We hammered on Inform.com last week following their launch and a fluffy article in the New York Times.

Inform.com’s goal is to provide a useful news interface – both blog and non-blog – and to show the interconnectedness of all of the content.

We had a number of concerns with the service. It’s a full page popup to ensure that they entirely control the user experience. It doesn’t work properly in Firefox. You are limited to reading the content they provide (you can’t add content they haven’t included in the service). The scroll button on the mouse doesn’t work. Etc.

I received an email from Julian Steinberg, the project manager at Inform, a few days after my initial post. He offered a point-by-point response to each of my criticisms. We followed up with a phone call today. I am re-printing his email below (with his permission), and I want to point out a few positive aspects of the service as well that I discovered after he walked me through it.

Mike,

I read your review of Inform’s beta launch, and would like to take you up on your offer to clarify a few things about our product. Hopefully this will help you see some value in the product, even in its beta form.

Most importantly – and as you pointed out – we recognize the need to improve site usability and other shortcomings in performance. However, given the powerful new tools inherent in the product today, combined with our personal frustration consuming and using news, we felt the trade offs of putting out an early release were worth it.

Below are responses to your specific points, followed by some of what differentiates Inform.

Re: “I honestly can’t figure out what it is, even after reading the Times fluff piece. They say its an RSS Reader but adding feeds is anything but easy. Newbies need simplicity. Oldbies want something that handles a ton of feeds efficiently. This does neither.”

* Inform isn’t an RSS reader. While the ability to add RSS feeds to Inform will be incorporated into an upcoming release, we are not an RSS reader today. However, you can ’subscribe’ to any of the sources we cover today, including blogs, in a similar way to RSS feeds, and read them by section. Unlike many RSS readers, we crawl every article on every source we cover and include all the articles from each publication, whereas RSS readers may only include a portion of a publisher’s content.

Re: “What it does do well is break. Early and often. They warned me that it was optimized for IE, but I’m a firefox guy and I charged ahead. Bad idea.”

* The only difference when using Inform with Firefox versus IE 6.0, is that we do not display articles directly within our reader. Instead they pop-up in a new window or tab, which some users prefer while others clearly do not. Otherwise, the functionality is identical in the two browsers. We are committed to continuing to support Firefox users and working to enhance their experience.

Re: “The UI is unworkable – even my scroll wheel on my mouse is disabled on the site.”

* Inform often displays two scrollable windows on many pages. To activate a window for scrolling, you must click inside it first (similar to Outlook Web Access or a product that has multiple panes).

Re: “I try to find the good in new products, but I’m failing on this one. Please, tell me what I’m missing.”

Michael, this might be a better conversation than email exchange. We are genuinely interested in your feedback and I’d welcome the opportunity to discuss this by phone with you. I can be reached at 646 722 XXXX. We have a lot of enhancements planned for the future, and hope you will bear with us while we continue to improve Inform.

Julian Steinberg

This was a reasonable and articulate response to a fairly aggressive post. And other than the scroll wheel funtionality (it doesn’t work), his counterpoints are good ones.

Here’s what I learned from the walk through:

This is a beta, so thin content is excusable. They do an excellent job of relating content to other content via topics (basically keywords). They do a great job with filtered tagging (searching across multiplie keywords like “miami” and “football”), something no real time search engine does today and which is a really useful way of drilling down into new content. You can also toggle on/off blog and non-blog news.

New feature releases over the next couple of months include a video seach and viewing tool, better firefox integration and the ability to add feeds that are not currently already included at Inform. I’m looking forward to all of this.

In 1999 Eng-Sion Tan launched a company called Third Voice, a browser plug-in that created a sidebar on web pages and allowed surfers to annotate the page by adding their comments. The service quickly devolved into web graffiti and shut it’s doors two years later.

Even though Third Voice is gone, the idea had some value. And soon Jean Sini and Marc Meyer will be launching something that has some of the characteristics of Third Voice, but which will not have the same graffiti result. They call it Stickis.

