Tuesday, February 18, 2003

NewsMonster Lives Wow, this one does look like a MONSTER Kevin Burton sent me a nice email today announcing creation of the NewsMonster project and the first beta! The new webpage looks really nice and the functionality looks overwhelming. NewsMonster is an advanced weblog manager, reputation system, micropayment economy, and semantic web application. NewsMonster allows the user to keep track of news and use reputation within the blogging community to help discover new weblogs, important articles, and other [1] compelling relationships. In one sense, NewsMonster is just an RSS aggregator. It allows the user to subscribe to RSS channels and keep track of recent news. NewsMonster also supports advanced aggregation functionality including the extraction of content for PDA support, a "sitefilter" for websites that don't support RSS, rich images on each channel including favicons, and many other features. NewsMonster doesn't stop there. We also incorporate an advanced reputation system [2] which allows for the sharing of certifications [3]. These certifications allow NewsMonster to moderate and discover new (high quality) resources. Since I STILL do not use an aggregator and I use Moz, I'm going to have check this out to see if it fits my needs. Looks pretty good right now. -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] 7:29:05 PM

MS Third Degree Oops, meant Three Degrees. Neat idea (I have a 10 year old, who asked me yesterday for her own blog), and given the libraries already existant in Java it looks pretty easy to replicate. What's the proper format for a TrackBack link, this one returns an error? [Vanity Foul] Yes, I was thinking just thos morning that journaling could be strong in the teen/young adult age demographic. decorate your weblog with your favorite characters, that type of stuff. One issue is that young children may want to keep a diary, but I'm not sure theyshoudl have public weblogs... 1:23:47 PM

SearchDay - Puzzling Out Google's Blogger Acquisition Other potential "synergies" between Google and Pyra: personalization and geolocation.  While I don't want to speculate too much without first talking with Google (spokesperson David Krane declined to comment), it's interesting to consider ways that the Blogger tools could be integrated with other acquisitions previously made by Google. In September, 2001, Google purchased Outride, a spinoff from Xerox Parc which was developing tools for discovering web content based on personal interests and behavior.  Speaking to the New York Times, Pyra CEO Evan Williams offered a tantalizing glimpse of the possible: "As blogs have taken off, one of the biggest points of pain has been finding what you want to read. What if you could search blogs in real time?"   Bingo! I write about what's on my mind, and content from other bloggers finds me! I want a service that subscribes to my weblog, runs a Bayesian filter on my content, then matched the results to other weblog bayesian filter result, and sends me previously unseen links via a weblog that I subscribe to. 11:47:58 AM

NewsWeek - MS ThreeDegrees So, Microsoft has combined IM with digital actors for the NetGen demographic: broadband teens and young adults. Here’s how the software works. You invite friends to form a posse of up to 10 participants. Representing the group on your desktop will be a colorful image, either one from a set provided by the software or something one of the group has produced. (It could even be a digital photo.) If you’re online—and since threedegrees assumes you have broadband, you’re probably online all the time—you give your friends a holler simply by sending the equivalent of an instant message. Everyone in the group will see it. If you want to send them a digital photo, you simply drag it over the icon and it shows up on everyone’s computer. Then there are “winks”: small animations that you trigger to run on everyone’s screen. Some of the standards include big lips smacking a kiss or a heavyset cartoon character who drops trou and cuts the cheese. (Sending these to oldsters might cause a NetGen gap.)         The most ambitious feature is called musicmix, an online equivalent of a pajama party where people take turns playing deejay. Each group member contributes favorite tunes into a shared playlist, displayed on a dashboard with a customized “skin,” and everyone listens together. A click from any participant can choose a new song. Then everyone chats about the tunes. Interestingly, men and women use this feature differently: guys will see it as a contest—who’s brought the coolest tunes?—and do virtual chest-thumps introducing the hottest bands. Meanwhile, the girls use the music as background for their chats. 11:44:13 AM

Instapundit on Blogads: 'highly desirable demographics" Glenn Reynolds gave a nice plug for Blogads yesterday. "Now that Google has seen the value of tapping into the blogosphere, I think that a lot of other folks will want to, too." Blogads "lets advertisers reach select audiences with highly desirable demographics for next to nothing," writes Glenn. [Blogads.org -- where money meets the blog] Now if BlogAds could just figure out that weblogs will be concumed by news aggregators instead of web browsers, they may have a business! 11:41:33 AM