Today, Rescuecom issued a press release declaring victory in its litigation against Google. But it's an odd definition of "victory" given that Rescuecom has apparently voluntarily abandoned its 6 year litigation effort without any new concessions from Google. The dismissal notice.

This development reminds me a lot of the American Blinds v. Google denouement, where American Blinds also simply gave up and dropped its multi-year lawsuit without any concessions from Google. Note to future plaintiffs: if you're going to threaten Google's $20B/year cash cow, chances are pretty good that they have the resources to outlast you.

Why did Rescuecom give up? According to Rescuecom's press release, "Google has recently confirmed to Rescuecom that it has removed Rescuecom's trademark from its Keyword Suggestion Tool." That, plus the fact that Google blocks trademark references in ad copy, means that Rescuecom feels it has "obtained two of the three things we initially sought in our complaint against Google." And if two out of three is good enough for Meat Loaf, apparently it's good enough for Rescuecom. At minimum, having low standards makes it a lot easier to declare victory when you give up.

However, this explanation is pretty hollow. Although the press release treats Google's removal of Rescuecom from the keyword suggestion tool as a new development, it appears that Google made this change IN 2005. Wendy Davis reports:

[Rescuecom CEO] Milman says he only learned last week that Google had stopped suggesting Rescuecom as a keyword. "Who knows what would have happened if they had told us back in 2005 that they had taken our name out of their keyword tool?" he said.

Hmm...I think I know the answer to that question! Then again, if getting out of the keyword suggestion tool really was one of Rescuecom's Big Three objectives all along, maybe they might have asked Google about it in 2005...or 2006...or 2007...or, well, you get the point. Spin it however they want, it's hard for Rescuecom to look good while dropping a lawsuit based on a 5 year old fact.

Nevertheless, I'm interested in knowing more about this removal. Does Google have a way for trademark owners to "opt out" of having their trademarks in its keyword suggestion tool? I would expect that option to become very popular if it were well-known. If anyone has information about how trademark owners can make an election with Google, please share it.

Given the completely disingenuous nature of declaring victory based on getting out of the keyword suggestion tool, there may be a better--and more self-interested reason--for Rescuecom to give up. Rescuecom is defending a trademark lawsuit brought by Best Buy over Rescuecom's competitive AdWords purchases of the "geek squad" trademark. Rescuecom was caught in the duplicitous position of making plaintiff-side arguments against Google while making highly contradictory defense-side arguments against Best Buy. As a result, every positive step in its Google case had the potential to degrade its position in the Best Buy case. By abandoning the Google fight, Rescuecom avoids this difficult dilemma.

As an odd byproduct of this development, Google and Rescuecom are now aligned in advancing the arguments that competitive keyword advertising in AdWords is legitimate. Isn't there a passage in the Bible about the lion and the lamb lying down together?

The roster of pending AdWords cases (I most recently double-checked the status of these cases on February 20, 2010):

* Ezzo v. Google
* Rescuecom v. Google
* FPX v. Google
* John Beck Amazing Profits v. Google and the companion Google v. John Beck Amazing Profits
* Stratton Faxon v. Google (not initially a trademark case). Check the status.
* Soaring Helmet v. Bill Me
* Ascentive v. Google
* Jurin v. Google 1.0 (voluntarily dismissed), succeeded by Jurin v. Google 2.0
* Rosetta Stone v. Google
* Flowbee v. Google
* Parts Geek v. US Auto Parts
* Dazzlesmile v. Epic

140proof, which is based in San Francisco and backed by a $2-million investment raised last summer from Blue Run Ventures and Founders Fund, said that its algorithm aims ads at users based on their profiles and other public data. Other Twitter advertising services include Ad.ly, which has gotten some press attention for paying celebrities such as Kim Kardashian thousands of dollars to endorse products to their followers, as well as Magpie, Assetize and IZEA.

The question all of these services will inevitably confront including Twitter itself, once it launches its own platform is how users will react to a wave of advertising in what was once an ad-free social network (in the case of 140proof, of course, you can simply not use HootSuite's mobile apps and you won't see them). Many of these services are only just ramping up in what will undoubtedly become a much bigger campaign to bring ads to the Twittersphere. So what will you do when ads start appearing in your Twitter stream?

Related content from GigaOm Pro (sub req'd):

How Human Users Are Holding Twitter Back

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana, a play on "mail analysis" since he was initially focused on email social graph analysis.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.

Sponsor

The Basics

ViralHeat has been around for just over six months, providing a low-price but full-featured social media analysis for the budget minded. We had a chance to chat with CEO Raj Kadam and founder Vishal Sankhla today before the relaunch, which is unveiling support for Facebook monitoring, a new user interface and API support.

The fully Web-based app gives full analytics by monitoring an array of blogs, over 200 video sites, Twitter and now Facebook for mentions of your brand, which is set up as a profile. Each profile exists as a simple logic search, wherein you can keep track of your brand by searching for phrases, domains and hashtags, all in the syntax we've become accustomed to from using from sites like Google.

Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget?

While ViralHeat compares itself on price to services like Radian6, there is a primary difference between the two services. ViralHeat offers a full set of analytics features, from standard mention monitoring to sentiment analysis using a natural language algorithm, but this is where it stays. It does not venture over to the content creation side, where we find the more expensive and extensive services like Radian6. Other services might offer workflow management, scheduled content delivery and other conversational tools, but this would be overkill for the users we imagine at this app's usability sweetspot.

We see that as an additional merit: ViralHeat has both the price point and the feature set fit for the company that wants to get on top of its image and perception on the social Web but can't afford to bring a social media expert on board - and on salary. The learning curve is suitable for the DIY set and the analytics it provides are self explanatory, not riddled with indecipherable, industry jargon.

For those of you that like the pricing but want to do a little more with the data, the service also allows you to export data into Excel format and access your data using the API.

The Price is Right

Speaking of pricing, this is a point that really brings it home for ViralHeat. With today's relaunch of the site, ViralHeat offers a three tiered pricing system, starting with a basic package for $9.99, a professional package for $29.99 and a business package for $89.99. The Basic package offers standard mentions analysis for 5 profiles, while the other packages offer sentiment analysis and API access for 20 and 40 profiles, respectively.

