Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say AOL. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.
Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks - Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you'll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don't have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn't yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.
Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this - "noise cancellation for social networks."
There are countless ways to track your brand on social media. Simple methods include using Twitter search and Google Alerts; more elaborate tools include Radian6’s newly announced Engagement Console, which will scour numerous social platforms for any mention of your brand.
So here’s a roundup of some of the more popular tracking tools.
Twazzup 2.0 beta (which Dawn wrote about last year) is a dashboard that gathers all the mentions of your brand on Twitter and presents them in an appealing and useful way.
Trackur is another powerful social media monitoring tool. It used to be premium-only, but a free basic plan was recently announced that allows you to monitor one keyword, which is sufficient for most small organizations and personal brands. One of the things I like is the way that you can export any search result to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.
SocialMention (which Dawn also wrote about last year) is similar to Trackur in that it will search all over the web for any mention of your keyword/brand. I like how you can set up alerts that will be emailed to you with results summaries. It also lets you break down search results according to where your brand is mentioned: blog posts, images, videos, news items and more. You can even see every time someone has saved a link from your web site/blog to Delicious or shared it on StumbleUpon.
Addictomatic presents all mentions of your keyword or brand on one nicely designed page. You’ll see images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, posts shared on Digg and much more.
Some people find it sufficient to keep track of their brand or other keywords of interest via their day-to-day Twitter client, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic or HootSuite. They accomplish this by simply creating a new column in the client that displays any tweets mentioning that keyword. The nice thing about this method is that you can reply and respond to people mentioning your brand or product, which makes it a good customer service tool.
Larger organizations that need more than one person to monitor Twitter can use a Twitter clients geared for teams, such as CoTweet, which lets multiple people respond to tweets at the same time. The other useful thing about CoTweet is the way it lets you turn tweets into tasks or action items that can be assigned to different team members, much like helpdesk tickets.
There are also tools that do nothing but track multiple hashtags/keywords on Twitter, such as Twitterfall, TweetGrid and my personal favorite of this type, Monitter. While Monitter doesn’t provide nearly as many columns or choices as TweetGrid, it does sport a slick user interface and feels faster. I do like the fact that TweetGrid lets you share a URL with all of the search terms you’ve assembled.
What tools do you use for social media monitoring?
Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say AOL. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.
Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.
Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this – “noise cancellation for social networks.”
Lifestream also lets users publish back to social networks. Status updates posted to Lifestream can be posted back to Facebook, Myspace and/or Twitter. Lifestream also optionally notes your location in your status updates via GPS on mobile devices, or you can manually add it instead.
That’s not it though. Users can sign in to Lifestream using their Facebook account via Facebook Connect, making it unnecessary to remember separate account and credentials for the site.
You also have a variety of choices in how you use Lifestream. You can access it via the website, an AIR application, or via iPhone and Android applications. As I said above, the mobile applications are particularly useful because they auto-note your location for easy check-ins, and you can post pictures you take from the phone.
That mobile version of the product is what excites me most. You can see where your friends are checking into on, say, Foursquare, click through to a place page and then go there yourself and check in. And Lifestream allows you to follow places just like people, so you can see whenever someone checks in to your local cafe or bar. That ability to follow places is probably the single best reason to use Lifestream.
The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.
AOL Launches Lifestream As New Standalone Product. This Is What Google Buzz Should Have Been
- Louis GrayNo FF support tho. :(
- Kevin PedrajaAOL Launches Lifestream As New Standalone Product. This Is What Google Buzz Should Have Been
- Kenichi Matsumoto
Marketers who are still a little unsure about charting their path through the choppy waters of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn could do worse than check out this handy little guide to making social media work for them. The CMO's guide to the social landscape, created for CMO.com by client 97th Floor, takes all the major social media sites in the U.S. and analyzes their capabilities in four sectors: customer communication, brand exposure, driving traffic to your site, and SEOs. (For the full-sized version, click here.)
Overall, it's YouTube and Digg that post the best results, although the former falls down on the traffic question, while the latter fails on customer communication. One thing that the cheat sheet neglects to mention, however, is how deeply you need to go into each Web site when launching a new campaign. It's pretty obvious that a softly-softly approach can get your message across on the social media. But if you over-market your product, it's un-friending all the way.
