William F. Garrity

PC Magazine periodically publishes a list of the "top 100 undiscovered web sites."  It's always worth looking at it. 

Here are the categories:

• Apps and Services
• Fun and Games
• Health and Science
• Info, Search, and Reference
• ifestyle
• Money and Real Estate
• Music
• News
• Photo
• Shopping
• Social Networking
• Technology
• Travel and Maps

My daughter found this: Using your browser URL history to estimate gender, at Mike On Ads.  It's a javascript that parses your browsing history against the Quantcast site rankings. 

You have to have a browsing history accumulated--if you delete your browsing history daily (as I do), there are no data to analyze. 

Rafe Needleman posts at Webware about Delver, a "social" search engine. 

Delver launches open alpha of its social search engine

By Rafe Needleman – July 15, 2008

One of my favorite companies from the January, 2008 Demo conference was Delver, a search engine that takes into consideration who your friends are and what they've said and bookmarked in its results. I liked the idea in January (see Damn clever: Delver makes search social) and I like it still--I've brought it up in several posts since then.

I finally got a chance to try it out, as you can today, now that the site has gone into open alpha testing. At the current time, it's cooler in theory than in practice, but there is a ton of potential here.

Once you tell Delver who you are, it builds your social graph by itself. It correlates your identities across sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, and more, and creates a list of who your friends are. It also layers in a list of your friends of friends. Then, when you search for something, it gives precedence to content and links from your friends and their friends. So if you're looking for an Italian restaurant recommendation in New York, you'll get results from people you know, or people your friends vouch for. Delver CEO Liad Agmon clearly believes that online content from people you know is more valuable than generic Google results. He says, "The Web is no longer just a collection of documents. It's made up of microcontributions."

...

Medpedia launches at the end of 2008.  It is (http://www.medpedia.com/index.php/Special:Medpedia/About)

... is an extraordinary global effort to collect, organize and make understandable, the world’s best information about health, medicine and the body and make it freely available on the website Medpedia.com. Physicians, health organizations, medical schools, hospitals, health professionals, and dedicated individuals are coming together to build the most comprehensive medical resource in the world that will benefit millions of people every year.

In association with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School and other leading global health organizations, the Medpedia community seeks to create the most comprehensive and collaborative medical resource in the world. Medpedia will serve as a catalog, database, and learning tool about health, medicine and the body for doctors, scientists, policymakers, students and citizens that will improve medical literacy worldwide.

...

See this article from The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch and this detailed post to TechCrunch. 

Medpedia offers to send you an email notification when the service is live. 

I've posted about Google's Knol previously (http://www.william-garrity.com/journal-home/2007/12/16/google-to-develop-wikipedia-alternative.html).  Here's a post by Christopher Dawson in ZDNet Education: 

Google Knol, Mountain View’s answer to Wikipedia, launched last week and, while it can’t yet match the volume of articles on Wikipedia, its focus on accountability and ownership makes it a better choice for students and teachers.

Consider the article on asthma by John Fahy. According to the knol (a knol, according to Google, by the way, is a unit of knowledge), John Fahy is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Google notes that this has been verified and a quick search for Fahy turns up his biographical site at UCSF. Try getting that information at Wikipedia about one of the authors.

I’ve always been a fan of Wikipedia. The amount of information available on the site is extraordinary, free, and usually a fairly accurate starting point for research or quick answers to questions. However, it has no accountability other than a community that can edit and comment on an article. Knol, on the other hand, removes contributors anonymity and gives students the ability to verify sources of information.

Will it be able to grow as quickly as Wikipedia? Probably not; plenty of people with subject matter knowledge simply aren’t willing to put their names and faces on the web. Is it an inherently more reliable tool that can improve students’ research capabilities? I think it is. It will be interesting to see how this competition shakes out over the next school year.

See also,

• Elinor Mills, "Knol and void: The day I became a published Google 'expert'," in Webware. 
• Jason Kincaid, "Google Launches Knol, The Monetizable Wikipedia," in TechCrunch.