ManagedQ is a new search search that provides a visual interface to Google's results (see our full review on AltSearchEngines here). Since ManagedQ's results come directly from Google, there's no loss in result quality, but the service adds a semantic layer to search, by automatically determining the key Person, Places, and Things for your search.

When you begin a query on ManagedQ, your results appear as tiled screenshots with an information bar on the left. The screenshots, powered by Snap.com have the link to the web site above them and a summary, the same as you would see on Google, beneath them.

If that was all ManagedQ did, it would just be another visual search engine, not offering much more than a similar service like that of RedZee, except that its visual previews are real-time.

However, ManagedQ has a unique feature in its "Executive Summary" bar to the left of the results. This is where you'll find the important ideas in your search grouped by people, places and things. If you're the first person to search a particular keyword, these take a little time to load, but summaries for repeat queries are instantaneous. As you mouse over an idea in the Executive Summary, it finds each occurrence in that term in search results and highlights the full matches in yellow and the partial matches in light yellow.

You can also search for a particular term in your search results, even if it's not listed as one of the terms in the Executive Summary. You simply begin typing in the search box and the Instant Find feature begins matching with every keystroke. In this way, the real-time feedback very much resembles the "Ctrl" + "F" functionality you have your own web browser today.

When you see a result that looks promising, you can click on it and you'll see the page as they are calling a "Managed Result." A Managed Result just renders the important info on the page, mainly text, with all the slow code trimmed out, so exploring results is fast. Of course, you can still visit the web site itself by clicking the web site's title.

The service also supports regular expressions, something that may be too geeky for most consumers, but an interesting and useful add-on for those who know what they're doing.

With ManagedQ, the result is more than that of just a visual search experience. Instead, this fast, flexible service hones in on what you're looking for with ease. With the addition of the People, Places, and Things in the Executive Summary and by making the search results themselves immediately searchable, it's as if it already knew what you were hoping to find.

Microsoft released the results of a survey today indicating that the small percentage of young people who know the laws around copyright are much less likely to violate them than are kids who do not.

The survey was released along with a new website at mybytes.com ("They're MY bytes, not yours!") and a newly announced curriculum for middle and high schools to teach the Microsoft economic and political agenda. “Intellectual Property Rights Education" is the innocuous name of the Microsoft provided curriculum materials.

Key survey findings include:

• Almost half of the teenagers surveyed (49 percent) said they are not familiar with the rules and guidelines for downloading images, literature, music, movies and software from the Internet.


• Only one in 10 (11 percent) said they understood the rules “very well.”


• Among teenagers who said they were familiar with the laws, more than eight in 10 (82 percent) said illegal downloaders should be punished. In contrast, slightly more than half (57 percent) of those unfamiliar with the laws said violators should be punished.

The MyBytes Site

MyBytes is a charming site where young people can remix their own, newly copyrighted ringtones and watch short video interviews with good kids and a couple of bad kids having IP revelations.

To be fair, the remixed ringtones can have one of four licenses attached to them, including unrestricted, unrestricted use without remixing and two variations of for sale. It's a ways from Creative Commons, but it's interesting.

There's one tepid perspective mildly critical of the copyright regime on the site. It's pretty remarkable and it's coming to a school near you.

Teaching the Children

The survey indicates that kids learn more about copyright from their parents than from anywhere else. So if you've got kids in school, make sure they know that other perspectives exist on sites like CreativeCommons, CopyFight.Corante.com and Genetic Resources Action International - Grain.org - because this issue extends beyond music and movies to include debates over IP law in genetics, agriculture, cultural tradition and more.

It was just Monday that the New York Times reported on the difficulty some users were having when trying to permanently delete their accounts from Facebook. The social networking site offers a "deactivate" feature, but still archives all of a user's personal information in case that user decides they miss Facebook and want back in. Frustrated members turned to groups on the site to complain (where else?) and get advice on unofficial processes for deleting their accounts. Today Facebook made account deletion a tiny bit easier.

Facebook modified its help pages to instruct users that permanent account deletion could be requested by contacting the company. "If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you," says the page. "If you would like your account deleted, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page and confirm your request in the text box."

