well, while I can see his point I must say that I do not see a reason why social networking / computing could actually not work within the SmB market. After all, people still need to connect with one another, most of the times, in a distributed environment, sharing their knowledge and collaborating with others. That is something that happens as well in SmB and quite a bit. And in fact, given how powerful social computing can be as an enabler to facilitate knowledge sharing regardless the environment and seeing how inexpensive it actually is it makes perfect sense to think that social networking tools would actually, if anything, be ideal for the SmB market. But perhaps that is the subject for another much more in detail weblog entry.
What I wanted to share with you as well, folks, is actually the second part of the article where Robin gets to mention one other IBM application, we are making use of internally, and which tries to help boost innovation @ IBM big time and which was demoed as well over at Lotusphere 2007. Unfortunately, Robin made a typing mistake and it is not Think Space but ThinkPlace.
In the past I have been talking about ThinkPlace a few times already as perhaps one of the most interesting options IBM is exploring around the world of innovation by placing ideas into a single repository in order to work with them and put them into practice. Not just with the work of several individuals, but also as a group. A group with a sense of belonging and commitment to keep things moving and drive those ideas through. This is something that I have talked about over here just a few days ago and which ties in quite nicely over here.
That is right, one of the main goals from ThinkPlace is to actually not just drive innovation forward for the sake of just doing it, but also from the perspective that innovation can be much more meaningful and rewarding, perhaps even much better positioned, if it is actually taking place from a group perspective. That is right, through the power of communities. And having different tools in place very much around the space of social computing is just going to have one particular effect: that of knowledge sharing, participation and collaboration with others. In short, innovation. I doubt it can get any better than that, don’t you think?
Either way, you would be able to read from that particular article how sometimes in order to reach out to others there is a good chance that you would be able to resort to your own social networks, those that you should treasure and nurture quite a bit, because they are the ones who are going to keep feeding your interest in innovation through sharing what you know with others using social software tools as enablers and not as showstoppers. So if you are thinking about an Innovation program for your own business, ensure that it is a program not just meant for individuals who can innovate, but also for communities to be able to do their share of innovation, because the chances of success are much higher than perhaps having one or two individuals sharing away. Don’t you think? At least, that is what IBM is finding out over the last few months with the existence of ThinkPlace and its use of several different social computing components, such as tagging, RSS / Atom feeds syndication, tagclouds, etc. etc. So whoever said that social networking / computing and innovation cannot walk through hand in hand should probably think about it twice and why it didn’t work in the first place, because for many other instances it is just a new and refreshing method for keeping innovation alive!
(Oh, and don’t forget to read the additional commentary, because it is equally educational!)
