Thanks to the power of RSS, and the flexibility of OpenSearch, Microsoft has extended the search experience within the Windows 7 Explorer shell.

I’ve been an advocate of RSS search for years (that’s what lead me to develop TagJag.com, which remains quite functional to this day). With TagJag, one can generate instant feed searches for Amazon, eBay, etc.

A few of us have created “Search Connectors” which bring the same functionality directly to your Windows 7 desktop. There’s nothing for you to edit – just download this collection of Search Connectors, then double-click the OSDX files included in the ZIP file, which currently include searches for:

• Amazon’s Full Catalog
• eBay Auctions
• PriceGrabber
• Coupons and Discounts
• Online Shopping
• My YouTube Videos
• My Blog
• The Geeks Social Network
• Lockergnome

These OSDX files are worthless in any other operating system, mind you. I do wish that Apple would “steal” this idea for the next iteration of Spotlight. We almost had something like it in Sherlock (which Apple “stole” from Watson). If you have other ideas for OpenSearches / Federated Searches / RSS Search feeds to put into this download, I’ll be more than happy to keep the bundle updated as the definitive collection of Search Connectors.

Download ‘em and try ‘em for yourself.

Windows 7 Search Connectors: Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, eBay…

You can take advantage of this growing community by being an active part of it. After all, it’s yours!

1. On the front page of http://geeks.pirillo.com/ you’ll find a list of the day’s registered birthdays. It takes less than 20 seconds to stop by someone’s profile and wish them well. You don’t have to be creative about it – a simple “happy birthday” is more than enough.

2. Watch http://geeks.pirillo.com/groups/group/list?sort=latestActivity for the latest happenings in the Groups. If you see something that interests you, join the group and start participating. Remember: it takes participation to evoke participation. If your favorite group isn’t showing up in “latest activity,” it’s because you’re not posting there. :)

3. Post your favorite daily news links and announcements in http://geeks.pirillo.com/forum as they come in throughout the day and night. No easier way of discovering who shares your thoughts. Posting a question that’s already been beaten to death isn’t very helpful at all. Did you just buy new hardware? Find new software? Tell everybody!

4. Keep an eye out for bloggers on http://geeks.pirillo.com/profiles/blog/list?pageSize=15 to see which geeks share your passions. Instead of simply leaving a commeent or passing the link to a friend account, why not click the user’s avatar and add them as a friend? Reach out!

5. Embed your own YouTube videos (or any of your videos) via http://geeks.pirillo.com/video/video/addEmbed and be sure to tag it accordingly. Your personality will draw people to you when they see what you’ve done!

6. Search for keywords on http://geeks.pirillo.com/memberSearch to see who matches you. Hopefully, every geek has filled out their own profile to the best of their ability. It’s all about discovery, my friends!

7. Go back to the front page when you have a moment – check out the latest activity that’s front and center! Not only can you click on member names and buddy icons, but their activity as well. Did they just upload a song you love? Did they just comment in a thread that sounds interesting? Did they just befriend one of your friends? The Activity Stream is incredibly revealing!

8. Keep your eye on http://geeks.pirillo.com/profiles/members/ which lists all the latest members to join the network. I wouldn’t recommend pouncing on them immediately, but once they’ve added a few things to their profile – why not personalize your greeting? Nothing would make a new geek feel more welcome!

9. When you do something interesting on Geeks, why not share the link with your Facebook or Twitter friends? It’s easy to do, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same people who follow you outside of Geeks would be more than interested in following you on Geeks.

10. Have you posted your event(s) to http://geeks.pirillo.com/events yet? Like, game tournaments, release dates, or anything else you’re interested in? Increase the chances of someone finding you before you find them… by simple participation.

To aid your navigation of Geeks features, several sub-menus were added to the menu bar recently. Go explore!

How to Meet Geeks

From Rickie Dickie, a passionate OPMLer – pointing out that grazr makes TagJag OPML much more usable on-demand:

Here’s a TagJag / grazr mashup smart bookmarklet for Firefox (right-click and add this link to your Bookmarks). Written as a smartlet – but JUST in case you don’t know what that is, you name the bookmark keyword to something like “tags” and then in the address bar type “tags gnomedex” to browse TagJag’s OPML for that keyword in grazr. I posted HTML embedding script; check out grazr’s site for particulars.

The equiv favelet (bookmarklet) for either IE or Firefox would be something like this:

[js]javascript:d=document;wgS=window.getSelection;dgS=d.getSelection();dS=d.Selection;q=(encodeURIComponent(‘%s’)==’%2525s’?”:’%s’)+(wgS?wgS():dgS?dgS():dS?dS.createRange().text:”);if (!q)q=prompt(‘Enter tag’,”);open(‘http://grazr.com/gzpanel?font=Tahoma,sans-serif&fontsize=8pt&file=http%3A//tagjag.com/all/’ + q + ‘/opml’);void(‘rickdog’)[/js]

This favelet is written to work like this:

• If nothing is selected and there is no smartlet argument on the address line, you’re prompted for a keyword
• If text is selected and there is no smartlet argument, the selected text is the keyword
• If no text is selected but there is a smartlet argument, the argument is the keyword
• If both text is selected and there’s a smartlet argument, they are combined to make a single keyword (smartlet + selected text)

I must also note the new Maxthon TagJag sidebar plugin – which is still getting tweaked. Oh, and Rickie Dickie also grazjag’ed a YubNub!

TagJag in Firefox