It begins with billboards spotted in exotic places like Knoxville, Tennessee and Ames, Iowa and posted online by curious Lost fans. The billboards advertise a URL, "FlyOceanicAir.com." Upon visiting the website, you are sucked into an adventure involving multiple websites, video diaries, photos with text hidden among the pixels, clue hunts, and strategy games. You can even call a toll-free phone number and get progress updates about the search for missing Oceanic Flight 815. Interesting characters and mysteries keep web players engaged and new content is posted at seemingly random intervals, forcing frequent check-ins to see if there's anything new.
In May of last year, Sonic Mountain bought the assets of Evan William's podcast directory Odeo (and then promptly renamed itself Odeo). In September, the new company bought out its chief rival, FireAnt, for about $400,000. The company planned to launch in December a public beta of its new software that merged Odeo's podcasting tools with FireAnt's desktop media player (which aggregated video blog feeds). Odeo obviously missed that date, but company COO Eric Rupert says that he expects the new Odeo "to be released for a more 'open' beta sometime at the beginning of Feb."
We have a new author on the ReadWriteWeb team, Sarah Perez, who will become a daily writer in a few weeks time - once she finishes up at her current job. Sarah has started posting here already, so keep an eye out out for her posts.
Sarah is from sunny Tampa, Florida where she had worked as an I.T. Professional for many years. You may know Sarah already from her personal site sarahintampa.com, which launched in 2004 and was the reason I noticed her writing.
Welcome to Sarah, who joins myself, Josh, Marshall and Alex as regular contributers to RWW.
Idiomag is a fascinating project that combines syndicated media content, user feedback, recommendation technology and now Attention Data to produce a very attractive personalized "web magazine" about music.
It's applications like this that make me love my job reviewing what's new on the web.
While CES is raging in Las Vegas, most of us are wondering what Apple has in store for their own annual expo, Macworld, which kicks off a week from now. We've combed through some of the top Mac rumors sites to pick out our favorite Macworld predictions and assigned a percentage of probability to each.
Last year it was the iPhone, two years ago it was the Intel iMac, the year before that the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini. While clearly, not every year is as exciting as the last, Apple always has something in store for us. History would suggest that this year's announcement won't be as earth shattering as the iPhone last year, but one never really knows what the Great and Mysterious Jobs has planned.
Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang was on stage today at CES and he showed a fascinating glimpse into the future of Yahoo. Yang outlined a product strategy that takes the simplicity and all-in-one portal approach that Yahoo! is famous for - and pushes it into the digital life arena by utilizing email, social networking, mobile and widgets. In Yang's words, Yahoo! aims to be the "most essential starting point for your life". The name for this new product suite will be Life!.
Dan Farber has a great write-up of Yang's speech on ZDNet, so in this post I'll summarize that and give some analysis on Yahoo's future.
Steve Outing wrote a very good article at Editor and Publisher on Friday about the need for cultural change inside the newpapers around the US (found via the wonderful CyberJournalist.net). That article got me thinking that people in many different industries probably hear many of the same objections to new, social media and online tools. ("It takes too much time, conversations online are insipid" etc.)
I decided to make a list of the Top 10 Objections to New Online Tools and What You Can Say in Response. I surveyed my nearly 1300 friends on Twitter and got all kinds of thoughtful replies.
Rumors abound that Yahoo! will make a major announcement about OpenID today at CES. It looks like at the very least you'll be able to use your Flickr user page URL to log in anywhere that supports OpenID login. The code is live, view source of any user page and search for OpenID and you'll find it.
The service, however, is not usable yet. Try logging in to an OpenID enabled site using your Flickr URL and you'll get this message: "Hey there! You have stopped by a bit sooner than we had expected. This feature is still being tested, so please check back in a few days. " So Flickr is set to become one more of a long list of accounts you can use to login to a relative handful of websites.
Yahoo! probably has more adherents than G*d, so meaningful OpenID support company wide would blow the doors wide open. That's not likely to be what happens.
PredictAd is a web site plugin that ads search box auto completion to your site, and then monetizes it with contextual text ads. The core service is a plug-n-play embeddable script that adds predictive auto completion to any search box -- similar to Yahoo!'s Search Assist feature. What PredictAd does differently is sell ads against that suggested text to monetize searches while the user is searching.
Part of Hulu's strategy is to not only be a destination, but also a hub for the distribution of content from NBC Universal and News Corp. They do this in two ways: 1. by letting ordinary users embed clips elsewhere on the web, and 2. by partnering with major media sites to deliver commercial content. The result is that consumers have a number of choices for where they can view the content on Hulu.com. We'll take a look at a handful of Hulu-powered sites below, including Hulu itself.
