TechAddress

Google Reader Implements Translation

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:35:35 +0000

Kevin Rose’s podcast network powerhouse Revision3 announced their financial returns for 2008, and they paint a rosey picture for online video. It also helps fill in a little bit of the gaps I and the rest of us were left wondering about following the cancellation of several shows on the network earlier in October.

The revenue for the network as a whole was reported to have tripled in 2008, though the press release doesn’t have any hard numbers as to what the total dollar amount was. Oddly, and unlike most media networks, rather than talking specifically about viewership and download numbers, Rev3 highlighed the amount of watching going on by quantifying it in minutes of “viewer engagement.”

It’s definitely a term that’s being used to obfuscate the amount of actual viewership taking place. Given how they seem to sell their ads (pre-rolls, post-rolls, host-read ads and certain affiliate relationships), it might be a more telling and insightful number to report exactly how many episodes viewed there were, rather than saying simply that they had achieved 140 million minutes of engagement monthly.

“Despite today’s tumultuous economic climate, Revision3 is making huge strides, dramatically increasing both viewership and revenue,” said CEO Jim Louderback in a statement today. “Like everyone else, we’re being cautious in how we approach 2009, but we anticipate continued growth over the coming months.”

They highlighted quite a few of their 60 advertising partners, including the Air Force, EA, Sony, Anheuser-Busch, Dolby, Virgin America, Go Daddy, Zune, Dr. Pepper, Carmex, Adobe, Microsoft and Axe.

The ones that are most prevalently advertising on the network these days are GoDaddy, Netflix, Michelob and Becks beer, GoToMeeting, and GoToMyPC, as we mentioned last month. Most of these seem to be affiliate style relationships, which definitely leaves the network with a lot of head room to grow.

2009 will see the online video market’s battle of the business models.

Revision3 is definitely one of the horses I’ve been watching run the video network race since their start in the business, and I’ve always had an affinity to its founders and many of their on-air talent. They’ve done a good job of pulling together a combination of recognizable faces, interesting genres and engaging shows. Because they’ve approached the business as creatives focused on video rather than aggregators with a broad-stroke approach (like Wizzard Media), they’ve an uphill battle on two fronts.

The first difficult front is that of content and audience monetization. Their application of commercialization has been uneven so far, though it seems to have markedly improved since the hire of Jim Louderback as CEO. Since the majority of the team is so focused on the creative side rather than the monetization side, this is to be expected, to a certain extent.

The other side of the business that’s an uphill battle for Rev3 has been the high cost of doing business as compared to a lot of the other players in their business. Aggregators like Wizzard don’t have to front the costs of production, only that of distribution. That’s why they’re able to sustain their business off the same type of advertisments that Rev3 may have a hard time breaking even with.

This isn’t to say that Wizzard has a superior business model. I think that if you talk to the business side over at Wizzard, they’ll readily admit that on average, the shows being produced at Revision3 are superior to what they host - that’s to be expected. Wizzard hosts tens of thousands of producers, whereas Revision3 hosts tens of producers.

That’s why Revision3 has made moves to crowdsource some of their production, but at it’s heart Rev3 is still a production house (not an aggregator). During the tough economic times we’re now facing for the forseeable future, it’s going to be a battle of the business models to see which one is boud for success.

Source:Mashable!

Only a few short years ago, the “registration wall” was a thorn in the side of every web user: major newspapers forced users to sign up in order to access stories. BugMeNot, which served up login details for all these registration-only sites in an instant, was an invaluable timesaver.

Those registration walls have crumbled, but creator Stateless Systems has a new foe: overpriced goods. Launching tonight, BeatMyPrice is a stunningly simple “people-powered price comparison engine” - enter the item name, the price to beat and where you found it on the web, and BeatMyPrice will compare that to data entered by other visitors. If someone found it cheaper elsewhere, BeatMyPrice serves up that result. It’s a product search engine, essentially, with a people-powered twist.

And surprisingly, our attempts to spam the site with junk prices were unsuccessful: whatever algorithm the site uses to filter results seems resilient to the kind of vendors who would claim to sell an iPhone for $1 to get more clicks to their own store. And if they can keep this data clean, our BugMeNot heroes could be sitting on a wealth of user-generated pricing information within a matter of months.

