Collecta starts out deceivingly plain – its landing page is just an orange and white search box on a purple background…like Google meets Crown Royal: sheer simplicity, lying in a big velvet field.

The only clue to the fact that this unassuming page is fronting a live, dynamic search experience is the small “Hot now:” link, serving just one currently trending topic at a time. When we were reviewing Collecta, the display rotated between “Breast Cancer Awareness”, “Balloon Boy Hoax”, “Paranormal Activity”, and “Lady GaGa – Bad”. I guess you can’t control what people are Tweeting about.

Once you enter your search terms, Collecta opens into a full-screen, 3-column format and reveals its hidden beast:

The far left column is a tab bar, allowing you to accumulate and maintain multiple searches that are toggle-able by clicking the terms. The current active search appears as a tab, and offers drop-down menus:

“Options:” lets you select the type of content to be displayed as a real-time results stream in the second column. We love this feature. The five check-boxes are for

Stories: blog posts, articles
Commments: on blog posts
Updates: Twitter, Jaiku, Identica
Photos: Flickr, TwitPic, yFrog
Videos: YouTube, Ustream

So this IS one of the few RTSEs that really DO go deeper into the real-time web than merely crawling Twitter! And the Options dialog is a great way to drill down to just, say, PHOTOS from a breaking story. That way you can be watching for the first camphone pics to be tweeted by someone at the scene, for instance. Normally I’d go to a service like Twicsy for that, but with Collecta, I can toggle on and off Twitter updates or new blog posts without leaving the screen.

A second link on the tab – “Share Search” – is the requisite self-promotion for Collecta. The Share Search drop-down serves up a row of social media share buttons: shortcuts that launch your choice of Twitter, Facebook, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious or StumbleUpon in a new browser tab; each offers a ready-made status update along the lines of “See what people are saying about yankees right now on Collecta. Via: http://collecta.com/s/yankees” – should you feel the need to advertise both your current appetite AND your dealer’s name.

The results column is about double the width of the first column, and is a fairly dynamic list of results that seems to update about every 15 to 30 seconds with a busy topic. I searched Yankees during Game 3 against the Angels Monday afternoon – Collecta was serving up about 30 results per minute in chunks of about 10 – 15 results. That meant a steady stream of fresh content – but new results didn’t bleed off the screen. They auto-update just about as fast as you can skim them during a mild caffeine buzz.

There’s a pause button at the top of the column if you’re feeling overwhelmed, and a running count, i.e. “156 results in the last 4 minutes”.  On a 20″ screen there’s about 15 results displayed at a time, and the “Older Results” button at the bottom rewinds almost exactly one screen worth of old headers each time you click it.

Results seem to be heavily weighted toward Twitter updates – versus all the other media being crawled. Which seems logical: there’s probably dozens of Tweets being sent for every blog post, comment, YouTube submission, etc. Yet a scroll backward through several minutes of results uncovered a cluster of maybe a couple dozen blog posts (nearly all appear to be WordPress blogs), a few blog comments, and several newspaper results (nydailynews.com, Newsday, LA Times and Toronto Sun’s online editions). Several Ustream results promised “live video” of the game, but the couple we clicked on both appeared to have formatting glitches that prevented the streams from either loading or playing.

Its hard to say for sure why all the non-Twitter content seems to be clustered. It may have been that I scrolled back through ‘older results’ beyond the time that started the Collecta search? If so, it seems that Collecta can scrape non-Twitter content that happened prior to one’s search, but not the Twitter posts. And that’s probably just fine: any Twitter content worth re-Tweeting probably will be (ad nauseum).

Finally, a huge viewer column at right displays the post headline, date, post time and complete update text (Twitter); or first-paragraph excerpt (blogs). A “read more” link opens the original content in a new browser tab, and finally, another “Share this result” bar offers up the same links to social media sites as were  present in the search column, plus a Digg button. Where this big viewer column really shines is when looking at photos from Twitpic or yFrog (we didn’t see any Flickr results). The linked photos load beneath the Twitter text and were nearly actual size on our screen – without invoking a pop-up or popover window. This was fantastic and we can’t wait to use it again.

Collecta appears to support boolean searches. We stumbled across this when testing the “Hot now” link for “Balloon Boy Hoax”: the link launched a new search tag containing a ready-made search for “balloonboy OR “balloon boy” OR “falcon heene” OR “balloon hoax”. That could come in very handy if it allows you to EXCLUDE terms from results by using NOT, or increase specificity by demanding two or more terms appear in a result using AND. I guess using OR would also theoretically allow you to monitor two unrelated stories at once without toggling between search tabs.

What Collecta DOESN’T attempt to do - unlike several of the other RTSEs - is be a buzz-tracker. The only trending-topic display is that super-svelte “Hot now” display with four topics in rotation. We watched it for an hour and the Hot now topics never changed. But that’s OK if you already know what’s breaking.

We tried Collecta on an iPhone 3GS running mobile Safari, and were disappointed. The search results page loads completely and fits reasonably-well in portrait mode. But despite the animated swirl orbiting the Pause button, the results column didn’t update for us - even after a recycling the page a few times, and despite the search engine updating the number of results it had collected. This may be a problem with the dynamic scripting being unsupported by mobile Safari. Anyone have better results on a different smart phone?