If we haven't drilled it in enough quite yet, here's the bottom line: ViralHeat looks like a solid social media analysis tool that is priced and designed for the more casual user, while offering simple features like export and API interaction that keep it flexible enough for the more serious user.

At the end of a failed 15-year experiment in giving away its product, the press (newspapers and magazines) has begun to renounce free. It's slow in starting, because of the inertia of this decade and a half, but the New York Times announced recently that it would begin charging for its Website, and others are sure to follow.... But payment for Websites alone won't be enough to change newspapers' and magazines' bottom lines from red to black. Apple's tablet, however, will.

It's time for free to end. Newspapers and magazines made the mistake, in the early days of the Web, of giving away their content for free, in exchange for revenue from Web advertising.

In the past few years, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, and newspapers and magazines are cutting back and folding all across the U.S.... Yet we need the press: the fourth estate is a necessary check for our government and business. As long as free thrives, the press can't do its job correctly. Free may be good for freeloaders, but it's bad for society. Those who want things to be free forget that there are still people doing the work they get for nothing, and those people need to be paid. As the old saw goes, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

What news agencies can't do is the added-value reporting, the analysis, opinion and in-depth reporting that we want to read to better understand, and that we need for society to thrive. It may be a coincidence, but in recent years, investigative journalism was severely lacking at a time when it was needed the most. Only when people pay for news can we have quality reporting.

To those who protest that "no one will pay for a newspaper on the Web", consider some very successful experiments in paid online content. The Wall Street Journal charges around $100 a year for full access to its Website, and plenty of businesspeople pay for this. This is because the Journal provides the kind of news that is not plentiful; people pay for the quality of the business news and analysis that they can't find elsewhere, as well as its timeliness.

I'm betting that Apple will get it right, as far as features, interface and usability are concerned. It will also be an excellent tool for reading the news. Newspapers and magazines will be able to package their content in multimedia bundles (either as apps or something similar to the iTunes LP) that will be designed for reading on a portable screen; this won't simply be web pages viewed on a smaller screen.

The key to hardware being successful is the software that supports it. One of the main advantages to Apple's tablet, as far as the press is concerned, is the iTunes Store. Since Apple already has this platform to sell and deliver that content, even on a subscription basis, readers will be able to easily buy their favorite newspapers and magazines and get them delivered instantly. They'll be cheaper than the print versions, and they'll be a lot greener too. And the iTunes Store will be able to provide a better selection than readers can find by going to individual Websites. Whether by subscription or by single issue, it'll be extremely simple to buy newspapers and magazines to read on the Apple tablet.

Thanks to a soft launch from an iPhone app, thingd, is now open to the public. You can begin to add your things!

The app arrived earlier this week and I've been playing with it for a couple of days. I wanted to give it, the site and the overall model of thingd a longer review, but time is of the essence. I'll stick with the iPhone app for now.

This way if you install it and start using it you'll be able to provide feedback to the thingd team. Wouldn't it be cool if your idea makes it into production?

And wouldn't be especially timely so that you can add your new Black Friday goodies!

What is thingd?

It is a massive collection of things that are linked together first by you, then by the data known about them and then by your thingd network. Thingd facilitates commerce, commenting and sentiment about particular things. It is also a discovery tool for new things.

How can I use the iPhone app?

First you need to get a thingd account. Once you have acquired that you'll need to begin by taking photos of things, preferably, those in your own possession. If the item is popular it will be tagged by thingd and as you to verify the right information. If the item isn't so popular or old you can add a model number and your own specs.

Once the photo of the thing leaves your phone it will head to the thingd website for inclusion into the data pool and be added to your My Things' list. It is here where the multiple levels of metadata can be added to a thing. Think of it as a semantic engine for things that is equally machine and human powered.

What do I do with thingd iPhone app?

The first step is add your things. The second is to look to it for creating structure around your items. Most likely the items you photograph first will be the ones that you like the most. Think of thingd as the expanding catalog of things and the iPhone app as the best way to make additions to the catalog.

For now, you can push your photos and things to thingd and test the out the site. At this early stage give the site and the iPhone app a thoughtful review and pass on those thoughts to the team that developed it.

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thingd iPhone App Is Here is a post from: TechStartups.com

Social media is a double-edged sword. Due to its unfiltered nature, it can be a powerful promotional tool. However, it can also publicly expose our problems. Former reality TV star Tila Tequila is an unfortunate but prime example.

Some backstory: Tila Tequila is one of the most popular artists on MySpace, was the subject of an MTV reality show, and most recently filed assault charges against San Diego Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman, which were subsequently dropped.

Fastforward to Wednesday, November 18th. That night, Tila had a very public meltdown on her Ustream page. She waved around a gun, played around with a knife, ranted about Shawne Merriman, and stripped naked, all live for thousands of people to see (the video was immediately taken down).

Despite claiming that she would never use her Ustream ever again, Tila is back on live video, and this time it's even more bizzare. She is streaming as Jane Cordovez, which seem to be her alter ego for the evening. She is not only waving around a gun once again, but is dancing around with a sword. Yes, a sword. And that's only half an hour into the live stream.

It's unfortunate that she's allowing her breakdown to be publicly streamed. While her brand has always been racy, the last few days have been simply bizzare. If she indeed has issues, we hope she gets some help.

The live, unfiltered video stream is below:

Tags: live video, Tila Tequila, ustream, video

Update: Threadsy is offering Tech Startups readers access to the private beta get your access on! Thanks @dskendall.

The story here really is theory vs. utility. Wave is a tool that comes from a part of Google dedicated to R&D and future earnings, Google Labs.

Threadsy comes from a startup with an agenda like making money in the short term with its software.

Both applications are ambitious in trying to solve a couple of problems at once.

Centralize tools that we use to communicate

Online communication tools are decentralized because most of them are products of individual need. They are solutions to problems that certain users were having with other ways of communicating. It wasn't a lack of vision that caused this. It was market demand. The same demand that is making it necessary to begin to centralize these tools.

Twitter, Facebook and email are the dominant players right now. Sure I know email isn't really a player but it is a mode of communication that is decentralized. It is really a collective of the GMail, HotMail and Yahoo!

This new aggregation of the communication modes makes it easier for end users to locate conversations and friends across networks. Think of it as that nebulous space between AT&T and Verizon where there networks connect. The difference in this case is that Wave and Threadsy are destinations where these connections are made.

