SOMEWHAT FRANK

Google Sued, Microsoft Buys TellMe, AOL Local, Last.fm Video, Attention Economy Overload & TECH cocktail 4 Coming Soon

Photo of the Week: This is a photo I took in my old neighborhood in Lincoln Park in Chicago prior to moving on to AOL in Virginia. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.18.07

Viacom Drops a $1 Billion Nuke on Google
Remember when Napster was a lawsuit target for helping to foster pirated music? When Google acquired YouTube everyone wondered who would be the first company to try and collect on video copyright infringement in a similar fashion. We now know, as Viacom was the first to step to the plate with a one billion dollar lawsuit against Google. Complete.com offers some interesting analysis on the situation.

AOL moves AOL Local Search into Beta - it's very slick
CenterNetworks reviewed the latest beta to come out of AOL. AOL Local refreshes the local options as a user moves around a map. So start in 10036 (Times Square) and move to 11235 (Brooklyn) and the options move.

Microsoft to Acquire Tellme Networks
Tellme Networks, Inc., a leading provider of voice services for everyday life, including nationwide directory assistance, enterprise customer service and voice-enabled mobile search. Microsoft and Tellme share a vision around the potential of speech as a way to enable access to information, locate other people and enhance business processes, any time and from any device.

Last.fm Adds Video Tracking
The Register reported earlier this week that social music play, Last.fm has added the ability to not only track the music you play on iTunes and other services but now is going to start doing the same with video.

Report: New Bloggers Flatlined in 2005, Reading Climbs
Steve Rubel reports that according to the latest State of the News Media report, the share of the online population that tried blogging peaked back in January 2005 at 10% and has hovered since at 8%. Blog readership, on the other hand is climbing.

The Attention Economy is Killing My Attention
Nick O'Neill explains how the attention economy may be producing information overload. He wonders how product like twitter along with blogs will be able to co-exisit as people piling on attention commitments.

Del.icio.us Adds Tag Descriptions
Del.icio.us, the popular social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo, has added a new feature which enables users to for the first time not only tag items but also add meta-data to title and describe each tag.

Goplan launches!
Webreakstuff has launched a new product called Goplan which offers a suite of online project management and collaboration tools that could draw comparisons to 37signals' product line.

TECH cocktail 4: Going, Going, Gone
TECH cocktail 4, the forth event in the event series I co-founded with Eric Olson back in July 2006, is now on its fourth event and we filled a 500 person guest list in 23 hours. Wowsers! TECH cocktail 4 will be on April 12, 2007 at John Barleycorn Wrigleyville in Chicago but due to the overwhelming response we have started a TECH cocktail 4 wait-list for anyone still interested in going. I hope to see you there.
 

PureVideo Search: Aggregates & Categorizes Top 10 Online Videos

With online video such a hot medium in the web 2.0 landspace there are a crowd of video sites in the market. PureVideo Search, a video search engine, recently launched to try and assist in organizing the online video space. PureVideo Networks is Los Angeles based media and technology startup founded by Erik Hawkins and Greg Morrow. In addition, to the PureVideo Search they have also created StupidVideos.com and GrindTV. Erik recently was interviewed by Folkonomy and gave some insight into where he sees the entertainment and media industry 10 or 20 years from now:

"...I suppose we’ll see even more time shifting, more mobility, and a cleaner user experience. Collaborative filtering and user profiles/playlists should also advance quite a bit, so you should be able to access your media collection from anywhere, or discover new media suited to you easily. I’m not sure what devices we’ll be using, but I do think that most media playback devices will be IP based, so that you can interact with the content, and so that your usage can be tracked."

While video search is not a new idea with companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo already offering video search services, PureVideo Search is a meta search engine for video. This means that PureVideo Search combines crawling the web looking for items with a feed-based search index.  The PureVideo Search homepage presentation of categorized top 10 videos from around the web (i.e. YouTube, AOL Music, MSN, ESPN, CNN.com, etc.) could help to keep users coming back for more. The categories include "Music," "Sports," "Comedy," "Viral," "Entertainment," and "News."  Finally, PureVideo Search offers a widget that enables users to add a videos search results to a personal homepage, blog or other web site.

Bottom-line: While PureVideo Search offers some interesting features, it leaves room to improve its search functionality and add additional web 2.0 hooks. I expect it will - afterall it is currently just a beta product.