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Fuel Cell Taxis Unveiled for 2012 London Olympics —

A prototype of London’s future fuel cell taxi fleet was just unveiled at their city hall yesterday and has us a lil’ jealous of their forward thinking plans. The fleet of water emitting “black cabs” will help Londoners meet their goals of being tailpipe emissions free by 2020 and will green up their image just in time for the 2012 Olympics. It seems that London is trying to make the upcoming Olympic games as sustainable as possible — we reported on the games earlier this year — and these taxis will be no small part of that effort.

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PostRank Activity Streams: FriendFeed for your content! —

Knowing how and where your readers are engaging with your content is critical to the success of any publisher today. With so much activity happening off the authors site, discovering the fragmented conversations, connecting with the audience, and growing your presence on all the social hubs has been an incredibly manual and a time-intensive task. That is, until today, because we are rolling out a new beta feature on PostRank Analytics: Activity Streams for your content!

Think of it as FriendFeed, but for your content. PostRank aggregates over 10 million daily activities from over 20 different social hubs, which means that we see every tweet, bookmark, vote, and comment about your stories. PostRank already knows about all the content you publish (zero setup, just specify your RSS feed), which means that we can scan the millions of activities, and pull out just the conversations and actions which mention your content! Nothing to setup, just login into your PostRank Analytics account and you’re ready to go. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Did someone just vote on your story on Reddit, or Digg? Did someone mention your story on Facebook or MySpace, or maybe they shared it with their friends on Google Reader? Well, now you can find answers to all of those questions by logging in, or signing up for a PostRank Analytics account.

Oh, and the beta part is there for a reason – we’re just getting started with the activity stream, so stay tuned!

How To Control the Online Discussion with Google Moderator —

Google Moderator is a feature that has allowed some pretty big names to have discussions with their audience without chaos ensuing. It provides a controlled environment where viewers on YouTube can ask questions and, if their question is popular among other Youtubers, get it voted up and answered. It’s like your own personal version of Digg…with video. Now, it’s available to all users.

Moderator is a versatile, social platform that allows you to solicit ideas or questions on any topic, and have the community vote the best ones up to the top in real-time.

Moderator was used in discussions on YouTube with Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It’s also been used to facilitate discussion about the future of the African continent and who is the best slam dunker not in the NBA. While YouTube has made updates to the commenting system to make it more manageable and inviting, it’s still difficult to have any type of meaningful discussion within the comments. The noise easily drowns out the signal. Google moderator turns the tables in your favor.

Your first step is to add the Moderator module to your YouTube Channel. Just open the Modules drop down from your channel page and check the Moderator box (don’t forget to Save Changes).

The next step is to create your first series. This refers to the entire discussion thread. Your Title is where you ask your community for questions, ideas, or suggestions on some topic. The Description allows you to got a little more in-depth as to what you want from your audience. You can optionally include a link to a YouTube video here if you are more comfortable expressing yourself on camera or need to attach related video content. One thing to note is that you can actually specify whether users will submit mostly questions, ideas, or suggestions. You can also specify start and end times for the series if it coincides with an actual event or you just want to limit responses.

Each user response can also have a video link attached. There is no way to comment on individual post, which helps to keep things clean and focused. The only way a viewer can give feedback is by giving an item a thumbs up/down. Those items that get the most positive attention float to the top so that you can provide a video response.

Besides being a great way to get user feedback on serious issues, this is a great feature for YouTube personalities that thrive by entertaining or helping their audience. It will be easier to crowdsource your audience. Whether it’s a certain song they want to see performed, some problem that needs a solution, or some type of challenge they want to see completed. A great way to keep the good content flowing.

How will you use Google Moderator?

One of the founders of Reddit, a Digg-clone, openly criticized Digg founder Kevin Rose yesterday for his plans to implement “me-too” features into the new version of the service. We consider this to be absurd and rather impolite.

Yesterday we discovered a video showing some of the features of the upcoming relaunch of Digg. In a nutshell, Digg has been trying to find a way to leverage social sharing to make the site more relevant, and users will soon see links to interesting things based on the what people and entities they choose to follow are voting on.

That goal isn’t anything new, founder Kevin Rose has been talking openly about it for more than a year now.

