Article Thirteen

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/13/graphing-internet-digg-google-trends/

This article talks about how interesting new ways that a person can look at trends on the internet. The first way talks about a program specifically for diggs. The program, known as arc, is a group of Diggs that move around a circle. Larger text sizes means hotter topics. Big Spy -- perhaps the least useful tool -- shows larger text sizes for the most popular topics. And Pics is all about popular photos and graphics. The second major program is Google Trends. This program allows you to compare two different subjects to see which is more popular. It shows one this information in bar and pie graphs. The last main program is known as microsoft pivot. This allows a user to read in depth about what they are searching, say Barack Obama. Pivot shows you he was the Time Magazine person-of-the-year. You can then "pivot" this data and see every person-of-the-year, or click filters to see only African-Americans. This type of data exploration just isn't possible otherwise.

Looking through this article, it's really neat what these technologies are capable of. This really does allow a user to "watch" the internet is a way never seen before. It will make the ability to expand searches seamless and much more satisfying. Also, if these technologies work properly it will be much easier to use the information for reports or other business projects. While doing this blog I tested out a couple of these things. I'll admit, before I went to try it I wasn't expecting much. I figured it would just basically be a search engine with a couple new tools. I figured it would somewhat interesting but nothing to write home about. I was 100% wrong. I could not believe how neat it was to see information presented in the way it was. It really gave me a lot of options I would never have with a simple google search.

With that being said, there are some things I didn't care for. For starters, it took a good bit of time to load up the information after I put it into the search engine. Also, although there was more information while searching this way, it often was somewhat confusing to try and figure out what was where. I would definitely only recommend this type of search for someone who is doing a report or heavy intensive research based project. Although this may seem like common sense, if these types of technologies get extremely popular people may get dragged in and forget about the simpler ways.

An article specifically regarding Digg Lab, found here http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/03/24/new_digg_app/, discusses the idea that although interesting it is still just another search engine. The interface is nice and clean, easy to use and it will be nice to have Digg to search. But to be honest, this is Digg and I was expecting a lot more. So it is a good app and good to have, but it will need to work hard to keep my interest.

These are definitely interesting pieces of technologies, but I will still just google what I need for now.