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Google's great OneBox feature now returns sports scores for NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB and MLS teams. All you need to do is search for the name of the team and you get back the latest scores and links to the team site. According to the Google Friends newsletter, the search engine will be "expanding this to other leagues and sports teams around the world."
Google Reader added some additional per feed statistics that help you measure where your attention goes. If you click on details for each feed Google tells you the number of subscribers, posts per week and the update time. These were there before. However, they now also offer a chart that shows you how many items you read per feed. (via Hutch Carpenter on Friendfeed)
Mahalo, a hybrid web directory/zeitgeist/search engine with wiki capabilities, has quietly added a Loyalty Program that tracks the number of pages people view and rewards the most loyal visitors with prizes. The site, which was founded by Jason Calacanis, has been in the news lately because it laid off 10% of its staff.
According to a special page on the site, Mahalo won't track specific pages people view. Mahalo - presumably via a cookie - tracks the number of pages you've viewed and lists the figure right below the search box in the upper right corner of the homepage. Further, there is a clear opt-out. There's no word yet on how often it will offer prizes or just what those might be.
The move is not entirely novel. Microsoft Live Search has a similar program with Live Search Cashback (Microsoft is an Edelman client).
Over the last year or so I have become addicted to data visualization and mashup tools. Every day it seems like there's a new one to explore. My current favorite remains PageAddict. Using the Firefox plug-in I have been able to reduce my time on social networks and increase my use of productivity apps. Now I have a new one that's equally revealing.
Twitter Charts is a Yahoo Pipes/Google Charts mashup that takes a user's tweets and plots them on timeline by day of the week and by hour. It's a great way to see just how active a user is on Twitter and when. In addition, it also gives you a sense for how engaged an individual user is in the conversation by revealing the portion of tweets that are replies.
To give you a sense for the differences between Twitter users below are two graphs. The first plots my tweets. The second graphs my friend Robert Scoble's tweets. As you can see there's quite a difference in how we use Twitter. Additional information on Twitter Charts can be found here. (Via Twitterholics)
Steve Jobs for Fortune Magazine by Tsevis
Though he's got plenty of flaws, Steve Jobs is one of my heroes. How could you not admire someone who beat cancer, helped spawn the personal computer revolution, reinvent mobile phones, not to mention nursed Apple back to health?
With the iPhone red hot, Mac sales flush and corporate earnings strong, Apple is riding high right now. In this recessionary climate, there are lessons each of us can take away from Steve's svengali-like reign at Apple. If you're committed to succeeding, it doesn't matter if you're a start-up CEO or a PR account executive, here are three tips to help you ride the recession the Steve Jobs way.
These are just three of the lessons I think all of us can take away from Steve Jobs.
Blogs.com reports on a survey of blogging journalists...
Blogging journalists get "story leads from comments on the blog or through private communication initiated via the blog," have "a clearer perception of audience needs and interests as a result of comments and visitor statistics" and find that "the previous process of 'moving on' to the next big story and forgetting about the old one no longer applies" since blogging allows for updates and corrections.
In the last week or so I talked about three trends: 1) social media is speeding up, 2) that the attention crash (and not just the financial crash) is being felt by more of us and 3) that the newsfeed - more so than RSS - is the future of syndicated content.
This last emerging trend is important and it's connected to the other two. Newsfeeds can solve the attention crash. Further, they are built for speed.
My post on Forrester's RSS study generated quite a bit of commentary. I believe in the data. RSS has peaked. Yes, there are lots of people who use iGoogle who don't need to know what RSS is and start pages are growing. However, I believe that social network newsfeeds will become more a more prominent delivery channel over time.
Newsfeeds elegantly combine peers and pros, algorithms and networks. They know no bounaries. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb agrees. This is why social networks will become the primary theater for PR in five years time.
Here's a great example of where this is going. If you haven't seen it, BreakingNewsOn is a great resource on Twitter. It's always the first to break big stories. It was useful on Twitter, but now it's even better because they're on Friendfeed and I can see what other people think through likes and comments.
As I write this, minutes ago a campus shooting has unfolded at Western Kentucky University. Note how the commentary is aggregating around the post and in the screen grab below. That's the future of news. It's real-time, collaborative and in this case it's in my Friendfeed stream.
What's interesting here is that the freshest story isn't always at the top. In fact, it's often the one that generated the most recent activity from the community (comments/likes in this case). That's an entirely different model than one that any news site uses. They organize around importance. Blogs, on the other hand, go in reverse chronological order. This is different.
The newsfeed metaphor synergizes commentary, activity, relevance and timleiness and that's why it's the beginning of a new era in news.
Forrester Research today published a new report on the state of RSS. In short, while there are bright spots, it does not paint the picture of a technology that's going mainstream anytime soon.
On a positive note, the resarch entitled What's Holding RSS Back?, says that nearly half of marketers have moved to add feeds to their web sites. Further, RSS adoption among consumers is at 11% up from just 2% of users three years ago. RSS feeds usage is more dominant among men.
Here's the kicker, though. That might be all she wrote for RSS' growth track.
According to the research, of the 89% of those who don't use feeds only 17% say they're interested in using them. In fact Forrester spends much of the report helping marketers better explain the benefits of RSS to their customers. "Unless marketers make a move to hook them — and try to convert their apathetic counterparts — RSS will never be more than a niche technology," the analysts (who include Jeremiah Owyang) wrote.
Lord knows, as someone who spends three hours a day in Google Reader, I am a giant evangelist for RSS. But I am also a realist. Feeds are way way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve. So I think RSS has peaked.
Still, while feed adoption may have crested the idea of online opt-in communications is just getting going. The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehichles that bring content you care about to you. In each case, you're total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you.
RSS is only one form of opt-in communications. The potential is bigger when you look more broadly to social networking. This larger promise still holds and as the technologies become more invisible the newsfeed could even one day subsume RSS.
I have written before about how to use Friendfeed's powerful imaginary friends feature as an aggregator. Now that they have real-time updating and lists, you can actually combine these to build a handy desktop news ticker.
First, create a bunch of imaginary friends for the different news sources you want to follow. Assign each to a relevant Twitter profile. For example, I have three imaginary friends: The New York Times (Twitter), Techmeme Firehose (on Twitter) and Breaking News (on Twitter).
Next, add these to a special Friendfeed list. I rolled them up in a list called News.
Now click on the real-time link on this list page, open the mini window and bingo. You can also bookmark it so that it runs in your Firefox sidebar. Here's the result.