Source:Mashable!

Google Reader today announced the completion of one of their 20% time projects - translation. Google reader is an essential tool in my daily life as a blogger and news consumer, and the ability to consume news from a wide variety and large quantity of sources is only made possible by this tool, so being able to pull in news from other languages will only add to the value for me.

When the announcement was made this evening, the feature had not yet propagated to my account, but as with most updates Google does to their apps, logging out and reloading was required to see the new features.

I must say that I’m rather impressed with how it works. Google translation has recently replaced Babelfish as my go-to service for translation, not necessarily because it’s more accurate (it seems to be stronger on some languages, and weaker on others), but because of the longer list of translatable languages available.

When I applied the translation option to a mixed language ego search feed I have set up in Reader, I actually had to carefully page through each item to try to find the article that was originally in Chinese.

To enable it on any feed you currently have set up, simply click onto that feed so that you’re viewing it directly (not a category/folder view), and then click on the Feed Settings pull down. From there, simply “Translate into my language.”

Might this actually be significant?

Over the years, I’ve found myself in the odd position of having seen my content become very popular overseas, despite the fact that my content is most of the time very centric to the United States. None the less, my personal politics and technology podcast I produced throughout 2007 was far more popular in China and the Middle East, and very recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of my Mashable articles recieve a second life as they make the rounds through the various Chinese news networks.

There’s an undeniable cultural divide between both of the geographic areas I mentioned above and most of the Western world. In terms of the Middle East, the cultural divide is said by many folks smarter than I am to be the cause of the very physical conflict between the US and the Middle Eastern fundamental Islamic culture. In terms of China and the West, there’s very real divides between what our perspectives on freedom are and what theirs are. This is currently being highlighted by Robert Scoble during his China tour, and Paul Glazowski talked a bit about this over the weekend.

So, not to gush too much over what is essentially a minor feature update, but the potential for this very minor feature is that it seamlessly puts content from a much more diverse selection of authors and publishers in the mix, and works to break down the cultural barriers little by little.

Put another way, when I was interviewed over a year ago by Bill Grady on You Are the Guest, we broached this very topic of what the biggest stumbling block there existed between American members of New Media and the burgeoning sectors of New Media in Iraq and Iran, it came down to language. Now that the most widely used tool for reading blogs has the ability to render that stumbling block moot, the fences that existed between the East and the West might start to come down more quickly.

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First Look: Tagging Comes to FeedDemon’s Next Version

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:36:07 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Automattic, makers of the WordPress blogging platform, has announced the acquisition of PollDaddy, a company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets. The deal apparently follows an integration project between the two companies, featuring a PollDaddy’s plugin for WordPress.org blogs as well as an integration with the editor on WordPress.com. Both products are immediately available on the heels of today’s news.

more to follow…

Source:Mashable!

I have been a long time fan of NewsGator’s FeedDemon RSS client, having used it on and off since its very early days when it was owned by Nick Bradbury and cost money for a registered version. Through the years, Nick has always been right there adding new features that he felt added value to the program or were requested by other faithful users. For me, it is the premier feed reader out there.

So last night when I got an email from him asking if I would like a chance to play with a pre-release of the next version, I didn’t have to think twice. Even though I had been giving Google Reader another longer try, I still found I was missing the service. After downloading my copy and effortlessly upgrading my current version, I started checking out FeedDemon’s new tagging feature.

Yes, I know that GReader has had this option from the start, so for the GReader faithful this won’t mean much. However, this is a great addition for those of us that find FeedDemon to be an indispensable tool as part of our blogging tool chest. Using this new feature is as simple as clicking on the Tag icon in individual RSS posts and either adding a new tag or selecting from one you have already used.

One interesting part of the tag editor as well is that it will recommend tags based on the post that you are adding the tags for. If you add a new tag it is added to the treeview tag list, which you can select later to display with any posts that are associated with it.

I’ve only been using this new version since late last night, but already I find it indispensible in letting me save posts to come back to later. Some other notes on the tagging feature:

- Tags are synchronized with NewsGator

- “Subscriptions Home” includes a tag cloud

- Tags can be dragged from the tree and dropped onto a post in a FeedDemon newspaper

- Tagged items can be excluded by the Cleanup Wizard

- Tagged items can be excluded from purging of older articles (click Options on the “Manage Tags” dialog to enable/disable)

- Tagging is now included in the attention algorithm

FeedDemon users should definitely be looking forward to these new additions and getting their hands on this excellent program.