[CMO.com Via The Common Hoster]
There are 15 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Extreme Female Promiscuity in a Non-Social Invertebrate Species:
While males usually benefit from as many matings as possible, females often evolve various methods of resistance to matings. The prevalent explanation for this is that the cost of additional matings exceeds the benefits of receiving sperm from a large number of males. Here we demonstrate, however, a strongly deviating pattern of polyandry. We analysed paternity in the marine snail Littorina saxatilis by genotyping large clutches (53-79) of offspring from four females sampled in their natural habitats. We found evidence of extreme promiscuity with 15-23 males having sired the offspring of each female within the same mating period. Such a high level of promiscuity has previously only been observed in a few species of social insects. We argue that genetic bet-hedging (as has been suggested earlier) is unlikely to explain such extreme polyandry. Instead we propose that these high levels are examples of convenience polyandry: females accept high numbers of matings if costs of refusing males are higher than costs of accepting superfluous matings.
The success of social animals (including ourselves) can be attributed to efficiencies that arise from a division of labour. Many animal societies have a communal nest which certain individuals must leave to perform external tasks, for example foraging or patrolling. Staying at home to care for young or leaving to find food is one of the most fundamental divisions of labour. It is also often a choice between safety and danger. Here we explore the regulation of departures from ant nests. We consider the extreme situation in which no one returns and show experimentally that exiting decisions seem to be governed by fluctuating record signals and ant-ant interactions. A record signal is a new 'high water mark' in the history of a system. An ant exiting the nest only when the record signal reaches a level it has never perceived before could be a very effective mechanism to postpone, until the last possible moment, a potentially fatal decision. We also show that record dynamics may be involved in first exits by individually tagged ants even when their nest mates are allowed to re-enter the nest. So record dynamics may play a role in allocating individuals to tasks, both in emergencies and in everyday life. The dynamics of several complex but purely physical systems are also based on record signals but this is the first time they have been experimentally shown in a biological system.
Maternal antibodies are believed to play an integral role in protecting immunologically immature wild-passerines from environmental antigens. This study comprehensively examines the early development of the adaptive immune system in an altricial-developing wild passerine species, the house sparrow (Passer domestics), by characterizing the half-life of maternal antibodies in nestling plasma, the onset of de novo synthesis of endogenous antibodies by nestlings, and the timing of immunological independence, where nestlings rely entirely on their own antibodies for immunologic protection. In an aviary study we vaccinated females against a novel antigen that these birds would not otherwise encounter in their natural environment, and measured both antigen-specific and total antibody concentration in the plasma of females, yolks, and nestlings. We traced the transfer of maternal antibodies from females to nestlings through the yolk and measured catabolisation of maternal antigen-specific antibodies in nestlings during early development. By utilizing measurements of non-specific and specific antibody levels in nestling plasma we were able to calculate the half-life of maternal antibodies in nestling plasma and the time point at which nestling were capable of synthesizing antibodies themselves. Based on the short half-life of maternal antibodies, the rapid production of endogenous antibodies by nestlings and the relatively low transfer of maternal antibodies to nestlings, our findings suggest that altricial-developing sparrows achieve immunologic independence much earlier than precocial birds. To our knowledge, this is the first in depth analyses performed on the adaptive immune system of a wild-passerine species. Our results suggest that maternal antibodies may not confer the immunologic protection or immune priming previously proposed in other passerine studies. Further research needs to be conducted on other altricial passerines to determine if the results of our study are a species-specific phenomenon or if they apply to all altricial-developing birds.Read the comments on this post...
Digg, the San Francisco-based social media company, is dropping MySQL and instead betting its future on Cassandra, an open-source data store. It’s just the latest sign of the growing popularity of the software, which was developed (and open sourced) by Facebook to search through its inbox. While Facebook has since backed off Cassandra, Digg plans to open source all its work on Cassandra and champion the software’s development and adoption.
In a blog post on the Digg blog, John Quinn, Digg’s VP of engineering, writes:
Perhaps our most significant infrastructure change is abandoning MySQL in favor of a NoSQL alternative. To someone like me who’s been building systems almost exclusively on relational databases for almost 20 years, this feels like a bold move. What’s Wrong with MySQL? Our primary motivation for moving away from MySQL is the increasing difficulty of building a high performance, write intensive, application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight. This growth has forced us into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies that have eliminated most of the value of a relational database, while still incurring all the overhead.
Digg is just the latest high-profile convert to the NoSQL world. Instead of using databases such as MySQL, many of the companies that deal in near-real-time information are opting for new kind of data stores — most of them open source, such as Cassandra and CouchDB.
Cassandra is roughly the open-source equivalent of Google’s Big Table. It was intended by Facebook to solve the problem of inbox search; the company needed something that was fast, reliable and had the ability to handle read and write requests at the same time. Messaging in an environment as heavily used as Facebook requires a system that can not only store data but also provide results for search queries at blazing fast speeds.