Stickis is still in private alpha. I don’t have credentials yet (they are keeping it very quiet and don’t want screen shots on the web), but Marc and Jean came by last week to give me a peak at the service. You can request an alpha invitation on their home page.

To be honest, it took me a while to get it. The reason: they’ve built a platform that has at least two or three killer applications and I saw so much in so short a time that I was getting lost. I slowed things down by asking dumb questions and, in the process became pretty fired up about stickis in general.

Once you are registered, you can add a “sticki” to any web page with your notes, which can be in the form of text or dragged in images. Every time you return to that page you can pull up your sticki. For lots of sites that I interact with, the ability to keep these notes is very interesting. Notes can be shared with friends or kept private.

You can also subscribe to feeds from other sites, and if those feeds have linked to the current site you are visiting that content will also appear in the stickis. For instance, If you were to go to the Sticki site, and you had subscribed to the TechCrunch feed, you would see this post included in the sticki.

They’ve also included a master page to manage the content you’ve distributed on various pages, and add feeds and friend’s content.

Marc and Jean are in the process of raising an angel round – everything to date has been created on their own dime and with their own time. They’ve been working on it for about a year.

Frank Warren the creator of the increasingly popular postsecret website is now coming out with a book entitled PostSecret : Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives.

The PostSecret book is a hardcover with 288 pages published by Harper Collins/Regan Books. Inside, there are hundreds of color images of postcards. Many of the PostSecrets have never been seen before.

Postsecret has been a favorite site of mine. I wrote about it back in July (getting their permission to post more than a single image). Thousands of people have sent postcards that tell a secret fear, regret, hope, fantasty, betrayal, confession, hope or experience. Some of them are touching to the point of incredible sadness or elation. The site is wonderful.

The rules? “Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before”.

Preorder the book here.

I’m looking forward to seeing what ma.gnolia is all about. It appears to be a social bookmarking service with a twist of some sort. I hope its a good twist because this space is getting a bit crowded to say the least.

Ma.gnolia describes itself as “Found is the New Search” and “Social Bookmarking to build an information community online”, adding:

What you mark in Ma.gnolia not only stays found but keeps coming back to you as your interests change. That’s our pitch, plain and simple, and it’s why we say that found is the new search.

If you’d like to be one of the first to see exactly what we mean, just enter your email below. You’ll be notified of our launch and become one of the first members of the Ma.gnolia community, where we believe you’ll discover the new evolution in growing and sharing information across town or across the globe. You may even be invited to participate in Ma.gnolia’s December 2005 Beta Launch.

They promise a beta in December 2005. I’m skeptical of companies that continue to launch with these domain name abominations (dropping vowels, using random ccTLDs and lots of extra dots), but if the service rocks, I will forgive all. Early buzz sounds promising.

I believe we had as many as 200 people here last night for TechCrunch Meetup #3. The last of the guests left at 4 am. Thank you to everyone who came and everyone who tried to attend via festoon.

Scott Beale took my favorite picture of the event. Here’s my second favorite: Kevin Burton hard at work on TailRank – using my oven as a desk.

Thanks to our very generous sponsors we were able to cater the event and provide t-shirts for everyone. You can also purchase a tshirt directly from Zazzle.

There were too many demos but they were all excellent. It was exciting to see the first public view of Sphere, and meet some of the entrepreneurs behind the other companies as well. Thank you to everyone who took the time to show us their products.

Dave Winer gave a rousing keynote that got everyone fired up. People are calling it the Flickr of keynotes. The always cool Marc Canter and his wife were in costume (picture also shows Keith Teare). Robert Scoble was here for hours and barely left the back room where we were showing raw demos of the really young companies, including edgeio.

VCs were roaming the party, looking for the next great investment. Google, Yahoo and ebay all had product managers, developers and business development people quietly talking to entrepreneurs. Scott Beale, Tara Hunt and others were taking pictures of everyone and everything (Flickr tag for your photos is “techcrunch” – please post them!). It was Web 2.0 perfection.