The company stopped short of saying they would supply a permanent account deletion button like rival MySpace. Facebook told the New York Times that if they perceived that they needed a more streamlined account deletion process they would test different implementations. So far, Facebook doesn't see that need. "On any given day, the number of users reactivating their accounts is roughly half of the number of users deactivating their accounts," Katie Geminder, Director for User Experience and Design at the social network, told the paper.

Though welcomed by critics of Facebook's lack of account deletion policy, some feel that the new blurb in the help pages doesn't go far enough. The aforementioned "How to permanently delete your facebook account." group has added almost 4,000 members since the original Times article ran on Monday. "But why hide the option far down in the help pages? And why make it a form? Do I first have to go hunting for HOW to leave, and then explain WHY?" wrote the group's admins in response to this morning's change, "This is a decent first step, now implement the long awaited delete button, thanks!"

Being able to permanently remove information from social networks like Facebook is not a trivial matter for some users. As we recently wrote, Facebook and other social sites are fast becoming your online "permanent record." People often feel comfortable disclosing sensitive information on these networks, possibly because they're communicating with friends. Being able to remove that personal information permanently is an option that I'd wager many people want, even if most aren't clamoring to exercise it (until the need to delete outweighs the utility of having an account, most people aren't going to want to delete their account).

What do you think? Should Facebook make it easier for users to delete accounts? Let us know in the comments.

PicLens is a nifty web browser addon from Cooliris that I hadn't tried until the company emailed us a couple of weeks ago to let us know that they had updated their software with a couple of new features, both stunning and useful. If you haven't tried out PicLens yet, this is definitely a good time to hop on board, as the browser addon is a lot of fun to play with and makes searching and viewing images on the web very enjoyable.

PicLens works on both Mac and PC, and has versions for FireFox, Internet Explorer, and Safari (though the Safari version is still awaiting its update).

The addon is basically a photo viewer for the web. It creates a desktop-like photo viewing experience for supported sites, by pulling out all images on a page (or in an online gallery) and creating a slideshow. PicLens supports a range of sites, including the image search engines from the big five search sites, social networks Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster, and photosharing sites Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, DeviantArt, and Smugmug.

The latest version ads a Cover Flow-esque photo browser called "The Wall" that stacks photos in a three dimensional space. It might actually be more comparable to the "wall of videos" Apple TV ad. Users can click and drag along the wall, zoom in on any photo, or visit the source. The Wall is a gorgeous feature that makes looking at web galleries a lot more like browsing photos using something like Apple's iPhoto app.

Even better, another new feature lets users search a handful of supported sites (Google, Yahoo!, Smugmug, Flickr, DeviantArt, and Photobucket) directly from within PicLens. Results are automatically loaded up on the wall.

The video below from Cooliris shows the new version of PicLens in action.

Cooliris also makes the Previews addon, which we wrote about last year.

Our second daily Comments Competition winner is theharmonyguy, for an insightful explanation of Googler Kevin Marks' "Social Cloud" theory. Congratulations theharmonyguy, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. theharmony guy argued that both OpenSocial and Facebook are "mainly creating a cloud for developers, not users." He explains more:

"The "social cloud" analogy is an interesting one. As Luigi pointed out, though, OpenSocial is more OpenWidget. But I think this still fits with the social cloud idea - it's just that OpenSocial, in its current form, gives developers a social cloud.

That is, developers looking to write applications that utilize social aspects (such as connections between friends) can write code which will run on multiple social networking sites and take advantage of those social features on each one. For the developer, the technology necessary to establish and manage those pieces of the puzzle become a social cloud, much like TCP/IP and DNS have become a cloud for people surfing the Web - those parts simply work, and we usually don't care how.

But users don't have a social cloud quite yet. If I want to find a picture of a friend, I may have login to Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Xanga, etc., depending on which friend I mean. For me as a user, social aspects like connections between friends are still distributed between various sites and require maintenance on my part.

I think Kevin recognizes this problem (the Social Graph API addresses it in a small way), but is overly optimistic about how OpenSocial answers it. A true social cloud for users will happen when social aspects of online activities become absorbed into the layers of the Internet.

