SOMEWHAT FRANK

Topix Unveils New Design, Search Feature

Topix.net, the news and blog content aggregator, has launched a new fresh design for the layout of its homepage. The design includes a new logo as well as a new layout for the page. The old design is shown below on the left and the new design is shown further below.

In addition to a layout upgrade Topix.net has also released a very interesting historic search sliders that can be accessed by doing a search in the top search box. It appears Topix has been in contact with search guru, Danny Sullivan about the updates and wanted to get them out in time for the Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose. The new slider presents the live web search results for over 1 year. It reminds me of the slider that blog search engine Sphere currently uses to sift through blog search result by date.

These changes come on the heels of the Inform.com deal I highlighted last week. Bottomline: Topix.net offers a more esthetically pleasing product than Inform.com and the redesign amplifies that point.

MOG: Social Networking Through Music

MOG is a social networking site for the music enthusiast. It connects music lovers with the similar musical tastes with new music and other users. With music as the focus, MOG users can customize a personal page similar to the way TagWorld or MySpace offers personal pages.

MOG allows users to select between automated and manually filled content widgets which can be easily selected and positioned to customize a personal page. The automated widgets include items that are driven by your contacts in the network while others sync up with a desktop application called MOG-O-MATIC. MOG-O-MATIC can be installed to keep track of which music you have been listening to on your iPod or desktop and automatically publish it to your music site. At first, I was a little leery that MOG-O-MATIC might be some sort of adware or spyware but after reading additional details from the MOG site I decided to have some faith in the application. I  was pleased to see the configuration controls that are in place to control MOG-O-MATIC. It forces a user to control the configure by selecting where the application should search the system for music thus eliminating my initial privacy concerns.

I set-up a MOG page here. The site produces RSS feeds for the MOG post which are basically blog posts and for the vital signs section of the site. The MOG-O-MATIC widget which should update as I listen to various tracks via my iPod and displays it on the page and in a widget that can be placed on another site in the rail like one shown above.

In summary, MOG connects people through music. Its most interesting feature is the MOG-O-MATIC application that tracks music that is played on you iPod and desktop and repositions it on your personal page, MySpace account or blog. I am not really sure how MOG's tagline, "Because the web mostly sucks" relates to the social network unless it is a snarky way of saying MOG is better than the rest of the web. Nonetheless, music lovers should check MOG out.

FeedBurner Network: Aggregating Feeds

FeedBurner, the Chicago-based feed management and advertising company, is looking to get into organizing blog feeds with a project called the FeedBurner Network. The FeedBurner Network looks to better organize similar blogs into categories. Check out a "Venture Capital" feed example here. In organizing the long tail of blogs into categories FeedBurner could then target advertisements into each of the channels. The idea sounds interesting and draws some comparisons to BlogBeat produced by Pluck and Squidoo. Brad Feld, a FeedBurner investor, recently explained the way the network would work:

"A FeedBurner Network is managed by a coordinator.  At this stage the coordinator is the gatekeeper for the network, although it will evolve so that all members of a network can promote other potential members. As a result, the content is "filtered and selected" by the network coordinator (and ultimately members) so that there aren't "fake" Venture Capital blogs as part of the network.  The result should be a higher quality network and a quick and easy way to find “Venture Capital bloggers.”"

TechCrunch also recently wondered:

"The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic."

There are a few products already trying to organizing and categorizing blogs online. Technorati, blog search engine, currently leaves the categorization of blogs up to the users while Sphere, another blog search engine, takes an algorithmic approach. It sounds like FeedBurner, who handles just about everyones feeds, will use its feeds to manually identify and organize the blogosphere. Hmm, organizing the worlds information, that sounds like a familiar mission. I don't see FeedBurner manually organizing the entire blogosphere since it is so huge and growing larger everyday but I can see benefits for offering bundles of like feeds to advertisers and potentially other publishers for syndication.

AOL Video Portal Launched

AOL Video has launched, as promised in my previous post, and it looks great! The video portal ties together a number of on-demand channels and viral web video - loads of video content.