Organizing the diaspora of personal brand

Users of the social media tools that are integrated into Wave and Threadsy have worked countless hours building a brands on varying sites. By combining the communication mechanisms they essentially combine a users online brand by centralizing a the users identity.

A users communication styles do vary based on the tool they are using but when centralized into one application it forces users to organize their collective into a single brand. It is a necessity of using the tool, Wave or Threadsy.

At this stage of Google Wave vs. Threadsy, I'm placing my bet on Threadsy to produce a tool that quicker than Google that will meet market need simply based on utility.

Google has a long way to go with the theory of Wave, especially on the front-end if they choose to compete in this space. I would assume that they will continue down a path to make Wave the platform that powers other real-time applications like Pulse from Novell.

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Google Wave vs. Threadsy is a post from: TechStartups.com

If you're a Flickr user and not a Flickr Desktop Uploadr user, you should be. It is the hidden gem of the heavily trafficked site and best friend of frequent uploaders.

The Flickr Uploadr for desktop use have gone through changes over the years. It's reached its current maturity at 3.2.1 after being plagued with upload crashes, double uploads and copy loss for images. This version doesn't suffer likes its predecessors . . . well, not as much.

There still are occasional crashes but the Uploadr handles restarting better and will load up the last batch of photos for upload with their copy intact on restart. I've found this to be a more frequent issue if I am trying to upload photos to Flickr from a throttled internet connection with slow speeds. Cough, Time-Warner Road Runner, cough.

With that said, I've found the Uploadr the easiest way to get batch photos online with titles, descriptions, tags and grouped the way the I want them with privacy settings. Here's a peek for the uninitiated:

With the ability to create groups like this and see them in left hand column I am able to more effectivley tell a story about each image as it relates to one another. To be honest, it is kind of fun to be able to create a narrative about a photo set that can be shared with viewers.

You'll also notice in the Description' box that the copy begins with two characters *^'. Well, as an added bonus of using the Flickr Uploadr to get photos on Flickr, I also use it as a front-end to insert photos on my own blog and to also send links to them on Twitter.

With the use of the magic API, RSS, I have two separate crontab scripts running that read my personal Flickr RSS feed and look for these two characters. The * tells the script to take the title and description and add them as posts to my personal blog. The ^ tells the script to grab the title and URL of the image on Flickr (shorten it), then send it on to Twitter in my personal Twitter account. The special characters are a control mechanism that allow me to filter or choose additional syndication for my photos.

I'm going down a geeky path here and will pull back a bit. The Flickr Desktop Uploadr isnt' something that is brand new or undergone a massive revision lately. What it is to me an many others is a powerful tool built as an add-on to a service to make it more valuable.

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Flickr Desktop Uploadr for Photos is a post from: TechStartups.com

Five years ago I wrote my first Content Management System from ground the ground up. After forty-five days of coding day and night I diagnosed myself with coder's elbow'. The main symptom being a sharp and agonizing pain in on the inner elbow the ulna meets the humerus.

It was in the middle of one of these painful episodes that I was working on the database and the trying to figure out how I was going to transfer that content to the display layer that my a-ha moment occurred. I wasn't building a content management system to circumvent the issues and limitations I was having with WordPress, I was creating a distribution tool.

Once I had the content in the database the display layer could be anything that I chose it to be. It could be sent anywhere that I choose. The greatest of all these bursting thoughts was that it could go places that I didn't even intend it to. The content would have a life of its own. No more was I restricted by developing a site architecture and held to the constructs of a storyboard with A to B to C or D back to A.

With my coder's elbow I went on another week long journey through RSS to make sure that the content would be in the right namespaces, that it could be personalized with unique URL elements, creating search and keyword feeds, developing feeds that could use Basic Auth to restrict usage and the holy grail of individual content metrics. Imagine throbbing pain in both of my elbows now as these feeds overtook my life.

What came from this platform was a CMS that I began licensing for professional development, blogging, podcasting and for real-time metrics (back in 2005). I literally began my first business with it and continued to use it and variants of it for startups and media companies like MTV.

One thing remained constant in all of these scenarios syndication. Along with that syndication came the monitoring and proof that the programs and companies were getting the most value from the digital projects they had entrusted to me.

I decided to write this post and explain my process after I found a series of posts by Daniel Jacobson (@daniel_jacobson) from NPR. He was one of the individuals responsible for developing their robust, media rich API. It's not an API that I have discussed here at Tech Startups because I don't use it for any projects. I did test it when it launched and found it to be a great way to traverse NPR's archives and deliver legacy content as if it were created that day. Daniel Jacobson gets it.

So to spare yourself a case coder's elbow that could ruin your tennis game, you should start with Daniel's COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere post. This will put you in the right frame of mind to follow with . . . wait I'll list them in order.

COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
Content Modularity: More Than Just Data Normalization
Content Portability: Building an API is Not Enough

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The NPR Model Is Correct is a post from: TechStartups.com

Of course, TweetLevel doesn't ignore numbers altogether. It does take into account the number of followers a Twitter account may have and the account's participation in the community (I assume that means tweet frequency). However, the tool places a much greater weight on what is being said and how trustworthy an individual twitterer may be.

Using a 100-point scale, here are some of TweetLevel's highest rated Twitterers:

• Perez Hilton (score: 86.5)
• Mashable (86.3)
• Twitter Tips (85.2)

Perez Hilton!? Edelman's developers may have to go back into the lab for a rewrite

Microsoft PR Agency of Record Waggener Edstrom launched a similar tool called Twendz earlier this year. Twendz monitors trending topics on Twitter while providing sentiment analysis on those topics. As of this post, I was unable to get Twendz running in Chrome, Firefox or Safari on my MacBook running Snow Leopard 10.6.2. The Company plans to offer a premium version of the tool later this year.

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Twitter Startups Born from PR Firms is a post from: TechStartups.com

Google News has launched Custom Sections for users to create their own personalized news groupings. This is a big step forward for Google News. They are inching ever closer to a content shopping cart.

As content becomes detached from its publishers and syndicated around the internet it takes on a life of its own. This is especially true for publishers that have their content scraped by Google News. The advent of Custom Sections for personalized news groupings stems from this flow of disparate content.

By allowing users to filter their content at a new level, be it still a pretty high level, Google News is positioning itself as a defacto standard for personal aggregation sans feeds. However, once a Custom Section has been created Google does give access to an Atom feed in the address bar of a browser through auto-discovery. Here is an example feed.

