It's been a while since we looked at Livestation, a video player that allows you to watch live streams of TV channels, with a heavy emphasis on news programming. While the channel selection was rather limited in February, there are now over a thousand channels to choose form, thanks to user submitted links to channels that stream live TV signals. Most are still news related, but there are also a handful of channels of music and other genres.
Another major change is that Livestation is now cross-platform. There are Windows, Mac, and Linux clients available. The Linux version works best on PCs with NVIDIA graphics cards, while the OS X version should run on any Mac with an Intel processor. The Windows version also no longer requires Silverlight to be installed.
The user interface has also been tweaked, making it simpler to search through the long list of channels or flip between channel presets. If the video window looks small in the screenshot, all you have to do is double click on any video to watch in full screen.
While Hulu, Joost, and other online video sites are focusing on offering video on demand, Livestation provides a decent way to watch live programming. And there are two things that most people would rather watch live than pre-recorded, news and sports. Since there's a lot more money involved in getting broadcast and webcast rights for live sporting events, I doubt we'll be seeing ESPN or similar channels on Livestation any time soon. But if you want to catch the latest BBC, CNN, or Bloomberg news, Livestation's got you covered.
News buffs will want to bookmark MediaScrape.com, a Canadian site that aggregates video news reports from a host of international sources.
Feeds from AP, Reuters, BBC News, CBC Television (Canada), ANI (Asian News), and many others are available for viewing. Since MediaScrape is all about news for the visually inclined, there's also a Google map view that geotags videos. Clicking a marker on the map pops up a thumbnail and link to the video.
Video transcripts are also available, a welcome feature for writers needing to reference a report. Registering gives users the ability to customize MediaScrape's feeds to include only their preferred networks, regions, and topics.
One thing I found a bit bothersome was the proliferation of Adsense ads. Video pages display two text blocks, and the video itself gets an ad overlay - you can close it, but it's an annoyance nonetheless.
Still, there's a ton of great news content to view and most of you are probably running Firefox and adblock anyway. If not, sites like this may convince you to install it.
Thanks to the popularity of microblogging and status sites like Twitter, Identi.ca, Pownce, and Plurk, we're being given to more information faster than ever before. The Pope's recent visit to New York prompted an incredible number of updates - as many as 800 tweets a minute. So how do you find important, relevant content amongst the constant flow of updates?
You find a great tool to do it for you, that's how.
NowPublic's Scan offers an incredible new way to look at what's happening right now by tapping in to data from the aforementioned sites, geocoding it, and analyzing it - all within mere moments of an event taking place.
Useful? Without a doubt. Cool? Absolutely. Revolutionary? The potential is certainly there for Scan to change the way people find and follow up-to-the-minute stories.
Len Brody, NowPublic's CEO, led me through a couple of topics to illustrate how Scan works. Take Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, for example. Scan provides the "engine velocity," which averages the number of pertinent posts per hour (Palin rates 109/hr). The five most posted links are displayed and - not too surprisingly - Exploration's listing of Palin rumors tops the rankings.
Google annouced this morning that they are expanding the already massive News Archive search by "partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives." Google's Marissa Mayer demonstrated the new technology today at TechCrunch50.
The service is built on the technology used in Google Books, and can distinguish headlines from article text. If you've ever used a microfiche, the experience is remarkably similar. A tumbnailed view is presented at the right of the screen and contains a draggable selection box that allows you to "flip" through the paper. Pages can also be navigated Acrobat-style by entering a page number or clicking forward/back buttons.
It's a promising development, and should prove to be a powerful research tool.
A side panel will display relveant articles as well as contextual AdSense ads, with Google and the publishers splitting revenue. They've also promised to drive new newspaper subscriptions by adding a "get this paper" link.
Yesterday might have been a US holiday, but the Twittering and blogging masses were awakened (by quacking claxons, I'm sure) to the inadvertent leak of Google Chrome, the oft-rumored browser from the search giant. Naturally, everyone wants a piece of the action. Here are a few of the stories we're digesting:
TechCrunch has some juicy first pics of the browser. They snagged a few blurry YouTube screenshots before the demo video was pulled as well. Is "blurry" and YouTube in the same sentence redundant?
Google News has a little over 1,000 stories on Chrome, all within 24 hours. So who's not interested in this thing?