Stu Hood the Technical Lead for the Search team in the Email & Apps division of Rackspace recently said:
I think that distributed databases solve a problem that a lot of companies with large datasets have had to solve independently in the past …Cassandra has an approach that hybridizes the Bigtable and Dynamo models, where a lot of its competitiors chose to take one path or the other. Over the Bigtable clones, Cassandra has huge high-availability advantages, and no single point of failure (possible because of the eventually consistent approach). When compared to the Dynamo adherents, Cassandra has the advantage of a more advanced datamodel, allowing for a single “row” to contain billions of column/value pairs: enough to fill a machine. You also get efficient range queries for the top level key, and even within your values.
In a post last year, contributing writer Gary Orenstein pointed out that thanks to these attributes, Cassandra has potential applications beyond inbox search that include “recommendation engines, targeted advertising, and content search, particularly when you combine many concurrent inputs and output requests to the same data set.”
Digg is a prototypical application. The company tells me that it gets:
It also generates:
As these numbers suggest, there is a high amount of interaction between the system and its users. No wonder Digg digs Cassandra!
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
What Cloud Computing Can Learn From NoSQL.
Baseball's Lebron James: http://digg.com/baseball/Baseball_s_Lebron_James #digg #diggthis #baseball #bryceharper #mlb
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Lego's licensing of the Disney/Pixar Toy Story franchise has produced something surprisingly awesome in this mashup of two classic toys. $11 from the Lego shop. [via Geekologie]
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in LEGO | Digg this!LEGO MINDSTORMS hacker Akihiro Uehara built an interface between an AlphaRex and a Wii Balance Board.
User can control the robot's leg motors speed and direction by changing the vector connecting user's center of balance and center of the board. I have designed this application for elementary school kids in a science museum exhibition.
Don't forget to leave a comment on our Facebook fan page to participate in our Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 giveaway. [Thanks, Akihiro!]
There are 35 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Does Tropical Forest Fragmentation Increase Long-Term Variability of Butterfly Communities?:
Habitat fragmentation is a major driver of biodiversity loss. Yet, the overall effects of fragmentation on biodiversity may be obscured by differences in responses among species. These opposing responses to fragmentation may be manifest in higher variability in species richness and abundance (termed hyperdynamism), and in predictable changes in community composition. We tested whether forest fragmentation causes long-term hyperdynamism in butterfly communities, a taxon that naturally displays large variations in species richness and community composition. Using a dataset from an experimentally fragmented landscape in the central Amazon that spanned 11 years, we evaluated the effect of fragmentation on changes in species richness and community composition through time. Overall, adjusted species richness (adjusted for survey duration) did not differ between fragmented forest and intact forest. However, spatial and temporal variation of adjusted species richness was significantly higher in fragmented forests relative to intact forest. This variation was associated with changes in butterfly community composition, specifically lower proportions of understory shade species and higher proportions of edge species in fragmented forest. Analysis of rarefied species richness, estimated using indices of butterfly abundance, showed no differences between fragmented and intact forest plots in spatial or temporal variation. These results do not contradict the results from adjusted species richness, but rather suggest that higher variability in butterfly adjusted species richness may be explained by changes in butterfly abundance. Combined, these results indicate that butterfly communities in fragmented tropical forests are more variable than in intact forest, and that the natural variability of butterflies was not a buffer against the effects of fragmentation on community dynamics.
Large-Scale Movement and Reef Fidelity of Grey Reef Sharks:
Despite an Indo-Pacific wide distribution, the movement patterns of grey reef sharks (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos) and fidelity to individual reef platforms has gone largely unstudied. Their wide distribution implies that some individuals have dispersed throughout tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific, but data on large-scale movements do not exist. We present data from nine C. amblyrhynchos monitored within the Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea off the coast of Australia. Shark presence and movements were monitored via an array of acoustic receivers for a period of six months in 2008. During the course of this monitoring few individuals showed fidelity to an individual reef suggesting that current protective areas have limited utility for this species. One individual undertook a large-scale movement (134 km) between the Coral Sea and Great Barrier Reef, providing the first evidence of direct linkage of C. amblyrhynchos populations between these two regions. Results indicate limited reef fidelity and evidence of large-scale movements within northern Australian waters.
