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I just happened to stumble on a pretty interesting tool today.

I was trying to find a word for “People that are behind the times” for my previous blog post.  I did a couple of searches in Google without avail and eventually started scouring for a tool that did a reverse lookup on a word.  A tool where I would give the definition, and it would give me some words that matched that definition.  What I discovered was Onelook.com’s Reverse Dictionary.

Reverse Dictionaries allow you to “Describe a concept” in order to find words that match that description.

Cool Stuff, especially for all of us non-harvard graduates.

What I find the most interesting though is all of the uses for this tool.  It is actually a very smart search engine.  You would be suprized the sort of answers you could get from asking a variety of questions.  Here are some of potential applications that OneLook describes:

- Find a word, when you know its definition, [or a portion of the definition].
- Explore related concepts. Baseball, clouds, cities.
- Generate a list of words in some category.  I.E. Large Birds, Green fruit, Canadian authors.
- Answer basic indentification questions.  What is the capital of Vietnam, Who is big birds friend on Sesame Street. What is the longest River in the world

In actuality Onelook is indexing much more then just dictionaries to find these answers.  They index encyclopedia’s and other reference sites as well.

I dont know about you guys, but if I had a very large amount of money, I might consider trying to buy their technology.  There are a lot of times I wish the major search engines could do some of the stuff that they are.  Ask.com (askjeeves) does some of this, but you cant get lists from Ask, its usually websites that come up that require you to sift through several pages to find your answers.

For all of you content mongers out there, this sort of technology could feed some very interesting sites.

I would love to see some sort of API.

http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml

Rand Fishkin (Randfish) over at seomoz.org recently published an interview with the MSN Web Search Team.  Rand collected 30 Questions that SEO professionals had come up with from a prior thread on SEOchat and forwarded them to the MSN WST.

It is a great read and one of the things I found very interesting was the questions that received a “no comment” from MSN.  It’s what you would expect when an SEO is interviewing a search engine, but what was interesting was the specific questions that they decided to not comment on.  Sometimes much more can be said with a “no comment” then could ever be said with an actual answer.  Of course, the only problem with non-answers is that it leaves it open to imagination, and we all know the kind of imagination that some SEO’s have.

There are also some great Q & A’s on linking. 

And for those of you Laggard’s that think MSN is’nt worth knowing about, I say “wake up and smell the coffee”.  MSN is doing all the things that the other engines are doing.  Understanding one of them will give insights into the future of all of them.

http://www.seomoz.org/articles/community-questions-to-msn-search.php

A recent study by a company called Pheedo shows that not only is it possible to monetize your RSS feeds, but there is also a preferred method to increase return.

In this article I look at the study to show you what you need to do to monetize your feed.

I have’nt seen something so funny in a while (or maybe I just don’t get out enough).  I was over on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog and he mentioned the “spread firefox” project when referring to the number of people currently using firefox. 

I hadnt been to that site in a while, so I took a little stroll over.  When I got there I noticed their newest program for spreading the Firefox word.  It’s called Firefox Flicks.

Firefox Flicks allows you to quickly add a video testimonial about how much you like Firefox, or whatever you want, onto a map of the earth that is scrollable similar to Google maps.

You would have to go to an SES after hours party to see as many computer geeks attempting to be funny.  I mean that in the best of ways :)

It really is a lot of great fun, makes me wish I had a webcam hooked up to my laptop.

Be sure to check out “Da Reaper”, his was the best of the ones I saw.

http://video2.spreadfirefox.com/