There I was walking around and innocenty listening to the Daily Searchcast, when I heard Danny Sullivan talking about the little snippet I wrote about the show a few days ago. It’s in the February 7 show.
Actually he doesn’t say much other than to joke about me complaining about the length of the shows. (And to point out the awful comment spam I get. Arg! I need to get a new comment spam filter in place.)
I still hold by my idea that a shorter show would get me to listen everyday!
Congratulations to Ask Jeeves on hiring Gary Price, long-time writer for Search Engine Watch and creator ofResourceShelf. From the press release, his title will be Director of Online Information Resources. That’s a pretty vague title for a search company, but apparently he “will lead Ask Jeeves’ outreach efforts within the library and education communities and will play an advisory role in the development of new search products for Ask Jeeves.” Cool!
In his own words:
“I’ve been asked (no pun intended) to do several things including:
1) Outreach to the library and education communities
++ This means a lot of things including doing what I’ve been doing (training, conference presentations, etc.).
++ Working closely with leaders of both communities to make Ask Jeeves a product that librarians and educators can count on.
++ A conduit (a person on the “inside” if you prefer) for these communities and from companies who serve these markets to share their ideas and services. What can we do better? How can we improve and meet your needs? We’re here to listen. Perhaps a service that librarians would find useful is already out there and we can work to bring the two sides together. It would be exciting to leverage what librarians and libraries already offer and make them more readily accessible to the public on AJ.”
It’s great to see librarians continue to be hired by search companies and I’ll be curious to see what comes of this hire.
The Daily SearchCast is a podcast featuring Danny Sullivan’s views on the latest search news. I like that each daily podcast is annotated so you can preview the topics before listening to the whole thing.
I grab these podcasts on my Zen Creative if I’m going for a walk or a jog or to the gym. Rather than reading the daily headlines I can listen to them. But on days when I do read the headlines I don’t bother with the podcast. Doing both takes too much time and is redundant.
Generally I like the podcasts but they could be cut from 10-15 minutes (or sometimes more like 20 or 30 minutes) to about 5 minutes each day. Less joking around by the guys and more news! They also run ads at the beginning of the show, but it’s easy to fast-forward past those, which I guess is an advertising flaw. The conversational format is sometimes awkward, but hopefully over time the guys will settle in and get more comfortable with it.
Bored with reading press releases from search engines and other tech companies? Head over to Valleywag to get the latest gossip on executive dating and other juicy tidbits. Although, like everywhere else these days, most stories about G, there are other topics that get some coverage, such as Larry Ellison, Y!, Ask, etc.
It’s sort of interesting to me as a search engine employee, but does anyone else actually care about these people? I don’t know…