Evolutionary Divergence in Brain Size between Migratory and Resident Birds:
Despite important recent progress in our understanding of brain evolution, controversy remains regarding the evolutionary forces that have driven its enormous diversification in size. Here, we report that in passerine birds, migratory species tend to have brains that are substantially smaller (relative to body size) than those of resident species, confirming and generalizing previous studies. Phylogenetic reconstructions based on Bayesian Markov chain methods suggest an evolutionary scenario in which some large brained tropical passerines that invaded more seasonal regions evolved migratory behavior and migration itself selected for smaller brain size. Selection for smaller brains in migratory birds may arise from the energetic and developmental costs associated with a highly mobile life cycle, a possibility that is supported by a path analysis. Nevertheless, an important fraction (over 68%) of the correlation between brain mass and migratory distance comes from a direct effect of migration on brain size, perhaps reflecting costs associated with cognitive functions that have become less necessary in migratory species. Overall, our results highlight the importance of retrospective analyses in identifying selective pressures that have shaped brain evolution, and indicate that when it comes to the brain, larger is not always better.
How Accurate and Robust Are the Phylogenetic Estimates of Austronesian Language Relationships?:
We recently used computational phylogenetic methods on lexical data to test between two scenarios for the peopling of the Pacific. Our analyses of lexical data supported a pulse-pause scenario of Pacific settlement in which the Austronesian speakers originated in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago and rapidly spread through the Pacific in a series of expansion pulses and settlement pauses. We claimed that there was high congruence between traditional language subgroups and those observed in the language phylogenies, and that the estimated age of the Austronesian expansion at 5,200 years ago was consistent with the archaeological evidence. However, the congruence between the language phylogenies and the evidence from historical linguistics was not quantitatively assessed using tree comparison metrics. The robustness of the divergence time estimates to different calibration points was also not investigated exhaustively. Here we address these limitations by using a systematic tree comparison metric to calculate the similarity between the Bayesian phylogenetic trees and the subgroups proposed by historical linguistics, and by re-estimating the age of the Austronesian expansion using only the most robust calibrations. The results show that the Austronesian language phylogenies are highly congruent with the traditional subgroupings, and the date estimates are robust even when calculated using a restricted set of historical calibrations.
BackgroundA systematic review was conducted for the association between animal feeding operations (AFOs) and the health of individuals living near AFOs. The review was restricted to studies reporting respiratory, gastrointestinal and mental health outcomes in individuals living near AFOs in North America, European Union, United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. From June to September 2008 searches were conducted in PUBMED, CAB, Web-of-Science, and Agricola with no restrictions. Hand searching of narrative reviews was also used. Two reviewers independently evaluated the role of chance, confounding, information, selection and analytic bias on the study outcome. Nine relevant studies were identified. The studies were heterogeneous with respect to outcomes and exposures assessed. Few studies reported an association between surrogate clinical outcomes and AFO proximity. A negative association was reported when odor was the measure of exposure to AFOs and self-reported disease, the measure of outcome. There was evidence of an association between self-reported disease and proximity to AFO in individuals annoyed by AFO odor. There was inconsistent evidence of a weak association between self-reported disease in people with allergies or familial history of allergies. No consistent dose response relationship between exposure and disease was observable.
Human Mammary Epithelial Cells Exhibit a Bimodal Correlated Random Walk Pattern:
Organisms, at scales ranging from unicellular to mammals, have been known to exhibit foraging behavior described by random walks whose segments confirm to Lévy or exponential distributions. For the first time, we present evidence that single cells (mammary epithelial cells) that exist in multi-cellular organisms (humans) follow a bimodal correlated random walk (BCRW). Cellular tracks of MCF-10A pBabe, neuN and neuT random migration on 2-D plastic substrates, analyzed using bimodal analysis, were found to reveal the BCRW pattern. We find two types of exponentially distributed correlated flights (corresponding to what we refer to as the directional and re-orientation phases) each having its own correlation between move step-lengths within flights. The exponential distribution of flight lengths was confirmed using different analysis methods (logarithmic binning with normalization, survival frequency plots and maximum likelihood estimation). Because of the presence of non-uniform turn angle distribution of move step-lengths within a flight and two different types of flights, we propose that the epithelial random walk is a BCRW comprising of two alternating modes with varying degree of correlations, rather than a simple persistent random walk. A BCRW model rather than a simple persistent random walk correctly matches the super-diffusivity in the cell migration paths as indicated by simulations based on the BCRW model.
