Luyi Chen’s blog

The real Xiangyang Road has closed, but someone already set up a new online Xiangyang Road. This one has nothing to do with the old one. It is actually an virtual aggregator of offline shops. And it provides a 3D map for you to explorer all these shops, just like you walk thought the real market. The 3D map loads a bit slow, but they put a small game on the loading page, so you won’t be bored.

Why this is a good idea? By organizing virtual shops into a 3D map, you can remember one shop not by its name, but by it location. For example you will remember there’s a chopstick shop at the northeast corner of the virtual market.

But the search engine part is still weak. I tried to search mp3 and backpack, but got nothing result. Anyway, it’s just been there for two weeks or so. Keep watching!

Thanks to Matthew. I’v got my personalized megite page here. This is made from my bloglines subscriptions. So they should be what’s hot in my reading list.

As my first glance, there’re some posts from blogs that never updated, like some from TechEd blog. Megite shows these posts are from 4 hours ago, but actually they are months old. Because they never show up in bloglines, I haven’t removed these feeds. But never mind, let’s keep watching. I believe this is a one time problem.

I haven’t checked TailRank for a few months. But I recently found some big changes in the service. I cannot tell whether these changes attract me now. I just log them for further investigation.

1. Tailrank doesn’t try to recommend new post for individual. Rather they try to filter out good posts from you own subscriptions. The old local view url still works, but it’s missing from the homepage. So users are not encouraged to use them.
2. Tailrank looks more like memeorandum now. It has cutted most of the features since the beginning. These feature includes the social view, blog recommendation, user promotion etc. More earlier, there’s even a wikipedia filter.
3. The import feature is improved. Now users can import individual weblogs. But there’s no easy way for user to add weblogs from Tailrank homepage directly. Even after following the source link of the weblog, I didn’t find anything like an add button.

These are significant changes. There’re also many small ones as well. The speed of the service is still a problem.

Steve Rubel said Tailrank’s index is better than memeorandum. Maybe I should try to do some link search with Tailrank later.

update: Robert Scoble says, “Cause I don’t want more stuff coming at me. I have my 840+ feeds for that. I want a tool to see what bloggers are finding important and so far Memeorandum is better for me.” This seems that Tailrank is going the right way. They are trying to be a good filter, rather than bring more stuff to readers.

114 is going to be Voice Google. 114 used to be a telephone number yellowpage. Now they are changing the strategy to more general information besides telephone numbers.

They are going to sell ads too. It should work like this. When you ask for hotel information around specific location. Which hotel 114 should recommend to you? The most paied one of course. Will you mind to get advertise information in this occasion? Probably it’s better than none.

Surely if this service is successful. We will see Google Adwords in the result.

I have noticed personalization feature of TailRank is hidden for some time. The personalization feature used to be called local view in this service. In my early days trying this service, local view is my start page of the site. It’s in this address:

http://tailrank.com/posts/depth/local

As of this writing, the link is still work, but hidden from the homepage.

Why tailrank is doing this? Is this the performace issue? I do feel tailrank a bit lag in early days. And another personalized search engine Searchfox seems never out of beta because of scaling problem.

With IP keyword in MSN search, you can find all the websites hosted on the same IP address. For example, do this search in MSN search [ip:210.52.223.105]. This is my blog’s IP, and you can find these websites hosted on the same IP.

• 高飞Blog：如影随形
• 阿童木中文网
• 年轮社区
• Nickcheng.LOG
• 小飞熊工作室

There’re more sites. Hi neighbors!

There should be other method to do this thing, but this feature makes it much easier. I don’t know if we can do this in other search engines.

via Search Engine Roundtable