A Melanie RoundUp

We’re listening, and shortening up these posts, and Melanie will start to post longer items on her own.

Here’s some news of note in the past few days:

Korozu Byoms Launched

Yesterday, Korozu made its trial of byoms search open to the public. Byoms brings a specialized search engine (with WebMD or Wikipedia, for instance) into your IM client, and in a way that can handle natural language queries. Make byomsFedMedia as a buddy, for example, to use a byoms selected by Korozu or create your own. As SEW notes, “In order to get the most out of the byoms, the searcher really needs to know their source and which search terms to use; a regular search that doesn’t give good responses isn’t going to be much better if consulted via an IM client.”

Yahoo revamps MyWeb

A MyWeb update promotes socializing with picture contact cards, a browser of users who use similar tags, and expansion of searchability to all public pages, as well as added export features.

Quote of the Day

“But as charming as he is, Schmidt runs Google about as much as much as the Dalai Lama runs the world’s spiritual life.” –Elizabeth Corcoran, “Who’s Really Running Google?” the first in a series for Forbes

Googlecheckout.net/org/info registered

ZDNet speculates deduces that Google is behind the registration (though held by another company) and speculates the domains will be used to create a shopping cart system for websites. “Maybe one day Google will even provide an inventory management solution with an API so websites can have their inventory in Google Base and on their own website without double entry.”

Harvesting the 2004 Presidential Election

Internet Archive has made keyword searchable the 2004 Presidential Term Web Harvest —a special collection of about 100 million items of web material. “This harvest was intended to document Federal agencies’ presence on the World Wide Web at the time that the Presidential Administration term ended in early 2005.” From Resource Shelf.

Sheet Music Consortium

A collaboration between UCLA, Indiana, Johns Hopkins and Duke, the Sheet Music Consorium is creating a collection of digitized sheet music, with additional contextual data and advertising imagery. (via Resource Shelf)

Turn Here

Turn Here launches, offering free short professionally-shot travel videos of a local’s walk around the neighborhood for tourist-destination spots–from Berkeley to the East Village. The narrative product placement model used was shown to be more effective than in-stream ads in a study, and offers a neat tie-in potential with map search.

Ask Blog-Feed Search

Ask caught up to the blog search game on Thursday by jump-starting Ask Blogs & Feeds, coordinated with Bloglines. Added features include: Bioculars to preview posts, a handy tabs for favorite and feed subscriptions, and ordering the search results by popularity, relevance and post time. Ask blog search also lists the top post searches and feeds.

Search Views points out that “Not everyone is in love with it …but at the very least Ask’s blog search is trying out unique ways to reduce junk results (we’re looking at you, Google) and determine relevance – even if all the kinks aren’t worked out on day one,” and points out a couple good reviews by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch and SEW.

Also, check out the notes for advanced search user at Resource Shelf from Gary Price, who had a hand in developing the new search.