Category Archives: Reviews

Google may listen to your TV, but not too closely

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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.

Google TVAdvertising? 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.

RSS yields most action: Geffen Records to leverage FeedBurner

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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?

Review of BlogBridge RSS reader

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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.

Hugg.com is like Digg for eco-types, but hardly used

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The super popular enviro-blog Treehugger has started its own Digg clone called Hugg. Both are systems where users submit and vote on the best stories online each day and the top stories are displayed on the front page. Digg is mostly for tech related news so it’s nice to see Hugg come along for a nontech topic, environmental issues are great for this.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be getting much traction. The top stories are ones with less than 10 “huggs” so far. See, for contrast a Spanish digg clone Meneame, which I wrote about a few months ago on Social Software. There’s another system like this for political news voted on, part of a larger network of shared video and audio, that I can never remember the name of or find in my del.icio.us archive. It’s pretty successful too, though.

Why hasn’t hugg.com gotten more participation yet? It couldn’t be more high-profile than Treehugger makes it. I would really like to better understand what makes a system like this work or not work, as I think it’s a great model. Is it viable outside the super geekosphere though?

My guess on Hugg.com is that the darned thing is just not very easy to use. There needs to be a javascript bookmarklet to submit a story, not a form on the Hugg page that you have to go to and click through 3 times. It looks like they are worried about people submitting too many stories – in reality the problem has been just the opposite.

Hugg has been around for more than a month. My new buddy Gillo from TotalTactics.org is one of the top 10 submitters to Hugg and he’s only submitted 11 links. So this system isn’t working. Why not?

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Who wants to help with a test?

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Hi there, would some one outside the US please text me XXXXX? I need to make sure my phone will take SMS from outside the US. And make it funny if you can, ok? Thanks.

Update: Ok, so Verizon can only accept text mssgs from 3 countries in Europe and like 15 countries around the world. Not from wherever the wonderful looking service Rasasa.com comes from. Holland is not on the list. As, I presume, one of the largest vendors in the world I would hope they would accept a technology standard that works for everyone everywhere. But they appear not to and deserve to suffer a horrible fate as far as I’m converned. Word – ask about this before you buy a contract for a phone. If there are alternatives, I know I want to be able to get SMS from more countries than this. Bad Verizon.

Post Carbon Institute and Drupal

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Today I posted an interview largely about the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal with a neat group called Post Carbon Institute over at Netsquared. Funny thing, same day they released a totally revamped look for their Drupal web site. What an improvement.

Check it out:
Old PostCarbon.org site
Today’s PostCarbon.org site

Doesn’t it look more proffesional, serious and credible? The difference on the most basic level? Rounded corners and darker colors. More than just a trend, rounded corners show that you care. I think it was a great move.

There doesn’t appear to be a direct link to their blog anymore, just posts headlined in a frame at the bottom of the front page. I think that’s a real shame and it’s the second Drupal site by a nonprofit I’ve seen that doesn’t have a direct link to the front page of a blog on the front page of the site. I think that’s bad. But overall, nice new look for a very cool group.

Again, the interview about their work is posted over at NetSquared.

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Feed Digest improves search, adds OPML export

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FeedDigest.com is my favorite way to turn RSS feeds into HTML for display on your site. I think it’s the most well supported, most sophisticated and best funded of all the tools for this purpose that I’ve seen. Many other services are just not something you’d want to use in a quality- demanding context. FeedDigest is fantastic. This week Peter Cooper, the man behind the awesome service, announced some new features worth noting.

Improved search/filtering. If you want to syndicate the feeds for say the nptech attention stream, the Net Squared blogs and items tagged “podcast” in del.icio.us all mashed into one newswire and displayed on your blog or website – that’s something you’ve always been able to do with FeedDigest. But if you want only display items that include the phrase “environmental justice” – well now you can do that. Cool.

Export by OPML (feeds bundled in outline form) and clean URLs. These features are just going to make the Feed Digest environment easier to work in.

I love this tool and can’t recommend it highly enough.

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