NBC Extends Olympic Downloads to Vista Media Center

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:01:05 +0000

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.

Source:Mashable!

UK residents have lived under the watchful eye of cameras for a while now, but still Google’s Street View initiative, an effort to photograph roadways and any structures adjacent to the tarmac, both east and west of the Atlantic, was required to undergo examination by the Information Commissioner after hearing from worried citizen rights watchdogs at Privacy International. Today it is said that the IC is officially satisfied with measures promised by Google to protect privacy and safety (blurring of faces of passersby, vehicular license plates, and image removal), and the company has been allowed to proceed as planned.

According to BBC News, the issue of privacy pertaining to roadway and streetside photography was first raised as a relatively high-profile concern earlier this month, when Google announced its intention to venture down lanes in a “few European countries.” The go-ahead given to Google ensures that it won’t be very long before the UK receives the same treatment many American cities have already.

The only resistance to Google Street View to be publicly reported in recent months, which in fact led to the complete removal of coverage for a specific area, was when the Minnesota community of North Oaks, a private jurisdiction, requested that it be removed when it was decided that Google had not gained the authorization to document it. Google complied.

Of course, any comparison with Google’s efforts and those of the UK government to surveil society, as I made a point to do in the introduction, must include mention that one project is privately managed while the other is government-led.

Source:Mashable!

If you’ve been hearing about NBC’s efforts to deliver on-the-go video content from the Olympic Games next month, and would like to watch downloads through a Windows Vista Media Center machine, you’re in luck. NBC is now enabling its Olympics On the Go service for that very purpose.

The broadcaster previously announced a partnership with Wavexpress, the name behind TVTonic, in late June. NBC chose the service to provide downloadable media from the summer games for viewing on PCs in automated, DVR-like fashion. Now the two companies are making it possible to extend the on-demand experience further by enabling Vista Media Center users the ability to watch such content - whether on the desktop or from the comfort of a home entertainment center.

NBC is said to be providing “popular events” for download, such as: beach volleyball, swimming, gymnastics, basketball, etc. Video quality is purported to be “up-to-HD.”

If you’re not interested in arranging your schedule to make time for live video streams from the NBC Olympics page in August — Beijing time may be difficult for a U.S.-based audience to adapt to — but wish to keep abreast of goings on in and around the city in a timely way, NBC’s arrangement with Wavexpress and its IPTV-like TVTonic development is something to consider.

It is rather unfortunate, however, that TVTonic is offered exclusively as a Windows Vista Media Center option. This will presumably keep many viewers in the Web browser to watch the games.

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NBC Extends Olympic Downloads to Vista Media Center