As an analogy, look at online video. There was a time (and it's still partially true) when watching a video would usually require you to download some specific plug-in that a particular site used. Nowadays, though, most users have Flash installed, adding a layer on top of a typical browser that video sites can take advantage of. The layer is invisible to the user, as they're never prompted to install or configure something - they just visit a site and see video.

An imperfect analogy, granted, but illustrates the point - and points back to the idea of distributed social networking. Currently each social networking site implements its own variation of managing a social graph - in other words, you have an application with social functions built on top. But with technologies like OpenID and OAuth, we may reach a point where social networking sites are built on top a distributed social graph. Essentially, the social aspects of things like friend connections become invisible to the user and simply another layer that people consider part of the Internet. Then we'll have a true social cloud for users.

Not to say that Kevin would disagree with any of this, I just felt like his presentation could have clarified these points a little more. With Facebook licensing their platform, we already have a competiting product doing the same thing as OpenSocial - but right now, both are mainly creating a cloud for developers, not users. DataPortability.org, which Andrew brought up, is an effort to create a cloud for users. Right now companies like Google who have joined DP are talking about how to make that happen, but I don't think even DP has yet figured out 100% how to accomplish it in a production setting. Many of the technologies are there, but it'll take time to actually put everything in place.

Sorry for the long comment... interesting presentation. :)"

Though unsurprising, a new study released today by a consortium of big players in advertising found hard numbers to back up what you might have guessed. Specifically, that only 6% of people online are contributing 50% of the clicks to display advertisements. Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda and comScore performed the study.

Those people who click heavily have a number of other characteristics of note. "Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000," the study said, and they "are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."

The authors conclude that the heavy clickers do shop more online than the population at large, but not at a rate proportional to their click rate influence. In other words, if your ads are getting a lot of click-throughs and you are holding your breath that they will monetize better any day now - you're not likely to find relief any time soon. The study also found that there was not a high correlation between heavy clickers and increased brand loyalty. Search ads were not included in the findings but add in the fact that after a few years online more people won't help but be able to learn the difference between their browser's address bar and search bar - and the overall ad money pot doesn't look terribly reliable.

These numbers probably speak for themselves, and will mean different things to different people, but we do hope that our unusually engaged readers will enjoy checking out the services of RWW advertisers. :)

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Semantic web browser extension BlueOrganizer relaunched tonight with more of the most popular services on the web smartly integrated into an easier to use interface.

The company says its extension is intended to let users browse the web with context and that its semantic technology cuts steps out of search. The basic idea behind Adaptive Blue's BlueOrganizer is that it can tell what the web pages you're looking at are about and it offers you useful links based on the particular subject matter. It's been downloaded more than a million times, several times by me personally - yet I don't find myself using it regularly yet. This new release might change that.

If you're on a page about music, movies, maps, recipes, wine or any of 24 other topics - then clicking the BlueOrganizer button will bring up a menu of options from topical search options like Yelp on Restaurant pages or LibraryThing on book pages. Tonight I was reading Perez Hilton about Gary Coleman's recent wedding and in just two quick clicks I was watching Diff'rentStrokes on YouTube. It was a miracle, albeit a small and strange one.

After some testing of the new version I can say that it's something I'd like to use regularly even if today it's outside of my typical workflow today.

What's New

Highlights of the new release include:

• Text level semantic analysis, highlight a section of a page in addition to viewing options based on the whole page.
• A collapsed menu tree. If you've seen BlueOrganizer before, it's a lot easier to use now.
• Integration of Twitter, Tumblr, TinyURL, Google Custom Search Engines and Lijit, among other popular new services.
• Context sensitive icons in the toolbar, when you're on a video page you'll see a big icon with a video camera, a book on book pages, signaling a different set of search options.
• Personalized search options based on your browser history and personal selections.
• Microformats support, reading microformats at least.

You can see more on the very nicely designed features page. I wish every startup that contacted us put together announcement resources of this quality.

Concerns

For all the semantic coolness of BlueOrganizer and the potential it has to be really useful, I have not found myself using the several impressive versions of this tool that I've seen. It excites me when I look at it the first time, but I don't find myself coming back to it. Perhaps this time will be different since this new version is simpler and offers more options that I would like to use.