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8 Google Reader Extensions for Firefox 3

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:46:44 +0000

Source:Mashable!

There are less than 10 days left to send your submission to the Boss Mashable Challenge to win either the $2,000 Grand Prize or the $1,000 runner-up prize. We’ve received many submissions so far and will continue to showcase the best of the best on Mashable until the September 28th Deadline. Three submissions that will definitely be making it into the voting round are: Tall Street, BooYarr and Buzka.

How do you win? Build a kickass mashup – search engine or any other Web app – using the BOSS API and any other data sources/technologies.

This Week’s Showcase:

Tall Street Logo

Screenshot:

tallstreet-screenshot

100 word description from developer: “Tall Street is a new search engine concept where you get to rank the results. If you become a member of our community you become a trader on our directory where you get to play the search results like a stock market. This means you make investments (with fake money) on sites belonging to certain keywords, if when people search those keywords they find the sites you have invested in useful, you earn more money to further invest. If people don’t find your sites useful then you lose money.”

Screenshot:

100 Word description from developer: “BooYarr aims to make search easier by improving access to the search functionality and by, more importantly, improving the process of navigating through the results.

BooYarr works by having all the search functionality, e.g. web, news, etc. kept inside the browser sidebar, even the results are displayed in the sidebar. This means it takes significantly less time to conduct a search and you don’t have to load whole pages in the browser window just to do a search. When we built BooYarr we also needed to ensure that it was easier to access the BooYarr sidebar than it is to use a toolbar or search bar, what we came up with was a bunch of shortcuts both keyboard and mouse.”

Screenshot:

100 word description from developer: “Buzka is a social web application that helps friends to share and organize favorites on the web. It’s the easiest way to share and save a link by using just one Buzka Button. Favorites shared with the Buzka Button are saved and organized into folders which users can sort and publish on the web. Buzka gives friends a way to browse, organize and search each other’s favorites and is a great way to collaborate and share knowledge - for work and play. BOSS search has been used to give users highly relevant content matching keywords within the context of nested folders.”

That’s it for this week. Less than 10 days left, so submit as soon as you are ready. If you are not developing for this contest, what are your thoughts on the submissions showcased above?

Source:Mashable!

Google Reader is a great service, but it would be nice to know when you have new unread items as opposed to always going to the tab, or being disappointed to find out it’s only your least favorite feed that’s been updated. There are numerous Firefox extensions that can help you with these issues, and even help you to continue the discussion on the original blog depending on the commenting system they have installed.

As with any list of Firefox tools, please do not install all of these at once unless you’d like to slow down your browser. And, honestly, how many notifications do you need to show you that you have unread items in Reader?

AideRSS - Brings AideRSS to your Google Reader, allowing you to see ranks directly in your reader, as well as letting you group feeds by rank. Also allows you to add your own thoughts on each feed.

Better GReader - Combines several Greasemonkey scripts in one extension. Includes things such as skipping the iGoogle choice page, the ability to preview the item as it appears on the actual Web page, shows the favicon for each feed, and several other choices.

Feedly - While actually a start page extension, Feedly will monitor your Google Reader activities to deliver what appears to be your most important news so that you can always keep up with what is most important to you. You can read a more in-depth review by Alana Taylor here on Mashable.

Google Reader Notifier - Shows you how many unread items there are, provides an itemized list, lets you customize where the information appears in your browser, different icon sets, and more.

Google Reader Toolkit - A straightforward extension that adds an icon to your status bar that shows you how many unread items you have, and can open Reader for you.

Google Reader Watcher - Based on a Greasemonkey script by the same author, Google Reader Watcher will check your account at an interval you set and will show you how many unread items you have. It can show this broken down by feed and more.

gReader Comments - If a blog has Disqus installed, you can continue the conversation in Google Reader with this extension.

IntenseDebate in Google Reader - This plugin will add a link to each item in your Google Reader to allow you to post comments directly to IntenseDebate.