Custom Sections allow users to title the section, choose search terms (keywords), choose a location domestic or foriegn and the ability publish the section to everyone.

A great addition to this list would be publisher, or in Google's nomenclature, author. Filtering news by selection of authors would make this a more valuable tool.

There is one major problem with Custom Sections that Google needs to solve metrics.

Publisher should be allowed to have access to metrics for their content in Google News and across all Google platforms.

Publishers should be able to know what groups, keywords, amount clicks they receiving and the additional syndication of their content in feeds from Google.

If Google really wanted to get publishers . . . sorry, authors, on board with these new tools they could share a bit of the that monitoring love.

Authors could create better content, find verticals they are strong in that had escaped them and share sections with their readers.

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Custom Sections in Google News is a post from: TechStartups.com

Startups are often in a position of being bootstrapped or strapped for cash when it comes to what is considered outside the core product roadmap.

Often in that category is the marketing of the product site online. The crew at Sitening as an ever maturing offering with Raven SEO Tools that won't hurt a startup budget and could prove a big return on a $79 monthly investment.

Raven SEO Tools is an internet marketing tool set. Designed to be a powerful tool for those in the know and accessible to newbies to manage site marketing, research SEO, monitor linking campaigns, reporting and integration with the Google Analytics API.

If there is one thing that Raven could do to improve upon this application it would be spin off components of the functionality into separate interfaces or other product offerings. Raven doesn't suffer from bloat, but it does put a lot of options for monitoring and reporting in front of a user.

Raven's interface is like opening a tool box to find the shiniest most sophisticated wrenches when you would settle for a rusty vice grip. After some time you can get to the rusty vice grip but you have to know where to find it.

The team at Sitening has begun to address with the addition of a Wizard for entering in a new site for monitoring and some social components. The social monitoring is a must for today's market in monitoring tools and a welcome addition for a startup to gauge the pulse of concerned users.

Beyond the Wizard integration there is something very interesting that Raven has that no other monitoring application I've reviewed has a content manager. Raven has a built in mini-CMS consisting of the essentials, title, keywords and body with a TinyMCE WYSIWYG wrapper that currently will connect with a WordPress blog.

The ability to blog from within a robust set of tools when a users mind is full of ideas, keywords, strategy and tactics is a powerful addition. It turns Raven into a hybrid monitoring SaaS that has the ability to help make your startup budget go further.

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Make Your Site Fly With Raven SEO Tools is a post from: TechStartups.com

It's time to drag Fotomoto back onto the stage after months of maturing and talk about selling photos online. More specifically, Fotomoto's solution to facilitate the selling of digital photos as prints to anyone that wants to buy them.

A single line of Javascript code is the solution that Fotomoto offers to publisher as the solution to allow them to sell photos online. This single line of code has a powerful algorithm running behind it to sort out the images that are on the publishers site and determine which is a photo that should be for sale. That way the publisher's site logo or other graphic headings don't end up for sale.

Fotomoto adds a few text links below the salable photo that are connected to a shopping cart. This shopping cart opens in a modal box on the publisher's site. Developers take note of how to create a cohesive user experience by allowing shoppers to stay onsite to complete the purchase process.

When a publisher is logged in to Fotomoto they have the ability to set pricing for photos based on the size and type of item being printed. There are other options that you would expect in a photo sharing site and others that you might not. Like the ability to track the sales of prints and a mini-CRM tool that allows the publisher to communicate with a buyer. This introduction of community into a sales platform is a welcome addition to the rather spartan offerings photo sites. Ahem, Flickr.

Fotomoto is solving a problem that professional photographers have had for a long time how to effectively capitalize on a digital marketplace. With the advent of cheaper, better cameras there is finally a critical mass of photographers, both professional and amateur. And with a larger source of photos worthy of being printed, expect more sites like Fotomoto to popup or the long standing photo sharing sites to step up with their own plugins to allow anyone to sell photos online.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Sell Photos Online With Fotomoto is a post from: TechStartups.com

I was asked to review a scenario for a friend this morning that deals with competition for mind share in an ongoing row between disparate entities. Ahem, feuding like Hatfields and McCoys as Waylon Jennings would say, and they're doing it primarily online.

Most of us choose to go about our business online without causing confrontation. You might not choose to be involved in a situation like this.

However, if you are put in this position tactics for a remedy are below:

1. Make sure all of your sites where dynamic content is being created on have RSS feeds
2. Make sure the sites are being indexed by Google . . . and recently cached by going to Google and typing in site:blogdomain.com blogdomain.com being the site URL
3. Most of the sites below (I was furnished with list including Topix and Blog Catalog to mention a couple) require registration and some code editing to claim the sites. Register with them and follow their protocol for submission into their directories for partner programs and additional synidcation
4. Create a press release(s) that contains links, not just copy, but links to the RSS feeds from clients site(s). Example, For more information on this ongoing issue subscribe to: http://www.blogdomain.com/rssfeed. The popular outlets have wide syndication
5. Use this tool from Google http://www.google.com/sktool/# and enter your sites and the sites of the competitor into it. Disregard the pricing listed on the page for AdWords and focus on the keywords. Compare the the keywords of your competitor with those of your sites and adjust accordingly in all digital communications. Organic search is king.
6. Next use this too from Google https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal once your keywords are set to see how you are doing
7. Depending on the blog or site platform you should have the ability to create keyword RSS feeds. Do this. Robots like structured data and favor feeds. Most, if not all, Google real-time alerts come from RSS feed links back to the source site.
8. Commenting on local (this is a regional battle for mind share) blogs with links to client site(s) and feeds is another way to increase chances of indexing and more favorable search results

If I were fighting this battle or one like it these are exact steps that I would take. So dear reader, if we ever lock horns, we may duel to a draw since you have my playbook.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

How to Win Mind Share in Online Battles is a post from: TechStartups.com

About the author:

Prior to becoming an elementary school teacher, David Cosand was an advertising media production geek.

He lives in Southern Oregon with his wife and four children.

Sometimes, the best learning happens when you're not looking for it.

You can bury yourself in books, immerse yourself in information, and attempt to lodge lecture after lecture in your long-term memory, but there's not much guarantee all of that content is really going to stick in a meaningful way.