Localization of Canine Brachycephaly Using an Across Breed Mapping Approach:
The domestic dog, Canis familiaris, exhibits profound phenotypic diversity and is an ideal model organism for the genetic dissection of simple and complex traits. However, some of the most interesting phenotypes are fixed in particular breeds and are therefore less tractable to genetic analysis using classical segregation-based mapping approaches. We implemented an across breed mapping approach using a moderately dense SNP array, a low number of animals and breeds carefully selected for the phenotypes of interest to identify genetic variants responsible for breed-defining characteristics. Using a modest number of affected (10-30) and control (20-60) samples from multiple breeds, the correct chromosomal assignment was identified in a proof of concept experiment using three previously defined loci; hyperuricosuria, white spotting and chondrodysplasia. Genome-wide association was performed in a similar manner for one of the most striking morphological traits in dogs: brachycephalic head type. Although candidate gene approaches based on comparable phenotypes in mice and humans have been utilized for this trait, the causative gene has remained elusive using this method. Samples from nine affected breeds and thirteen control breeds identified strong genome-wide associations for brachycephalic head type on Cfa 1. Two independent datasets identified the same genomic region. Levels of relative heterozygosity in the associated region indicate that it has been subjected to a selective sweep, consistent with it being a breed defining morphological characteristic. Genotyping additional dogs in the region confirmed the association. To date, the genetic structure of dog breeds has primarily been exploited for genome wide association for segregating traits. These results demonstrate that non-segregating traits under strong selection are equally tractable to genetic analysis using small sample numbers.Read the comments on this post...
Have you ever wondered what exactly is involved in building a working, radio-controlled R2-D2 robot replica? This vid documents the two-year process of Victor Franco, of Southern California, and his friends building an R2, mainly from scratch-built parts of varying materials, including wood, styrene, resin, and aluminum. He also used some parts provided by members of the R2 Builders Club. Nice work! [Thanks Chris James and Michelle Iva Cook Hlubinka!]
More:
Guilherme Martins wanted a simple Arduino-compatible board that he could use as a robotics platform, so he designed one. Called the Motoruino, he took a standard Arduino board and added an H-Bridge chip so that it can control two motors directly. Of course, you could certainly get the same functionality using an add-on board such as the MotorShield (or even by making your own on a breadboard). If you know you are going to be making a robot, though, I can certainly see that having everything together on a single piece would help make your project smaller and more reliable.
He is working on some final tweaks, and plans to release the project under the Creative Commons license. Cool stuff! [via Lets Make Robots]
In the Maker Shed:
RT @digg_technews: "The Rise of Netbooks (Infographic)" - http://digg.com/d21L5DL?t4
[Direct Link]Spotted in the MAKE Forums:
Liam built this impressive robot, then used it to demonstrate the difference between proportional and PID control. The robot is designed to stay a certain distance from an object, and uses two Sharp IR distance sensors to track it's position. The system looks like it is working great, however he is noticing some variability in the output of the distance sensors he is using- anyone have any ideas?
This is the GBOT with a PID controller using the ZX-40A microcontroller from http://www.zbasic.net. ZX-40A is based on the ATMEGA644 AVR chip. Inputs include 2 IR range sensors (GP2D12). Outputs include 2 PWM signals to the Pololu motor driver (VNH2SP30).The GBOT maintains a setpoint distance of 10-inches from a target and maintains that distance, no matter what. The control system was originally coded with P-control only and resulted in excessive overshoot and oscillations. So then I added PID control. See video to observe P-control vs. PID control.
Had trouble with IR sensor noise. Issue mitigated with hardware and software. Hardware... added low ESR 1,000uF capacitors on VIN and VOUT of the LM2940T voltage regulator. Software includes an 8th order butterworth filter to clean IR sensor position and velocity. I did have issues with a fire, probably caused by a short or the motor driver. Not sure yet. Since isolating the regulator with the filters and after adding a large heatsink to the voltage regulator, no more fires. See picture below of "incident".
Anyone have experience or information on GP2D12 IR sensor distance variability? I have the noise reduced to 0.025" amplitude. Can this be reduced further? Thanks./blockquote>
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!
Build your dream, then make it move! Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 is the latest version of the robotic building set that launched First Lego League and inspired thousands of kids. People have used Mindstorms to make everything from robotic animals to Rubik's cube solvers.
Today, in association with The Lego Group, we're giving away a NXT set! All you have to do is leave a comment on our Facebook fan page. Simply find the post on Facebook corresponding to this one, and leave a comment describing a real or theoretical project you'd like to make with the set. We'll choose a random commenter to get the prize. The contest ends noon PST tomorrow. Good luck, and our thanks to Lego for their generosity!
