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It’s what you want. The very popular StumbleUpon concept is simple: when you sign up, you provide the service with some of your interests, and you install the neat little toolbar. Once you’ve got the application installed, you can simply begin stumbling and you can tell the system how you feel about the page that was served to you. By clicking on the thumbs up “I like it” button or by clicking on the thumbs-down button, you teach the SU system what content you truly enjoy. By stumbling and sharing your finds to other users, you’re personalizing your own experience and the experience of your peers as well.

The personalization concept — where content is being provided based on your own desires — has proven to be quite successful. Since it was introduced two years ago, StumbleUpon now boasts over 1.8 million users, and is continually expanding. Version 2.90 of the toolbar, which came out earlier this week, is incorporating the relatively new video social search engine that it unveiled in December. StumbleUpon is truly growing…

And so is Digg.

At half the amount of subscribers that StumbleUpon has, Digg is aiming to emulate the SU concept, a recent BusinessWeek article has reported. Hot on the heels of StumbleUpon, Digg (which launched its own video extension five days after StumbleUpon did) is aiming even higher to SU’s core success model: a recommendation tool.

According to Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder who is quoted in the article, “Digg will be smart enough to know what interests you” and it will serve content that fits within the tastes of its users. For current subscribers, this means that Digg will serve content based on the stories users have dugg or buried. If you used the service to promote pages that you truly liked, the Digg system appears to not be much different from StumbleUpon.

More and more companies are involving themselves in what can be an imminent threat (well, perhaps not just yet — and it still depends on who you ask): personalization. Google’s personalized search is being promoted more heavily. As more and more people realize that there are only a few items that may be of interest to them when they search, systems are learning to adapt to user preferences through their own algorithms. As Google explains it, if you’re searching for “dolphin” because you want to learn more about the football team from Miami, you’re not overly concerned with results pertaining to marine life. Depending on the types of pages you visit and the domains upon which these sites are located, Google’s personalized search will rank these pages higher than the undesirable results, thus providing you with a searching experience that like that of no other user. To Google, this is a move provide quality results and reduce the unnecessary clutter.

To make our websites shine through these results and be obvious to the viewer, there will likely be obstacles that we’ll need to overcome. Good content is a necessity. Telling your friends is a good way to get the word out. Promoting these pertinent sites through social search is still going to be very useful.

We’re bordering on a new era, one with incredible challenge and obstacles, but one that does have the end user — you — in mind, and hopefully everyone in all communities will be happy with the results.

http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/search-marketing/39752.html

The above link leads to the article below:

Gmail has a bunch of lesser-known feature that can end up being very useful once you get to know them. The product manager at Gmail put together last year a list of his top 10 favorite features that you may or may not be familiar with.   Here's his list, which was very helpful to me in becoming more productive with Gmail and learning to use it's many features.

10. Custom "from" Most people end up managing more than one email account — some are personal, others might be for work or school. When I graduated from college, I wanted to keep my .edu address for alumni-related things, but made Gmail my primary personal address. My university made it easy to forward my .edu mail to my Gmail address, so I could read all my mail from my within my Gmail account. I was happy to find out that Gmail would actually let me send mail "as" my .edu address, so I could continue to keep that identity, while managing all my email from one place. Here's how to set that up.

9. Open attachments in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, or view as slideshow If you are sending a Word document or Excel file as an attachment, Gmail lets you easily open it in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. (In case you're not familiar with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, it's our online word processor and spreadsheet application, which lets you store and access documents online and collaborate on them with anyone.) Since other people are working on many of the docs I receive as attachments collaboratively, it's really easy to just open them in Docs & Spreadsheets and create a single document to work from, rather than constantly sending versions of documents back and forth. If the attachment is a PowerPoint presentation, Gmail will recognize this and give you a link to"View as a slideshow." This will open a window with a Flash preview of the slides. This is great for quickly reviewing slides in the browser.

8. Gmail gadget for iGoogle I use iGoogle to bring together a lot of the information I care about on the web (feeds, my Google Calendar, YouTube videos, etc). I use it as a dashboard at the start of my day to get an overview of what's going on in the world. I've added the Gmail gadget to my page to get a preview of my Inbox, which is great because it's one of the first things I'm interested in seeing.

7. Reply by chat Most people know that you can chat with your contacts in Gmail if they're using Gmail too. But there are some subtle features that make chat particularly useful in the context of using your email, like replying by chat. If you've received an email and notice that the sender is online (by seeing the little green dot next to his or her name in the conversation), you can click the button "reply by chat." What's particularly convenient about this is that the chat will be archived as part of the email thread to which you replied. I like this most because it means when I search for anything related to that thread, I find the chat transcript alongside all the relevant email messages.