It's when you are in the middle of doing actually solving a real-world problem that all of those nuts and bolts of life often drop into place or rearrange into something that makes sense. Something that will get the job done. Something that looks suspiciously like learning.

As a fifth grade teacher in a public school, I'm hard-pressed on all sides to make sure my students are learning. Heck, we've got all sorts of standardized tests to prove I'm doing my job. The most exciting moments in my classroom don't happen at the end of a state achievement test, though.

They show up when my students are collaborating, communicating, integrating, and innovating using the same technology tools that real people in the real world use. When the stuff of the school day lines up with the substance of life, the learning kicks in.

Some tech tools are created with education in mind. Jeff O'Hara's (@zemote) Edmodo is a perfect example. It takes what's great about microblogging and remixes it especially for students.

Other apps find their way into the classroom at the hands of tech-hungry teachers looking for something fresh. Animoto, VoiceThread, Glogster, Wikispaces. They're natural fodder for the classroom whether education was their initial focus or not.

It makes a lot of sense for non-education start-ups to include educators in their target audience. As Malcolm Gladwell might put it, teachers are natural connectors, mavens, and salespeople. When we find a great tool, we can't shut up about it. We post links in our Twitterfeeds and blog about it until, pretty soon, the whole Ed world has heard of it.

When you craft that next innovation that will set the world on its ear, remember the teachers. Your original thinking and creativity just might propel my students into a new level of learning. Whether they're looking for it or not.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Learning When You Least Expect It is a post from: TechStartups.com

This is my last feed post for a while. I swear.

That said, it might be the most important one that can help startups, bloggers and established media makers begin to deliver new and better experiences to users.

Check out the Kris is reading section of Croncast. Go and check it out, be quick. I'll be here when you get back.

Glad to have you back.

So what the was that, right?

Croncast is my playground for all things nerdy that I can then apply to in my trade without doing it with a client's dime. So when things break I am not on the hook .

What you just saw was an interesting concept that enhances sharing information online and makes it more personable. You just met the full content feed reader, Kris the Filter'.

I'm going to describe that link destination the best way I can.

1. My server reads my Google Reader shared feed and stores it in a database. This is done with a script that runs on a cron (timed job) every two minutes to get new items post title, description and timestamp
2. The script stamps the item with the current time that I most likely read the item
3. This is cool the server runs a script to generate keywords (subjects) from the shared item. The script needs to mature a bit but it is effective enough for now.
4. Then cached posts are pulled up in to the Kris is reading section of the site and ordered by the time that I read them. Really the only way to organize them coherently since the post original times vary based on the author's time zone.
5. Keywords are displayed below each post. Each keyword is a link that will search all of my other shared items for related posts, has a link to Technorati and is an entry into a RSS feed for that keyword.
6. I have added a Search my read items' function so that you can search my shared items for whatever you like. If you want to find items that I have read about about ceratin topic like, Facebook, you can.

What's happening here is that I am giving you, the reader of my shared feed, the ability to use me as a content filter. And the best part is that you didn't have to ask me to read up on a given topic that you are interested in. I didn't have to add it to a to-do list, I was already doing it. And now I'm able to give you access to it in a few ways:

1. Here's everything that I have read and shared from Google Reader
2. Here's everything that I have read now search it by subject
3. Here's everything that I have read now subscribe via RSS to a subject (keyword) and get updates every time I read an item about your subject without needing to come back to this post or the site

In this scenario I have become a 'social filter'. I am able to share an item from a publisher that my current readers might have never found. In a strange way it gives an individual like myself the chance to create a low threshold directory with the ability to be distributed simply by marking items that I like.

It takes Google Reader to a new place beyond a feed reader and makes it a platform for syndication. Google Reader becomes a powerful tool to create new channels of distribution for content that usually meets its end on a subscribers computer. Now it has legs.

How can I see other people using this? Tons of ways.

1. The same way that I am using it to create a history of my own reading with the ability to share right down to the topic level.
2. By individuals respected as gate keepers like librarians. Example whether the source feeds were running on their library content or the internet they could mark items from those feeds and then give the feed based on a topic to a patron, i.e. happy computer savvy student who doesn't need to come back and ask for help again.
3. Could be used to share information behind a firewall from corporate blogs. Great way to fatten up a corporate knowledge base by picking and choosing from your qualified authors.
4. You could create micro-repositories based on topics
5. A million other ways that I haven't thought of yet. Not even quite sure I could come up with a million.

I know that I am not the first to work over a shared feed this way but it was fun to build and I am sure it will be useful in making something else. Maybe it will inspire someone else to do something cool.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Make Use Of Google Reader Shared Feeds is a post from: TechStartups.com

About the author: Matt is a software developer and author living in Chicago. He is the author of five programming books, most recently Drupal 6 Javascript and jQuery and an Open Source project called QueryPath for PHP that allows developers to easily build applications from XML data with jQuery like functionality.

Matt's personal blog is at TechnoSophos.com

I saw into the future. At 10:00 AM PDT on October 25th, in a conference room seating 16 people at the Googleplex in Santa Clara, I saw into the future of the web. And it was good.

What I saw was the demise of Web 2.0, a technology grown to capacity. And it is not Web 3.0 (whatever that is) that will take its place. No, tomorrow's web is about user interfaces.

The weekend of October 24th was the annual Google Summer of Code (GSOC) Mentor Summit at Google's headquarters. Ostensibly, this is the opportunity for all of the Open Source organizations who participated in GSOC to get together and perform a collective postmortem on the summer's successes and failures. But anytime such a menagerie of geeks is assembled under one roof, much more is bound to happen.

Unsurprisingly, many of the unconference's sessions were focused on the GSOC program itself. But a healthy dose of technology centered sessions made their way onto the schedule as well, and the hallway may very well have seen more code than the conference rooms.

Beyond the physical conference space, much was happening in the virtual sphere as well. As a gesture of thanks to the GSOC participants and mentors for a summer of work, Google gave everyone Wave accounts.

Wave's utility lies in numbers. Signing in without a friend is like throwing a party but inviting nobody. Bring a friend or two into the Wave, and it feels like hosting tea in a room with too much furniture. But once the numbers start to rise, Wave's strengths surface. It is a cocktail party that comes complete with a birds-eye view of all of the chit-chat. Conversations swirl around, splintering into smaller threads of conversation only to merge back into the main discussion later. Images, maps, polls, and an API for building extensions make Wave a promising tool except for one thing.

