Personal recommendations of targeted content are something almost every publisher would like to offer their site visitors. It's hard though, to know who those visitors are and what they really like. That task just got easier today with the release of a WordPress plug-in called "Just for You," built by the team at Yahoo's MyBlogLog.
MyBlogLog has more personal information about millions of blog readers than any other system we know, it's ripe for offering this kind of service and we're excited to see it come to fruition.
We first wrote about the mainstream RSS reader and blog directory Regator in early July. At that time, Regator was still in private testing, but today, it has opened up its doors for a public beta release. Since we first covered Regator, the developers have made some important changes to their service, including the ability to upload OPML files. Even with this feature, though, Regator still remains a highly curated service, where every new entry in its blog directory has to be approved by the editors.
On Monday, Facebook released a sample site that demonstrates how Facebook Connect (previous coverage), their new authentication methodology for logging into third-party web sites, will work. On the demo site, instead of registering for an account, you're presented with an option to use Facebook Connect instead. The Facebook team built the site so developers interested in using this technology could see how it works. The source code was provided as well.
One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it.
As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?
You can do a lot with new software if you tell it a little bit about yourself - but who wants to give the new kid on the block the password to their most important communication tools?
Unfortunately that's what we're asked to do with a lot of new applications these days. It doesn't have to be that way, though.
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Do you hate calling customer service at a large company? It's safe to say we all do. Nearly every large corporation today utilizes phone menus to route your call to the correct department and it's nearly impossible to get a real person on the phone. Wouldn't it be great if there was a web app that did the calling for you and then rang you back when they reached the right spot in the phone menu? That would be a truly useful service, wouldn't it?
We just got word of an interesting new microblogging service: Rejaw. Rejaw is an interesting combination of microblogging with real-time chat. In some ways, it is similar to Plurk and Identi.ca, but its interface looks a lot more traditional and instead of just alerting you to updates, it pushes them directly onto your screen in real-time. On the client side, Rejaw is taking the unusual route of releasing a Mac client first. A Windows version should follow in the very near future and the team is also planning to release an iPhone app.
Mloovi is a new app that runs any RSS feed through Google Translate. This may not be perfect, but there's is a clear need for such a service so we're pretty excited about it.
Created by the makers of language learning service LearnLists, Mloovi is free with ads and offers premium accounts. The company credits TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher with the inspiration, and Butcher's blog is where we discovered the service.
Google has just announced that it will sell its Performics search marketing business to Paris-based Publicis Groupe. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008. Google acquired Performics when it bought DoubleClick and after this deal closed in March, Google had already announced that it was going to split up Performics into a search marketing and an affiliate marketing division. Google rebranded the Performics affiliate marketing business in June, but hadn't announced any plans for the search marketing business until now.
