We're currently running a series of posts about recommendation technologies and in the comments of our last post about the Netflix Prize, a company called Jinni made itself known. Jinni is a kind of 'Pandora for movies', because it aims to recommend movies and tv shows to you based on its Movie Genome (aping Pandora's Music Genome Project). Jinni's genome project contains over two thousand "genes" that describe plot, mood, style, setting, soundtrack and more. Jinni says that its ontology was created by film professionals - much like Pandora employs people to create its unique music database.
Just a few days ago, we wondered why the White House was giving preferential treatment to Google's YouTube. As CNET's Chris Soghoian points out today, the federal government has very strict rules about using persistent cookies on government sites. However, the new privacy policy for the WhiteHouse.gov site explicitly exempts YouTube from having to follow these guidelines, as the Obama team wants to be able to continue to embed YouTube videos on the new White House blog.
UK police have reported that a man who murdered his wife this Spring did so because he was upset after seeing her change her marital status to "single" on Facebook, according to coverage today from the BBC. This looks like a horrible story with a sensationalist internet component, but it's actually more culturally significant than that.
The integration of new social networking into the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world is dramatically changing communication and introducing unknown new dynamics into ages old-interpersonal issues, including psychosis and violence. There are new questions to ask.
The Washington Post launched a new political database site today, lead by a top political blogger it snapped up this month from a leading new media site. Are these the types of steps that can help struggling newspapers thrive in the future? The Post could join the trailblazing efforts of organizations like the New York Times and the UK Guardian in making the newspaper of the future a database of public information, layered with analytic, visual and programmatic added value. That's what we have hopes for, but it's not clear yet that the Post knows what to do with its new site.
WhoRunsGov.com is the Post's new site where readers can learn background information about the new Obama administration, members of congress, prominent military officials and others who now "run government."
Google today released a new tool that will make learning and testing code for Google's Javascript APIs a lot easier. Google's interactive AJAX API Playground gives developers an easy to use interface to write some basic Javascript code for Google's eight Javascript APIs (Maps, Search, Feeds, Calendar, Visualization, Language, Blogger, Libraries, and Earth).
The API Playground will also become Google's official way to show Javascript samples.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica is about to open ups its articles to edits by its users. Jorge Cauz, Britannica's president, tells the SMH that readers will soon be able to make edits to existing articles and create their own content. These updates, however, will be vetted by Britannica's staff, which hopes to review every edit within 20 minutes.
Britannica is trying to a take a hybrid approach which combines Britannica's editorial expertise with Wikipedia's principles of transparency and openness.
Imagine you're at a concert where your favorite band is playing for the last time. Or you're watching President Obama get sworn into office. Or maybe you're just sitting around with your family under the Christmas tree watching your children open gifts. What are you doing in all those scenarios? If you're like most people today, you're probably recording it with some sort of technological gadgetry, be it a smartphone, digital camera, or camcorder. You might also be sharing the moment with others across the web via Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed.
FriendlyFavor, which was released today, does one thing, and it does it well: manage favors. The service lets you request favors from your friends, and offer favors to your friends. With FriendlyFavor, you can ask your friends for help with your move, or easily offer tickets to a basketball game to all your friends. FriendlyFavor then provides you with a dashboard that lets you manage the responses from your friends, which is a lot easier than trying to keep track of individual emails.
If you're into electronica, you've likely grabbed some sets from your favorite DJs. And while DJ sets are a great way to get fresh content from some of your favorite artists, they all suffer from one annoying drawback: a set is usually a single file devoid of any track information. What's more, it's usually a huge file spanning one or more hours. As such, listening to these cutting-edge digital sets becomes, ironically, a very traditional linear experience akin to listening to the radio. You don't know what you're listening to or what's coming next.
Mugasha, a new service focused on the world of electronic music, hopes to improve that listening experience by taking those long sets and parsing them into something you can use.
The BBC Music Beta project is an ongoing effort by the BBC to build semantically linked and annotated web pages about artists and singers whose songs are played on BBC radio stations. Within these pages, collections of data are enhanced and interconnected with semantic metadata, letting music fans explore connections between artists that they may have not known existed.