The user interface stinks.

Yes, Wave's merits surface only when many people are in a discussion. Unfortunately, that's also where the big shortcomings surface. As one conversation forks into many smaller discussions, the wave quickly becomes visually unmanageable. The Quickest Scrollwheel in the West will still have a hard time traversing the continuously growing vertical pane that wraps the conversation. The entire advantage gained by the birds eye view of the conversation is lost to clumsy scrolling.

But this failing is indicative of something greater. Once again, Google has achieved an engineering masterpiece. And for all technical purposes, Wave is a marvel. It certainly pushes AJAX and asynchronous web interaction to its very limits, and I have no doubt that the source code for the server component would make my head swim. But the user interface, for all its visual business, simply doesn't work. Wave is an attempt to cram the internals of a Hummer into the body of a circa 1996 Honda Civic.

This is where the Mentor Summit offered a revelation.

On the second day of the summit, the PyMT team hosted an hour-long session on multi-touch input. PyMT is a set of Python application bindings for various multi-touch libraries. Linux, Windows, and OS X all support multi-touch input technologies. Last week, Apple's new Magic Mouse made its debut featuring a multi-touch surface atop a traditional laser-based mouse. Dell offers a laptop with a multi-touch screen. Wacom offers a multi-touch tablet. Microsoft's Surface technology boasts table-sized multi-touch surfaces.

Multi-touch is arriving in a big way. But what's the hubub about? What's the big feature that suddenly makes these technologies attractive? It is the extension of point and click to touch, tap, pinch, swipe, expand, drag, rotate, throw. The simple mouse model that has driven graphical interaction for decades is mid-way through an extreme makeover. And with deflection- and pressure-sensing surfaces rapidly advancing, mice and fingers are just the tip of the input iceberg.

The PyMT team took an hour-long trip to Google's hands-on room and came back with an impressive demonstration. Beginning with some Lego pieces, a flat sheet of metal, and a PlayStation 3 camera, the pair of programmers from PyMT built a gaming surface and a couple of paddles. The camera tracked the motion of the paddles on the surface, transforming the physical paddles into virtual ones in a game of Pong projected onto the wall. In an hour!

When we can build new input devices with an Open Source library and $35 worth of corner-drug-store toys, a whole new universe of possibilities appears.

And that's where Wave returns to mind. As I walked out of the room with UX Design guru Steve Fisher, he turned to me an remarked, When I watch a demo like this, it makes me wonder What is the Web going to look like in a few years. Yeah, it makes me wonder, too.

Wave is a fantastic architecture. But the architectural gems are obscured behind yesterday's user interface limitations. In that way, Wave is a milestone that marks the death of Web 2.0. And it is more than that. It's a fingerpost pointing not to the technologies touted as Web 3.0, but toward a new mode of human-computer interaction. What is going to make tomorrow's web compelling? Not metadata. Not cleaner layout. Not even native support for videos. Better user interfaces. Interfaces tuned to convey information more effectively. Reactive interfaces. That's where tomorrow's success stories are waiting.

HTML 5 and RDFa are good and all, but the real sea-change is coming from your fingertips. All ten of them.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

The Demise of Web 2.0 is a post from: TechStartups.com

Yo SEM, I'm really happy for you and Imma let you finish, but organic SEO had the best results for startups this year.

So your new startup app is killer and you are going to need to get traffic to it. You don't feel like adding SEM to your burn and you want earn traffic from the people searching for your product. Go organic and do it smart.

You might know the list below by heart, but let's make it rote. You deserve traffic. Earn it by remembering to do the basics.

Here are 5 of the best organic SEO quick tips for startups.

1. URL Structure Before you ever build a page know what you are going to use for URL paths. Whether they are rewrites (see #2) or direct to files. From alpha, beta and full release get these pages indexed and maintain this structure.

2. Use URL Rewrites Will save you a ton of headaches if you decide to modify #1. Don't modify #1 and you'll be fine. But just in case you can then use the original URL structure to 301 or 302 redirect to to the new structure.

3. Page Titles Sort this out while you are working on #1. Know what you want your page titles to be from day one of actual development.

4. Auto Discovery I won't add to this list creating an RSS feed because you won't forget that. What you need is to make sure that you have placed the auto discovery tags in the header of ALL pages with feeds. That includes adding dynamic auto discovery if you have search or tag generated pages. Example, <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="TechStartups.com RSS Feed" href="http://www.techstartups.com/feed/" />

5. Keywords Know your vertical(s) beyond what is in front of your face on a daily basis. Use Google's AdWords tool to help you find keywords and search terms outside your sphere that can bring you traffic. In the beginning, spread the widest net that you can. Worry about creating a better funnel once you have more traffic.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Best Organic SEO Quick Tips for Startups is a post from: TechStartups.com

Let's start by saying that we all have been reading and participating in the most recent meme that 'seo is evil', but this isn't the time to get in the gutter.

Now that this is out of the way I wanted to point you in the direction of a new tool in Google Labs called Fetch as Googlebot. It allows you to run any URL from sites in your Google Webmaster account as the Googlebot. This can be of huge value when you are trying to discern just what the bot sees when it is sent out to fetch content from your sites.

To use it login to your Webmaster Tools account, click on the site you would like to fetch, choose Labs from the top left menu, click Fetch as Googlebot, enter the URL you want to review and wait a few seconds for it to load. That's it. The analysis is up to you.

Real value

It becomes particularly handy when you are using AJAX, hidden div layers or image based linking. You can ensure that when your content is fetched by the Googlebot that your content is making its way into the index as you intended. Whether it is a static page, dynamic one or an RSS feed you will be able to view fetched content as Google sees it. And it sees them very differently.

Below is an example of what the Googlebot sees:

Highly structured data (RSS feed)

Unstructured data (dynamic HTML)

If you were a developer on the Google team, which one would you rather index and run algorithms against?

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Post from: TechStartups.com

A few weeks ago the FTC updated their advertising guidelines for endorsements and testimonials to include blogs and other new media publishing methods. In the time between this update and today, DigComm (short for the Digital Communications Group), a company that builds digital communications tools for PR and social media agencies, has released CMP.ly.

