Global Voices Online starts project re imprisoned bloggers

As some readers here may have noticed, my friends at the Committee to Protect Bloggers have curtailed their work due to funding shortages. People still concerned about bloggers threatened by their governments because of the contents of their blogs (and there are plenty of reasons to be concerned) should check out this new advocacy project, from Global Voices Online. See also the project’s introductory post and wiki. Thanks to Curt for pointing this out.

Bloggers gotta stick together!

78% of US youth have blogs?

Study published this week in USAToday finds, among other things, that 78% of US youth 18-24 have a personal website or blog. That can’t be right. That’s insane. Sure isn’t the case amongst youngsters I hang out with. The future is coming though, it’s almost old hat to set up a MySpace blog at least. Look out work world.

Google releases video player for Mac

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 may listen to your TV, but not too closely

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

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?