Posted last night a profile of possibly my favorite SplashCast user – GrowingGoodness.com. Fascinating situation. This guy collected 35 “channels” of video from YouTube related to local, organic food, displayed them in SplashCast and then built an awesome site around them. The site is so proffesional looking and such a valuable resource – and the video channels are so compelling – that now people from the local, organic food communities are submitting original video to GrowingGoodness itself. I love it – I actually think it’s a great example of an emerging art form. If this sounds interesting to you, go check it out and don’t forget to visit the site’s blog. If you want to share some Digg love and get this story out to a much larger audience, here’s the link. I love stuff like this! Totally makes my job feel fun and worth doing.

Talk about a wretched Web 2.0 experience! I was so excited a year ago when I was invited to participate in the Corante Web Hub. Not only have I never been paid as promised, I don’t know anyone else who has either. Worst of all though I, and I believe at least one other person, have resigned, quit, said “get me the heck off your site” and gotten NO response! If I was still writing here, all my posts would be getting sucked onto their stupid site. (Oops! I guess this one is, huh???) I’m still listed as a participant. Ken, the editor and a great guy, says it’s not his department to remove me from the site. I’ve sent several emails. It’s really bumming me out. I thought it was a great idea at first, but it became apparent pretty quickly that it was going to get messed up – and now look at the mess I’ve gotten myself into.

Probably not a huge big deal – there’s loads of scraping splogs out there around the web, but I’m amazed that Corante can’t do better than this.

Packing your Products Properly is a blog about packaging eBay products…properly. I had written that the new blogs in eBay were silly because people just wanted to buy and sell, not converse. Obviously I don’t know as much about eBay as I thought I did because I’m sure there are many other blogs like PPP that could play a valued roll in that community.

This looks great – a nice looking video player for films downloaded from Google Video, finally for Mac. Google Video has everything YouTube has except hipness, right? And now with a desktop player for both Macs and PC’s, maybe they’ve got more. You can embed videos in your web page from Google video just like you can YouTube. Well, I won’t claim to know much about this field really – here’s a great discussion comparing YouTube and Google Video over at the Church of the Customer blog. Don’t forget the comments section. That’s actually got me convinced that YouTube does have more, community oriented features. I’m just making note of the Macness here, don’t take my word on the best online video – go check out the scene at GeekEntertainment.tv. That’s who I’d ask.

Don’t forget to see the last story I wrote too, about Google’s kinda creepy TV plans. Downloader beware about this video player, huh?

Google Research on “Social- and Interactive-Television Applications Based on Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification”

The Google Research team at last week’s Euro ITV (the interactive television conference) won the best paper award for research just posted to the Google Research blog. Their topic? Personalized experiences synchronous with mass-media consumption. That means a system where your computer listens to the TV in your living room, compresses the sound for comparison to a Google sized audio database and then offers you services online related to whatever you are watching.

This does not appear to be functional yet, but the paper also seems to assure readers that it does not require much new technology either.

Advertising? Wasn’t discussed. The examples the Google scientists provided fell into the following four categories:

• personalized information layers
• ad hoc social peer communities
• real-time popularity ratings
• TV- based bookmarks

Of course advertising can be contextual to any of those, as is shown in the hypothetical screenshot above from the Google paper. There will also be the option of selecting Two Minutes Hate worth of advertising in exchange for access to premium content. Just kidding about that part. The rest of this is real, though.

“If friends of the viewer were watching the same episode of ‘Seinfeld’ at the same time,” the paper says, “the social- application server could automatically create an on- line ad hoc community of these ‘buddies’.”

The paper assures skeptics that the privacy will be technically ensured.

The viewer’s acoustic privacy is maintained by the irreversibility of the mapping from audio to summary statistics. Unlike the speech-enabled
proactive agent by Hong et al. (2001), our approach will not “overhear” conversations. Furthermore, no one receiving (or intercepting) these statistics is able to eavesdrop, on such conversations, since the original audio does not leave the viewer’s computer and the summary statistics are insufficient for reconstruction. Further, the system can easily be
designed to use an explicit ‘mute/un-mute’ button, to give the viewer full control of when acoustic statistics are collected for transmission.input-data rates. This is especially important since we process the raw data on the client’s machine (for privacy reasons), and would like to keep computation requirements at a minimum.

There’s no mention of localized versions for China, for example. Can the US government be trusted not to demand access to this kind of data? No. I can imagine the privacy concerns here are going to be huge. People may go for it though. I am open to the idea, but I don’t think I like it. GMail’s contextual advertising doesn’t scare me though.

This seems like a recipe for nothing but shopping and superficial interaction. I suppose I could debate with people in my “snobby snobs” group about the veracity of a History Channel show. So maybe I’m wrong.

One way or the other, this seems like a pretty viable vision of the future.

FeedBurner just announced that their services have been employed by Geffen Records after the company’s preliminary studies discovered that feed subscribers were four times more likely to take action on the Geffen site than recipients of more traditional promotional efforts. People will apparently be able to subscribe to a variety of music industry and selected artist specific news.

The company is really going to make the most of FeedBurner offerings, customizing the links that appear after each feed item (as anyone can do) and advertising Geffen artists in other feeds. FeedBurner keeps adding to it’s list of mega customers.

The Geffen website is delightfully low key in its aesthetic. You can see the first iteration of FeedBurner feeds there now; some of the links aren’t working yet but others are. They use the standard orange icon, the words “feed” and “subscribe” (not RSS) and the “add to MyYahoo” button because of it’s dominant market share. The aesthetics of the feed landing page could use some work, but the functionality looks pretty good.

This is a smart partnership. Eventually all organizations large and small that represent artists will offer feeds for fans to keep up with news about each of those artists. It’s just too compelling a model to avoid, to allow users to pull in news automatically about their favorite artists, as part of their default web experience either in a start page or a feed reader. Unlike the spam filled world of email, news delivered by feed is just a part of our individualized web landscapes. Feed reading builds relationships. The early-adopter nature of feed reading surely has some impact on its unusually high reaction rate right now, but I don’t think that explains it all. Feeds are just plain effective.

Related news: Feed aggregator NewsGator signs an agreement to move into the Japanese market. Is your organization publishing and reading feeds yet?

UPDATE: My complaints below proved unfounded after going through the system with its developer. My apologies. Please check out BlogBridge with confidence that it can in fact do the things I wrote below that it could not.

In my ongoing effort to find the best RSS reader for my serious feed reading needs, I just tried out BlogBridge. Though it has some very innovative features that have been widely written about and has a nice look to it, the first few minutes of use made its shortcomings for me clear.

It does not respect the folders in my OPML file. This alone is a deal-breaker. I have 600 RSS feeds carefully organized into folders by priority and if importing those files into a feed reader strips out the folders, I’ll be darned if I’m going to use the thing. I though I had selected the “import as multiple guides” option, but the OPML coming in from Net News Wire just landed in one undifferentiated pile called “my subscriptions.”

There is a limit to the number of feeds you can import – 500! After all the talk on the company’s front page about how BlogBridge users are different because they read a large number of feeds, this was a major disappointment. I can’t use a system that doesn’t welcome all my feeds in at import!

No “river of news” option. As far as I can tell, if HorsePigCow is the feed I’m subscribed to that has been most recently updated, I have to read every item in that feed – even ones a week old, before I the items in the second most recently updated feed appear. There is discussion of river of news throughout the BlogBridge site but I can’t see how to make it work that way.

I like the del.icio.us support, the dynamic reading lists shared with other users and some of the metadata about each feed in my subscription list, but there are too many shortcomings here for serious feed readers seeking to jump in. That’s how it appears to me at least.