CMP.ly is a simple solution for what could become a confusing and complicated landscape of sorting out what types of disclosures are needed different circumstances. CMP.ly makes this easy by allowing bloggers, SMS, tweets and podcasts simply link to a standard human readable disclosure.

The six standardized disclosures include:

CMP.ly/0 No connection, unpaid, my own opinions
CMP.ly/1 Based upon a review copy
CMP.ly/2 Given a sample by vendor/agency/brand
CMP.ly/3 Paid post cash payment or other compensation
CMP.ly/4 Employee/shareholder/business relationship
CMP.ly/5 Custom Disclosure

And for my disclosure I am a co-founder of CMP.ly. I have worked very hard on this project with a great friend, Tom Chernaik. I believe that this is an important tool for any publisher to remain transparent as the old guard is now prepared to regulate this medium starting December 1, 2009.

What is most important for us is that a site like CMP.ly is coming from people within the independent publisher community. It is our belief it can be used as a platform to prove that we're not new media, but the media.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Post from: TechStartups.com

Dart v. Craigslist, Inc., 09 C 1385 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 20, 2009)

Yesterday, Judge John F. Grady of the Northern District of Illinois federal court dismissed Cook County Sheriff Dart's lawsuit against Craigslist for user-posted advertisements in Craigslist's erotic services/adult services category on 47 USC 230 grounds. This is hardly surprising, as I wrote in March that "this lawsuit is almost certainly preempted by 47 USC 230." However, it was nice to see such a clean and decisive opinion--and a little ironic, as our law enforcement officials, who are supposed to enforce the laws rather than bypass them, got schooled in the limits of their legal authority.

With respect to the 230 analysis, the court characterizes Sheriff Dart's claims as alleging that Craigslist negligently published the user-supplied ads. The court says that the Seventh Circuit implicitly said that 230 preempted such claims in the 2008 CLC v. Craigslist case. To get around this, Sheriff Dart tried a Roommates.com styled attack, arguing that Craigslist induced the users' advertisements by creating an erotic/adult services category and letting users do keyword searches. These arguments go nowhere (making this yet another case where Roommates.com is cited for the defense). An adult services category can legitimately contain postings for legal services, and the keyword search functionality was agnostic about the illegality of the search and therefore a "neutral tool" (whatever that meant from Roommates.com).

Two other interesting doctrinal notes from the opinion:

* In FN 6, the court reiterates that 230 preempts a civil action to enforce a federal criminal statute. See Doe v. Bates.

* the court rejects arguments that Craigslist "arranges" meetings for prostitution, "directs" people to prostitution or "provides" contact info for prostitutes because, in all three cases, the user-supplied ad (if anything) satisfies those verbs. Similarly, Craigslist's role in "facilitating," "assisting" or "aiding and abetting" these user activities is governed by 230. I believe this is consistent with my view that 230 should preempt any claim that one party "endorses" third party online content.

Given some ambiguous language floating in Seventh Circuit 230 jurisprudence from the CLC v. Craigslist case and the old Doe v. GTE case, it wouldn't surprise me if Sheriff Dart tried an appeal. However, this opinion was solidly reasoned and completely consistent with that jurisprudence, so I wouldn't expect a different result on appeal.

I've reviewed quite a few job descriptions and talked to a few folks in the field, and can boil down the job reqs to three major skills, they are:

The Three Essential Qualities of Corporate Social Media Positions
There's often a list of skills, backgrounds, education, and sometimes Twitter follower requirements listed but It boils down to three qualities:

1) Fulfill Meaningful Business Objectives
Here's where companies are having problems finding qualified folks. The social media early adopter types tend not to be able to see beyond the shiny technologies and understand the business objectives. I can quickly find out who these folks are as they focus on the greatest latest tool. What's a trick for landing a corporate job in social? Be able to have a 5 minute conversation with an executive about connecting with customers without ever mentioning twitter, facebook, or a blog. Secondly, these individuals will be able to use brand monitoring tools, have analytical abilities, and be able to benchmark their efforts that tie back to business metrics not social media metrics.

2) Bridge Both Internal Stakeholders and Customers
This quality requires the professional to be able to relate to internal teams that may not understand the social culture, be empathetic, be able to communicate and train them, and be able to put it into action. Secondly, they often need to understand the culture of the community which they serve, communicate with them in a trusted manner, and engage in meaningful dialog.

3) Show Credibility With The Technology
The biggest struggle with hiring teams is that the demand and excitement for social and the recession has spurred a great number of social media experts and consultants. We already know that usage and experience don't equate to social media expertise, yet hiring teams continue to look for credibility by the individuals current use with the tools. What they don't tell you is this: are you capable of learning new technologies, evaluating, and then applying for business needs. Don't misread this, it's not in your favor if you were a late adopter, or don't know the nuances of the technology, but it's secondary to being able impact the company.

My hope is that boiling down these three essential qualities it'll help both hiring managers and applicants be able to sort themselves out. But let's open it up to you, are you a hiring manager or a candidate? What's missing?

Update: David Armano shows what not to look for.

Most of Creately's diagram and illustration tools, ranging from dead-simple flowcharts to circuit diagrams, are free for signed-up users and allow sharing, embedding, publishing, commenting, and other collaboration tools for up to five people on publicly available works (paid accounts get more shared users and private postings). Like so many web tools, it strips down the interface of desktop offerings like Visio and makes it easier for first-timers to get a grasp on things. Click on a shape or line in your Creately chart, and a context menu offers all the options of moving, reshaping, resizing, or whatever else you can do with it.

We might ask for a more updated look than the steel-gray toolbars of yore, but the end productsstamped with a subtle Creately logo, unless you fork outare what really matter. Creately is free to sign up for and use.