The only problem was the whole festoon remote participation idea didn’t work out at all. People couldn’t see or hear anything. Someone created a very funny festoon image and defaced the wiki this morning. Instead of deleting it, we kept it up. That kind of creativity shouldn’t be deleted. We’ll get it right next time.

Then there was the whole keg situation. We never did get the damn thing to produce beer, even after a number of geeks and ex-bartenders went to work on it. Clearly we didn’t have the right kind of geeks at the event (via Marc Brown).

The best thing about these parties is that we all get the chance to get to know each other a little bit better, and intensely cross-pollinate ideas.

I am keeping a running directory below of blog posts and pictures from the event. Please email me if you’ve written about it with the link.

Pictures (tag: techcrunch), Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Matt Marshall/SiliconBeat, Marc Canter, Marc Canter #2, Scott Beale, Tara Hunt, Ethan Stock, Narendra Rocherolle, Susan Mernit, Richard MacManus (you were here in spirit Richard), Ben Barren, Russell Limprecht, Bhagvan Kommadi, John Furrier, Allthatscool, Andrew Woolridge, Jared Cosulich, Sylvia Paull, InTheCrowd, Alex Moskalyuk (good overview of demoing companies), Zoli Erdos (great idea on people bringing their own nametags…Jeff Clavier did this).

Everything is all set for tonight’s party and we’ve very quietly re-opened the wiki to attendees. It also looks like we’ll have 50+ people participating remotely via festoon.

We will be having demos from 6 pm to about 10:30, starting with the first public look at Sphere At 7, we’ll take a break and have sponsor speeches and a keynote by Dave Winer. His preparation notes are here.

Memeorandum continues to be our news site of choice, and it is starting to get real traction outside of the core blogosphere as well.

Ryan Singel at Wired posted an in depth review of Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum this morning.

Gabe Rivera, the 32-year-old programmer who quit his job at Intel to found the site, says he built Memeorandum thinking of the “live web as an editor.”

“If you read blogs, you know that there is this conversation and that some articles are the talk of the day, and other posts have important things to say about those,” Rivera said. “If you built graphs in your mind of what the talk looks like, I think it looks like what I’ve done. I get the sense (Memeorandum) is just a natural representation of what is already going on.”

Rivera hopes the site will appeal to more than just the überconnected, and could be useful as an entry point for those unfamiliar with blogs. To that end, the site’s design, which features large headlines and stories in declining order of importance, mimics that of an online newspaper.

“The best way for someone to get into (the) blogs thing is to find a blog that is tracking an issue important to you, because someone new to it can understand the headline and then go read the blog. I think my site works pretty well that way,” Rivera said. “My dad started using my site … a couple weeks later he spotted something he was interested in and now he knows all these bloggers.”

Congrats Gabe on the Wired article and the mainstread traffic it will send to Memeorandum. As I’ve said, Memeorandum is exceptional, and it is changing the web.

The Memeorandum News Widget

Memeorandum also just released a new feature – a great widget that bloggers and webmasters can include on their site showing the most recent tech.memeorandum headlines. We’ve included the widget on TechCrunch, in the left sidebar. It’s another great way to stay on top of the news!

Check out the blogging conversations on the topic at Memeorandum.

Ojos, which never owned ojos.com (they used ojos-inc.com) has found a permanent name – Riya. More on this on the Munjal Shah’s blog and Tara Hunt’s blog.

Riya has a facial and text recognition technology that automatically tags photos with who’s in them. We profiled them earlier.

Riya is preparing to start their private alpha and will hopefull launch within a couple of months. If you are interested in participating in the alpha, email alpha@riya.com. During the alpha they will only support IE6.

I just heard from Geoffrey Arone at Flock that they will be launching it to the general public within 3 hours (by 5 pm PST).

