Miley Cyrus, originally uploaded by MileyLuv2492.

Miley Cyrus in ecstasy

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Miley Cyrus and John Travolta, originally uploaded by MileyLuv2492.

Tags: John Travolta, Miley Cyrus, Travolta John

MapQuest today got a few useful additions: You can now save personal data in your My MapQuest account -- like your home and work addresses, your mobile numbers, and car's mileage. The first two features make it easier to create a route involving one of your typical hangouts and send it off to a phone. The third helps you with your expense reports or taxes.

Other updates dropped on MapQuest users recently: You can drag a map around on-screen (finally), and grab and move a route if you want to change it (the "Highway 101 Always Sucks" feature). And there's a robust "local" page that gives you a ton of information on events and news attached to a location. It'd be a good thing to scan before going on a trip.

MapQuest now lets you keep your favorite routes handy.

Since I'm sick of creating new accounts for every new service I try, I also like that you can log in to the new personalized MapQuest with my OpenID.

MapQuest continues to be relevant for a large number of users, and it also has deals with publishers who use its APIs. The cool QuickBooks data visulization service I covered recently, for example, use MapQuest data and maps.

However, I still won't be using MapQuest. The service may be getting more capable, but the interface is busy and slow compared to Google Maps, which, by the way, saves the addresses you visit automatically.

Previously: MapQuest inches toward modernity.

Tags: Additions, Apis, Baby Step, Going On A Trip, Google, Highway 101, Interface, Map, Mapquest Maps, Mileage, Mobile Numbers, Modernity, New Accounts, Personal Data, Publishers, Quickbooks Data, Work Addresses

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Disagree with Google's search results? You'll be able to do something about it with a change the company plans to release starting Thursday.

Google's SearchWiki is a feature that lets people elevate, delete, add, and annotate search results. Google remembers the changes a person made to search results, so repeat searches will show the same customizations and notes.

Google has been offering SearchWiki as an experimental feature to some people for months, but starting Thursday it will become available to anybody who's searching while logged in with a Google account.

"This is a search feature that gets a user more control over their search results," said Cedric Dupont, Google's SearchWiki product manager.

SearchWiki shows an up arrow for promoting Web sites, an X for deleting them, and a 'note this' speech bubble for adding comments.

(Credit: Google)

There's also a collaborative element: people can show the collective wisdom of the masses by clicking a "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link at the bottom of each search results page. That shows notes and how people have promoted or deleted pages in aggregate.

Google isn't alone in its customization work. With a research project called U Rank, Microsoft has been testing the user-tuned search results idea. Mahalo presents search results created by humans. And Wikia Search, an open-source search engine, is open to user suggestions. "Today, search undervalues the human touch," argues Wikia Search.

Feedback for ordinary search?
Where things get interesting is whether Google will use people's voting behavior as an input to the regular search algorithm that determines the order of search results. Google already employs human judgment in its algorithm by virtue of its PageRank technique, which judges a Web site's merit in part on how many other Web sites link to it, but people promoting or deleting specific Web addresses could be another signal.

Dupont was noncommittal about whether the company planned to build in that feedback loop, either directly as a signal to influence search rankings or indirectly as extra data that could help the company judge the relevance of its search results. But he certainly didn't rule the idea out.

"We don't close any doors. We constantly evaluate signals" that are incorporated into the search results algorithm. "Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they'd like to see their search results."

Certainly people's collective behavior could be useful. For example, Dupont said, "You could imagine if we do see a particular site (about which) people have a unanimous opinion, that might trigger external things. Like maybe we should check out our spam control," he said. In other words, if a lot of people deleted a particular page from search results, perhaps Google should check why its system isn't flagging that page as a problem.

Another narrower possibility could be to use SearchWiki customizations to influence the personalized search results people can get through Google by signing up for the Web history feature. Dupont seemed cooler on this idea.

With SearchWiki, Google produces "customized search results in a very granular and precise manner," adjusting only specific Web addresses and not broad influencers on search results. "At this point we don't have anything to say about how to combine these two features."

