MusicPlusTV.com launched a revamped website today. As well as a new look, it has doubled the resolution of its flagship 24/7 television broadcast stream, added social networking capabilities, and more. MusicPlusTV.com is an interesting blend of online video/music and a traditional TV network - only with a niche audience. It reminds me of Revision 3, which is also creating niche online TV shows. I like these websites, because they're not just regurgitating mass media TV (a la the recent NBC/News Corp deal). It is all about fresh made-for-Web content. MusicPlusTV's business model includes revenues from advertising, content licensing, brand integration, event sponsorships and digital distribution.
In its first three weeks in open beta, MusicPlusTV.com’s new site has already generated an active base of users and creators. Currently it is getting an average of 140,000 page views per day, which equates to over 4 million page views per month. Not too shabby.
I checked out the broadcast TV aspect - it's mostly youth-oriented (no surprise), with a lot of music. A good example is (indie) substance, hosted by 20-year old Avital - screenshot below. The shows are recorded in Los Angeles.
Written by Phill Midwinter, a search engineer from the UK. This is a great follow-up to our article last Friday, Hakia Takes On Google With Semantic Technologies.
Semantics are said to be ‘the next big thing’ in search engine technology. We technology bloggers routinely drum up articles about it and sell it to you, the adoring masses, as a product that will change your web experience forever. Problem is, we often forget to tell you exactly what semantics are - we just get so excited. So let's explore this...
Wikipedia says:
‚ÄúSemantics (Greek semantikos, giving signs, significant, symptomatic, from sema, sign) refers to the aspects of meaning that are expressed in a language, code, or other form of representation. Semantics is contrasted with two other aspects of meaningful expression, namely, syntax, the construction of complex signs from simpler signs, and pragmatics, the practical use of signs by agents or communities of interpretation in particular circumstances and contexts. By the usual convention that calls a study or a theory by the name of its subject matter, semantics may also denote the theoretical study of meaning in systems of signs.‚Ä?
...which is absolutely no help.
The hot topic today is offline web apps, with Zimbra having just released an offline version of its web collaboration suite. As Dan Farber noted, Zoho and ThinkFree are two other Web Office vendors to have either released offline access or have plans to. Also Stan at franticindustries has a nice post explaining how offline capabilities can help web apps work better. So for this week's poll, we're asking: what other web apps would you like to see have offline access. I've listed some popular web 2.0 apps below in a poll, so let us know which of those you'd like to see with offline access. You can select more than one. Also feel free to note others in the comments...
Zimbra, one of the Web Office vendors
we've been tracking
for a while, will later today announce the launch of Zimbra Desktop -
which enables offline access to Zimbra's Ajax-powered collaboration suite.
Zimbra will unveil Zimbra Desktop on stage today (Monday PT) at the ETech
Conference in San Diego.
It's a growing trend amongst Web app providers to provide offline access for their Ajax apps. In fact Mozilla is heading in this direction too, as Firefox 3 will support offline access to web apps. As Zimbra put it, this trend means that web apps will be "available no matter where a user is – at the office, on the road, or even in the air." Another company we profiled recently, Morfik, is also developing offline web apps. Not to forget the web/desktop integration happening via platforms like Adobe's Apollo and Dekoh.
As noted in the press release, Zimbra Desktop will allow users to access their email, calendar, contacts, and documents while on the road, or in places without a network connection, through Zimbra's familiar Ajax-based Web interface. When users come back online, all the changes that were made offline - such as composing, replying to, deleting, editing or moving messages, appointments, contacts or documents - will synchronize with the Zimbra server and mobile devices. Zimbra Desktop is compatible with Windows, Linux, and Mac; plus browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.
The Zimbra Desktop Alpha will be available soon from www.zimbra.com/desktop. It works with the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 4.5+, which has an open source edition as well as commercial.
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If you would like to explore sponsorship opportunities with Read/WriteWeb, one of the top 50 blogs in the world and the premier resource for Web Technology trends, contact the editor Richard MacManus at readwriteweb@gmail.com.
Our current sponsors are:
Atlassian is a leading wiki provider for enterprises and it has a new product called Confluence Hosted, which I encourage you to check out. Right now you can try Confluence Hosted free for 30-days.
Wild Apricot is a long-term supporter of Read/WriteWeb. Wild Apricot offers web 2.0 products for non-profits - one of their largest user segments is professional associations. Probably the most popular area of functionality in Wild Apricot is the online member database, which features goodies such as online application forms, automated renewal reminders and much more.
Zoho is also a long-term R/WW sponsor. It's a Web Office suite and they recently added a Web Conferencing application called Zoho Meeting to their excellent range of office products.
Userplane has been a sponsor since December. Part of AOL, Userplane is the premier provider of communication software for online communities.