Feedback to their recent beta expansion has been so positive, Geoffrey tells me, that there is no reason to delay any longer.

Congratulations Flock! I imagine tens of thousands of people will be downloading and using their product by end of day. Make sure you upload your del.icio.us bookmarks and try out the blogging tool.

UPDATE: Flock is now live:

Flock Developer Preview is now available.

Our code couldn’t wait any longer to be free!

But! This preview ain’t for the faint of heart! If you’re the bleeding-edge type and don’t mind a few scrapes and busted knees from time to time, feel free to give it a whirl.

We’ve got interesting ideas in this thing. We want to know what we’ve done right how we could improve. And we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us!

So if a bucket of source code and developer binaries sound enticing, head over to our Developer page now.

Socialight, that launched yesterday, is a mobile location aware application that allows you to take notes about places you go by in the street so that when your friends go around the same place get notifications on their cellphones about your notes. Their about page reads:

Socialight is a mobile phone and web based platform that allows users to create and share location-based messages called StickyShadowsâ„¢. Socialight’s mobile and web tools give you access to location-based media on your mobile and on the web.

StickyShadows are virtual multimedia sticky notes that you create using your mobile phone or this web site. A StickyShadow is made up of media, such as text and a picture, and information about who can see it and when and where it’s available.

The idea of overlaying information on top of the real world by tagging and noting real places, while still connected to a social tissue (it’s your friends that get access to the information) is something that i’m particularly interested about. If it’s going to pick up or not is what we’ll see, but it’s nice to see helpful information pop into your familiar places.

We are proud to annouce the sponsors of the third TechCrunch party this weekend. Thank You: Edgeio, Flock, Goowy, Loomia, Pandora, Real Travel, Shasta Ventures, Simply Hired, Wink, Zazzle.

If you plan on attending, please sign up on the Wiki.

Demos start at 6 pm sharp. We are going to reduce the demo time to 15 minutes to get more companies in. At 7 pm we’ll take a 15-20 minute break for toasts and a keynote by Dave Winer.

I’m pretty fired up about these demos. Some of the companies, like Sphere (and to some extent Flock), will be showing their stuff in public for the first time ever.

Most venture capitalists don’t understand tagging, blogs, rss, ajax, or the two way web. They scoff at social bookmarking sites and think podcasting is a fad (maybe it is). They desparately “want in” to this renaissance of the web, but can’t be bothered to open up the simplest RSS reader and understand the power of decentralized content. In short, they don’t get it.

Most traditional VC funds have a single web-focused partner, who may or may not be interested in web 2.0 consumer companies. For the most part, these VCs are not part of the most interesting deals. If they do get what you are pitching, they want to pump way more money into the company than makes sense.

Here’s my attempt to point out the venture capitalists who do get it. Some of these have new funds and only recently became venture capitalists. Some of them have been around forever. There are just two personality traits all share. First, they understand that a fundamental shift has occured in web evolution. Second, they are hungry as hell to find deals, and spend more time proactively looking for the next opportunity than they do sitting back and looking at the business plan stream that naturally flows into any venture fund.

This list is purely subjective. It’s blatantly biased. Some VCs don’t belong and many who do are left off. But it’s a list, nonetheless, that I’ve come up with over the last few weeks of interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and journalists.

David Cowan

David Cowan is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and writes a blog called Who Has Time For This. He’s on this list partially because he incubated the hottest and most anticipated company on the web right now, Flock.

This guy picks winners. Of 43 early stage investments, 19 have gone public and 16 have been acquired. It could be because of his education – he has the killer combination of a math/CS degree and a MBA from Harvard.

Tim Draper

Tim Draper invested in Skype. Done.

He also sits on the board of SocialText, and his fund was in Baidu.

Tim will go anywhere in the world for the right deal. Most VC’s with 1/10th his net worth won’t leave silicon valley for a board meeting.

