Yahoo! Podcasts adds vidcasts

Yahoo! Podcasts now supports feeds with video content, or vidcasts. You can add a video series to your personal subscriptions, tag a vidcast, as well as rate and review vidcasts. Videos can be played inside your browser window using either Windows Media 9, RealPlayer 10, or QuickTime 7 players configured through a Yahoo! cookie.

Eric Rice’s videoblog is one example listing. Even though the site now supports video all of the text and images on the site seemed focused on audio content. Audio content from the Yahoo! Podcast directory could be integrated with Yahoo! Music and hopefully vidcasts will make their way into the player soon.

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Pacific Digital WiFi picture frame with Windows Vista features

Pacific Digital wireless picture frame

Pacific Digital is also showing off a WiFi picture frame at CES in Las Vegas. The new MemoryFrame products will connect to Windows Vista PCs using Windows Media Connect, Windows Connect Now, and Vista’s integrated RSS features.

The picture frame can connect to other PCs on a home network using WiFi and display shared content. I could not find any pricing information but current 10.4″ wireless picture frames from Pacific Digital cost about $400.

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eStarling WiFi picture frame

eStarling WiFi picture frame

eStarling just released a picture frame with built-in WiFi that can receive photographs from any RSS feed or POP e-mail account. You configure the device once using a USB connection and it will automatically update itself over a 802.11b wireless network (even with WEP encryption). Pictures formatted in JPEG or bitmap format are displayed on a 5.6″ LCD.

You could subscribe to a specific tag on Flickr or send e-mails from your cell phone to a special e-mail address such as a free Gmail account. I would love to give one of these to my mom and have it automatically update with pictures from family members around the world.

The picture frame costs $250 and is currently available through ThinkGeek.

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Atom-formatted resume and podcast

Atom feed syndication logo

Last weekend I decided to break free of the standard boring job résumé or CV and express my job history in the Atom syndication format complete with audio enclosures. Syndication geeks may appreciate the implementation details.

I used the published and updated dates to represent my start and end dates. My first day on the job seems like a good match for the published element’s intended use as the “time of the initial creation or first availability” and my last day on the job is the last time the entry was “modified in a significant way” or updated. Since updated is a required entry element and I am currently employed at Technorati the time of my job’s initial creation and last significant modification are the same and my most recent entry contains identical values for published and created

I used link relationships of “related” to specify further reading material such as a more in-depth text version of my résumé or my blog homepage. I created categories to match keyword searches or job classifications by an aggregator.

I much prefer a conversation to a set of bullet points so I decided to spice up the podcast with some audio content summarizing my responsibilities and accomplishments at various companies. All summaries are less than two minutes and correlate with the extended version of my résumé. I added iTunes duration to indicate the length of each podcast.

A final step was the addition of geographical coordinates for location-based searches.

Job aggregation sites may be able to used standardized formats such as Atom to make job listings and work history available to a larger set of users. I just did it for fun as a way for the résumé format to be a little less dull.

TailRank API for blogosphere snapshots

Blog zeitgeist tool TailRank is opening up its parsed feed update stream to third-party developers through a new feed delta API. Developers can request the latest 100 posts discovered and parsed by TailRank’s spiders.

The API is a good way to capture a snapshot of the most active and highly linked blogs written in English at any one time. Past research and development projects have seeded their data sets from Weblogs.com and perhaps TailRank can be a new source of information for newcomers to analyze the blogosphere in different ways. API keys will be available at no cost for non-profits and educational work and under license to commercial organizations.

TailRank lead developer Kevin Burton also maintains Apache’s Jakarta FeedParser project, a Java library that helps make sense out of the various feed formats and namespaces on the web today.

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Emerging video trends podcast

Om and I sat down this week to discuss the current and future state of video creation and distribution technologies. We both expect many video-related announcements from this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that will bring a wider variety of video consumption products into the living room. We also talked about new ways for amateurs to create and share videos online and using specialized portable hardware such as the iPod video.

I don’t think any search company currently is doing a good job indexing video content. Even audio content has been a big challenge. Closed-captioning provides a bridge to video indexing from the text-based search engines of today but Yahoo!’s Media RSS approach to video search reminds me of the days when search engines trusted meta keywords and description values as fairly accurate representations of a page’s content. We may still lack the proper computing power to properly index audio and analyze frames of video.

We also discussed the popularity of sites such as YouTube fueled by the distribution of what may be copyrighted and illegal material. Will content providers start to crack down on these advertising supported websites? How can video hosting startups compete when I know my content is more stable hosted by an established industry player such as Google with its Google Video product?

This week’s podsession on emerging video trends is 21 minutes and 46 seconds in length and a 10 MB download.

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Google at CES

Larry Page

Google co-founder Larry Page is a keynote speaker at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. The Los Angeles Times reports that Google has been in talks with large retail stores such as Wal-Mart to carry a computing device called the “Google Cube” running a Google customized operating system and applications. Page was a late addition to the keynote roster, so Google might actually be ready to announce something. This week will be full of announcements for sure.

Update 1/03: News.com reports both Google and Wal-Mart denied the rumor. Google issued a statement saying “we see no need to enter that market.”

Update 1/04: Om Malik heard from “a reliable source” that Google will announce a new and improved Google video and perhaps a video distribution deal.

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Mac small business dinner January 11 in San Francisco

Macintosh Small Business group

I am organizing a dinner for Mac small business owners and developers on Wednesday, January 11, at Chaat Cafe in San Francisco starting at 7 p.m. I want to bring together the small businesses attending the conference for face-to-face discussion and sharing of ideas among other people who have probably used your software and read your blog but might have never met face-to-face. I enjoyed the lunch meeting during this year’s WWDC and want to keep the conversation flowing.

Chaat Cafe is located at 320 3rd Street (corner of 3rd and Folsom) in downtown San Francisco, one block from Macworld and the Moscone conference center. They have free WiFi, so bring your laptop to show off your latest creations to everyone. You will order food and drink individually with an individual bill ($10 or so), so there are no billing hassles! The restaurant can hold about 75 people, leaving enough room for people to break into small group discussions.

Anyone is welcome to come join us. People with some expertise in small business services are especially encouraged as there are generally many questions raised and good knowledge sharing.

I’d love to have some freebies to give away to help out some new development projects and small businesses trying to get started. Invoicing, blog hosting, legal advice, Cocoa book, that sort of thing. If you offer some small business services and would like to help get a new business off the ground please contact me.

Marissa Mayer on OneBox

John Battelle had conversation with Google’s Marissa Mayer this morning about the affect of the deal between Google and AOL on Google’s search results. John posted a loose transcript of the conversation, but what interested me most was the discussion around OneBox results on Google’s search result pages.

What we normally do on the OneBox, like on our stocks page or travel, where we have links to a few providers, we look at Media Metrix or PageRank data, and generally they agree and corroborate themselves (as to) who are the top three or five providers. And those are who we generally look to include. We make sure to look at the overall user experience – you know do these people have a good page for us to click through to? So with the travel providers what we were looking for is do you get a results page that shows you flights? … We looked at who was willing to provide us a page that was suitable and accessible

It’s good corp-speak but I don’t think it’s the truth. I view a Google OneBox result with links to third parties as an intermediate step for Google to learn more about that traffic flow before introducing their own hosted service. Answers.com led to the define operator and related results pages based on Google crawl data. I expect Google will integrate travel search with Froogle and eventually introduce financial services tracking if only because Googlers want to spend some of their 20% time creating better ways to track their financial portfolio.

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Paid placements over broadband pipes

The latest of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week Om and I talk about the emergence of paid placement or prioritization of services on networks run by broadband providers such as your cable or telephone company.

Cable and phone operators currently prioritize the handling of data packets from their own services flowing across the network. A call placed using a carrier’s Internet telephony product will receive priority handling ahead of calls placed using competing services such as Skype or Vonage. The carriers are now in discussion with other businesses dependent on fast delivery of their content to include similar service prioritization for a fee. Microsoft might be willing to pay Comcast for a trip to the front of the pipeline for its live conferencing or gaming products. Yahoo! might pay SBC to have its pages returned faster than Google. These prioritized services will appear to be better performers for customers and lead to better experiences and sales.

This week’s podcast is titled “Towards a two-tier Internet” and available as both a podcast and a full transcript. The podcast audio file is 23 minutes and 14 seconds in length, a 10.8 MB download.

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