The read link on this post takes you to our Google Chrome page, and we'll be liveblogging around 2pm to cover the press conference via those who are there. Will September 2 be a watershed day online, or is Google's browser destined to be an also-ran? Leave your thoughts in the comments, as always. UPDATES: Chris Messina chimes in, explaining why this is important to Mozilla and the open web at large. Forgot to include Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, who references her awesome interview with Mozilla CEO John Lilly. VC extraordinaire Fred Wilson pulls up a three-legged stool to explain what this means. Switched has a post about Chrome as well. Matt Cutts has a liveblog going of the announcement (thanks Ryan!) Jack Flack deciphers the Googlespeak. Ryan at CybernetNews asks if Chrome will eat all other browsers for lunch. OStatic's Mike Gunderloy has a terrific browser scorecard with his predictions on how other browsers will fare after the Chrome hits the fan.
On Sunday we watched a short segment on CBS Sunday Morning about Google. The company, 10 years old this month, represents the best of what came out of the dot-com bubble in the 90's. Today they are madly profitable, focused on their core services and yet, still crazy after all these years. Massages, naps and gourmet food? Why, that's the kind of hubris that brought down dozens of companies in the first boom, so what's Google's secret sauce?
The fact is, Google is known to the mass market as "how to find stuff on the internet." Their success, like most success stories, is wedded to a fortuitous series of events: the price of computers and internet access dropping like a stone and the democratization of page creation and monetization. That's a mouthful, for sure. Cheaper computers and easier, faster access made computing and creating pages within the grasp of more people. As more people came online, they saw ways to make money by generating content and running the drop-dead simple AdSense on their pages. From memes to spy shots, Google helped the new wave make their wee blogsfiscally sensible.
What all this brought was brand recognition. The average person uses Google as a verb now, and that really means something. Another happy coincidence was the emergence of mobile and mobile browsing. Now you've got a vector of adoption that can reach even more folks who merely see the home computer as a porn/game machine but use their mobile devices every day. So the brand is unquestionably huge, which brings us to Chrome...
Every year Google releases a zeitgeist, a list of everything that is popular on the web based on their search data. But what if once a year just isn't enough for you? Then you turn to Evri.
Evri is a site currently in beta that uses news sources on the web to chart the popularity of different subjects in the categories of People, Places and Things. Clicking on the individual circles in the flow chart opens up a list of news articles in which they appear. Using Evri.com is certainly one way to keep up to date on whats hot and what's not.
Snackr is an Adobe AIR-based RSS ticker that pulls random headlines from your RSS feeds and scrolls them along the bottom or the side of your screen, letting you click through to read anything that looks interesting. It's not a replacement for your regular RSS reader, but it makes a great supplement. Snackr's well worth checking out if you're an information addict who has to have the fire hydrant open at all times.
Because it's an AIR app, Snackr is cross-platform and sports a look that won't feel out of place on your OS. Ticker speed and position on screen are adjustable, and you can force the ticker on top of your other windows if it suits you. Snackr supports OPML files, so it's very easy to populate with the feeds of your choice. It also minimizes to a tiny tab when you want to put it away for a while, and shows a preview of each story you click on, instead of going directly to your browser. Snackr doesn't interrupt what you're doing unless you want it to.
All in all, this is one of the most useful, best-designed AIR apps we've seen yet. It's essential for heavy RSS users, or anyone who wants to stay on top of breaking news. Don't ditch your full-featured feed reader, by any means, but do supplement it with Snackr if you're looking for a faster, more dynamic way to consume information.
Condé Nast Publications (which owns Wired, Wired.com, and a whole bunch of major magazines) has agreed to purchase Ars Technica for an undisclosed sum.
According to TechCrunch, Ars will be placed under the Wired Digital umbrella under CondéNet, which was made whole with the 2006 acquisition of Wired.com, and may be combined with Wired and Wired.com. The sale will be announced some time in the next week, Mashable has confirmed.
Ars looks to be a good fit for Wired and Wired.com, especially given the similar styles of tech reporting available on on both networks. Both include traditional professional feature style reporting on technology and trends. Wired will benefit from the addition of the new writing staff and Ars will gain a new outlet from its reporting. We wouldn't be surprised to see their work appearing in other publications across the Condé Nast house. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and even GQ (all Condé Nast publications) could stand to benefit from Gear and Gadgets and some of the other ongoing reporting from Ars Technica.
Twitter may have started off as a micro-blogging tool that asked users "what are you doing" right now? But the service has grown into a complex communications platform. Some people use Twitter to keep in touch with a few friends, while others use it take part in wider discussions taking place throughout the blogosphere. Still others use it as a sort of micro-broadcast medium, sending out updates, but rarely responding to messages posted by others. One thing is clear though: People post a lot of links to interesting articles on Twitter.