Compete has been supporting Read/WriteWeb since the start of 2007. Not just a statistics service to rival Alexa, Compete also provides search, analytics, shopping deals, and a personalized homepage.
ElephantDrive came on board as a sponsor this month. It is an online storage and backup product, with a new WebDAV client coming in April. This will allow users to map a network drive directly to their ElephantDrive account.
Digication has also supported R/WW since December. It is an e-learning suite of tools, designed by educators for educators. Digication is all about bringing teachers and students together in a seamless learning environment.
Eurekster is an innovative kiwi startup that provides the community powered search box on Read/WriteWeb. It is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it.
Charles Knight, Read/WriteWeb's search engine authority, has provided another list of weird search engines. We're interested in getting your opinion on this, as a bit of weekend geeky fun. So which one of these 10 really alt search engines do you think is the silliest/funniest/oddest? Here is the list, with the poll right below....
1) http://www.worldwebwar.com/
World Web War
2) http://www.ufocrawler.com
3) http://www.omnipelagos.com/ Omnipelagos
4) http://www.pupna.com/
Pupna
5) http://www.searchbots.net/
Searchbots
6) http://www.ujiko.com/
Ujiko
7) http://www.timesearch.info/
Time Search
8) http://searchwithkevin.prodege
9) http://www.goyams.com/
GoYams
10) http://www.goodluckfinder.com/
Good Luck Finder
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb, with the results of our poll at the end.
Much of the discussion in the blogosphere this week revolved around two pieces of big news. Firstly Google announced that it is beta testing a new CPA (Cost Per Action) online advertising service. Our take is here, in which we posed the question: will Microsoft and Yahoo have to buy their way into the CPA game? This generated some interesting comments. Adam noted:
"Google's key advantage with CPA could be the integration with Google Checkout. If Checkout takes off, then Yahoo's in trouble with trying to catch up on CPA because it can't just buy into the race and be as effective as Goog."
SEO Mash wrote:
"CPC will still be king and there is no need for Yahoo or MSN to be that worried. CPA/PPA only make sense when there is a well defined "purchase" action that can be directly related back to the original click-thru and for many/most Adwords advertisers that is not the case."
We had a great response to the ETech Caption Contest, with the winner receiving a free ticket to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference next week - March 26-29, in San Diego. And the winner is... [drum roll] Kevin Jones, with this caption:
"You navigated through Vista's new security and accessed MySpace! Good job!"
Congratulations Kevin, you've won a free pass to ETech, enabling you to attend the Tuesday-Thursday sessions. I'll be in touch with more details.
Some other entries I liked:
"Act calm honey ... he won't bite as long as you don't open Google
..."
by Chen
"A gleeful Bill Gates unveils the new "Tickle Me Ballmer" to
the delight of fans both young and old."
by Andy
"mommie, what does "welcome to the social" mean?"
by ryan
"Yea! We finally found some folks who love our software!"
by Joshua Porter [who I happen to know is an Apple fan!]
This
week I spoke to Hakia founder and CEO Dr. Riza C. Berkan and COO Melek
Pulatkonak. Hakia is one of the more promising Alt Search Engines
around, with a focus on natural
language processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results.
Alex Iskold profiled
Hakia for R/WW at the beginning of December and he concluded, after a number
of search experiments, that Hakia was intriguing - but it was not a level to compete
with Google yet. It is important to note that Hakia is a relatively early
beta product and is still in development. But given the speed of Internet time,
3.5 months is probably a good time to check back and see how Hakia is
progressing...
Riza and Melek firstly told me what makes Hakia different from Google. Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Most other major search engines, including Google, analyze keywords. Riza and Melek told me that the future of search engines will go beyond keyword analysis - search engines will talk back to you and in effect become your search assistant.
One point worth noting here is that, currently, Hakia still has some human post-editing going on - so it isn't 100% computer powered at this point.
Web 2.0 has brought us a flock of APIs and the wonderful new concept of a Web mashup. Thanks to apps like Google Maps, del.icio.us and Flickr, we have started to think a lot about remixing the web. In the figure below is a classic example of a mashup - a Twitter Map. This mashup uses Twitter and Google Maps APIs to create a new application, which literally puts Twitter users on the map.
When two services like this are put together, it is likely that something interesting will emerge. However, not all possible combinations of services are actually useful. To bring order to the often chaotic world of Mashups, John Musser created a site called ProgrammableWeb that tracks mashups and APIs. John's site forms the basis of much of this post. So let's head over there to find out what the big trends are in mashups and APIs today...
The API section of ProgrammableWeb shows popular APIs. It also has an interesting scorecard that compares API offerings from web giants like Google and Microsoft. A quick look at the score card reveals that Yahoo! and Google lead the pack in terms of number of APIs - 22 and 20 respectively. Amazon, Microsoft and AOL have roughly half of that and eBay has 4.
