Filed under: News, Freeware, Search, Web
Silobreaker offers alternative search service for news and current affairs
Who do you think of when you want to search for what's happening now? Increasingly people are searching social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and Google has increased the speed of its index to offer more up-to-date real-time information. In the realm of technology, Techmeme has had a lock on live news for a few years now.
But there's a site I recently learned about that you might not be aware of that has a unique take on allowing you to search for and presenting news and current affairs called Silobreaker. Silobreaker's current list of categories includes Global Issues, Technology, Science, Business, Energy, and World. Clicking on any of these top-level categories presents a menu of 4 to 6 sub-categories that allow you to further refine your view.
Silobreaker pulls from news sources, blogs, and multimedia sites to put together a hub of related posts and articles for any given story. In the sidebar, they offer an In Focus section with direct links to the people or organizations being discussed, a Network graph that helps you to visualize how each of the publications or services that are used in a story's summary are related, a Blogs section listing relevant blog posts, and a self-explanatory Audio/Video section.
Silobreaker's approach to sourcing out relevant information and determining what's hot seems to be working, and the way they present the collected information is second to none. Watch for the service to grow by leaps and bounds.
Google is working on something mysterious that has to do with Gmail and social networking, but the details are still under wraps. The new product will be unveiled tomorrow, and it could be anything from integrating Gmail status updates with Twitter and Facebook to launching a full-scale Twitter-like service of its own.
Here's what we're hearing so far:
TechCrunch says the new product will ...
Liquid Scale is an iPhone / iPod Touch app that allows you to resize images by removing unimportant elements in the photo, leaving the important ones untouched. It's a technique called seam carving that we've previously mentioned, but what's interesting here is that it's now available to be used on the iPhone.
For those that are unfamiliar with it, the seam carving technique analyzes images to ...
Grooveshark is a fantastic music service; it lets you immediately listen to almost any song or album you can think of. They've got an enormous library, and the quality is usually decent. We've covered it before, but what makes it special for me is that it is actually one of the few services that work in my geotarded neck of the woods (no Hulu or Spotify for me).
And now, Universal Music ...
Microsoft and Facebook have worked together for two and a half years now, with Microsoft selling display ads on the social network. In a newly-announced deal Facebook will be taking over responsibility for selling their own display ads -- which makes sense given that they've got their own ad network.
Microsoft's Bing web search service will be extended to Facebook worldwide, and Microsoft will ...
I almost (not quite, but almost) feel bad for Adobe right now. Apple has been unceremoniously dumping on Flash in a big way since the iPad announcement, and all Adobe can do is claim they don't ship known-buggy Flash releases and announce how much better Flash will perform on Macs when Flash 10.1 is released. Flash still has critical mass adoption among traditional computing devices (desktops and ...
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