TweetWire attempts to take some of the most interesting links and organize them in a newspaper style web page. Tweets are broken up into a handful of categories, including elections, technology, sports, and celebrities. And the links are collected using a combination of the Twitter search engine TweetScan and the Yahoo! Pipes RSS remixing utility.
The results are... mixed. On the one hand, we love the idea of finding some of the best links from Twitter laid out on a simple web page. This way you don't have to sift through page after page of messages from your contacts to find out what people are talking about. But TweetWire isn't going to replace your daily newspaper anytime soon. On the one hand, all the links were at least interesting enough for someone to post them online. On the other hand, a lot of the day's top stories might never make it to TweetWire simply because nobody bothered to tweet about them.
If you're only interested in tech news, you might want to check out TwitLinks, which compiles tweets from a handful of influential technology bloggers.
If you run a blog or other web site, odds are you already know how important social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon can be for generating traffic. But while you may be used to seeing large traffic spikes from these sources occasionally, over time social bokmarking sites can give you yet another gauge of your blog's popularity. Have your stories been Dugg or stumbled more times than your competitors? SocialScan makes it easy to find out.
Just enter any URL into SocialScan and the service will look up the site on 12 different social bookmarking/news sites. Some measures are more thorough than others. For example, you'll only find out how many times that exact URL (ie: your homepage) has been submitted to sites like StumbleUpon or Reddit, while the Digg results will show any time a web page starting with your URL has been submitted.
Just when you thought -- "I wonder what Google could possibly develop next?" -- the company busts out a new layer for Google Earth which gives users the ability to browse the day's New York Times headlines by region.
In all honesty, the feature is a great idea, and we're sure the company has some work to do (hopefully adding support for other news outlets), but it comes off as "half-assed" for now with New York (what a surprise!) getting the most NY Times markers. California, Mexico, Michigan, and a few other places get a marker too, and as you can see in the picture, the NY Times provides Google with the most important of news stories. Oh well, it'll probably get a lot better.
Other Google Earth improvements in version 4.2 include a simpler GUI, high-res photos of terrain, the ability to explore stars and constellations, and more.
After ruling that Microsoft has failed to comply with a 2004 antitrust order, the European Union has added $1.3 billion to the fines already owed by Microsoft. That brings the total to about $2.5 billion, or just slightly more than pocket change to Bill Gates.
A few years back, EU regulators had decided that Microsoft was abusing its position as the number one operating system provider by bundling software with Windows that would decrease competition. Wednesday the EU ruled that Microsoft hasn't done enough to remedy the situation
Microsoft released a statement pointing out that in October of 2007, the EU found that the company was "in full compliance with the 2004 decision," meaning that the fine relates to past misdeeds. This could explain why Microsoft made such a big show of launching an open standards initiative last week.
NewsClipper is a news aggregation service that brings together videos from popular news sites like CNN, the BBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, MSNBC, and ESPN. You can sort videos by network, category, most recent, or most viewed. Future upgrades will include a search box and the ability to rate the videos you watch.
You can also add videos to a playlist and create your own virtual news channel with videos from various sources. Overall, it's an extraordinarily useful little site. But if it catches on, something tells us some of the TV networks providing its source material aren't going to be too happy. That's because CNN, for example doesn't offer users the ability to embed videos on their own sites. It's not clear how NewsClipper funnels the video stream, but you can grab embed code from any video on NewsClipper and add the video to your own site.
On the one hand, most videos feature plenty of branding so you always know where the video came from. So you could view each short clip as a commercial for a TV network. On the other hand, if you viewed the video on its original page, you'd actually be viewing other ads as well, which you don't see if you stream a video from NewsClipper. And that means that we expect the site to start getting cease and desist letters any day now. But we kind of hope it happens later, rather than sooner. In a perfect world, the TV news networks would partner with a site like NewsClipper and share any advertising revenue.
Ever wonder what you would get if you crossed Digg with Techmeme and gave the new site a slick Web 2.0 style theme? Yeah, neither did we, but that's a half decent description of Newspond, a news aggregation site that launched today.
Newspond is not a social news site like Digg. Articles aren't submitted by users. Newspond is more like Techmeme in that the site gathers stories from across the web using an automated system to analyze the topics that blogs and news sites are talking about. Articles show up on the front page or in a variety of subsections like tech, games, and science. Under each main article is a list of links to more articles on the same topic from other web sites. You'll have to click the "View All Sources" tab to see additional articles, but Newspond will pull them up without a page refresh.
While there's no user generated primary content on the site, Newspond does have a nifty commenting system which adds a social aspect to the site. The comments are threaded and easy to read. But you really have to play with them to get the full effect.