We write about the semantic web a lot here at ReadWriteWeb - and for the sake of disclosure, in case you didn't know, many of those fantastic posts are written by Alex Iskold, founder of Adaptive Blue. If you'd like to plug in to the larger discussion about the semantic web, check out our Toolkit for key issues in 2008.

I, though, am wary of semantic technologies that require any but a minimal change in workflow by users. Iskold acknowledges that this is a challenge but argues that right clicked context menus are particularly familiar with users. Let us know if you find yourself remembering to make use of this powerful app's feature set.

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Whether or not you're a fan of the great website registration bypassing service BugMeNot, I think you're really going to like a new service from the same shop called PdfMeNot. (username: stateless password: systems until Thursday) It creates a Flash display of any PDF document! No need to download the document and launch another application to view it anymore - PdfMeNot lets you convert PDFs by upload, URL, bookmarklet or a script entered into a website's page if you're the publisher.

I've added the bookmarklet to my browser toolbar and may never download another PDF again. Unless I want to search inside it, keep it for my records or read it on my phone - but you get the idea, publishers push PDFs more often than they need to.

Here's a quick way you can try it out: Go to the tools page, drag the javascript bookmarklet to your toolbar, then go to this Creative Commons page where there's a link to a press release from yesterday in PDF format. Click on your bookmarklet, then click the PDF link. Voilà! I love it!

See also Issuu, which is more complicated and does other things, but also works magic with PDF files.

One of the speakers at the LIFT conference - where Kevin Marks from Google also presented - was Gen Kanai, Mozilla's Director of business development in Asia. In his presentation Kanai talked about Mozilla's market share in Asia, plus the perception that Asia isn't contributing enough to open source projects.

Firstly there were some interesting factoids about Firefox market share. Firefox now has almost 28% market share in Eurpoe, 16-17% in US, and lower market shares in Asia -- it's 16.5% according to a recent post on Mozilla Links. See graphs below:

Firefox Global Market Share; Chart via Mozilla Links

Kanai said that Mozilla is "seeing a lot of growth in China", after opening their China office last year (it's being run by the former leader of MSN at Microsoft China). In Japan, Kanai said, there are more mobile users of the Internet than PC users, so it is a unique market for them. It currently has a 10-12% market share in Japan.

Mozilla structure in Asia

In Korea, Kanai told an interesting story about how the market for Firefox has been restricted by Korean govenment encyrption protocols, which make people use Windows and Internet Explorer! So Microsoft has a "de-facto monopoly" in Korea in the browser space.

Kanai then addressed the question of how strong the open source movement is in Asia, a topic recently explored by Victoria Ho on ZDNet Asia and by Mat Asay on CNET. The story so far is that Asia corporations are using open source, but (it's claimed) are not giving back to the open source community. Linux founder Linus Torvalds recently said that the barriers are: culture (possibly the largest barrier), language, education. Kanai has more details on his blog.

Kanai believes there is actually a lot of participation in open source in Asia; he cited the Ruby language, which was developed in Japan by Yukihiro Matsumoto. However he acknowledged that cultural and language barriers are significant - e.g. he thinks the open source community in the West can be very forthright in their opinions, which is a cultural thing that open source developers in the East may not like. He also cited economic factors.

Here is the video presentation:

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I love Twitter but even when it's not down it's got its limitations. Enter the API and a world of developers eager to engage with the active community of Twitter users. Twittershare is the newest truly useful development on top of Twitter; it lets you easily share files of up to 10mb in size.

Mac users can upload and post with a desktop widget, everyone can use the web interface and a cross-platform AIR app is forthcoming.

Twittershare was built by a web design shop called Phoreo, sassy church-going web developers in Indiana. When you're perusing the list of the most popular Twitter clients, you won't find others that support file transfers this large. I'll put this one in my shortlist of handy apps to remember.

There's some kinks to work out still, but none are show stoppers. The possibilities for further feature development are many but I expect Twittershare to stay simple. Just like Twitter itself - simple is often all you need.