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Track What Obama, McCain, and Political Journos are Sharing on Google Reader

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:39:28 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Czech search engine, Seznam is on the block for $1 billion, according to reports, and Google may be in the hunt for that country’s most popular search engine. And while it wouldn’t surprise me if Google did acquire Seznam to shore up its international influence, it points to a key issue that shouldn’t be overlooked: Google is so powerful and so rich that the chances of a small search engine growing to challenge its prowess are becoming smaller with each passing day.

There are a variety of search engines in the wild that all offer something new or unique. Some think Quintura will be a major player in the search space one day, while others believe Wikia, Clusty, or even KartOO might have a shot at slaying the Google beast. Each offers something unique and something that many people may be looking for, but do they have the staying power or popularity to grow under Google’s nose like Baidu, and utterly command the search market in one space? I doubt it.

Google is simply too big and too powerful to be challenged by a small firm. That’s not to say that it’s better than Wikia or even better than Quintura, but it does mean that Google simply won’t let these services get too big before it’s forced to react.

The search engine space is increasingly becoming a three-horse race in the United States and even fewer are finding footing overseas. According to the most recent numbers, Google now controls 70 percent of the US market and Yahoo and Microsoft continue to lose ground. All the while, smaller search engines like Wikia and Quintura are not even included in that discussion. That said, they’re still growing, albeit at a much slower rate than Google.

But that doesn’t matter much anymore. Years ago, search engines would start up and have a fighting chance at reigning supreme. But in today’s consolidated market, there’s no such chance. Instead, the idea of creating a search engine has followed the Web 2.0 mantra that venture capitalists love and egotists that want to rule a market don’t: Make your search engine grow to a level where people take notice, do something unique, and in no time, Google or Microsoft will acquire it to shore up their presence online.

Powerset is a prime example of that idea. Sure, it only lets you search Wikipedia right now, but what it did do was provide a highly-useful way of inputting queries and getting relevant results to be returned. And in the process, Microsoft saw something it liked and acquired it before it became a threat or before Google had the opportunity to do the same.

It might sound naive to say that no company will ever really challenge Google, but it may be true. The way I see it, Yahoo is the only company that’s even close right now and it’s in such disarray that it’s not a threat to Eric Schmidt and the rest of his cronies at all. Microsoft is probably the stiffest competition because it has the cash to compete, but let’s not forget that its market share is barely relevant — it has yet to even hit 10 percent.

But that’s also where the smaller search engines come in. Smaller search engines don’t need to play the same game Google and Microsoft do and tend to be more successful when they break the mold and create a real user experience. The Web is littered with the remains of search engines like Lycos, Altavista, and dare I say, AOL, that tried to do the same thing as Google and failed, so why shouldn’t startups try something new and give the big three some ideas?

After using the myriad search engines on the Web, it’s abundantly clear that some — most notably, Wikia and Clusty — have a chance at growing into a search powerhouse. But in today’s environment where both Google and Microsoft make billions each quarter and have all the money they need to stop small search engines from growing too large and threatening their dominance, that’s simply impossible.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are probably here to stay for quite some time. And although I’d like to see a new company crop up just as much as the next person, the chances of another Baidu emerging are extremely small — Google or Microsoft would acquire it before that ever happens.

That said, it doesn’t mean innovation is dead and I fully expect Microsoft to lead the way in that regard. After all, if you’re trailing by such a wide margin, wouldn’t you want to try something new and hopefully coax more people to your service?

Source:Mashable!

While I suspect this initiative will be as carefully crafted by the respective Presidential campaigns as their TV commercials and speeches, give credit to Google for putting together a cool initiative for users of Google Reader that might bring more users into the fold along the way. The popular RSS reader has just launched “Google Power Readers in Politics,” a collection of Shared Items from the McCain and Obama campaigns, along with those of high powered political journalists like Arianna Huffington and Patrick Ruffini.

On Power Readers in Politics, you can browse what each of the candidates and journalists is sharing, and like any Google Reader shared items feed, subscribe to it via RSS. Each user’s shared items page also includes a list of their favorite sites to read. The homepage is a mashup of the most recently shared content from all of the participants.

So what are the candidates reading? While there is some overlap between the two (ESPN and each candidates hometown sports teams), both reading lists would appear to represent each candidate’s political leanings and public perception. For example, McCain lists Fox News, Navy.mil, and The Weekly Standard on his page, while Obama includes Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and The Daily Show.

