Ask.com announced an upgrade today to their already impressive local search tool. Now you can draw a shape on the map with a drawing tool and limit your search to inside that shape. They do so many impressive things over there, yet they are so far behind in market share. Is it too complex? Like the blogsearch tool, I don’t even use it myself but it’s so smart! They filter out blogs that don’t have at least a small number of subscribers in Bloglines. Goodbye blog spam in search results! I should start using them more myself.

I just wrote a review over at SplashCast of speech-to-text search engine Podzinger‘s new feature to search YouTube. It’s very impressive and wanted to make sure readers here knew about it too.

Results are different from searching YouTube metadata, so subscribing to feeds for both searches would probably be a good idea. There are a number of ways to do that, including Vixy’s YouTube RSS generator or through the official capacity with an URL like this: www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss That’s of course most useful if you want to subscribe to YouTube videos tagged “monkey.”

How many people are going to want to subscribe to searches for words used in YouTube? A whole lot, I think.

Google sold their 5% pre-IPO shares of Chinese search giant Baidu, it was reported today. I guess that means no buy-out and moves instead to increase Google share in China. Or maybe they’ll just give up on total world domination and work on dominating search everywhere else. For what it’s worth, the shares were bought for $5 mill and were worth $63 mill at the end of May when the sale actually went through. That’s a whole lot of AdWords clicks that don’t have to happen, I suppose. Just a quick note in case it’s of interest; I find anything about non-US web giants of interest.

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.

Here’s some big news, the 440 news outlets around the country that use the AP’s news module will now include a list of the most blogged about news items of the day on their sites and display inbound links to each individual article as discovered by Technorati. I wrote about it over on Social Software – and it will be interesting to see what other people think. I think it’s great – especially for local-issue bloggers. The barrier between traditional and new media is being broken down more every day.

Here’s some free advice: nonprofit organizations wanting to do issue-based outreach with their blogs would be well served to subscribe to the feeds of organizations like the AP, either for search terms or through a filter. For high-priority items, if you’ve got a fast blogger on your team, set up an RSS to IM/SMS alert system for selected filtered feeds. That way your blog will be amongst the first to cover AP stories of interest. That’s how I wrote about the Technorati/AP partnership announcement before any other blogs did.

Interesting note: when this type of alert system sets me to write a particular post and I’m looking to cover the news first, I ping the key ping servers manually with Pingoat to come and index my new post instead of relying on automated pinging systems. Google Blogsearch has found my post about this partnership in its search results, but despite pinging Technorati specifically, Technorati has yet to discover the post I wrote linking to its own blog. Hmmm…

Another note, this on Memeorandum: the Technorati blog post I covered is on the top of the page, this blog – which does not link to the Technorati post but to the Social Software post that does – is second in the conversation, and the Social Software post I made is third. Interesting. A number of conclusions could be drawn from that.

Feel like you’re not getting the most out of all the information the web has to offer because it’s just so overwhelming? I really believe that optimizing our RSS reading practices can go a long way, but Robin Good of MasterNewMedia.org offers a more sophisticated vision in which our organizations have dedicated NewsMasters. These NewsMasters focus on using RSS, search, filtering and more to get us the best information on our area of interest as quickly as possible. We just get the good stuff. I like it.

I just interviewed Robin over at Net Squared. If you’d like to hear him explain the big picture of NewsMastering in his own voice and words – here’s a quick sound clip to go allong with the text write up. The full interview has lots of good details and links for online research in general.

Robin Good on NewsMastering (1 minute 30 sec)

This might be totally obnoxious, but I’m going to give it a try. Randy Morin of the RSS Blog began an experiment recently where he gives a free book from Amazon.com to the person who sends him the best link via del.icio.us by tagging it for:randymorin. Similar to Engadget Mobile giveaways, where a new phone is given to one random person who comments after a particular post. Those posts get thousands of comments.

I think that’s a pretty cool idea. It’s like in SnowCrash where people suck up “intelligence” information freelance about everything, submit it to the Central Information Agency (privitized CIA) and get paid whenever someone pays the CIA to access their intel. Hmmm…maybe that’s frightening.

Regardless, let’s try it.

If people tag their favorite online productivity product, service or application for Web 2.0 style info-management/research with the tag tools4marshallk – I’ll pick my favorite one of the month and the person who submitted it gets one year of premium subscription to any web service of their choice on me, up to fifty bucks. For two runners-up I’ll pitch in twenty bucks towards premium subscription to a web service of your choice. High stakes stuff, huh? I think it could prove more than worth it. And fun! At the end of this month I’ll profile the winners, their submissions and their selected services. Unless I have less than 20 submissions, at which point I’ll extend it to one month from this post. It’ll be great, and did I mention fun? Since it won’t be a for:marshallkirkpatrick tag, anyone can see the submissions here. Heck, if this works well then we could all vote on which submissions are best. But this whole idea might be really stupid, or at least in need of continual evolution.

Update: the tagging has begun! Check out the first submissions at http://del.icio.us/tag/tools4marshallk
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