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in LEGO | Digg this!CheapTweet Wades Through the Sea of Tweet Deals http://bit.ly/9k13zV
Whether a website sells off your email address or forces you to install some pop-up plagued toolbar just to get 10% off your next online purchase, searching for online coupons can involve treading in dangerous waters. Enter CheapTweet, which uses both algorithms and crowdsourcing to verify its content, and suddenly looking for the best deals online isn't quite so scary.
The self-described "Twitter-based social deals search engine site" does precisely that - it finds tweets about deals and coupons through a custom search algorithm and then allows its users to upvote or downvote the deals on its site.
Sponsor
Tweeting deals, if your wondering, can be big business. In 2009, Dell made more than $6.5 million through Twitter deals and CheapTweet probably sent a few of those customers their direction. The ad aggregator is actually celebrating its 5 millionth indexed deal with a roll-out of a refurbished website, which includes upgrades to its search engine, the voting mechanism, a redesign and and new feature, the "DealStream".
CheapTweet allows its users to search for deals by category and keyword and will customize the stream of tweets according to their votes and Twitter conversations. They can also up and down vote tweets, like they've become accustomed to on sites like Reddit, Digg or Google Moderator. The "DealStream", which contains a user's customized results, can also be read as an RSS feed.
As CEO Hayes Davis points out in a press release, CheapTweet is poised to help distinguish the good from the bad as more and more companies prepare to monetize through Twitter.
"Online channels will only become more cluttered, as social networks start to monetize with ads," said Davis. "CheapTweet's service makes it easier for shoppers to sort through the clutter online and shop more effectively."
We've not only heard a number of rumors and anonymous tips on what the Twitter ad platform will look like, but other companies like 140 Proof have begun to enter the market, bringing tweet-like ads to third party clients. This doesn't even account for the vast number of small businesses taking advantage of the service to pass out Web-only deals and coupons.
With all of these ads, CheapTweet will help weed out the bad apples. Its users down vote nefarious tweets, the algorithm cuts out spam using a form of natural language processing and the multiple tweets about the same deal are combined to cut down on the noise.
We think that a service like CheapTweet has found a perfect niche and its the ideal service to recommend to your less technically-savvy relatives, as well as those just looking for a deal. Like we said, searching for online deals can put you in some dangerous waters and this service helps clear out some of the flotsam and jetsam.
DiscussThere are 22 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post..."A strong wind is produced as the centrifuge induces a cyclone...The smell of boiling insulation emanates from the overloaded 25 amp cables. If not perfectly adjusted and lubricated, it will shred the teeth off brass gears in under a second."
That's Neil Fraser's description of his 10-foot centrifuge he used to induce 3x gravity onto a lava lamp. And even though the lava lamp succeeds (doesn't explode all over the place), the test itself is still a worthy watch. It's not often you see the world from a centrifuge's POV. [Neil Fraser via Digg via Neatorama]
Rawr! Instructables user poyecto_gir writes:
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Halloween | Digg this!I will teach you how to make props of a mechanical arm (the clamp can be activated by spring action or motorized action, I will show both possibilities), a face plate (the eye lights) and the battle vest (the chest plate lights too).
And the best part? The props are made 90% of dead computers pieces. You will find here plastic cases of almost any kind of computer parts or accessories related with computers, PC and MAC. (Curiously, the only thing you will not find here is a mouse).
This guy was manufactured by Odetics, Inc. in Anaheim, California, in 1984. From its page on The Old Robots Website:
Odex 1, from Odetics, Inc. ; is a six-legged walking robot that weighed only 300 pounds. Its onboard computer could be operated remotely and the robot moved under its own power. It is capable of reconfiguring its shape to be tall and slender or short and squat, and able to walk in either configuration or anywhere between the two. Each leg is able to lift 400 lbs, the "legs" are versatile enough to be used as manipulators as well. Odex is capable of lifting over 2,100 lbs vertically, or carrying over 900 lbs. at normal walking speed. To display Odex 1 agility, engineers commanded the robot to walk to a truck, get on the truck, and then get off and actually move the truck.
[via BotJunkie]
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!Studying the front page of Digg or Reddit can give you some pretty decent insight into what kinds of content is worthy of the communities votes. However, it’s nothing compared to what you can learn by reading and being an active member of the “social” part of social media: the comments. If you’re looking for insights into the “algorithms” of your favorite social news & bookmarking sites, this is your pay dirt. But getting to know the community is just one reason to join in on the conversation…the other, which is vital to the success in the world of social bookmarking, is networking.
