It has been around for a while, but the Optimal Title plugin is still a great tool to add to your blog.

What the plug in does is set the name of your blog post before the blog’s name. Your blog post will most likely have keyword content that will be picked up by the search engine’s, and blast your post ahead of the competition.

Wired has posted about a new search engine, Pluggd, which is currently in beta testing and available as a demo to test out.

The basic principle behind the new site engine is explained by Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk:

“First, the company uses parallel servers to churn through audio, performing a speech-to-text analysis of each file at faster-than-real-time speeds. The company also maintains what it calls a “concept map,” a database that tracks associations between words by analyzing Pluggd’s speech-to-text transcripts and looking for words that often show up in the same contexts. This tool also studies text web pages, so the concept map learns to associate words faster than Pluggd can analyze audio files.”

As podcasts, digital radio broadcasts, and audio in general exponentially grow across the web, a search engine like this will become vitally important in finding recorded information. Programs that can analyze audio have been around for a while, but if Pluggd succeeds in its mission, it will be like nothing else available on the web (until someone else builds a mirror of it).

Using the Google Co-op platform, VDoogle allows you to search through many popular video sites all at once.

The full list of video sites it searches through includes the usual sites such as YouTube and Google Video, as well as a few others I’ve never heard of such as Bolt.com and vSocial.com.

Since the site uses Google Co-op, the search results are formatted just like a normal Google Search, which is a definite bonus in my eyes. Though that red color scheme is a bit jarring on the eyes.

As the holiday shopping season approaches, it is easy to go overbudget, and even easier to pay more than you should be for an item. DVDs are always a popular gift, and with DVD Price Search you’ll be able to find the lowest price on a specific title that you want.

Once you search for a title, a list will show the available sites carrying the title, the price for the DVD, any shipping costs, the total you’ll wind up spending, and an easy link to the store’s webpage.

Also available on the site are hundreds of coupons and sales happening at any given time in the online retail market. Happy Shopping!

Yotophoto is a search engine that specializes in finding freely licensable images. In that aspect it’s not too different from other search sites such as Creative Commons Search. For example, I wanted to find a picture of a very intense monkey (don’t ask why) and it was very helpful.

(Image CC by OskarN)

But what if I wanted to find something more specific like, say, a bright red car? Not all people tag or label their images based on color, so Yotophoto’s color search feature is pretty handy. Here are the search results for cars with the added hex code for red, which is #FF0000.

Even with their little color picker, though, it’s a little hard sometimes to pick a hex code that will give good results. They’re blog explains how the color matching algorithm is implemented, but I really don’t think it works as well as it should. I hope they continue working on it, though, because it could be quite useful. You know, for finding more pictures of monkeys.

If you ever find yourself in need of non-restrictive sounds for a multimedia project or a similar endeavor, The Freesound Project might be what you need. They offer a user-contributed database of Creative Commons-licensed sound files.

As with all Creative Commons materials, I would suggest you go over the licensing rules and understand when and where you can use the sounds. The Freesounds Project uses the Sampling Plus 1.0 which specifically restricts usage in advertising. It’s really not all that complicated, but proper attribution is what makes these licensing schemes work and attracts creators. Just take a quick look at their Rules and Legal pages and you’re good.

I searched for all sorts of random things and came up with really nice results. The files are of good quality and not noisy and scratchy like you’d expect from some random Joe with a crappy Walmart mic.

And just in time for Halloween, there’s a wide assortment of screams and other scary sounds.

Normally when it comes to search interfaces I opt for the “simpler the better” approach, but Live.com’s Image Search with all it’s flashy Ajaxy goodness makes me happy. Maybe it’s the fact that you still see the image results on the left side, next to the framed source page, after having clicked on an image.

Let’s do a comparison:

A search for hedgehog on Google Image Search.

The same search on Live.com Image Search.

What can I say, I like hedgehogs.