Will it help save Digg, which has been stuck in a no-growth cycle for years now as services like Twitter and Facebook have surged? I have no idea. I do know that Digg will now become much more personally relevant to me, and TechCrunch will certainly be auto-publishing to Digg and adding a Digg button to posts.

I love nothing more than shouting my opinion on things, and I’ve been particularly harsh on Rose and Digg over the last several months. But opinions are one thing. Rewriting history is another.

Hypocrisy Alert

Reddit, a site for discovering and sharing new things, was launched in mid-2005, more than six months after Digg. There were very few differences between Reddit and Digg then, and they haven’t diverged all that much since then, either. Both sites allow users to vote on submitted stories/links, and the most popular stories are on the home page. Reddit ripped off the core Digg idea when it launched. Which is totally fine in my opinion, since the Internet has evolved in this way from the beginning. You take someone else’s ideas and you try to improve on them.

But Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says Digg needs new ideas. From his post:

…this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”

Those are your words from that aforementioned 2004 video segment.

Now what matters is how many followers & influence a user has and how many followers & influence they’ve got.

Where have we heard this before: Twitter? Facebook? GoogleBuzz?

Kevin, you absolutely deserve all the credit for starting the movement — fascinating things happen when online communities can efficiently share content. Whales get silly names and we can expose the tragedies our fellow man endures faster than ever before.

It’s a damned shame to see digg just re-implementing features from other websites.

Is it reasonable criticism? Absolutely. Except when it’s being said by someone who cloned the site that he is now complaining is copying features from others.

But hold on just one minute – Ohanian says he never even knew about Digg when he decided to build Reddit half a year after Digg launched:

Funded by Y Combinator, Steve Huffman and I started work on reddit in June 2005, which we launched a month later. A month after that, we learned about digg and realized this was going to be an interesting new space — we had some catching up to do.

Is that possible? Did they really invent the Digg idea completely independently from Digg six months after Digg launched? And no one at Y Combinator pointed out that there were similarities?

Paul Carr put this best when we were discussing this post internally on Yammer: “So at best they did zero research before they launched Reddit into a space that kinda relies on the founders knowing where to find cool new stuff online.”

At worst of course he’s simply lying.

Everyone knows that Digg needs to do something to find relevance again. This new version looks as good to me as anything else I’ve heard suggested, and it certainly doesn’t smell like something the venture capitalists forced down their throat. Kevin returned to a full time role at Digg earlier this year and clearly wants to prove that he can bring this company back to life. He’s excited about Digg, clearly. He may succeed. He may fail. But at least he’s in the arena and fighting valiantly.

The Twitter of News? — Liz Gannes has written an intriguing story about the new version of Digg coming soon, saying it aspires to be "The Twitter of News." This is very interesting.

Think of Twitter as "at least a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future." They gave it a diminutive name, easy to dismiss, but Twitter does something important. It makes composing and reading news easier than it's ever been.

But Twitter has been standing in the same place for a long long time. Why shouldn't Digg be able to catch up and pass them in a meaningful way? If they're motivated enough and good enough the answer is they should.

What's wrong with the tech industry that it lets Twitter stagnate so long without raising a serious challenge. Google didn't do it with Buzz or Wave. Yahoo could have done something with Flickr, but they're too disorganized. Even Facebook has failed to mount a realistic challenge to Twitter.

So why not Digg? Let's hope they have something good. Let's also hope they have innovated with their API, kept it simple, and perhaps offer developers a little more to play with than Twitter has.

It's time for some rock and roll.

Update: Zee sees it too.

Digg Wants to Be the Twitter of News —

Digg founder Kevin Rose is close to his first major launch since taking over as CEO and instituting layoffs. He published a video today on his personal YouTube account laying out the site’s upcoming version 4 release, due “very soon” (found via TechCrunch).

The new Digg — which has been in the works for at least a year now — will extend the site’s current social features (which are pretty minimal) to allow for both friending and following other users and publishers. So if you friend a user, you see what they Digg and comment on; if you follow a publisher, you see everything they publish. The result is a personalized news page that seems like a combination of Google Reader, the Facebook news feed and Twitter. These features aren’t surprising; they’d been discussed publicly by previous CEO Jay Adelson and others at the company.

