Social news site Mixx introduced a new feature today: Mixx Communities. Mixx always had a strong emphasis on 'groups,' but the Mixx Communities take this to a different level by offering a higher degree of customizability and a stronger emphasis on communication between group members.
There has been a recent trend of allowing groups of users to take greater control over their experiences on social news sites and Mixx's efforts add some interesting ideas to this.
Popular video sharing website MetaCafe just announced the launch of a fascinating new experiment it's calling WikiCafe - the ability for any registered user to "edit, enhance, and even translate video tags, descriptions, and other types of metadata."
Somehow Metacafe has a much lower idiot-to-civil commenter ratio than YouTube, where we can only imagine what kind of disaster such an experiment could lead to. For MetaCafe, though, this could be another experiment that works out really well.
We're watching the media landscape change in real time and one of the most interesting ways that's happening right now is through new online video producers breaking the monopoly of the old TV giants. Who's taking the lead in the new video landscape? Though old media is making a strong play - it's not winning so far. New, independent online video producers are the top publishers today.
A company called TubeMogul is keeping track of the viewership on 15 different websites from YouTube to Crackle. Today they've launched the TubeMogul Top 40, a monthly leaderboard for viewership across a wide variety of video services around the web. Below is a look at who those leaders are.
Last year, we told you about PutPlace, an online application designed to help you manage all your digital media. PutPlace isn't just your usual file backup service, though - it also provides web access to your files while allowing you to track where you've stored those files online. That's because in addition to setting up files and folders to be backed up, you can also add "web places" to the PutPlace service, which lets PutPlace track where your files are online at web storage sites like flickr, for example.
Sticking with the sporting theme, and in deference to the European Championship currently in progress in Austria and Switzerland, our latest look at mainstream use of web 2.0 is a football (i.e. soccer) website. OleOle is a fully featured social media platform for football fans - and it has shown impressive growth since its launch on 28 April '08 (although it has been in public beta since last year). Already the company claims 2 million monthly unique visitors, a great stat for such a young site.
Facebook has launched a Japanese version and a Chinese version (the latter announced this week). However, many Facebook clones have been in operation in China for a long time. So whether Facebook has an official presence in China does not really matter for millions of Chinese users. Perhaps you are bored with these China copycat stories. However if we study in depth these Chinese Facebook clones, as we will do in this post, they are more innovative and colorful than meets the eye.
Evri, a Paul Allen backed semantic search engine, is launching into a limited beta tonight. Evri was first shown publicly at the D6 conference. Evri's CEO Neil Roseman likes to talk about Evri in terms of organizing content instead of calling it a search engine. At its core, however, Evri definitely is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms.
Social news sites such as Digg, Propeller, Reddit, StumbleUpon, where the community decides what content is worthy and what content isn't, are powerful enough to drive tens of thousands of visitors to some lucky content producers, and thus have become an incredibly valuable marketing platform. One good day on any of these sites can get you more than 60,000 visitors in less than 24 hours.
Twitter just announced yet another sum of funding, this including money from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezo's fund Bezos Expeditions. The company says the money will be spent on building up its infrastructure and reliability to become the communications utility it needs to be before it can become profitable.
Om Malik unearthed the rumor of this round of funding last month and noted that Spark Capital was believed to be the lead investor. The round is rumored to be for $15 million. Jeff Bezos's involvement was unreported until today.
The Creative Commons Foundation launched a much-needed database of case studies today, highlighting CC licensed content from around the world. Creative Commons licenses are built on top of international copyright law but let content producers offer their work with more refined permissioning for re-use than the de facto "it's mine don't touch it" sentiment of standard copyright.
When working to advance a new concept or technology, few things are as important as showcasing proven, inspiring use cases. The new CC database does a good job of that. If your organization is interested in making your content easier to distribute, this database is a great place to learn from the experiences of others.