The on-demand section is pretty amazing as it offers videos from a blend of partners which include A&E, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, VH1, Expo TV and more. You can see some of the channels here. Some video content is free while other videos like the David Cappelle Show episodes are premium priced starting at $1.99.

The viral video sections are also very interesting as they repositions viral video from existing AOL properties as well as ask for user contributed video content. A "hot list" of the most popular videos is displayed on the homepage and is shown to the right.

The site includes a solid video search which is powered by  Truveo and SingingFish, two companies AOL acquired. The search allows you to sort results by different categories like sports, music, movies, news and television for getting through results more easily.

In summary, AOL Video offers an impressive hybrid blend of video content from a number of different sources which could give Google Video and YouTube a run for the money in the space.

Flickr Tying Tagging to Local Maps?

Flickr may be offering a new geotagging feature soon which could allow users to be tagged based on geography. This feature is said to combine mapping with the drag and drop of photos which could help to combine Yahoo Local and Flickr. There is a screen shot here.

I am a big Flickr fan as I mentioned previously. I have been thinking that the ability to make photos search-able by location would be a pretty sweet feature adding another way to rifle through the countless Flickr photos of people, places and things.  Additionally, it might be interesting to be able to search on people's profiles. For example, I wanted to find all the Chicago photographers on Flickr it is currently a daunting task. I hope the Flickr "map" tab is more than just a rumor and maybe down the road Flickr will add the profile search too.

The Hurricane Blog Debacle

The Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog, a blog which was created by the Weblogs Works team, recently was temporarily shut down by Weblogs Works. Just to bring you up to speed:

"Brian Oberkirch became a national figure last year when he covered the Hurricane Katrina disasater real time on his blog, slidell.weblogswork.com. The blog was linked to heavily by bloggers and news sites looking for the latest news on what was happening. Doc Searls linked over and over, and  Jeff Jarvis, Fred Wilson, Tom Evslin, Business Week, The Washington Post and others also linked."

The site was taken down which caused many blogs and mainstream media articles to have broken links and in essence break the "live web." Brian recently parted ways with Weblogs Work and Alex Muse and the company shut down the hurricane blog due to an apparent spam comment problem. Thankfully, after a blogosphere debated the masses appeared to prevail and Weblogs Work brought the site back up. Ah, another conversation filled day in the blogosphere showing us once again the power of the online community.  The moral of the story: don't break the web!

CrunchBoard: Find a Job in the Valley

CrunchBoard, an online job site for techie and web jobs, was launched today (August 3, 2006). CrunchBoard is another piece to the TechCrunch suite of site which is now being called the Crunch Network. The goal of the site is to:

"Our goal with CrunchBoard is to build the ultimate web insiders network."

There are a number of job sites (CareerBuilder, Monster.com, HotJobs & Dice.com) and job boards (Good Experience & 37signals) but with CrunchBoard the focus is on offering the Silicon Valley area filled with web 2.0 technophile employers a place post job listings for $200 for 30 days. The site will be linked to all of the Crunch Network sites which includes: TechCrunch, MobileCrunch, CrunchNotes and TalkCrunch. The board should help to link TechCrunch readers to a sweet new gig!

The Search King: Danny Sullivan

Search guru and Search Engine Watch Editor, Danny Sullivan was highlighted recently (August 1, 2006) by the USA Today in an article in which he was praised by both Matt Cutts and Tim Mayer, Google and Yahoo top search authorities respectively.

I would have to agree with them, Danny knows his stuff. I listen to his podcast just about every morning on the way to work and enjoy Danny's energy, humor and creative delivery which makes a sometimes boring commute fly by. Congrats - keep up the great work!

Apartments.com Design Gets Spruced Up

Apartments.com, the national apartments web site owned by Chicago-based Classified Ventures, launched a spruced up design last night (August 1, 2006).  The new design is fresh and clean and should result in a better user experience. Check it out for yourself below:

                 New Homepage                            Old Homepage

The design was done by our fabulous and speedy designer Sam Gonzalez. As the product manager for Apartments.com, I led the effort I am pleased to have the new look out there for the organization, property management customers and users alike.