Regular commenting, especially on stories & submissions within your topic or category is a necessary part of building a social network. While most social news & bookmarking sites allow comments to be voted on, which can help build (or hurt) your profile’s “karma” (as Reddit calls it), that’s not the main goal, here. What’s more important is that active commenting shows you have a desire to be part of the community. Those who skip this part may still be able to build a network of “digg this and I’ll digg yours” friends, but they’ll be missing some of the most important votes of all: The real community’s.
Here are some general guidelines for commenting on social bookmarking/news sites in order to help build a strong network.
FIRST!
Building a network within a social bookmarking community means voting on stories that have been recently submitted; not just after they’re on the homepage. This activity gives you the perfect opportunity to get your comment in before the masses. Being first to comment on a submission has obvious advantages. Making the first comment means yours will be the first other users read as well as the longest running, giving you a better chance to rack up those up-votes. Most importantly, being early means that users (particularly the submitter, who’s probably still actively promoting their sub) will be more likely to notice you and your comment. Hint: if you’re trying to get the attention of power users, this is the perfect place to start.
Read & Reply
One of the most frustrating parts of social commenting sections is duplicate comments. If you don’t take the time to read what’s already been said, you run the risk or repeating another user’s comment, and your comment will more than likely be buried. Furthermore, reading through what others have said gives you an opportunity to reply to other great comments that could start a new conversation. Replying directly to comments can also even send your comment directly to a user’s e-mail inbox (depending on their settings), giving you just one more chance to be noticed.
Add to the conversation
Lame comments like “what a great article” or “this was pretty cool” just isn’t going to get it done. And while being funny can be great, in order to make the most of commenting as a networking strategy, you really need to say something that somehow expands on a submission or that can evoke a conversation. Think of it as your goal to get users to reply to your comment – obviously without anything negative. If you’re link dropping, be sure that the link follows this rule too, or you could find yourself in bigger trouble than simply buried. One more thing: leave your personal stories out of it. If you’re a member of Digg, and one of your comments gets the reply: “Cool story, bro.” You fail.
It’s a Trap! Avoid Comment Memes
Comment memes are essentially comments that are either repeated across a thread (or multiple threads) that generally follow a pattern or theme (like the “it’s a trap” ascii art comment meme). Every once in a great while, you might see a “comment meme” used in a way that’s both appropriate and perhaps even… enjoyable. That is, however, the exception to the rule. Not only that, but these types of comments are not really the kind that help you build your network. If used properly it might get you some up-votes, but as I said earlier, that’s not the main goal. Generally speaking, avoid comment memes in comment sections. That is (of course) unless you’re on Reddit, where depending on the situation, the opposite might be true…use your judgment after you…
Get to Know the community
Before you try jumping right into a community, it’s probably wise to take some time to get to know that community first. Look over the comments, particularly in your niche, and get to know where the users generally stand on hot topic issues. Find the top comments and take note of what types of comments are attracting the most up-votes. Perhaps more importantly, take note of comments that have the most down votes to see what types of comments and opinions aren’t wanted. It’s not that you have to pretend to be someone you’re not, but taking the time to do this will probably help you avoid making a comment that offends and/or gets buried.
Stay Positive & Don’t be a troll
Making negative comments on a thread or reply is pretty much whatever the opposite of networking is. Leave your strong opinions to yourself and focus on the task at hand. Nobody likes a troll; and entering into a flame war doesn’t help anyone. Remember the saying: “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”? Apply that here and you’ll be just fine.
If social media is a part of your online marketing strategy, then commenting in social news communities should be a part of your every day social media routine. It’s a surefire way to get noticed by users (especially power users) and will more than likely be a catalyst to building a strong social network. If you’re lucky, you may even get the attention of some of the content producers opening opportunities for things like guest articles, media contacts, and even LINKS!
Todd Heim is CEO, co-founder, and SEO manager of Essential Internet Marketing, LLC, an SEM and Social Media Marketing company based in Albany, NY. You can find Todd on twitter at: http://twitter.com/ToddHeim/
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
A Networking Guide to Social Media Commenting
There are 22 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Genetic Patterns of Paternity and Testes Size in Mammals:
Testes size is used as a proxy of male intrasexual competition, with larger testes indicative of greater competition. It has been shown that in some taxa, social mating systems reflect variance in testes size, but results are not consistent, and instead it has been suggested that genetic patterns of mating may reflect testes size. However, there are different measures of genetic patterns of mating. Multiple paternity rates are the most widely used measure but are limited to species that produce multi-offspring litters, so, at least for group living species, other measures such as loss of paternity to males outside the social group (extra group paternity) or the proportion of offspring sired by the dominant male (alpha paternity) might be appropriate. This study examines the relationship between testes size and three genetic patterns of mating: multiple paternity, extragroup paternity and alpha paternity. Using data from mammals, phylogenetically corrected general linear models demonstrate that both multiple paternity and alpha paternity, but not extra group paternity, relate to testes size. Testes size is greater in species with high multiple paternity rates, whereas the converse is found for alpha paternity. Additionally, length of mating season, ovulation mode and litter size significantly influenced testes size in one model. These results demonstrate that patterns of mating (multiple paternity and alpha paternity rates) determined by genetic analysis can provide reliable indicators of male postcopulatory intrasexual competition (testes size), and that other variables (length of mating season, ovulation mode, litter size) may also be important.
