Google announced yesterday its real-time search plans and released a screencast of how it will allegedly work. It will include content from twitter, news, blogs and social networking sites. It’s hardly a surprise, I find myself more and more searching twitter search (summize.com) these days to find information, or to just use my twitter community to push information to me and find it that way. I also use delicious to find ranked and tagged information. I tend to value more what the community i.e. real people think more so than Google. Its interesting how for a lot of professional related search – Im really looking for interesting blog posts, or links to very specific information – and Google does’t deliver that to my without friction I find. I may not be the typical user, but you’d have to think that there is a real need for niche search products. I don’t find the most interesting stuff through Google anymore its most definitely social – and its only beginning so very interesting times ahead. Maybe the Google Realtime search will address some of these issues. Here’s the video:

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Here’s a nice pithy video from Eric Amundson that goes through 5 ways to bulletproof and improve your wordpress blog – references some good tools and plugins that can help managing back-ups, customising the look and feel, improving search and improving security and performance.

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social software, socialmedia free, Plug-in, Plugin, Templates, twitter, WordPress

Continuing on my podcast quest I have recently come across the London School of Economics Public Lecture series. This is an excellent resource that is published on the LSE website,  they also provide an RSS feed and you can subscribe via iTunes. A lot of the talks from what I have listened to have a very Keynesian slant, which is in total contrast to my previous post where I recommended listening to the econtalk series hosted by Russ Roberts who is much more an advocate of efficient markets. This is wonderful resource with a large back catalogue. For instance, back in June 2009, Paul Krugman gave a three part talk on depression economics which was broad and very insightful into current government actions that are being taken to try and stabilise the current economic crisis. I just love the fact that you can get access to this content, can you imagine how difficult it would have been to access it 10 years ago unless you were physically there.

• Paul Krugman vs. the University of Chicago (curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com)
• ExFSA chief Sir Howard Davies sees ‘dramatic’ risks for Britain (telegraph.co.uk)
• US academics share Nobel prize (guardian.co.uk)

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On the subject of podcasts here’s another one, econtalk.org, which is a fantastically interesting series of academic talks hosted by Russ Roberts. Content includes mainly talks on economics and  political economy, but weaves in lots of cogent and clear cultural, sociological and philospophical commentary too. I’ve just started listening to it and I have to say, I’ve found it to be a must listen to and am looking forward to getting through the backlog.

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social software Associations, Economic, econtalk, Podcast, Social Science

There’s a couple of interesting podcasts that Ive been listening to recently which both involve Dave Winer of RSS and Blogging fame that are very much worth listening to. The first one, Re-booting the News, Dave and Jay Rosen from NYU host it together, where they try and  figure out where the news and media system is going and what it might look like when the dust settles on the current upheaval that is taking place within that industry. The second one, Bad Hair Day, is with Dave and Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb, who discuss more technical developments particularly around social apps and inevitably Winer’s RSSCloud and the 140 character loosely coupled network that he is trying to encourage. Anyway, both of them are unvarnished content rich podcasts that cover some very interesting ground and give well informed analysis.

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