David Hornik

David Hornik is is a General Partner at August Capital and writes a blog that has over 10,000 RSS readers.

David best asset is that he knows everybody. He’s the kind of guy you want to drink beers with while watching a football game. If you are his friend, he’ll happily introduce you to anyone, and often puts two people together just because he thinks they should know each other.

He’s invested in companies that are defining the web today: SixApart and Technorati among them. And even if he doesn’t invest, he’ll do more than most VCs who have invested to help you. Here’s just one example – take a look at the things he says about Pandora, which isn’t a portfolio company.

David has told me on numerous occasions that “the web is an ecosystem” and that he wants to play his part in making it healthy. He certainly does.

Josh Kopelman

Josh Kopelman, through FirstRoundCapital, is quietly filtering through just about every young web 2.0 company, and investing in many of them.

Josh has a Wharton MBA and was the founder of Half.com, which was sold to ebay in 1998. His investments include Feedster, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us and, reportedly, Browster (and others).

Josh understand web 2.0 better than most entrepreneurs. His experience as an entrepreneur and growing huge businesses out of whole cloth is an incredible asset.

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson is a founding partner of Union Square Ventures and writes the extremely popular A VC. If you are new to web 2.0, start with his Blogging 1.0 post. Then read the rest of his blog (even the stuff about music).

Fred was the original lead investor in del.icio.us, back when people were still scratching their heads about it. That enough gets him on the list. But Union Square’s other investments, including indeed, could also be major home runs.

It’s clear from his blog and what people say about him that he spends a lot of time working with his portfolio companies. He’s the kind of guy you want on your side when you go into battle.

Notables

Jeff Clavier – Jeff is a former VC and still makes the odd angel investment (Feedster, Truveo, and a few others). His new venture allows him to work with pre-funding companies and get them ready for prime time. In the last year, he’s worked with Userplane, Buzznet, UltraDNS, Glenbrook Networks, Loomia and two other undisclosed companies. If you have a hot idea and need advice, funding, introductions and anything else, Jeff may just take you on as a client and do what it takes to help you be successful – but like a VC, he’ll have to be convinced of your potential.

Brad Feld – Brad is a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital and writes a must-read web 2.0 blog called Feld Thoughts. Read his posts on Term Sheets if you are in the process of raising capital. I keep trying to meet him but haven’t yet. Brad’s investments include invested in NewsGator, Feedburner and Technorati.

O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures – This is the only non-person on here. OATV just closed a $50 million fund to invest in young companies. Given the incredible access Tim O’Reilly has to these companies, OATV could quickly become an important fund in the web 2.0 space.

Pierre Omidyar – Pierre founded ebay and is the Co-founder of Omidyar Network, where he’s invested in a number of interesting companies including EVDB, SocialText and Feedster, plus a few undiscloseds. And it’s always good to have a multi-billionaire on your side.

Peter Rip – Peter is a founding partner of Leapfrog Ventures, a $100 million fund. Peter also writes Early Stage VC, another must-read blog. His investments include ojos, an incredible new photo-metadata service that is going to be extremely disruptive (and useful). Like others in this post, he’s a guy I’d want on my board. He’s gone through many battles as an entrepreneur in his time (he founded his first company in the early 80’s and worked at Infoseek in the late 90’s).

Peter Thiel – Peter, the former CEO of paypal, has invested in LinkedIn, Friendster, LinkedIn and other web 2.0 companies. He’s just created the Founders Fund. Can’t wait to see what investments come out of it.

The Young Guns

There are three additional VCs that are yet to make notable investments. But they are laser focused on the space and are hungry to make investments in web 2.0 companies. You will find them at every event and seem determined to make a name for themselves. I include them here now because Ithere’s a good chance that when I update this list in a year, they’ll be at the top.