Molecular and morphological evidence unite the hemichordates and echinoderms as the Ambulacraria, but their earliest history remains almost entirely conjectural. This is on account of the morphological disparity of the ambulacrarians and a paucity of obvious stem-groups. We describe here a new taxon Herpetogaster collinsi gen. et sp. nov. from the Burgess Shale (Middle Cambrian) Lagerstätte. This soft-bodied vermiform animal has a pair of elongate dendritic oral tentacles, a flexible stolon with an attachment disc, and a re-curved trunk with at least 13 segments that is directed dextrally. A differentiated but un-looped gut is enclosed in a sac suspended by mesenteries. It consists of a short pharynx, a conspicuous lenticular stomach, followed by a narrow intestine sub-equal in length. This new taxon, together with the Lower Cambrian Phlogites and more intriguingly the hitherto enigmatic discoidal eldoniids (Cambrian-Devonian), form a distinctive clade (herein the cambroernids). Although one hypothesis of their relationships would look to the lophotrochozoans (specifically the entoprocts), we suggest that the evidence is more consistent with their being primitive deuterostomes, with specific comparisons being made to the pterobranch hemichordates and pre-radial echinoderms. On this basis some of the earliest ambulacrarians are interpreted as soft-bodied animals with a muscular stalk, and possessing prominent tentacles.
How particular changes in functional morphology can repeatedly promote ecological diversification is an active area of evolutionary investigation. The African rift-lake cichlids offer a calibrated time series of the most dramatic adaptive radiations of vertebrate trophic morphology yet described, and the replicate nature of these events provides a unique opportunity to test whether common changes in functional morphology have repeatedly facilitated their ecological success. Specimens from 87 genera of cichlid fishes endemic to Lakes Tanganyka, Malawi and Victoria were dissected in order to examine the functional morphology of cichlid feeding. We quantified shape using geometric morphometrics and compared patterns of morphological diversity using a series of analytical tests. The primary axes of divergence were conserved among all three radiations, and the most prevalent changes involved the size of the preorbital region of the skull. Even the fishes from the youngest of these lakes (Victoria), which exhibit the lowest amount of skull shape disparity, have undergone extensive preorbital evolution relative to other craniofacial traits. Such changes have large effects on feeding biomechanics, and can promote expansion into a wide array of niches along a bentho-pelagic ecomorphological axis. Here we show that specific changes in trophic anatomy have evolved repeatedly in the African rift lakes, and our results suggest that simple morphological alterations that have large ecological consequences are likely to constitute critical components of adaptive radiations in functional morphology. Such shifts may precede more complex shape changes as lineages diversify into unoccupied niches. The data presented here, combined with observations of other fish lineages, suggest that the preorbital region represents an evolutionary module that can respond quickly to natural selection when fishes colonize new lakes. Characterizing the changes in cichlid trophic morphology that have contributed to their extraordinary adaptive radiations has broad evolutionary implications, and such studies are necessary for directing future investigations into the proximate mechanisms that have shaped these spectacular phenomena.Read the comments on this post...
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[Direct Link]Neil Fraser's Lava Lamp Centrifuge is 10' across, weighs 50 pounds, and spins at 42 rpm generating 3 Gs. It uses a Nexus One's accelerometer to measure g-force. Excellent!
Will lava lamps work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter? This topic spawned considerable lunch-time discussion and no clear consensus emerged. Most people initially assumed that the wax would sink to the bottom and wouldn't cycle, but as the physics was examined in greater depth this assumption became difficult to defend.
To find out how lava lamps behave in super-terrestrial gravity, I built a large centrifuge in my living room. This was intended to be a fun activity for a long weekend in January. However the project's size and power requirements were well outside my previous experience. Thus it was a rich learning experience as I encountered one metal-shredding and wire-melting failure after another. In the end, perseverance paid off and I obtained the answer to the original question.[Thanks, hectocotyli!]
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- Orli Yakuel