Read/WriteWeb Network blog last100 is reporting that MTV Networks has decided to put every episode of "South Park" online for free sometime next year. MTV decided to put South Park on the web following the success it saw after steaming the entire back catalog of "The Daily Show" online. As last100 notes:
The lesson learnt by MTV Networks subsidiary, Comedy Central, when it made the entire archive of "The Daily Show" available for streaming online, is that Internet TV viewing can lead to more traditional television viewing. In other words, The Daily Show’s television viewing figures are up not down, even though fans are able get an unlimited fix via the show’s own website.
"One does not diminish the other by any stretch of the imagination. That is kind of our hat trick," MTV Networks Chairman and Chief Executive, Judy McGrath, told attendees gathered at the Reuters Media Summit in New York on Wednesday.
last100 also says that this move may signal an intention by MTV to eventually put more of its 20-year catalog of content on the web.
In June, we published a post entitled Swap Meet 2.0 that took a look at a handful of sites at which people buy and sell handmade goods on the Internet. Specifically, we looked at eBay, Etsy, DaWanda, and Lov.li. This is a small, but growing niche and today we'll take a look at three more startups that provide ecommerce and community services to independent artists and crafts people.
If you know of any other such services, please feel free to share them in the comments below.
A substantial portion of the web world is turning today to look at a small experiment underway at Google, but there's no reason to believe that big changes are right around the corner. Googlified, one of several independent Google watchdog blogs, discovered a new voting feature in the Experimental section of Google Labs and promptly jumped to the click-friendly conclusion that something Digg-like was afoot.
The search company is experimenting with letting users give thumbs up to certain items on their results pages to move those items up the page, or to select an X icon to hide a result from the page. Users can also suggest a link to be included in their personal results page for the same search query again. You have to be logged into a Google account to see the results of your clicking on these icons the next time you search.
A few things to keep in mind, perhaps talking points to bring down your hyperventilating co-workers:
Google Operating System, a particularly smart Google watch-dog blog, concludes its post today with links to previous, similar experiments by Google - like add better search results, reorder the results and remove search results.
With the rise of MP3s and other forms of downloadable music, the venerable mixtape, which Wikipedia says gained mass popularity in the 1980s, may be going the way of the dodo. It is, afterall, rather hard to give someone an iTunes playlist, not to mention a whole lot less romantic (if that's what you're after). But New York-based Mixaloo isn't about to let the mixtape die.
Mixaloo revives the art form of mixtape creation by packaging mixtapes as flash widgets that you can spread via social networks or blogs. These "digital mixtapes" are powered by Clearspring, and while they don't play full songs (just samples), they do something arguably better: they can make you money.
The Mixaloo widget doesn't just show off you smooth musical taste, but also acts as a mini-store front from which your peers can purchase your creations. We created a Bob Marley-heavy mix (embedded below) that has 14 tracks -- Mixaloo puts that at a $15.22 price point. Mixaloo offers a 50-50 profit share (or about 20-40 cents per song) with mixtape makers. Mixaloo also offers a points system. Users earn points for doing things like selling tracks, and recommending related artists that the app suggests during mixtape creation. Points can be redeemed for things like Mixaloo merchandise and audio equipment.
One of the highlights of October's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was the emergence of 'Semantic Apps' as a force. Note that we're not necessarily talking about the Semantic Web, which is the Tim Berners-Lee W3C led initiative that touts technologies like RDF, OWL and other standards for metadata. Semantic Apps may use those technologies, but not necessarily. This was a point made by the founder of one of the Semantic Apps listed below, Danny Hillis of Freebase (who is as much a tech legend as Berners-Lee).
The purpose of this post is to highlight 10 Semantic Apps. We're not touting this as a 'Top 10', because there is no way to rank these apps at this point - many are still non-public apps, e.g. in private beta. It reflects the nascent status of this sector, even though people like Hillis and Spivack have been working on their apps for years now.
Firstly let's define "Semantic App". A key element is that the apps below all try to determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users. Another of the founders mentioned below, Nova Spivack of Twine, noted at the Summit that data portability and connectibility are keys to these new semantic apps - i.e. using the Web as platform.
In September Alex Iskold wrote a great primer on this topic, called Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web. In that post, Alex Iskold explained that there are two main approaches to Semantic Apps:
1) Bottom Up - involves embedding
semantical annotations (meta-data) right into the data.
2) Top down -
relies on analyzing existing information; the ultimate
top-down solution would be a fully blown natural language processor, which is able to
understand text like people do.
Now that we know what Semantic Apps are, let's take a look at some of the current leading (or promising) products...