Thomas Ball – Tom is a Venture Partner at Austin Ventures, a fund with $3 billion under management. He’s their consumer and web 2.0 guy and seems to be spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley and at web 2.0 events. Prior to joining AV, Tom was an entrepreneur who founded a couple of successful Internet companies. This adds a unique perspective to his investing philosophy in web 2.0. He works actively with a number of AV portfolio companies including Pluck and, I suspect, will be making important investments in web 2.0 in the near future.

Dan Grossman – Dan is a principal at Venrock Associates and has recently started a great blog called A Venture Forth (where he wrote a much bookmarked post on Ajax). Prior to Venrock, Dan was at Garage.com. You’ll also find Dan at most web 2.0 conferences, and he’s made a huge effort to reach out to the community and network.

Jason Pressman – Jason is a principal at Shasta Ventures, a young $200 million fund that has a deep commitment to and expertise in consumer-focused businesses. Jason was at Walmart.com and was part of a small group of executives that ran the place before coming to Shasta – he was VP of Strategy, Operations and Business Development. He has a keen insight into web 2.0 and has served as an advisor to a number of companies in the space. Jason knows how to grow startups to massive scale, and he is always thinking about which new companies he can help to achieve that scale.

The founders of Jux2, a great metasearch engine, put it up for sale on ebay yesterday. John Battelle wrote about this yesterday as well.

Aaref Hilaly, one of the founders (and a friend) emailed to tell me about it, saying that the founders just don’t have enough time to put into the project and deal with growth.

Starting price? $0.01, with no reserve. Current price? $26,100 with 7 days left.

Jux2 won Search Engine Watch’s best metadata search engine award earlier this year. It’s an excellent way to view the big search engine results side-be-side, and has a very clean and usable interface.

We are having our next TechCrunch party in Atherton this Friday (October 21) afternoon and evening. Sign up here. Our last meetup drew about 100 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, bloggers and beer drinkers, and I am hoping this one will draw at least that number.

We are changing to a socialtext wiki and it will be up later today along with a confirmation post. Please email us now if you would like to demo your product. We have 8 slots.

We are also taking up to two additional corporate sponsors – this allows us to keep this event free. Email us if you are interested. Package includes right to put up a banner, a toast/speech of up to 2 minutes and your logo on an event tshirt. Plus the happiness of knowing that people will love you and your company.

UPDATE: This is 100% on. Wiki with information and signup area is here. We need two additional sponsors to the two we have already. If you want your logo on the tshirts (free to everyone), we need to get confirmation of sponsorship by end of day today. Sorry for the complete lack of notice. The cost is $250 and will defray tshirt and catering costs.

UPDATE #2: Sponsors include Simply Hired, Flock and Goowy. THANK YOU very much. One spot left. I need help with tshirt logistics (company, timing, etc.).

This is too good not to post. Web2.0 or Not? is the tongue-in-cheek, hugely sarcastic and quite funny creation of Ryan King and Eran Globen. Yeah, its HotOrNot for Web 2.0 companies.

These two guys, who by the way are brilliant engineers (Ryan consults with Technorati, Eran works at Jeteye), have been keeping things lively with their various projects, another of which is Supr.c.ilio.us, which describes itself as “social social tagging site tagging”. The top tag is “tagging”. Yeah, they’re making fun of the rest of us. Read their blog post on the Slide party last weekend as well.

All I can hope is that these guys continue to do what they are doing. And yes, we’ve added TechCrunch to Web2.0OrNot to see what people think.

Flock’s CEO Bart Decrem expanded the beta over the weekend to 1,007 people, most of whom are now blogging about it.

The product, which was good back in August when I first tested it, is even better today. I’m a big supporter of Flock. I am even writing this post while wearing a Flock tshirt. Flock is definitely the Flickr of browsers.

The three most powerful tools Flock offers it’s users are bookmarks, blogging and a RSS reader.

