Could Ask3D kill Technorati?
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I was exploring Ask3D, the latest relaunch of Ask.com, and it struck me how powerful the “blogs and feeds” search can be as a blog discovery and promotion agent.
Take a look at the example search for “telecom” here.
You not only get recent posts (by date and time) — but also a “top feeds” category that can help you discover leading blogs for this search.
What’s more, you can Digg or Subscribe to individual blogs from right there on the search results page.
Atleast for me, this will have a big impact on the way I discover new “live” content.
P.S. Technogeeks: Go to www.ask.com ; right-click the Ask logo, and hit “view background image” — can someone tell me what and how they’re doing what they’re doing?
10:37 pm
Impressive work, although I don’t see it toppling Technorati anytime soon.
, I did have a go at the Ask.com logo with Firebug. Turns out its a simple DIV, 100px high and 150px wide, with its background set as the image you see when you click ‘view background image’. They’ve added (negative) positioning to the background (background-position for CSS enthusiasts) to hide the rounded corner on the top left. Because of the DIV’s explicit dimensions, you don’t see the rest of the image.
Although I don’t like being referred to as a Technogeek,
If you look at all the other images on the page, they’re done the same way, i.e. they’re using the common image, and have custom positioning to show only a specific portion of it.
Weird technique, haven’t seen it before. Probably done in an attempt to reduce the number of separate image requests going to the server, hence faster image loading.
10:40 pm
Interesting technique indeed.