The fact that the search engine emperors have no clothes is one that nobody seems to like to talk about. What I mean is, search engine results suck. How often do you search for something even remotely complicated and get truely great results at the top of the list?
Watching the world of tagging emerge, the idea of enabling users to contribute to solving this problem has been occuring to me lately - not that user input or feedback is a new idea - but it was brilliantly brought up today in a post by Bubblegeneration who took it a step further and suggested that users get paid for helping.
Search deperately needs to catch up with the hype and dollars. It needs lots of improved vertical search solutions. It needs the invisible tabs to get visible. It needs a lot more 'spam pages' to be filtered out. The algo's and the engines that own them can't do it alone. I hope they let us help.
GotVmail is a theoretically great service that provides 880# and local numbers with voice mail, call forwarding, and related services. Unfortunately, they can't seem to enable their phone lines to work consistently for any period of time. The last two days have put into the double digits the number of times I've had to complain because callers get fast-busy or 'cannot connect your call' or just plain silence. Tech support never fails to quickly let me know that they 'can't reproduce it' or that 'they know there is a problem and they're working on it'. I've suggested a new tagline for them: "bringing all the hassle of cellular to your landline".
If you're looking for voice mail or virtual office phone management, and saw the ads or heard the radio spots for GotVmail, I suggest you return to Google and find one of their competitors.
There are lots of reasons to blog, and lots of ways to blog. Hugh is giving a speach on this topic and highlights some of his wisest words, and links to a few from others. If you're still trying to figure this out, you could do a lot worse than absorbing his words and links.