Bookmarks

They’ve dropped their propreitary bookmarking engine and have replaced it with del.icio.us. I have a ton of del.icio.us bookmarks – thousands – and it took a while for the browser to chug through them all during the import procedure. But it did, and I now have one hell of an interface into my favorite bookmarking service. Since Flock supports tabbed browsing, I can keep bookmarks open in a separate tab and refer back whenever. Partnering with Del.icio.us is brilliant. I do not know if they have plans to integrate with other social bookmarking sites, but I imagine it would be fairly simple for them to do.

Blogging

The blogging tool was, and remains, absolutely the best I’ve seen. This tool brings flickr pictures directly into the blog tool, allowing simple drag and drop into the post. It’s dual-pane, with both wysiwyg and html interfaces (I actually preferred the old toggle method of changing from html to wysiwyg, but I’m not complaining). Setup is very simple. It just works.

RSS Reader

Flock also has a built in RSS reader that is both dead simple to use and yet powerful enough for heavy users. A simple drop down box can be accessed for any page that allows you to grab the feed for the page you are currently on, and add it to an existing or newly created folder. Feeds can be tagged, and the viewer allows for expanded or collapsed feed viewing.

There are some speed issues with this version, 0.5, but in my opinion it has more than enough features to convince web users by the millions to switch from their default browser and go with Flock. Let’s launch this thing!

Alex Bard’s flash-based desktop replacement Goowy, based in San Diego, has impressed me from the start. We originally profiled Goowy on August 17, 2005 and again a couple of weeks ago.

Today Goowy released further functionality. First, they increased storage from 100 MB to 2 GB. While that storage is only for use with email now, they will soon be releasing a virtual file storage product, allowing users to really put that 2 GB to work.

Second, Goowy released a flash-based desktop application that allows you to access core Goowy features without going to the site. Email notifications, RSS updates, calendar items, etc. are included. The look and feel is very much like Konfabulator, but we’ve noticed no performance issues on our machine as we did with that service.

If flash is your thing (and maybe even it if isn’t), Goowy is for you. Let us know what you think of it.

Company: HealthLine
Launched: October 16, 2005
Location: San Francisco

HealthLine, a very smart medical search engine with web 2.0 features, launched this evening. Tony Gentile, HealthLine’s VP Product Management, writes about it here.

First, its a good search engine. Normal language is translated into medical terms, and refinement options are shown for related information. For instance, a search for breast cancer shows refinement options for “treatment” and “symptoms”, as well as links to the broader search of “cancer”.

The HealthMaps feature is incredibly useful. It is a visual display of information relevant to your query. Do a search for “cancer” and click on the top left link just above the first result to see this. Clicking on any of the visual cues will give additional refined information. You can also see the HealthMap feature in the screen shot above.

Refinements, along with HealthMaps, is a very good way to find relevant information with a single search on a term even loosely related to the information you are looking for.

Healthline also offers browsing by channel, with topics ranging from Acne to Yeast Infections.

If you become a member, you can create news alerts, and tag and save search results. You can also write reviews of articles and rate other reviews.

This is an excellent resource.

Web 2.0 This Week
October 9 – 15
Location: Silicon Valley

Tons of new companies launched this week. My guess is they were aiming for the Web 2.0 Conference last week but had to delay. This may have worked out for the best as the covereage they received was probably much better after the press chaos last week.

Most bloggers have probably noticed that Dave Winer is back in the bay area. It’s good to have his brain around here again. I’ve been invited to a couple of his weekly breakfasts with Steve Gillmor. I try to keep my mouth shut and keep my listen to talk ratio as high as possible. These guys aren’t always right, but they’ve seen and done enough that even when they’re wrong, you can learn a lot by being around them.

We said goodby to Richard MacManus, who stayed with us for during his trip to silicon valley. Based on how warmly he was received, my expectation is that Richard will be back soon. His eloquent goodbye post was excellent.

We launched something called the Web2.0WorkGroup last week. It’s an experimental sandbox that a bunch of bloggers focused on writing about the new web are working on. Right now its a directory of participating blogs. Soon it will be much more.

