Here’s a News Search tool with some added visualization from TrackThisNow. STEP 1 Enter a keyword and select the country or country group that you want to track. Let’s try “AltSearchEngines” in all 250 countries that they search. (Yes, it’s Google) STEP 2 Watch the map change - see image below. We were mentioned in 2 countries. STEP 3 Click on the placemarks on the map to read news from that country. Like so: Guiana, French Deep Web Technologies Paves the Way for China to Join the … … ken,” concluded Hope Leman, Library Technical Specialist with Samaritan Health Services,...
Peter Kim is a Senior Partner at Dachis Corporation. He blogs about social computing and marketing at Being Peter Kim. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been curating a list of social media marketing examples. The list started with 100 examples (including 35+ from Mashable) and has since tripled in size with the participation of over a hundred contributors with examples from companies around the world. We could probably come up with 3,000 examples instead of 300 - but the current set already gives us a pretty good sample to think about. One takeaway: for now, those neurotic...
Here’s the latest action: Barack Obama’s views on tech policy — The polls all have him ahead right now, so we should probably know the positions with regards to tech for what could be our next President in a few hours. Via TechCrunch. Circuit City closing 155 stores — I bet Blockbuster is pretty happy right now that its odd idea to buy the troubled electronics chain didn’t end up happening. The AP has more. Flickr gets its 3 billionth picture — The uploaded picture is of a door. Yahoo loses a couple more key guys — Scott Moore, the...
Grab your OPML reading list and get out now. That was the message in an email sent today to users of the innovative start-page service YourMinis, a years-old startup that was acquired by AOL in February. YourMinis was a start-page service like no other, but its feature richness and happy users fall victim to the cold business logic that so many cool startups face after being acquired. YourMinis is now primarily used to power advertising widgets for AOL, a practice that will continue but pales in comparison to the beautiful topical pages its users built with the full service over...
While there are countless Digg clones, only a handful gain enough traction to stay on the radar. Mixx is one of them, and the company has released the metrics today showing its growth over its year-long existence. Since its inception, Mixx has claimed its attention to its user base as the major point of differentiation between it and Digg, and this has so far led to Mixx’s achieving approximately 700,000 uniques per month. It hoped to create an alternative community to possibly steal Digg’s dominance in content aggregation, as Digg still brings in over 22 million unique visitors on a...
I have been traversing on the Internet for a little over a decade now. Throughout the years I have had a number of personal blogs on various blogging platforms that have come and gone. I have never taken any of these blogs seriously, nor have I updated with any frequency, because it was just that, a personal blog for the occasional journal thought and pictures from family outings. I decided earlier this year that I have no use for a personal blog anymore. My substitute is a private Twitter and Picasa account serving as a repository for all things personal....
Widgets have provided one of the more effective yet indirect ways of increasing your reach on the web. Now, Widgetbox, one of the more prominent and well-funded widget platforms, is taking another step to differentiate itself in commoditized market. It is starting to use its own network to drive traffic to blogs and other online sites. Widgetbox’s new Blog Network, to be announced at the BlogWorld Expo this week, automates a portion of the content widgetizing process on behalf of publishers, and encourages a more methodical spreading of widgets. Here’s how it works. To join the Widgetbox Blog Network, a...
FriendFeed, the social content aggregation site has moved some of the new beta features it was working on to the main version of the site today. On the main site you’ll now find friend lists, photo posting, quick navigation, the ability to see other’s feeds as they seem them and an updated UI. We detailed all the changes in a post last month. More interesting however, is that FriendFeed has added a new features with the roll out. Users of the service earlier today noticed that FriendFeed has started bunching together related entries. It appears that FriendFeed has a new...
Tingz has developed shareable widgets that work across multiple platforms such as the phone, computer, and TV. They can be used to manage and synchronize your data across these devices. The startup presented today at TechCrunch50 during the Collaboration session. You can watch a video of its presentation here. Tingz works on Mac OS X, the iPhone, and in Windows Media Center. In each, the interface is basically the same, which Tingz believes is the most useful feature it offers. And what it offers is quite substantial: it lets you find movie listings, watch trailers, pick showtimes, and purchase...
When I first saw Koollage, I thought its concept of gathering content you want online and on your iPhone in Pods (Packages-On-Demand) was interesting, but sounded vaguely familiar. Then it hit me - it sounded like Squidoo and its concept of Lenses for content. The other site Koollage reminded me of with its Klubs, Koollage Krew and Kool Factor was MySpace, and its content aggregation properties smacked of a prettier FriendFeed. The idea behind Koollage is simple. Find content you want to pull together into a Pod, and make that Pod into your personal “podspace.” You can have more than...
BoomTown is back from a seasick cruise vacation in the wilds of Alaska–official sightings: lots of icebergs, 16 glaciers, a passel of jellyfish and starfish, four lumberjacks, three orcas, two seals, one otter, no moose or bears and, yep, one Republican Vice Presidential candidate’s lovely house in Juneau–just in time for school. Or, more precisely, a little schooling for some of the tech companies that I cover in a mildly obsessive-compulsive manner. All of them, I predict, are in for a news-filled fall. That’s right, more Facebook employee hijinks! More BMOC-battling between Microsoft and Google! More Yahoo trying its...
You have probably heard about TraceMonkey. If not, I recommend that you read these 3 excellent post about it: Brendan’s Roadmap Update, John Resig’s update and Ajaxian’s article. As pointed in the 3 articles, this is a very promissing development and will change the playing field. Specifically for feedly, it means that we are going to be rewarded for having chosen to implement streets and the feedly client in Javascript. Let me explain: everytime you load a feedly page, somewhere around a 100,000 lines of Javascript code start executing - involving both content aggregation, service integration, caching, content analysis, filtering,...
I’ve been thinking a little bit about the syndication formats for microblogs lately, and I’m wondering if we might all agree upon some very simple conventions to integrate the various providers. Nothing profound here, just some simple ideas about how to get an easy win with existing technologies. Taking FriendFeed as the best current example of an aggregation site, I notice that the FriendFeed team has hand-coded various content providers, but they don’t have the same richness enabled for generic feeds. For example, take Dave Winer’s stream on FriendFeed. His FriendFeed page looks pretty darn good, doesn’t it? (I pick...
A couple of months ago Six Apart launched a new initiative that provided custom ad options aimed to offer more engaging ways for brands to interact with content producers and consumers, thanks in part to its acquisition of Apperceptive. Things seemed to have worked well for Six Apart as a result, and the next step for the blogging software creator is a new self-service option for site publishers to add social networking capabilities to their online publications with the upgraded Movable Type Pro (MT Pro). This combines Movable Type’s blogging platform with social networking features, which is something that...
Yesterday, Mozilla announced Snowl, a prototype of a universal messaging/content aggregation plugin for Firefox. In its current incarnation, Snowl only allows you to view your Twitter messages and RSS feeds, though Mozilla is planning on adding more messaging services in the near future. During our first tests, we came away disenchanted, as the execution of this first version leaves a lot to be desired, even if the general idea behind Snowl is quite interesting. Marrying Messages and News The basic idea behind Snowl is to bring together messaging and feed reading in the browser. As Mozilla points out, it shouldn't...