Power Readers in Politics is obviously quite timely given the upcoming elections, but launching similar efforts for other topics like sports and entertainment would be a great way for Google Reader to potentially find new audiences. Considering hundreds of thousands of people “friend” celebrities on social networks, letting users subscribe to their favorite athletes and entertainer’s reading lists in Google Reader seems like a slam dunk.

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Google Reader Finally Introduces Granular Sharing Control

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:30:27 +0000

Source:TechCrunch
San Francisco startup Dipity has created a new product called Archaeologist, which provides an interactive view into any topic as seen through Digg. The product allows users to search for a topic and view a timeline of related articles that have received considerable attention on Digg. Users can view results for any keyword, from […]Source:TechCrunch
Back in December, Google Reader announced that it was introducing a feature that let users share posts with anyone in their Gmail/Gtalk contact list. Unfortunately, the sharing was all-or-nothing - if you decided to share a post, it would be available to all of your contacts, as there was no way to single out […]

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Socialmedian Opens Up Combining Many of the Best Ideas in Social News

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:59:35 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Socialmedian, a social news site that we’ve tracked the progress of over the past few months, is now open to everyone.

While a lot of the bases have been covered in our previous coverage, give Socialmedian credit for a nicely paced launch and responsiveness to its alpha users. Today’s public launch includes 350 “user-generated features” as founder Jason Goldberg likes to call them, and the site already has more than 1,000 daily active users – not too shabby considering that until now the service has been invite-only in the hyper-competitive social news space.

The ongoing enhancements and relatively active community were very visible in a tour of the site that Goldberg gave me yesterday. A lot of the ideas behind the service are very familiar if you use products like Digg, Friendfeed, and Google Reader.

You can follow different topical news groups – which are a collection of activities from people interested in the same topic (called News Networks) - or subscribe to updates from other users (called Newsmakers). On your homepage, you can then filter between the activities in your News Networks and the activities among the Newsmakers you’re tracking. Activities tracked include “Clipping” a story (akin to Digg with bookmarklet and all) or commenting on something on Socialmedian.

Looking beyond those features – which on the surface seem like a hybrid of Digg and Friendfeed – is where Socialmedian potentially gets very interesting for news junkies, and it comes in the form of providing feedback to the service. You can vote on each story’s relevance, rank topics in the order of importance to you, and upgrade the frequency at which you’d like to see stories from specific sources. So, hypothetically, if you want to customize Socialmedian to show you more stories about social networking, from Mashable, you can do just that

Beyond these features are where I draw the analogy to Google Reader. The “sharing” options associated with each item on Socialmedian allow you to either email it, Tweet it, or perhaps most interestingly – share it with one of your News Networks. Additionally, you can send a “Snip” (akin to a Note in Google Reader) to your networks.

If that’s not exhaustive enough, Socialmedian also acts as a profile aggregator, using the Google Social Graph API to pull in your profiles from various networks. While right now, this only leads to your profile displaying links, eventually it will turn Socialmedian profiles into yet another lifestreaming aggregator, but with a focus squarely on news according to Goldberg.

In addition to opening up its door to everyone, Socialmedian – which to-date has consisted of Goldberg and a team of programmers in India - is also for the first time disclosing its list of investors. Among the high profile people and organizations backing the company to the tune of $600,000 so far are WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt.

Clearly, Socialmedian has been paying attention to a lot of the trends in social news and aggregation in readying its public launch. It’s an impressive effort, but if there is one big drawback, it’s that the site does require a big investment from the user. Versus sites like Digg where you can passively browse the top content in your preferred high-level categories, to really get the most out of Socialmedian, you need to be active in the form of following other users, joining different News Networks, and continually using the feedback loops that the service provides. On the other hand, that investment might be well worth it for those that are drowning in information overload.

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FriendFeed To Become Your Podcast Player?

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:30:03 +0000

Source:Mashable!
Audio podcasts still continue to be a prevalent form of information delivery, despite the rise of online video, and just about every major category of online content has well produced content (much like our own Web 2.0-centric Mashable Conversations series). FriendFeed has noticed this and has very quietly been testing embedded players in the FriendFeed […]

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