I must start this post by giving a plug to Netvibes, my favorite personal homepage. One of the features of Netvibes allows one to add a widget to a page that searches multiple podcast directories at once - ODEO, iTunes, Podemus (a French directory) and Pluggd.

I noticed Pluggd right away because of one simple fact: when I searched for Orlando, I actually got relevant results. iTunes did a decent job, and ODEO was so-so, but Pluggd showed me lots of things I hand't heard of, but would like to listen to. In addition to searching individual shows, you can also search Channels, which is the word I like to use when talking about podcasts.

Here is where it gets cool (and disappointing): apparently Pluggd has a service called HearHere, which lets you interactively search inside a show for a keyword, and they even use semantic matching to try and determine relevance. If you watch the video by PodTech.net, you'll see what I mean.

Here's the disappointing thing: it looks like you can only do this on the ESPN show. The pop-up player for all of the other shows doesn't have the extra tabbies to let you search inside the show... sigh. Guess I'll stick with Podzinger for now.

Wired 15.01: 10 Top Tech Towns

All that Battlestar Galactica will come in handy: Walt Disney World and Epcot actually pay you to make the unreal seem real. When you're ready to engage with planet Earth again, check out the city's craigslist site, one of the most happening in the country.

If you go to the site, the also list the number of Circuit City stores in the area, the health of the Craigslist community, and the number of comic book stores per capita as being some of the more significant statistics about Orlando.

Daylife has finally hit the web, and it is pretty cool so far.

This is how you do a 'zine Hosted on Zooomr

From what I can see, this is the most usable news site I have seen. Like a magazine, they have a cover with big, pretty images and headlines, and like a good interactive experience, you can jump straight to that story. Also, once you get there, you are showed lots of good related content, also with photos!! Then, they provide... location-based stories! Magic!

The location page is packed with goodies, like stories from the past week, a month or so ago, and beyond. There are also the ever-present images from Getty along with captions slideshowing past, quotes, and testimonials relating to that geographic area. To the left is Florida.

There are bound to be a few things about a brand new site that the critics will not like, and I can't say I disagree with Mike Arrington (who invested in this project some time ago). Apparently lots of A-listers have some money/ consulting sunk in this site, but Mike doesn't mind coming out and stating some shortcomings.

From Techcrunch Jan 04, 2007:

What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what�s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, even for your bookmarked stuff. Even worse, there�s no ability for users to leave comments on articles, a feature that has been wildly successful at NewsVine and Topix. And the fact that the front page news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.

This quote also serves the added duty of comparing Daylife to the other top news sites on the web. Mike says Google News is still the king of aggregated news stories, and I must say I agree with him. Actually, I think Techmeme (see their tracking of Daylife posts) qualifies as a competitor, though the "tech" in the title suggests a different audience, I suppose.

I really hope these guys get a clue and start including audio and video services, along with the related stories and etc. If someone could start semantically linking podcasts, audio and video through speech-recognition, it would be quite a bit easier to steer people (or spam them). Maybe that's a mashup idea in the works... anybody game?

I just read on Scoble's blog that he has read over 25,000 items on his Google Reader account (which he hasn't been using that long) across 483 feeds.

These are two massive statistics. I doubt I subscribe to 100 feeds. I'm sure that if his feeds weren't published as a "river", meaning all the items simply appear in chronological order, he would not be able to stomach so many feeds. Also, if there weren't a "Mark All As Read" button, he'd be screwed.

Still, it shows the extremes as well as the median. Scoble is subscribed to 483 feeds, I'm subscribed to 108 (not counting MySpace blogs), and my father along with most of America is subscribed to 0. If we can make the average about 5 per person, feed subscription will have succeeded on a massive scale. Right now, it is still lagging a bit. Hell, it even took a few weeks of coaxing to get some of my tech-happy friends to create a Netvibes account.

How many feeds are you subscribed to? Are any of them from Liberatr.net?