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Jun 4, 2010

Starved for New Net Search Tools? Some Whoppers...

Image via Wikipedia

Search Tools Compilations

May 28, 2010

Google Names Facebook Most Visited Site

Image via CrunchBase

Daniel Ionescu, PC World

May 28, 2010 9:29 am

Google has publicly released a list of the top 1000 websites in the world, raking the Facebook social networking site as the leading Web property by unique users.

According to Google's AdPlanner stats, Facebook scores more than 540 million unique visitors per month, reaching a sizeable chunk of 35.2 percent of the Internet population.

Facebook not only has the most unique visitors in Google's stats, but also the most page views per month, a whopping 570 billion views, ahead of other properties like Craigslist (#49) with 14 billion views.

The AdPlanner list does not contain any figures for most of Google's own properties, like YouTube, Gmail, News, or Search, but gives an interesting insight into which top Websites do not serve advertising.

Wikipedia (#4) and Mozilla (#10) are the only two Websites in Google's top 10 not to display advertising. A noteworthy entry on the 18th spot in the AdPlanner rankings is Twitter (#18), with 98 million unique visitors per month, which doesn't serve ads.

Destinations portals such as Yahoo.com (#2), MSN.com (#5), Baidu (#8), Sina.com.cn (#11) and 163.com (#15) are also high on the list, probably due to the fact that many people use these sites as their home page.

Search engines also occupy several top places in the AdPlanner list (excluding Google's own Search). Live.com (#2) has over 370 million uniques per month, Bing.com (#13) with 110 million, and Ask.com (#20) with 88 million.

Blogging is also high on Google's list, with Blogspot (Blogger) situated in the 7th place with 230 million uniques, and WordPress.com in the 12th spot with 120 million uniques.

Several news sources made it into the top 100 as well: Cnet.com ranks as #35, BBC.co.uk on #43, CNN.com at #64, and NYTimes.com on #83.

Other entries worth noting among Google's top 1000 websites are Microsoft.com (#6), Adobe.com (#14), Amazon.com (#22), eBay.com (#24), Apple.com (#27) and Hotmail.com (#30).

Apr 5, 2010

Aggregators help media professionals keep on top of digital content trends | Media | The Guardian

Image via CrunchBase

by Kevin Anderson

The internet is not like trying to drink from a firehose but rather like trying to drink from Niagara Falls. For any media professional trying to remain up to speed on digital content trends, it is often overwhelming. I've had to develop a lot of methods and constantly change the tools I use to manage this torrent of information. I've mentioned Popurls before as an easy one-stop shop to follow internet buzz, and once registered you can personalise the site to show your favourite digital content sites first.

You can log into Popurls using your user name and password from several other services such as Google or Yahoo. You can create your own Popurls sharing page and automatically post items you share to Facebook, Twitter or Friendfeed or mini-blogging sites Tumblr or Posterous.

However, if you don't want to take the time to personalise Popurls, there are a number of aggregators that pull together a great sample of digital trends. Sites such as Original Signal are good if you want a single page to have a quick glance at sites covering web 2.0 developments, such as TechCrunch, GigaOm, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb. There is a North American bias to a lot of the content because most of the aggregators operate from there, but it's a good start for a filtered view of the web based on the interests of a digital media professional.

Image via CrunchBase

These sites cover the world of web 2.0 with great depth, but if your interests are even more specific, you may want to check out the aggregator Alltop. It takes Popurls to the next level, not just featuring buzz and top-level topics but aggregated pages from sites and blogs covering a wide range of subjects. For instance, you can quickly find blogs and sites covering such specialist topics as web analytics, virtual worlds, rich internet applications or mobile. You can even filter Alltop based on location.

The newest addition to these media news aggregators is also the newest addition to the popular TechMeme family, MediaGazer. TechMeme uses an algorithm and human editors to filter tech stories that are generating conversation. MediaGazer takes the TechMeme model and focuses on media coverage, and it has a very good transatlantic spread, at least in terms of English-language media reporting.

Aggregators are just one way to manage information but, with a little tweaking, they can help the flood of information seem more manageable and relevant.

10 Simple Google Search Tricks - NYTimes.com

Image by Bramus! via Flickr

By SIMON MACKIE of GigaOm

I’m always amazed that more people don’t know the little tricks you can use to get more out of a simple Google search. Here are 10 of my favorites.

