Personal Broadcasting

A new photo sharing service is coming online soon. I know, with Flickr being so popular do we really need another site out there? Well looks like Flickr is a couple steps behind this new service called Slide, sounds pretty interesting:

From Business 2.0 Blog: Instead of just being a Website, Slide is an application you download to your computer. It indexes all of your photos, and then lets you publish albums so that other Slide users can see them, as well as lets you subscribe to albums that other users publish.

Really like the idea of being able to set up RSS feeds of your photos (and video) so that people can subscribe to updates. The only drawback may be that it is a desktop app - then again Picasa is pretty good, so we'll see. The service is in beta right now and you need to be invited. I sent an email to inviteme@slide.com, hopefully they'll let me try it out.

The term “personal broadcasting” seems to be trademarked on the site. What a great term. Makes me think of my earlier post about where the web is headed. Personal, relevant content being distributed and consumed. Great to see this trend continue on.

New Video Search Engine

I just came across this and thought it was interesting: www.blinkx.tv

From the site:
blinkx.tv allows you to search the web for video and audio clips. Unlike other search providers, blinkx.tv not only lets you search using standard keyword and Boolean queries but you can also use conceptual search. This type of search is provided by blinkx only, and allows you to enter normal text for which blinkx.tv will return results whose content is conceptually similar to your search text.

Give it a try, let me know what you think.

Google Vs. Yahoo

It’s great to see Yahoo and Google battle it out on who can build and release more cool stuff into the market. At http://next.yahoo.com/ we see a bunch of new tools related to blogging, podcasts and social computing. While over at http://labs.google.com/ they have all things search related, but with one very cool addition – the next step from Google maps - yes, Google Earth. http://earth.google.com/

I installed this when it was still “Keyhole systems”, but it looks like Google has certainly expanded on the original product. You can see all the top examples here.

Speaking of Google, seems that with incredible success comes increased risk. You may have heard over the last little while about an article on CNET that talked about Google’s immense collection of personal data – and what is truly at risk if someone gained access to it.

If search history, e-mail and registration information were combined, a company could see intimate details about a person's health, sex life, religion, financial status and buying preferences.

It's "data that's practically a printout of what's going on in your brain: What you are thinking of buying, who you talk to, what you talk about," Bankston said. "It is an unprecedented amount of personal information, and these third parties (such as Google) have carte blanche control over that information."

Seems that Google is taking their time responding to this article….

Google could not be immediately reached for comment. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)

But what about Yahoo? Considering the size and maturity of Yahoo’s long list of personal services - wouldn’t they be a bigger threat to privacy than Google is? Probably…but Google is still a sexier target…at least for now.

The real impact of RSS

I was reading Alex Barnett's blog about an article that he read on CNet about the "RSS Effect".

Bill Flitter, writes:

RSS, like other time-shift technologies such as TiVo, will change the way traditional media consumers interact with their content. When people get an RSS feed, they need not go through standard Web site navigation patterns that we are accustomed to tracking. They look at just what they want, when they want.

While this is great for the consumer, it can be detrimental to publishers that have heretofore ignored the impact of RSS. Suddenly content that used to take a few clicks to get to on a Web site--providing ample room for profitable ads to appear--can be accessed in one page view, sans the ads. That's a huge change that most publishers have yet to grasp.

Smart publishers need to wake up and smell the RSS coffee because it's not just a flavor-of-the-day trend for bloggers. RSS is a permanent and fundamental change in the way content is delivered and experienced online. If they don't watch out, their Web sites just might die along with the traditional viewership model.

Welcome to the age of consumer-controlled media.