Yahoo! tonight announced the release of the latest version of the Yahoo! Widgets platform, version 4.5. For developers, the platform includes a range of new features, including the ability to use video, widgets for spreading your widgets, and better security disclosures. But the single most important new feature in this release is a re-architected widget core that gives developers full access to the DOM, as well as HTML and Flash.
What that means is that any developers with web collateral in HTML or Flash can easily transform their web widgets into desktop widgets. Yahoo! is already working with the leading web widget distribution platforms, including Netvibes, Clearspring, and MuseStorm, to bring their widgets offline. Netvibes has already committed to bringing the thousands of widgets created for their ecosystem to the desktop via Yahoo! Widgets.
MuseStorm will bring some of its high profile widgets to the desktop by the end of the year, and Clearspring will enable some of their widgets on the Yahoo! platform as well. All three will be able to offer desktop distribution as an option to developers via Yahoo!'s new system.
I've been thinking a lot about user centric identity over the last few weeks. One of the 5 Big Themes from the Defrag Conference was the importance of user centric identity. As mentioned in that post, we ended up having one of the leading thinkers in this area, Kaliya Hamlin (a.k.a. Identity Woman) on an episode of Read/WriteTalk. Early in the interview, I asked Kaliya to give me the elevator pitch on user centric identity. She responded:
"Really, it’s about giving people the freedom to move around the web with their identity. Just like we move about the world with our bodies. Now I’d see you in one context and then you show up in another place I go “Oh! That’s the same person because they’re walking around in the same body.” So on the web, we just have handles and there has been no standard until very recently where I could move from one context to another context and take that identity that handle with me and would prove that I’m the same person. Of course, giving people the freedom to aggregate across the network of sites. Instead of having a username and password that’s different at every single place you go."
With standards like OpenId, it's great to see user centric identity moving from a concept to a reality. In the rest of this post, we'll explore:
I am included in the group of writers at RWW who receive pitches via our email address tips@readwriteweb.com. I've been amazed at the number of innovative web apps being developed to solve real problems. It seems like at least once a week I come across something that I'd be interested in trying out. The problem is that if a site doesn't accept OpenID, it ends up being one more handle and password I need to remember. Keeping track of all these accounts is exhausting. Over time, it has raised the bar for when I'm willing to actually try out a service. I call this effect sign up fatigue. Interestingly, many of the people I talk to seem to be experiencing the same thing.
We've written about San Francisco-based Kiva.org, a not-for-profit organization that arranges interest-free microloans to entrepreneurs in developing nations, a couple of times before (here and here). Kiva has been a massive success story in the non-profit web space. It has now funded over 18,000 loans from over 123,000 lenders totaling about $12.4 million. To put that in perspective, recall that just a few weeks ago, in September of this year, Kiva crossed the $11 million mark on 17,000 loans from 110,000 lenders.
That sort of growth and success is phenomenal, and for profit businesses could learn a thing or two from how Kiva conducts its business to achieve such staggering results. Entrepreneur and author Guy Kawasaki summed up six lessons business owners can learn from Kiva in a great post on his blog today.
Below are his six lessons, but I've left out the great additional commentary that he provides on his site, so be sure to check out his original post for that:
These are some great lessons that any entrepreneur should pay attention to. And as Kawasaki suggests, why not visit Kiva.org and help fund a loan to someone who really needs it?
Yesterday we noted the launch of a new Nasdaq stock market index tracking only Internet companies, called the NASDAQ Internet Index. The index (^QNET) will track a diverse range of companies covering "Internet access providers, Internet search engines, web hosting, website design, and Internet retail commerce."
The list is now available (thanks TraderMike). The leading companies include Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, IAC/InterActiveCorp. It also includes international companies, like Baidu and Sohu from China.
As Josh noted earlier today though, curiously absent are sites like Microsoft and News Corp. - who control some of the most popular properties on the Internet (MSN/Live and MySpace/FIM respectively). These companies many not be only Internet companies, but their impact on the web is undeniably enormous. Are there any other public Internet companies missing who you think should be there? [full list after the jump]
African social media aggregator Afrigator held a launch party in Johannesburg last night and unveiled the beta of the team's beautiful new website. Several thousand African blogs, podcasts and videos are already indexed and viewable.
The site offers services for both readers and content producers. Visitors to the site can sift through content by keyword, country, time, hot items or hot sources.
Hotness is determined by an algorithm that combines traffic, Afrigator user ranking, Page Rank and incoming links. I'm excited to see some traffic help flesh out the rankings, I've already enjoyed watching several of the top videos.
The ranking is most easily understood by starting with a comparison to Techmeme, I think - but that's clearly a comparison of limited worth as Afrigator is a very original site that goes beyond what Techmeme does in content and the algorithm in this case isn't a black box. In some ways it's like what Technorati is trying to do with its move to multimedia, but better executed in this case.
