I've been experimenting with Spezify, a new visual search tool that pulls from Flickr, Yahoo, and a number of other search sources through their APIs and presents the results as thumbnails of screen shots, images, and videos spread out on your screen. Try this search for Hanover, NH. It's feels more like making a scrap book than using an encyclopedia or Google. A list of related words are displayed across the navigation bar linking to a new search. My initial reaction to Speziy is very postiive but I quickly wanted a way to refine and organize results. Hopefully that's in the pipeline.
Spezify is founded in Stockholm, Sweden by Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson who have over 10 years experience within the creative digital industry.
A beta was released late April 2009 and the first official version went online on the 15th of June. We are constantly working on Spezify, adding API:s and enhancing the search experience for upcoming versions.
Inspired search
Spezify is a search tool presenting results from a large number of websites in different visual ways.
We take web search further, away from endless lists of blue text links and towards a more intuitive experience.
We want you to get a good overview of a subject,
find useful information and be inspired with Spezify.
We mix all media types and make no difference
between blogs, videos, microblogs and images.
Everything communicates and helps building the bigger picture.
We collect websites and are aiming to use as many relevant, free and open API:s as possible to generate extensive and diverse search results.
Every once in a while I come across something that's both cool and useful. Allan Jardine has created a set of bookmarklets called Design that are very handy for anyone working on the web. Design takes about 5 seconds to install and 30 secondsto decide if it's something you can use.
Here's a nice blog post on DOSHDOSH (http://www.doshdosh.com/twitter-marketing-mass-follow-users/) discussing the differences between the Quantity and the Quality of your Twitter followers. The key point is that having followers that are responsive to your tweets is much better than just having a lot of followers.
Ever wonder how vulnerable you site or web application is to being hacked? Try Wapiti, a great little tool that scans your web application or site for vulnerabilities to a variety of hacking exploits. Wapiti is written in Python and has a simple command line interface. I've been using it as part of the PCI compliance certification process for a customer.
Wapiti can detect the following vulnerabilities :
File Handling Errors (Local and remote include/require, fopen, readfile...)
Database Injection (PHP/JSP/ASP SQL Injections and XPath Injections)
