I know that both Yahoo! and Google are indexing blogs, so that you can search on them. However, I think that they need to add a feature to allow you to search on just blogs. And while they are at it, they should also have a _search the web without the blogs_ feature too.

The challenge will be to make this near real time. The general web is fairly static when compared to blogs. For blogs, seconds count — especially for things like election coverage.

Get on it!

Recently, I’ve noticed that Del.icio.us has been getting slower and slower. I read somewhere (I can’t remember where) that Del.icio.us’ user base has been growing like weeds over the past few months. To meet this new demand, Del.icio.us has been installing a bunch of new “hardware”:1. However, it seems that this new hardware is not enough to keep the service snappy.

Speed on the internet is life. Why do you think Google is so popular? Del.icio.us better get a handle on this problem — and fast (bad pun semi not intended).

As they say at Yahoo!,
You
Always
Have
Other
Options.

[1(Del.icio.us blog post on new hardware)]http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/05/more_hardware.html

I just stumbled upon a cool feature of “Yahoo! Unlimited”:1 (Yahoo!’s new subscription music service). It’s a feature that creates a playlist of music similar to the artist or song you are browsing — for some reason the feature isn’t available in _album_ view.

For example, if you were browsing the artist page for Rush (for some unknown reason), there is a button called _Create a Playlist of Similar Artists_ as shown below:
!/img/yahoo_music_create_a_playlist.png!

If you push this button, the Yahoo! Music Engine (the Yahoo! Unlimited client application) automagically creates a playlist of songs similar to Rush’s music. Here’s a view of the newly created _Like Rush_ playlist tacked onto the end of my playlists.
!/img/yahoo_music_create_a_playlist_playlists.png!

Browsing the playlist, you can see what kind of songs Yahoo! thinks are similar to Rush. Overall, I’d say that it’s pretty good at picking similar songs for the playlist (at least in this example).
!/img/yahoo_music_create_a_playlist_rush_playlist.png!

I’ll be playing around with this feature more to see how it aids in discovering new music.

P.S. You should probably sign up soon for the full year of Yahoo! Unlimited while it’s still only $60/year. As quoted over on the “O’Reilly Radar”:2, Jerry Yang says that the pricing for Yahoo! Unlimited is an “introductory price.”

[2(O'Reilly Radar post on Apple vs. Yahoo!)]http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/tit_for_tat_app.html

[1(Yahoo! Unlimited home page)]http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited/