Niall Kennedy's home on the web
In this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions we discussed the current state of online privacy and the options presented to users with their choice of product and features. Do users pay any attention to EULAs? Does anyone realize what data is being stored about them online and shared with advertisers and potentially governments?
This week’s podsession, Online privacy: who’s watching you?, is 29 minutes long and a 13 MB download.
MSN Search is giving away prizes to searchers who pay close attention to ads in its search results. If you see a sponsored link with the words “MSN Search & Win” and click on the ad you may have won a new snowboard or maid service.
A pretty clever way to get users to pay more attention to ads in search results. Users may change their search behavior to try and trigger a prize response for sponsors such as Bugaboo, Crate and Barrel, and Design within Reach, an average $2.50 CPC on Google AdWords.
I’ve been digging into a few new areas of interest over the past few months I feel still need improvement in search, discovery and tracking. I’ve spoken about most of these topics in my podcast series with Om, but it’s worth mentioning again in text. I’m interested in continuing my work in these areas and perhaps helping to solve some existing problems.
We have RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0, the world is starting to understand how syndicated content makes sense, but I don’t see a lot of future thinking for handling multiple locations, personas, and personalized content. Advertising is a whole separate issue that’s less interesting to me but pays the bills.
Syndication is becoming a content pipeline, delivering updated blog posts to your favorite aggregator, updating your TiVo with new videos and photographs, and publishing the latest advertisements from ad publishers to client websites. Photos, videos, and music over syndicated feeds still have a lot of room for improvement before they can be turned on as content channels on anything from mobile devices to a home media center with full synchronization and recommendation abilities.
Many people pronounce feed aggregators as dead commodities but I disagree. New users don’t know what they are looking for, what to do with a feed once they’ve found it, and honestly it should all just seem like behind-the-scenes magic. There will be applications released in 2006 to help focus your attention, visit sites related to the item you are currently browsing, and adding channels to your desktop will be hip once again.
I’ve been poking at various aggregators discovering my favorite features, new ways of presenting data, and I have a few ideas on how to change the space.
Think the vertical search game is over? While Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft fight it out to become the default search engine of Internet users small companies can meet niche interests and make some good money in the process.
Blogging using text is just the beginning. Look for more people lip synching to Backstreet Boys from their home computer, sending audio blasts to friends, and sharing pictures and other content from their everyday lives. These multimedia types are not well indexed at the moment and I think the industry is still catching up.
Social search and personalization will shake things up once we have the computational horsepower to handle these advanced queries and better encouragement and assurances for people handing over personal data.
There is a lot more to discuss but I am on my way to a social computing event at the Computer History Museum to listen to Erik Fair, Randy Farmer, Reid Hoffman, Mena Trott, and Kara Swisher talk about the future of social interaction online.
I am leaving Technorati to pursue new opportunities. I submitted my resignation letter this morning and I will be a free agent on March 1. I joined Technorati in February 2005 excited about changing the world of weblogs and introducing people to a new kind of search. Almost a year later my passions at work have eroded and it’s time to find new horizons. Valentines Day is the perfect time to rekindle lost flames.
The company has accomplished a lot in the past year, emerging from what many people viewed as a commodity space into a market leader. The Alexa graph above shows a steady growth trend since I joined a little over a year ago. According to Hitwise Technorati had about 60% more unique visitors in December than Google Blog Search.
I had the chance to lead two anti-spam summits and bring together industry heavyweights that had never before met face-to-face. Bloggers are now featured alongside news stories in The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Dateline NBC. It’s a lot easier to find content of interest on Technorati thanks to a site overhaul and redesign and new features such as Blog Finder to help pinpoint your personal topics of interest. The blogosphere and search has changed a lot over the past year and taken its place as a viable publishing medium.
So what’s next? I remain excited about blogs, user generated content, feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.), search, and other emerging technologies that allow individuals to find and create the things they care about. I am open to new full-time employment and consulting work to apply my passions to new products. Check out my resume in HTML or in Atom podcast format for more information about my work history. Contact me to talk shop, brainstorm, and possibly work together.
I’ll be busy working on new projects to make my favorite Web technologies accessible to more people more often. I have a few consulting gigs lined up, a few ideas that may turn into startups, and I’m also talking to a few companies about how we might work together. Stay tuned for more interesting things in the weeks ahead. I plan to attend ETech next month to talk about some of the more interesting things I’ve been working on. I’m excited about the future and new possibilities over the next horizon.
