AOL News

New Look and Features for AOL Search

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 06:11:17 GMT

AOL search -- powered by Google -- have launched a new search interface, incorporating new look and features. Wendy Boswell -- who thinks there are valid reasons to use AOL search over Google -- has a profile of the changes.

My personal opinion: A few nice concepts, but let down by being mostly sluggish and over-engineered.

AOL Buys Weblogs Inc

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 15:36:38 GMT

PaidContent reports that AOL have acquired Weblogs Inc -- a company founded by Jason Calacanis which is one of the largest publishers of professional paid bloggers -- for an estimated $20 - $35 million:

This is a very quick exit: the company was founded about two years ago, and took some money from Mark Cuban a year down the line. For Calacanis, this is his second company being sold in a space of about two years...his original company Rising Tide Studios was first sold to Wicks Business Information, which in itself was bought out by Dow Jones. The company's blogs have had an exponential trajectory, with sites like Engadget, Autoblog, BloggingBaby, and others. In total, the company has about 130 bloggers, with about 15 full time employees, from what I know. AOL intends to keep the company/blogs separate from its site, much in the vein of what is happening with other blog and Web 2.0 companies being bought. But this is perhaps the first pure content-related company being bought out in the blog/ Web 2.0 space...or at least of this scale.

AOL BETA Leaves BETA, Find Out Why It Sucks!

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 19:48:01 GMT

AOL's new home has left BETA, way to early in my opinion. See my AOL screenshot with piece by piece narrative of the serious design/usability problems (in my opinion) that probably should have been addressed before launch. There are actually a few more issues that I noticed, but I lacked time/space to fit them in.