Digg, which has spent four years trying to level the playing field and democratize media, will soon receive a facelift. According to Kevin Rose, Digg's founder and chief architect, the site, which hasn't changed much since its inception, will be putting a "stake in the ground this year and making some big changes."
Speaking to the Ad:Tech audience in San Francisco today, Rose talked about Digg's future saying ads need to be more interactive, print can't be saved, online publishers are in an incredible position and the importance of power users may be underestimated.
Update: Digg starts rolliing out its own ads
WordPress, on their official blog, made a short announcement that Wordpress.com blog owners could now enable reply by email support for comments made to their blog. With a couple of simple configuration changes, blog owners can get the convenience of being able to directly reply to new comments via their preferred email address instead of through the Wordpress admin interface.
Yahoo has announced that its website creation service GeoCities, which it acquired for $4.5 billion in 1999, will close later this year. Existing customers are being encouraged to "upgrade" to Yahoo! Web Hosting, which offers a site-building service and a personalized web address. The closing of GeoCities is the end of an era. Last June, we profiled the rise of "GeoCities 2.0" services, i.e. website creation tools for the Social Web. Many of them will attempt to pick up GeoCities' customers. Although, as Yahoo! itself indicated in its closure message, website building is mostly a 'feature' nowadays rather than a separate product. So, is this a viable business now for the likes of Weebly and Yola?
Unless you lived in an exceptionally dark cave in the last two weeks, you probably weren't able to escape the Susan Boyle phenomenon. According to some metrics, over 100 million people have watched the immaculately edited video of the 'frumpy' 47-year-old's performance on Britain's Got Talent (BGT) by now. While this is most definitely an interesting cultural phenomenon, the Times today also reports that neither ITV, the network that shows BGT, nor YouTube have really been able to directly profit from this huge hit because the network and YouTube have been arguing about the terms of their advertising agreement.
In a new report, Nielsen Online takes a closer look at how social media and video sites have reshaped the web and the online advertising market over the last few years, especially in the context of the current economic crisis. According to Nielsen, since 2003, the time spent on video sites has increased by over 2,000%, and the number of Americans who visit online video sites like YouTube and Hulu has climbed 339% over the same time period.
With regards to the economy, a number of sectors, including retail, and the auto and financial services industries, have obviously made dramatic cuts to their online spending. On the other hand, the pharmaceutical industry is actually spending more on online ads today.
Google announced this morning that Google Product Search is now tightly integrated with mobile search results on the iPhone and Android. The new interface should make it easier to find price comparisons and customer reviews while on the go.
I'm not a big shopper but I have struggled while standing in stores to find product reviews on my phone for tennis racquets, vacuum cleaners and power tools within recent memory. Natural search results and Amazon listings only worked so well. Unfortunately, a lot of shopping searches I tried this morning didn't have Product Search results. When they are available, they are pretty good though.
Yesterday, Google made a major change to the search results page that appears when you search for a person's name. Google Profiles, for people who have set them up, now appear on those pages. Today, Google opened a discussion about Google Profiles and called for voting on ideas about what they include.
Profile options are already being changed in response to popular requests; a new section of contact information that you can expose only to selected groups of people has just been added, for example. This opportunity to influence how Google describes you via your profile could be a very important one, and it's worth your while to take a look at the discussion and cast some votes for and against ideas. As we write this, only 600 people have so far.
After delivering her report to President Obama last Friday, Melissa Hathaway, the Acting Senior Director for Cybersecurity for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils, today gave RSA Conference attendees in San Francisco a glimpse - what she called a "movie trailer" - into the state of U.S cybersecurity.
According to Hathaway's 60 second trailer, the key to a cyber secure future lies in cooperation between the public and private sector and a united effort on both a hyperlocal front as well as globally.
Any good webmaster knows the cardinal rules of website optimization. Yahoo! wrote them all up years ago on its Developer Network site. And the more of these rules you can adhere to, the faster your site will load for your visitors. But, more and more often as sites turn to using asynchronous technologies like AJAX to make their sites more responsive and act more like applications, the old rules lose their effectiveness.
Today, the website wizards behind Digg have revealed a new technology called MXHR, or Multi-Part XML HTTP Requests, as a method for optimizing delivery of Digg's complex AJAX-enhanced site. The implementation of MXHR is an addition to Digg's User Interface Library, called DUI.Stream. While still in a fairly rough early stage, Digg believes that MXHR will eventually give it a huge boost in un-cached page rendering efficiency.
Tweetmeme, a memetracker that tracks popular retweets on Twitter, just launched a real-time version of its service that displays tweets that are currently in heavy rotation on the popular microblogging service. In order to filter this constant stream of messages, Tweetmeme users can choose to only see messages that have been retweeted at least twice, though the default setting is for five retweets and can go up to twenty.