Here’s this week’s wrapup:

1. TechCrunch Profiles This Week

Kahuna (update), Gada.be, Google Reader (update), Yahoo Blog Search, Google Bookmarks, Wink, MeasureMap (update), Memeorandum (update), Yelp, Qumana (update), RememberTheMilk, Sphere (update), PreviewSeek, Reading Lists, Inform

2. Smart PR and Dumb PR

Smart: Give the blogosphere an exclusive preview and announcement rights of your new product and let the accolades roll in.

Dumb: Launch a product that breaks Firefox, ignore blogger input and give the New York Times an exclusive. Bloggers respond.

3. 100 Million Blogs Strong

Blog Herald reports that there are over 100 million blogs. Breakdown by country. Awesome. The BBC also reports that the web has grown more this year than ever before.

4. Dave Winer on Nerd TV

Dave Winer is interviewed by Robert X. Cringley on Nerd TV. It’s a big download but worth it. I’m glad stuff like this is being recorded for historical purposes.

5. Robert Scoble writes about Real Time Search

It’s a cross between a rant and a classic essay, and it’s important. He’s continuing his theme of comparing search results on the existing blog search engines.

let’s talk about what the state of time-based search is.

In a phrase: it sucks.

No one is doing it well.

I can just hear everyone saying “huh? I thought Feedster, Technorati, IceRocket, Bloglines, and Pubsub, among others, are doing time-based search?”

Yes, but they all are unsatisfactory. Why? Well, for one, they’ll never have the traffic of MSN Search, Yahoo, or Google. Most of the “normal” people around me never will use a search engine other than these three. Heck, most of the people in the world have never even clicked on “advanced search” and you’re gonna try to get them to visit something like http://blogsearch.google.com ? Yeah, right.

Everyone said search was “good enough” before Google. Blog search isn’t even “good enough”.

6. List of Large-File Sharing Apps

Massimo Curatella takes the time to list large-file sharing apps. Bookmark it.

7. Oodle loses Craigslist Feed

Oodle got it right when they went for the decentralized content approach. Craigslist felt threatened and turned them off. Oodle responds diplomatically.

This is not great for Oodle, but I also think it’s not great for Craigslist. Data must be open. Sites that try to horde it will lose in the end.

8. Tagging Essay

Fred Oliveira writes about Tagging, with a focus on why people tag. I hope he’ll still be in the bay area for Tag Camp on October 28 to share his ideas with that group.

9. Chris Pirillo Fires Off on BlogSpot

A post by Chris Pirillo launched a huge blog discusson on splogging and the fact that BlogSpot seems to be the main source of it. Google owns BlogSpot and has a clear incentive to allow this to happen – they serve ads on every one of these splogs. This is not a new problem. Google needs to take action.

10. Bury this Hatchet

Dave took the first step. Yesterday he reached out again. These two guys need to work together to make the blogosphere and the web a better place to hang out. I hope they find a way.

Company: Inform.com
Launched: October 16, 2005
Founder: Neal Goldman
Employees: 55
Location: New York

Inform.com launched today with a splashy New York Times article.

Steve Rubel has some kind words. Rafat Ali isn’t so kind – he says “It fails miserably.” I agree.

I honestly can’t figure out what it is, even after reading the Times fluff piece. They say its an RSS Reader but adding feeds is anything but easy. Newbies need simplicity. Oldbies want something that handles a ton of feeds efficiently. This does neither.

And if I simply want to know what’s hot in the blogophere, I use Memeorandum, which as I’ve said, is ugly as hell but it actually works. As an example, track this story on Memeorandum here.

What it does do well is break. Early and often. They warned me that it was optimized for IE, but I’m a firefox guy and I charged ahead. Bad idea. Also, URLs are hidden. The UI is unworkable – even my scroll wheel on my mouse is disabled on the site.

I try to find the good in new products, but I’m failing on this one. Please, tell me what I’m missing.