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September 4th, 2008 at 9:37 am

We covered SocialMedian’s Beta launch earlier this summer, and since then they’ve been listening to their members. After several weeks of feedback and hundreds of suggestions, they’ve just announced their first major release with several major changes to the service. Here are the four new core features:

News-Streaming

SocialMedian calls this feature News-Streaming because it allows you to create a News-specific form of content streaming and connects your social networking feeds to SocialMedian to get just the right content shared to the right people and pages. For example, you can share specific news-related tweets or photos from Flickr, but not your Pownce messages. To add links and feeds there’s a new SITE option next to the Snip and News tabs.

The key to this feature is a powerful filtering system that can help you share only the content that you want to share based on the keywords that you specify. The options are plentiful and can be as granular as you want them to be. The same process works with many popular sites such as Digg, Delicious, Google Reader, etc.

Reverse-Blog Widget

This feature allows users to promote their own blogs on SocialMedian through the use of a new widget. After setting up the feed to their blog, the widget is displayed whenever anyone is reading or commenting on a story from that blog on SocialMedian. This will also be the case if they are reading about someone’s blog via a share from Google Reader or Delicious, etc. This is a good idea because it gives credit not just to the person who shared the content, but also to the original source of the content. In the future, this widget will be customizable so bloggers can change the way it looks, the colors, add their logo, etc.

Better ways to find hot discussions and popular stories

There’s a new option menu for finding all of the most popular stories and hot discussions. There’s Popular Today, Popular Week, Popular Month, Rising Fast and Hot Discussions.

Make the socialmedian site more publicly available

SocialMedian has opened up just about every page so that they can be crawled by search engines. They also listened to their users who wanted to be able to expose links to their own pages on SocialMedian, which enables anyone to have their own version of the Drudge Report.

Other changes and future plans

They’ve made the site more publicly available by removing registration walls on SocialMedian pages. People will now be able to navigate throughout the entire site and all external links without having to register on the site unless they want to take advantage of personalization features, clip a story, add a comment, etc.

Conclusion

SocialMedian might not be everyone’s cup of tea because it does require more input and just plain work than most sites these days. However, these new changes will make SocialMedian very attractive to those who love sharing news and information, especially bloggers. It’s like Digg, Google Reader and FriendFeed all mashed up together.

Source:Mashable!

Location-based advertising? You’ve seen that, right? Practically every other ad you see on the net is tied to your general location, which is derived from your IP address.

Eventful, however, is a local events site, which means that the ads on it - now delivered by Placecast, described as “the world’s largest place-based interactive media company” - will truly be local, pinpointing your exact position. Here’s the example provided by Eventful:

“A user checking Eventful’s site for the next Coldplay concert in New York City would see an ad for Scion with the address and link to the closest Scion dealership, while a user looking for outdoor activities in San Francisco would see a localized ad for Subaru.”

Now, I’m not a particularly big fan of ads (who is), but this type of advertising might actually be useful every now and then. How do they do it? A combination of user-entered ZIP codes, content taken from Eventful and GPS for mobiles who have it, for example iPhone or Nokia N96.

Placecast has been integrated across Eventful’s entire online advertising inventory and email programs, and it delivers all kinds of ads (text links, Flash, images, video, audio) on any connected device, such as a laptop or a mobile phone.