Tags: Cedric, Collective Wisdom, Custom Search Results, Customization Work, Customizations, Dupont, Experimental Feature, Google, Google Search, Human Judgment, Open Source Search, Search Algorithm, Search Feature, Search Feedback, Search Google, Source Search Engine, Speech Bubble, Up Arrow, Virtue, Web Addresses

Wired, with the help of users on the VR-Zone forums, has uncovered a simple way to get high-quality uploaded videos to display in 1280x720--also known as 720p.

YouTube has long been expected to roll out high-definition video playback, and this appears to be the first viable way to do it. The hack in question is similar to the one that was first used to toggle on the "high quality" mode. It is done simply by adding "&fmt=22" to the end of the video URL.

I got it to work without any problems on a video I uploaded earlier this morning. What's interesting here is that it was not ready at the same time the Flash version was.

In my case, it took about 15 minutes longer for the HD version to display. YouTube could be doing the second round of processing for these higher-resolution videos at the same time it's doing H.264 conversions for playback on TiVo digital video recorders and iPhones. My original upload was H.264 to begin with, so that could have sped things up.

Getting the higher-resolution video to display properly in embedded code is not so easy--but as you can see below, it works and looks gorgeous. You have to manually go in and change the embedded-link structure--something newbies might want to steer clear of. The YouTube embed technology for HD videos is missing the option to view in full screen, but you can toggle it on from the Google service's hosted video page.

One thing to note is that some folks to whom I sent this had problems getting the clip to display on older hardware. On my Intel Core2Duo machine, my CPU usage shot up from around 10 percent to 40 percent, and it peaked at 70 percent. This also happens on other HD video sites, such as Vimeo and Dailymotion. If you're using a computer equipped with a chip less powerful than an Intel Pentium 4, you might run into problems.

HD Version:

Regular version:

Tags: Cpu Usage, Dailymotion, Digital Video Recorders, Flash Version, Google, H 264, Hd Version, High Definition, Intel Core2duo, Intel Pentium 4, Link Structure, Quality Mode, Tivo, Tivo Digital Video Recorders, Video Playback, Video Sites, Video Url, Vimeo, Vr Zone, Youtube Videos

Brownbook, a global business directory that allows users to edit information about companies, launched recently for visitors all over the world.

According to the company, Brownbook aims at combining the power of wikis, peer-production, and social networking to change the way business directories are presented online. Instead of providing a directory for users, Brownbook allows users to edit and update business listings, provide reviews with video and photos, and receive rewards by commenting on businesses.

The premise sounds simple enough and some may think it's interesting, but after using it for a while, I'm not quite sold on its usefulness. I perused the site, looked for different companies, read reviews scattered across the service, and found myself asking the same question each time: "what value does this site really provide?"

It's not that a business directory isn't nice, but there are a slew of them across the Web, like yellowpages.com and Yahoo's business directory, that present pertinent information in a much nicer package.

Brownbook claims that over 27 million businesses have already been indexed. But when I searched for a major firm like Walmart, the site returned a results page that listed Canadian stores and their phone numbers, but little else. That may be fine for Canadian customers who want to know a particular store's phone number, but the rest of the world is left out. And after viewing incomplete information about each store, I quickly realized that it's much easier to use Walmart's store locator to find important information instead of Brownbook.

Being able to add a business and comment on that business is the real draw of Brownbook. But after searching through the site for quite some time without finding any useful review, I can't help but wonder if people are willing to review a major accounting firm or Ford dealership like they review hotels on TripAdvisor or restaurants on Yelp. I doubt it.

That said, adding a review was made simple by clicking the "Add a review" link and changing or adding information about a particular company is as easy as filling out a form and confirming the changes. That simplicity was welcome and could help the company grow as more people learn about the site.

But at its core, Brownbook is a directory site and so far, I just don't see any reason to use it as such. The idea of having a place to find important information about a particular company or franchise like mailing address, phone number, and location is fine, but with other services across the Web that present that information in a much cleaner way, I don't see a reason to use the site. And considering Brownbook is inherently subject to angry customers and bias, I'm not convinced the site can become a trusted source of important business information.

Tags: Accounting Firm, Aims, Business Directories, Business Listings, Canadian Customers, Different Companies, Ford Dealership, Global Business Directory, Important Information, Premise, Quite Some Time, Rest Of The World, Rewards, Slew, Social Networking, Tripadvisor, Walmart, Yahoo Directory, Yellowpages, Yelp