This week's poll is part of our R/WW Files on Personalizing Google. We're asking if you've noticed much difference in your Google search results, now that Google claims you can "get more relevant search results" when signed into Google Accounts. Let us know what you think.
This week we're opening a file on Google's efforts towards personalization, a trend that has become very apparent in Google over the past year. As we did with Yahoo last week, we'll publish a number of feature articles looking at how Google is implementing personalization into its products - and how it effects you, the user.
We mentioned in our Half-Year Web Technology Report that Google has impressed so far in 2007, on both the acquisition front and building up its own technology. Equally impressive is that Google is not sitting back and letting the hundreds of alternative search engines overtake them in technology. Often incumbent tech companies are content to sit on their market position and so they don't innovate much further. However Google has busily been experimenting with, and implementing into its main search properties, new types of personalization.
In January we ran a poll asking which "Search 2.0" approaches stood the best chance of beating Google. Personalized Search was the option that got the most votes. Also our interview with Google's Matt Cutts revealed that Google has been experimenting with personalization a lot over the past year or so.
A huge thank you to our sponsors, for supporting Read/WriteWeb and our growing community and network of blogs. One of our sponsors even made it onto the Conan O'Brien show (see below)! Our sponsors are...
Wine library Tv is one of my favorite video blogs and check out the YouTube clip below to see why. Founder Gary Vaynerchuk teaches NBC's Conan O'Brien that wine tastes just like grass, rocks, dirt, and socks. It's very funny and well done Gary for taking video blogging mainstream! ;-)
ADS-Click enables you to earn money from your Tag Cloud Widget. You select your keywords and then add it to your blog. The company is based in Switzerland, so great to see international startups doing well!
Zoho is a leading Web Office suite, with probably the most comprehensive product range of all the online office suites.
Adicate has developed an online advertising solution called The Hourly Advertising System, which enables you to advertise on Read/WriteWeb on an hourly basis.
Wild Apricot offers Web-based Membership Software for clubs, associations and other non-profits. And still no official word on whether the cartoon character in the advert is a caricature of the R/WW editor!
Userplane is a provider of communication software for online communities. Recently they've released both Webchat2 and Webmessenger2, plus they now offer a revenue share program.
Compete is more than just a statistics service to rival Alexa; Compete also provides search, analytics, shopping deals, and a personalized homepage.
Pageflakes is a personalized start page that features "Pagecasts" - allowing users to share their Pageflakes page with the public or a specific group of users. They also recently introduced a social networking component.
Eurekster is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
This week's Web Product of the Week is Iceberg, which Phil Butler profiled for Read/WriteWeb. Iceberg is a private beta startup that provides a Web based platform for building, sharing and selling powerful business applications, without the need to do coding. Phil called it "potentially a powerful service for business and personal applications".
Is there a new blogger scandal brewing? Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks seems to think so. Allen takes issue with the new video blog Webb Alert (which mentioned Read/WriteWeb today), saying that the blog doesn't disclose its connection with advertising network Federated Media (which hosts it and sells advertising for it) and suspects that the whole thing may be an elaborate scheme to push traffic to FM clients (and notes that FM clients have been gushing over the show in return for the disproportionate links they get).
I honestly don't think there's any conspiracy here, but Allen's post sheds light on a larger subject: the journalistic practice of disclosure. Blogging is still in its relative infancy and bloggers are still struggling to figure out when and how they should disclose potential conflicts of interest in an ongoing effort to gain legitimacy and garner respect from readers and other media producers.
Interesting news tidbit today that Billboard is adding online music streaming to its 'algorithm' for compiling the Weekly Billboard Top 100. As a Gen X person who grew up listening to the weekly American Top 40 (by Casey Kasem and then Shadoe Stevens), this struck a chord with me. According to the press release, in the new Billboard Hot 100 formula, radio audience will average about 55% of the chart's total points, digital sales will account for about 40%, and streaming media will determine 5%. In a further sign of the times, physical singles - "in line with the music industry's retreat from that product over the past decade" - will account for less than 1% of the chart's new formula.
Specifically, the 5% will be streamed and on-demand music data from AOL Music and Yahoo! Music. They are also looking to include other sources, such as Rhapsody. According to Billboard, digital delivery began playing an important role in the chart's composition in February 2005 - when they factored in the sale of digital tracks, "as measured by Nielsen SoundScan from a comprehensive panel of online merchants."
A new online video show about web technology debuted this week, called WebbAlert. It is already making some waves in the blogosphere. Hosted by Morgan Webb, it's a daily 5-minute show on the latest web tech news. I watched the debut episode yesterday and immediately added the RSS feed to my start page. Then today a couple of people pinged me to say that Read/WriteWeb got a mention, so obviously I tuned in to watch that.
There seems to be another one of these weekend blog brouhahas brewing about disclosure on the show, as FM Publishing is its advertising partner and a number of FM clients are mentioned on the show. All I can say on that is that yes, I am an FM Publishing client too; but no, I wasn't asked to plug the show. I would think the reason R/WW got a mention is that we are a top web technology blog. Anyway I am thrilled to see R/WW on online TV and so that's why I am mentioning it here :-). No conspiracy, but nice work stirring one up Allen ;-). Also I'm pleased that Morgan a) pronounced my name right, and b) said Read/WriteWeb correctly (it is a tongue twister at times!). Here is the latest show:
A report yesterday from Bloomberg says that Yahoo! is planning to revamp its online video offering by year's end in an effort to compete with YouTube and MySpace TV. According to comScore, Yahoo! is actually third in the US in terms of total video streams, though their 4.6% market share is well off the pace set by Google (mostly via YouTube), which soundly dominates the online video space, serving more than 4.5 times as many videos each month as Yahoo!.
Ari Levy at Bloomberg reports that Yahoo! plans to beef up its video offering with more content from media partners as well as users. Yahoo! also plans to add video to its popular photo sharing property, Flickr. "One of our strategies is to put video everywhere you are on the Internet," Yahoo!'s general manager for video, Mike Folgner, told Bloomberg. "We're going to build a much better destination for you to access all this different content."
I just got in to the shiny new beta for the Google Mashup Editor and I wanted to share my thoughts on it with you. Like Yahoo! Pipes before it (our review here), the Google Mashup Editor provides a simple interface that enables developers to make basic web applications and mashups quickly. And again, like Yahoo! Pipes, it is very definitely aimed at developers.
The idea behind it is to provide a rapid development framework for mashing feeds into Google services, using common technologies such as XML, JavaScript, CSS and HTML. It also offers a JavaScript API for more advanced behavioral interactions. Google describes the Mashup Editor as "a great tool for grabbing information from feeds and letting users see and manipulate it."
When Yahoo's next-generation online advertising system was launched on 5 February this year, it was expected to be a panacea for Yahoo's ailing fortunes. Yahoo's Panama ad system is designed to take ad quality and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages. Panama includes a new search ranking algorithm, which takes bids, ad quality and other factors into consideration. Along with the algorithm changes, there is a new pricing mechanism and a lot of other functionality for advertisers (e.g. an API).
The key addition is 'ad quality', which Google has been doing for years with AdWords. So Panama was always going to be a game of catch up for Yahoo. With that in mind, and nearly 6 months after Panama's launch, how is it performing?