No, I’m not going to start making overly impassioned political posts, I’m talking about Democracy. Democracy is a video player, but it’s also much more than that. It’s mixes RSS feeds from various video sites and a Bittorrent client to make finding and saving videos to your personal collection a nicely integrated experience. Being free and open source doesn’t hurt either.

Democracy’s interface is reminiscent of iTunes, which I guess makes it easier for Apple’s users to switch back and forth when they get tired of overpaying for shows and movies on iTunes Store. The sidebar on the left has a pre-built list of RSS feeds for video sites, but you can add as many others as you want. The default feeds aren’t bad for a start, though. Video Bomb, for example, is sort of a Digg for internet videos. They link and embed popular videos from the other big sites like YouTube and Google Video and allow you to vote on themYou’re likely going to find a lot of videos that you’ve already seen elsewhere, but there’s also a lot of original content that you might not have come across before. When you find a feed you like, Democracy will automatically download the new videos for you as they are posted.

Democracy showing a custom RSS feed.
(Click to enlage.)

The player itself is nothing extraordinary, but it works. I did have some issues with a few videos, like flickering, but considering how many different formats this thing plays, that’s not that surprising. The volume slider has an annoying habit of getting stuck to the pointer if you slide it too far in either direction without letting go of the button, but these issues are small and I imagine they’ll be fixed in time for Democracy 1.0.

In case you haven’t tried it yet, Google has come up with a new way to improve search results for their image search. Google Image Labeler turns the otherwise tedious task of labeling images into a multiplayer game.

You can try it out at first by just playing as a guest, but if you want your score to be saved, you need to be logged into your Google/Gmail account. Also, you can change your nick to anything you want, even someone else’s nick, but your score will be tied in to your account, so you won’t get a huge score by masquerading as the current points leader.

The game is rather simple. You and your partner start off with 90 seconds on the timer and are shown a thumbnail for an image in Google’s index. You both then begin entering labels you feel describe the image’s content, and if you both happen to enter the same one, another thumbnail appears. If you are both stumped on an image, you are able to pass. After your time runs out, points are tallied and if you wish to continue playing, another random player will be found. During the first day or two that Image Labeler was open, you could check the thumbnail’s URL to find out details about an image, but Google has since fixed this small “exploit.”

While playing I noticed that people don’t seem too concerned withmaking quality matches. Far too many times when a book cover appeared, players wouldn’t try to enter words from the title or author, they’d just stop at book. Or whenever a person with facial hair appeared they’d stick with beard even if the subject was easily recognizable. Once, I spent nearly all 90 seconds refusing to enter monkey when the picture was obviously of a chimp. Eventually, we matched on hairy. When the match was over and I was able to see what labels my partner had chosen, monkey and hairy were the only two he had attempted.

Google did plan for this, at least partially. There is an off-limits list of labels for each image. Once an image has been matched on one label, it becomes off-limits and you can no longer match on that particular term. This will, hopefully, force players to be somewhat more imaginative on future matching opportunities.

And in case you were wondering, at least at this time, the points you win serve no purpose beyond recognizing that you spend way too much time doing this. Which is a good thing, because if there was something useful you could do with them, the matches would be even more imprecise.

I play as 8seek, by the way. Just remember, if we happen to get matched up, I refuse to call an ape a monkey!

Guess I have while to go before I can make that leaderboard.

Lifehacker has a useful article about finding media with reusable licenses such as Creative Commons or GNU Free Documentation License. They list several search engines tailored specifically for this and also some tips you can use to find such media with your usual search engine of choice.

Now, I was going to post about this story and then add a nice little edited Creative Commons licensed image to show my support for sharing your work and allowing others to creative derivative works, but as I got into reading about the different licenses and discussions regarding their usage, I realized it was all very vague on some points and more than a little confusing. Their FAQ answered some of my questions, but left enough unanswered, especially in regards to attribution, to persuade me into not using a CC licensed image.

It would take the patience of Gandhi to figure all that out. Well, not really, but I wanted to use this public domain picture of him that I masked out and made a “derivative work” from.