All in all, we were surprised and pleased with the functionality and page design of Collecta and look forward to putting it to a real-world test next time a big story breaks.

When a big story breaks, traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo! are just about useless for gathering the latest information about what’s happened. That’s when the new crop of ‘as-it-happens’ search tools become indispensable. Mostly powered by Twitter (although several claim to crawl Facebook and other sites as well), the real-time search engines (RTSEs) promise to keep you up to the second and give you instantaneous insight about what everybody’s talking about (or will be, soon).

But just how good are the RTSEs at doing what they aspire to? Which are the best, and which are serving up yesterday’s news? We’ll look at the ten search tools and buzz-meters pictured above over the coming days and give you our impressions. Meanwhile, we’ve added links to each of them at right so you can give them a twhirl yourself.

As close as we may be to DIY, instant-upload nirvana…there IS a Holy Grail out there yet to be seen in the wild: a real, live digital camera with a cellphone (or at least a cellular data radio) built-in. Yes, the bizarro-world inverse of the probably two billion-odd cellphone handsets currently sporting a dumbed-down, one to three megapixel, plastic-lensed, no-optical-zoom-having camera circuit.

Which means at this moment, images and videos captured in the field and uploaded to the Web are either one of two things:

1. Lousy, low-res, security-cam quality snaps that can be uploaded instantly – any time, anywhere there’s a cellular data signal, or

2. Real, live photographs or video clips: zoomed, composed, properly-exposed images…that have to be offloaded from the camera onto a computer, and (at best) uploaded from a laptop with an aircard or built-in GPRS/3G circuit.

Neither alternative is particularly ideal, is it?

Camera manufacturers – we know you’re listening! In early September, freelance columnist David Pogue asked his Twitter followers “What cool innovation have the camera manufacturers not thought of yet?” About a dozen of the 140-odd responses mentioned cellular uploading or onboard GPRS/3G capability. And a Marketwatch.com ‘Telecom Update’ on September 28th notes that wireless carriers are looking beyond cellphone handsets for other gadgets to bury their radios in – and specifically mentions cameras, in addition to E-readers, photo frames, and handheld video games.

I know the true digicam geeks out there are screaming “Eye-Fi cards!” and “Wi-fi-enabled point-and-shoots!” And we’ll be sure to cover those options in upcoming posts. But let’s face it: Eye-fi cards are slow and have no real user control at the camera. And either option forces you to run to an accessible 802.11 access point at the very moment you want to be uploading. And unless you’re living in 2003, the number of open or easily-accessible wi-fi access points in any given place is pitiful.

So we’re going on record, right here and right now: digital camera manufacturers, meet wireless networks. Wireless networks, meet digital camera manufacturers. Canon, this is Verizon…nice to meet you too! Now get down and start making full-featured SLRs and point-and-shoots with 3G, HSPA (ideally HSUPA) radios inside, please! Give me a few months free data access, then add it to my cellphone bill. Or I’ll pay a la carte!

In the meantime, we’ll look at the present-day alternatives, and we’ll dream…

• Nearly-ubiquitous wireless Internet connectivity

• Nearly-ubiquitous digital cameras and digital video recorders

This convergence is fueling a third phenomenon:

• A nearly-ubiquitous thirst for real-time feedback about both the world around us, and the world abroad.

“What’s happening NOW?” “What are people doing NOW?” “What are people thinking NOW?” There’s an intoxicating feeling of omniscience that comes from being plugged-in to the world’s zeitgeist at a given moment.

For the first time ever, thanks to the technologies mentioned above – plus a number of offshoot applications: real-time social networks and search engines; wireless upload cards and GPS-based geotagging among others – we can look down on the world from above at any given moment.

We can zoom in to see events unfolding live or nearly-live before us – almost anywhere and at anytime. We can zero in on the specific happenings that WE care about – be it storms, celebrity, sport, crime, natural (or unnatural!) disaster. We’re no longer bound by what the broadcast and cable networks choose to serve up; nor what repressive governments choose to cover up.
Newscrashing is the art and science of connecting the world in real-time, by recording and reporting the events around us. It’s scooping the networks – who are often constrained by budgets, bureaucracy, and bulky technology. It’s uploading photos and videos of breaking stories to Twitter via local wireless networks. It’s providing real-time, uncensored commentary from the military crackdown in Tehran, or from the blacked-out, storm-ravaged streets of New Orleans.

As citizens of the world, we can – in fact we NEED to – participate in this process. Without us, the revolution will not be televised.

*Those of us lucky enough to live in the “developed world” (i.e. places with a developed infrastructure that includes electricity, near-ubiquitous Internet connection, and near-ubiquitous wireless communication). While that may seem exclusive – remember that as the Third World rapidly evolves to join the “developing world”, it generally skips over the cumbersome generations of wired communication technologies, directly to latest-tech wireless networks.

According to the International Telecommunications Union, from 2002 to 2007, worldwide landline subscriptions edged upward from 800 million to just over 1.2 billion. In the same time period, worldwide mobile phone lines increased tenfold, from 400 million to over 4 billion. And from 1998 to 2008, the developing world went from having almost no mobile phones, to over 39 lines per 100 people. And though Internet penetration lags mobile phone uptake, the developing world went from virtually no Web connectivity in 1998, to nearly 13% in 2008.