Here’s the key quote from the video, from Rose describing Digg’s new value proposition:

“Because we’re only links and news we cut out all the miscellaneous status updates like you see on other sites.”

This sounds like a good approach. The problem, though, will be standing out from those other sites that people already use to get their news and updates together, since much of that information will end up being duplicated and redundant for people who use more than one of the services.

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In an interesting nugget of Friday afternoon news, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has posted an article featuring a preview of the upcoming fourth version of the social news site Digg. Founder Kevin Rose has published a glorious 1080p video to YouTube aimed at explaining the new features to publishers. Among the most interesting features is the inclusion of social network contacts into the Digg ecosystem, as well as the ability for publishers to auto-publish stories to Digg via an RSS feed.

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Just like when joining most Web services these days, users will be asked to search their Facebook and Twitter accounts (among others) to follow friends and contacts via Digg. The Digg homepage will then default to a page consisting entirely of stories dugg by the users they choose to follow. When browsing articles either on the social "My News" section, or on the more traditional "Top News" tab, users will be able to see which stories their friends have dugg, as well as view their friends' comments directly in-line with the story.

Rose says these new features play into the hands of publishers because the viral aspect of sharing stories with friends will help stories achieve higher digg counts. If one person diggs a story, it shows up on the homepages of their followers, and if they digg it, the process continues. To make the process of getting articles online even simpler, publishers can now claim their RSS feeds and automatically publish their content on Digg without having to visit the site.

These changes and additions may be just what the doctor ordered for Digg which has had to continually delay these updates. Personally the preview looks pretty slick, and may actually bring me back to using Digg on a more regular basis. Check our Rose's video below and let us know what you think in the comments.

Discuss

Kanji-to-animal transformers —

Japanese toy giant Bandai is set to release a series of nifty kanji figures that transform into the shapes of the animals they represent. The shape-shifting critters, called Mojibakeru (moji means "character" and bakeru means "to change"), come in six varieties -- 犬 (dog), 虎 (tiger), 魚 (fish), 馬 (horse), 鳥 (bird) and 竜 (dragon) -- and are available in black, white, yellow and blue.

I posted this mainly because the excitement around the Makerbot/Bre transformer. Could more cool printable transformers be on the horizon? I sure hope so. [via Pink Tentacle]

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Lego DNA model —

The Brothers Brick editor Nannan Zhang, a med student at Washington University in St. Louis, created this DNA model out of Bionicle claws in honor of his research mentor's 60th birthday. He also created another excellent DNA model that even has a secret message in the helices. [via The Brothers Brick]

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Facebook's latest privacy problem should raise a few eyebrows. Facebook sharing "private" data in unexpected (and occasionally unwelcome) ways is nothing new, but this newest problem is unusual, in that it does something that Facebook's lengthy (and oft-updated) privacy policy explicitly says should not happen: it shares private user information with advertisers.

The research originally describing the problem looked at more than just Facebook. Many social networking sites, including LinkedIn, Digg, and Twitter, suffered the same leakage of personal data. Of the twelve sites looked at by the researchers, the only one that didn't leak data to advertisers was the one already owned by an advertising company—Orkut.

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I’m looking for concrete examples of businesses, large and small, that have seen firm success by integrating Facebook either as an application, a Page, or on their own website via Facebook Connect or Facebook Graph API.  If you have analytics and statistics to back up your claim, I’d like to get quotes from you on how Facebook’s API has helped your business.  The best ones I’ll be including in Facebook Application Development for Dummies.

This is a great opportunity for your business or website, as your brand will be promoted, pushed, and shared with an audience of thousands (wouldn’t it be cool if it were millions?) of readers worldwide, in a brand that is recognized in bookstores everywhere.  So if you, or someone you know has a great story to tell about how the Facebook API has helped your business, I’d like to share those case studies with my readers.  The best ones I’d like to also try and share on this blog if you’re okay with it.  Feel free to share them in the comments if you want everyone to see, or send them to jesse@staynalive.com.

Oh, and and not to show preference, but if anyone has any good contacts at Digg – I really want to see if their integration of Facebook Connect has helped.  I think that would be a great example to share – send them my way if you think they might be interested.

This book is a group effort – I hope to include you in many more opportunities like this, so keep reading and subscribing!