6. Gmail for mobile application It wasn't that long ago that my cellphone could barely handle sending text messages. I didn't used to think of it as being an efficient place to access my email. That's changed — big time. Email has become one of my primary forms of communication when on the go. Unfortunately, on a lot of phones, dealing with email can still be a pretty annoying experience, especially if you're not using a device like a PDA. Enter Gmail for mobile. It's fast, it syncs with your online account, and it gives you virtually all of the same Gmail functionality like search, filters, and access to your whole archive of mail.

Two other little known features to get greater control over your inbox:

Here are some little-known ways to use your Gmail address that can give you greater control over your inbox and save you some time and headache. When you choose a Gmail address, you actually get more than just "yourusername@gmail.com." Here are two different ways you can modify your Gmail address and still get your mail:

• Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.

• Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses — we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)

For me, the real value in being able to manipulate your email address is that it makes it really easy to filter on those variants. For example you could use hikingfan+bank@gmail.com when you sign up for online banking and then set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails addressed to hikingfan+bank. You can also use this when you register for a service and think they might share your information. For example, I added "+donation" when I gave money to a political organization once, and now when I see emails from other groups to that address, I know how they got it. Solution: filtered to auto-delete. ive it)."

Tags: GmailGmail_features Top_10_gmail_features

In that spirit, Business 2.0 magazine sent senior writer Paul Kaihla and a team of reporters on a quest to find some of the best "best practices" in business today. The companies they interviewed have stumbled upon their own unique methods for doing everything from running meetings and generating product ideas to troubleshooting M&A deals and keeping board directors on their toes.

Following are 25 ideas that are truly gems, broken down into five categories: finance, HR, management, marketing, and R&D.

They're methods that help keep some of the best-run companies, like Procter & Gamble (Research), Google (Research), Southwest Airlines (Research), Microsoft (Research), Intel (Research), and Coke (Research), at the top of their game. You've probably never heard of most of these practices — but you might want to start implementing them tomorrow. 

HEWLETT-PACKARD CEO Mark Hurd loves numbers–and insists that his managers learn to love them too. Since Hurd came onboard last March, one of the key tools he's used to keep pace with rivals is his extreme form of industry benchmarking. Instead of comparing HP's sales and profits with Dell's or IBM's, the company now tracks itself against rivals by every conceivable measure. "We want to make sure we break down every unit and business function," explains Marius Haas, senior strategy officer at HP, "so we can become best in class in each one."

Here's how it works: Imagine a matrix with various business units running down the side (printing, servers, storage, IT services, etc.) and business functions across the top (finance, HR, marketing, R&D, etc.). Now create benchmarks for each of the 72 resulting cells and you have a good idea of how Hurd is managing the $87 billion company. The benchmarks are the best guess of where HP's rivals are going to be in 2007, based on more than a dozen variables, from real estate cost per square foot to operating expenses as a percentage of gross margin.

Before Hurd took over, HP measured itself primarily against IBM, using one very blunt tool: costs as a percentage of revenues. That ignored IBM's higher gross margins and the fact that it has more gross profit to spread around. Hurd's new benchmarking method formed the basis of HP's reorganization effort announced last July, through which HP has promised to save $3 billion by 2008. Already there is key evidence of success: Operating expenses as a percentage of gross margin dropped 2 percent in 2005, helping to fatten profits by $385 million. — E.S.

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Summertime is a time for sharing love; we spend time with friends and family, we travel and experience new things and new cultures, and we make new friends.

Yesterday was the Summer Soltice - the longest day of the year for us in the Northern Hemisphere.  Here in Sweden, where I live, celebrating the Summer Solstice is a holiday with roots from Pagan times - a celebration that has the same status as Christmas and Easter.  It's called the Eve of MidSummer.   Maypoles are dressed in birch leaves and flowers.  The poles are put up in every park and clearing in the woods, and the Summer is "danced and sung in".

In olden days, and sometimes even now, as my daughters have once done, very young  girls pick seven different flowers and place them underneath their pillow to dream of their true love to come.

By this time, all of the boats have been launched and masted and many Swedes have begun their long 5-6 week summer vacation  now.

Feasts are served, normally the "Smörgåsbord", but my family had a bar-be-que on our veranda, protected by the awning from the wet and chilly air.  We played verbal games of saying one thing nasty and one thing nice about everybody at the table, each person taking their turn to speak out.  After that, each person got to say the one thing they are most proud of about themselves.

Please let me know what you think of me - give me a taste of the birch, or some roses, or both. Tell me what you are most proud of about yourself, and let me know what I can do for you, and trackback to your site.

In the spirit of sharing the love and making new friends,

Warmest MidSummer Greetings!

Angela Wickenberg