Odeo introduced some new features last week including extended profiles and the ability to send any Odeo member an audio message. I’ve been asking Ev for audio comments for a few months and I’m glad it’s finally here!
Anyone with a Flash player can send an audio message to an Odeo member. You can add a special button to your podcast site and instantly collect audio comments for each episode. Choose from over 20 pre-made buttons to include on your site and you can enable audio comments in minutes. I added a “Send me an Odeo” button to my contact page and my podcast site.
Do you use Movable Type and want to submit forms using an image? You’ll need to edit your Movable Type installation to work around a 4 year-old bug.
Movable Type is listening for the “post” or “preview” parameter but if you use an image as a submit button these parameters have x and y values corresponding to your mouse click. You need to teach Movable Type how to listen for these different parameters before your comments will work.
if ($q->param('post') || $q->param('post.x')) {
$app->mode('post');
} elsif ($q->param('preview') || $q->param('preview.x')) {
$app->mode('preview');
}You can now use image submit buttons for your Movable Type comments.
I spent a little time today playing with Ma.gnolia, a new social bookmarking site currently in beta. Ma.gnolia was built in San Francisco by Larry Halff using Ruby on Rails and some design help from Jeffrey Zeldman and Happy Cog Studios.
Ma.gnolia includes standard bookmarking features such as a title, a description, and some tags but the application does a good job of connecting those bookmarks to other groups of users with similar interest. You can browse groups to find like-minded users and subscribe to a group pool of interesting links.
Groups allow members to stay involved even if they never add their own bookmarks. Ma.gnolia allows you to mark personal bookmarks as public or private, share with a friend, or share with a group. Groups can be moderated or open to the public. Every member can rate a bookmark on a scale of 1 to 5 to easily sort through favorites of favorites.
The rich data of groups, ratings, personal connections allows Ma.gnolia to build search relevancy tools to help people find what they may be most interested in among thousands of results. Find what you want and look good doing it.
Om and I discussed the latest startup companies that caught our interest in our latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions. We talked about some companies presenting at the DEMO conference as well as companies who are bootstrapping to deliver an interesting new product with a different approach.
The startup round-up podsession is 22 minutes in length, a 10 MB download. A full transcript is also available.
Google employees confirmed in person today plans for local advertisements within Google Maps, including their Web APIs. Google will overlay blue markers on the map to highlight local business advertisements directly within the graphical search result. A corporate logo and advertising message will be displayed inside of marker info windows complete with a paid link. API developers will have the option to display the ads or to signup for a commercial relationship with Google.
Combining local search targeting with graphical ads should yield extremely high payouts for Google. Google is currently paying data fees for maps used in a variety of mashups and I was glad to hear the company has some plans to monetize the experience. Google has just started a new developer relations group to interface with outside developers using maps and other APIs in their applications so I expect improved future communications.
The Google blue marker experience was previously spotted and reported by sites such as ClickZ a few weeks ago when Google first started testing the idea but no one at Google would confirm their plans at the time.
I had lunch today with the Google Reader team and learned a bit more about the group, their success and challenges, and how new projects at Google are sometimes formed. This is the story of how a side-project intended for someone’s blog became a feed aggregator integrated into one of the largest Web properties in the world.
It all started with a love of blogging. Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell were both members of the Blogger team and working on different ways to trick out their personal blogs. Jason kept various blogs including a link blog and wanted a way to integrate feed content from these blogs on his sidebar. Chris helped out with some JavaScript parsing and the first mini-aggregator was born.
Meanwhile, at the Googleplex, a few other engineers were using some of their 20% time to create their own mini-aggregators and think of new ways of applying concepts such as relevance, social software, and media-specific browsing such as images and video to the emerging world of feeds. Google has an internal mailing list used to discuss the latest trends and interests in the aggregation space, and a few of these ideas cross-populated between groups and a few hopeful projects were identified.
What was once a side-project and an exploration was soon encouraged to be released as a product. A small group of five people came together and started working on Google Reader full-time. The feature list for the team’s initial launch at the Web 2.0 conference in October was chosen, scaled back, and scaled back some more before its initial release four months ago. The team is still growing and adding new features including a public Google Reader API to allow other developers to create and extend applications on top of the Google feed ecosystem.
They’re just getting started and I expect some interesting announcements in the coming month.