Yodel Anecdotal: Yahoo! Corporate Blog

Yahoo! under the guidance of summer intern Paul Stamatiou has launched Yodel Anecdotal a blog focused on capturing the Yahoo culture and exposing it to the blogosphere. I think it is great to see a large corporation like Yahoo create a blog just to showcase its culture. The blog is very simple and pleasing to the eye. It is great to see it uses Mint, FeedBurner and Flickr.

It sounds like Paul got some great experience and helped influence the blogging experience at Yahoo! Paul is a talented individual so I hate to say it but the project reminds me of my Gaping Void coffee mug.  For the amount of work that Paul did, I wonder why Yahoo! did not hire Paul part-time or as a blog consultant?

FeedBurner Users To Podcast For Company

FeedBurner, the Chicago-based feeds management company, released its second podcast after producing its first back in 2005. Feed Burner handles 61,819 pod cast and video casts for 3,744,215 subscribers so I can only imagine the break between casts was due in part to managing all those feeds. FeedBurner has also announced it will be employing a new customer-sponsored and produced podcast format for the podcast. Empowering to the people is so web 2.0 - I like it!

The second podcast was produced by David Lawrence and featured Rick Klau of FeedBurner. They discussed podcast support for iTunes, the recent TypePad integration and the Blogbeat acquisition among other things.

FeedBurner also mentioned that the company podcast will be released more frequently so I look forward the next cast as I am curious to hear who will be involved in producing it.

Craigslist Worth $2.4 Billion?

A case study by Startup Review, a blog recently started by Nisan Gabbay of Sierra Ventures, has estimated that Craigslist is worth $2.4 billion. The estimate takes Craigslist's business model into consideration and weighs it along side eBay which could be the perfect company to buy Craigslist - especially since eBay already owns 25 percent. Somehow though, I don't think Craig Newmark is quite ready to sell the rest off to eBay quite yet or he would have already. It does make for interesting conversation though, as companies like YouTube and Facebook swirl in acquisition rumors with price-tags in the billions.

Read/Write Web, pointed me to the report - thanks Richard.

Google Paying for News Content?

Google News is paying some of its content providers, according to recent post by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Watch which points to this article on Google Blogoscoped. In a world where Google's mission is to organize all of the world's information, apparently they thinks some information is worth paying for. Paid content - very interesting! 

What Screen Size Should You Design For?

This is the question that, usability guru, Jakob Nielsen tried to answer in his most recent article. While Jakob admitted that the answer to was not clear he did give a few points which make it a bit more clear:

• Optimize for 1024x768, which is currently the most widely used screen size. Of course, the general guideline is to optimize for your target audience's most common resolution, so the size will change in the future. It might even be a different size now, if, say, you're designing an intranet for a company that gives all employees big monitors.
• Do not design solely for a specific monitor size because screen sizes vary among users. Window size variability is even greater, since users don't always maximize their browsers (especially if they have large screens).
• Use a liquid layout that stretches to the current user's window size (that is, avoid frozen layouts that are always the same size).

Jakob rallying behind a "liquid layout" which changes based on the window size of a user which was very much in line Clickstream study last week which had this to say about screen resolution:

"Although all survey participants used a screen resolution of at least 1024 by 768 pixels, most did not utilize their entire screen for browser windows. Smaller windows, toolbars, and other widgets left users with about 160 horizontal pixels and 170 vertical pixels unused. For 1024 by 768 screen users, the average available document width was about 890 pixels... "

In summary, the research shows that a liquid layout optimized for 890 pixels is the optimal design for todays changing web 2.0.

Inform Offers Autolinking Aggregator

Inform was spotlighted recently (July 31, 2006) for its latest offering, a product that automatically adds related content links into the body of an article. This could be a very interesting time saver for content producers. You can see an example of the product in action here on the NewsOK.com website. If you go through the article an click on the links you will be presented with a new page filled with additional items. For more on Inform.com's publisher services visit there web site here.

How are they doing it? Most likely, with a slick algorithm to cluster related articles and some search and replace functionality to implant the links. I think the product has some value for larger sized media companies. I could also see a couple of my favorite news aggregators, Topix.net and techmeme.com offering similar services.