Chalk that headline as a hat tip to one of my favorite artists, Tracy Chapman is performing in San Francisco this weekend. In the slipstream of my post from earlier this month, The Evolution of Blogging, several folks have come-up with their own take on why there is a crying need for a new blogging revolution. Chris Saad, who works for JS-Kit.com, a start-up that makes social media tools and has been involved in various technical groups such as DataPortablity.org, today outlines seven reasons why the blog-builders and users need to rise-up. It's time we start re-investing in our own, open social platformsBlogs are our profile pages social nodes on the open, distributed social web, he writes. Well said, Saad! For his seven reasons,

1. Twitter Inc decisions that have not reflected the will of the community particularly changing the @ behavior, changing their API without informing developers, making opaque decisions with their Suggested User List and limiting access to their Firehose.
2. Facebook's continued resistance to true DataPortability
3.The emergence of tools and technologies that turn blogs into real-time, first class citizens of the social web. Tools like Lijit, PubSubHubBub and of course Echo.
4. A broader understanding that blogs are a self-owned, personalized, tool agnostic way to participate in the open social web.
5. FriendFeed selling out to Facebook
6. A flurry of great posts on the subject
7. The broader themes of the Synaptic Web (via Chris Saad )

The point number six is a bit of a stretch, but rest of them make absolute sense to me. By the way, I am going to be following up my original post with additional thoughts and ideas.

---

The Future of Cloud Computing: GigaOM Pro provides you with insight to understand tomorrow's cloud computing market. Learn more

Yahoo's social bookmarking service Delicious launched a new home page this morning, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter to deliver what it calls the hottest news from around the web in real time. While the exact formula behind the front page remains unclear, its contents are clearly changing minute by minute.

It is something the site probably should have done a while ago and if done correctly could make other services, like Digg, look all the more behind the times. The move could also help Delicious survive the coming Yahoo Search purge at the hands of Bing.

Sponsor

The new front page is focused on political and tech news instead of the most popular topic on Delicious, web design. There also appears to be some smart filtering of the Twitter messages being counted, as the numbers are far lower than other services' counts and seem to exclude the spammy retweeting bots that pump up big news sources in other retweet counting services.

We've long believed that Delicious is one of the most under-appreciated social media services remaining from the early days of the social web. This new version could help win back some of the early love, but it does represent a radical shift away from the original vision most people have of the service as a tool for bookmarking things you want to return to later. The founder of Delicious, Joshua Schacter, said on Twitter last night "i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal."

The pressure on Digg to find a way to speed up the pace with which it surfaces news on its front page has got to be growing. Note that Delicious hasn't decided to put its links inside a toolbar as Digg, StumbleUpon and many other services have. That's nice.

For a closer look at Delicious and the real-time web, see our recent posts Five Great Delicious Hacks, in Five Minutes, for Delicious's 5th Birthday and our Introduction to the Real-Time Web.

Apart from those, I consider an RSS reader to be such a vital tool for me as well, both on a private as a professional level. As I wrote before, I quickly fell in love with Streamy for that particular aspect of sifting through mountains of information on a daily basis, partly because it allows me to both track blogs and news sites I subscribe to and keep track of what Twitter and the people I follow on there as well as on Facebook and FriendFeed are buzzing about.

Add to that Techmeme, which has an algorithm in place designed to weed out the best and/or most talked about news stories related to the tech industry out there, and you can tell I have a pretty solid set of tools readily available that enable me to keep tabs on what I want and need to be tracking closely. Techfuga was another one, but it recently ground to a halt.

New to the arsenal of tools at my disposal free of charge is Tech Investor News, which despite its not-so-sexy name is exactly what it sounds like: a news site that investors in tech companies - plus industry pundits and reporters - should be made aware of. Glad to be of service.

TIN complements the websites and services described above perfectly, and competes with neither one of them. If anything, it saves me a lot of time and rids me of the pain of going to Google News / Blogsearch all the time to learn what the most recent stories in tech or centered around a company in particular are.

What I like about it? The big fat stock quote in the upper corner, the fact that you can filter down to 20 of the most discussed tech companies (note the Google Investor News screenshot below), the decent search function and the speed with which it updates news feeds (every 5 minutes or so, with some human editing involved). But what I also like is the fact that you can narrow your news consumption down to a specific set of categories which makes it very easy to find specific information (for instance, you can opt to display only stories about Steve Jobs' or Rumors' when browsing for news on Apple).

TIN is a project bootstrapped by a self-described media nut' / investor called Frank Cioffi, who spent decades working in such media as radio and television and turned to the internet after many years of consulting and trading stocks. Cioffi got the idea for Tech Investor News to scratch his own itch, and that's always a good way to start something that other people - like me - could also find interesting.

Bookmarked!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

Sponsor

The application aggregates live streaming and recorded radio broadcasts from across the US, displays their current and planned content schedules and now offers a search function that stretches across all those different types of content: live streams, podcasts and text show descriptions. It's a free app and the the organization that makes it hosts almost nothing on its own servers. The end result is a remarkable user experience that ought to be an inspiration for old media of every kind. It isn't perfect, but it's getting better fast.

The app was made by a non-profit organization called Public Radio Exchange (PRX). PRX was founded and is run by Jake Shapiro, a man who used to be an associate director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Shapiro used to produce an NPR radio show with Christopher Lyndon and before that he was one of the first tinkerers with web distribution of music for his band Two Ton Shoe.

Two Ton Shoe didn't find a lot of success in the United States, but thanks to the long tail of the web Shapiro says they somehow found a big fan base in Korea. The band toured there and Korean bands have covered some of their songs. "I'm a Korean rock star," Shapiro says, "and I believe there's a 'Korea' out there for everybody."

About a year ago Shapiro says he called around all the major players in public radio and argued that they had a unique opportunity in the iPhone platform if they could collaborate and create a really strong offering. An organization called American Public Media decided to contribute the work they had done so far on their own iPhone app to Shapiro's project and NPR and Public Radio International agreed to lend their support to what would become the Public Radio Tuner, today renamed the Public Radio Player.

Funding Local Radio on the iPhone

Public Radio Player could facilitate that long tail experience for obscure local public radio content by making it far more available on the iPhone. But PaidContent's Rafat Ali worries that by freeing radio listeners all the more from their local radio station, the Player could sever the loyalty and fund raising connections that keep public radio alive.

To that concern Shapiro has two interesting responses. First, he says that survey data shows most users prefer listening to their local stations on the app, along with a variety of favorites from elsewhere.

Even more interesting is the project's collaboration with Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls. Searls is at Harvard's Berkman Center now, developing a framework for what's being called Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) - a customer-based response to the business paradigm of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The VRM project and Shapiro's PRX are developing ways for Public Radio Player users to track what they listen to on the player and make financial contributions to the radio stations they've consumed from the most.

Shapiro says that part of the project faces a major roadblock from Apple. Though Apple introduced in-application payments last month, the feature is only available to paid apps (Public Radio Player is free) and