Use the “site:” operator to limit searches to a particular site. I use this one all the time, and it’s particularly handy because many site’s built-in search tools don’t return the results you’re looking for (and some sites don’t even have a search feature). If I’m looking for WWD posts about GTD, for example, I could try this search: GTD site:webworkerdaily.com.
Use Google as a spelling aid. As Rob Hacker — the WWD reader I profiled last week — pointed out, entering a word into Google is a quick way to see if you have the right spelling. If it’s incorrect, Google will suggest the correct spelling instead. Additionally, if you want to get a definition of a word, you can use the “define:” operator to return definitions from various dictionaries (for example, define: parasympathetic).
Use Google as a calculator. Google has a built-in calculator — try entering a calculation like 110 * (654/8 + 3). Yes, your computer also has a calculator, but if you spend most of your day inside a browser, typing your calculation into the browser’s search box is quicker than firing up your calculator app.
Find out what time it is anywhere in the world. This one’s really handy if you want to make sure that you’re not phoning someone in the middle of the night. Just search for “time” and then the name of the city. For example, try: time San Francisco
Get quick currency conversions. Google can also do currency conversion, for example: 100 pounds in dollars. It only has the more mainstream currencies, though — if you’re trying to see how many Peruvian nuevos soles your dollars might buy, you’ll be out of luck.
Image by shannonpatrick17 via Flickr
Use the OR operator. This can be useful if you’re looking at researching a topic but you’re not sure which keywords will returnÂ the information you need. It can be particularly handy in conjunction with the “site:” operator. For example, you could try this search: GTD or “getting things done” site:webworkerdaily.com
Exclude specific terms with the – operator. You can narrow your searches using this operator. For example, if you’re looking for information about American Idol but don’t want anything about Simon Cowell, you could try: “american idol” -cowell
Search for specific document types. Google can search the web for specific types of files using the “filetype:” operator. If you’re looking for PowerPoint files about GTD, for example, you could try: GTD filetype:ppt
Search within numerical ranges using theÂ .. operator. Say, for example, you want to look for information about Olympic events that took place in the 1950’s, you could use this search: Olympics 1950..1960
Area code lookup. Need to know where a phone number is located? Google will let you know where it is, and show you a map of the area, too. For example: 415

What are your favorite Google search tricks?

Dec 26, 2009

Helping Children Find What They Need on the Internet

Image by michperu via Flickr

By STEFANIE OLSEN

When Benjamin Feshbach was 11 years old, he was given a brainteaser: Which day would the vice president’s birthday fall on the next year?

Benjamin, now 13, said he typed the question directly into the Google search box, to no avail. He then tried Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com, also without success. “Later someone told me it was a multistep question,” said Benjamin, a seventh grader from North Potomac, Md.

“Now it seems quite obvious because I’m older,” he said. “But, eventually, I gave up. I didn’t think the answer was important enough to be on Google.” Benjamin is one of 83 children, ages 7, 9 and 11, who participated in a study on children and keyword searching. Sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information.

Like other children, Benjamin was frustrated by his lack of search skills or, depending on your view, the limits of search engines.

When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools.

Search engines are typically developed to be easy for everyone to use. Google, for example, uses the Arial typeface because it considers it more legible than other typefaces. But advocates for children and researchers say that more can be done technologically to make it easier for young people to retrieve information. What is at stake, they say, are the means to succeed in a new digital age.

“We’re giving them a tool that was made for adults,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit research center in New York focused on digital education for children. Allison Druin, director of the human-computer interaction lab at the University of Maryland, suggested expanding the concept of keywords. Instead of typing a word into a search box, children could click on an image or video, which would turn up results.

Ms. Druin said that parents played a big role in helping children search. She proposed that search engines imitate that role by adding technology aids, like prominent suggestions for related content or an automated chat system, to help children when they get stuck.

Children’s choices of search engines differ only slightly from the preferences of adults. Google ranks most popular among children, followed by Yahoo, Google Image search, Microsoft’s Bing and Ask.com, according to the research firm Nielsen. (Among adults, Bing is ahead of Google Image.)

Irene Au, Google’s director of user experience, said that rather than develop a specific product for children, her team used research findings to inform how it could improve search for all ages. “The problems that kids have with search are probably the problems adults experience, just magnified,” Ms. Au said. “It’s helped highlight the areas we need to focus on.”

For example, Google has long known that it can be difficult for users to formulate the right keywords to call up their desired results. But that task can be even more challenging for children, given that they do not always have the right context for thinking about a new subject. One 12-year-old boy searching for information about Costa Rica used the search term “sweaty clothes” because that was what he associated with the jungle.

“If we can solve that for children we can solve that for adults,” Ms. Au said.

One way Google aims to overcome that problem is by showing related searches. Ms. Au said Google had tried various placements since related searches were introduced in 2007 and had found that it could be helpful to introduce such queries — or other content like video, images or news — at the bottom of the page.

A search on the word dolphins, for example, shows a set of related searches, (sharks, bottlenose dolphins) and two YouTube videos of dolphins at play. Ms. Druin called the bottom of the screen “valuable territory” because children often focus on their hands and the keyboard when they search and see that space first when they glance up.

Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, said that for certain types of tasks, like finding a list of American presidents, people found answers 28 percent faster with a search of images rather than of text. He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. Microsoft says Bing’s audience of 2- to 17-year-olds has grown 76 percent since May. “My daughter who’s 5, her typing skills aren’t great, but she can browse images of various dog breeds through visual search,” Mr. Weitz said.

In May, Google introduced Wonder Wheel, a graphical search tool aimed at making browsing easier. (To find it, click on “show options” on a page of search results; it appears halfway down the left column.) For a search on “apple,” the wheel shows prongs pointing to “apple fruit” or “apple store locator” in the left panel.

Children also tend to want to ask questions like “Who is the president?” rather than type in a keyword. Scott Kim, chief technology officer at Ask.com, said that because as many as a third of search queries were entered as questions (up to 43 percent on Ask Kids, a variant designed for children), it had enlarged search boxes on both sites by almost 30 percent.

In September, Google also increased the length of its search box and the size of its font for related searches. Google said the change was meant to enhance ease of use for everyone.

Future trends in search may also be helpful to children. The move toward voice-activated search like the Google voice search on iPhones and Android phones and audio and video search will prove beneficial to children with limited abilities, experts say.

Benjamin Feshbach, who’s now considered a power searcher, has his own ideas.

“I think there should be a program where Google asks kids questions about what they’re searching for,” he said, “like a Google robot.”

Aug 4, 2009

FUMSI Articles on Finding, Using Managing and Sharing Information

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Practical, actionable tips and information: FUMSI articles are a starting point, launching pad, training resource or quick refresher. Free: Search and read online, forward to colleagues, print and save – and if you find these articles useful, consider subscribing »

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Jul 30, 2009

Fast Forward: Yahoo to the Recycle Bin

By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, July 30, 2009

Adieu, Yahoo.

Not the Web site or the company, but the search engine. Yahoo announced Wednesday morning that it signed a 10-year agreement with Microsoft to combine search and advertising efforts, each ceding much of one field to the other.

"In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers," a press release declared.

Few Web users are likely to miss Microsoft's contribution to Web searching, but most people have fed a query to Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo at some point. Replacing Yahoo's search engine with Microsoft's Bing would delete one of the oldest landmarks in the Web landscape.

It would also take away a choice for users and a source of innovation for Web search, contrary to the claims at the "Choice. Value. Innovation." site that the companies set up to herald the news.

Yet their separate attempts have not slowed Google's steady growth. Yahoo may have no other choice but to make its search engine yet another casualty of outsourcing.

If so, it will mark the end of an long run.

Yahoo began life in February 1994 as a simple catalogue of Web sites put together by Stanford University students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It acquired its name -- short for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" -- not long after and then expanded into a true search engine.

That head start, combined with Yahoo's early proficiency and the missteps of other Web sites (anybody remember Lycos, Excite or HotBot?), allowed the firm to become the Microsoft of search engines for quite a few years.

And then yet another Stanford research project took off. Google found things on the Web faster and more accurately than Yahoo and didn't try to sell you 20 unrelated things as it did. Then Google began adding other Web services -- e-mail, maps, calendars -- that made Yahoo's fare look clumsy by comparison.

In the process, Google ran away with much of the Web advertising business -- a machine that generates most of its profits.

Inertia has helped Yahoo hold on to a respectable chunk of the market even as its search site grew stagnant and new ventures including a music store and a social network flopped. Almost 20 percent of U.S. Web searches ran through its site last month, according to ComScore's data. Yahoo has also kept a spot in many browser toolbars; for example, it remains the only search-shortcut alternative to Google on the iPhone.

Microsoft, for its part, spent years fumbling around with quasi-proprietary online services such as MSN or Windows Live. Two winters ago, it tried to solve its Internet issues by proposing to buy Yahoo for around $47.5 billion.

The Microsoft folks in Redmond, Wash., should thank their counterparts in Sunnyvale for spurning that offer, against the advice of nearly everybody in the technology business. Yahoo's rejection stopped Microsoft from burning through billions of dollars just in time for the economy to plunge off a cliff, then spending years cleaning up after an AOL/Time Warner-esque collision of corporate cultures.

Left on its own, Microsoft had to build a better search site, and with Bing it may have done just that. The site, unlike some of Microsoft's older forays and Yahoo's just-redesigned home page, delivers much of the accuracy and simplicity of Google.

Should the Yahoo-Microsoft deal survive antitrust scrutiny, Yahoo's search technology won't vanish down the bit bucket; Microsoft would be able to add its features to Bing. Likewise, Microsoft will continue to handle automatically placed search ads. And other Web services, such as e-mail and instant messaging, will remain separate -- your Yahoo Mail won't get forwarded to Hotmail or vice versa.

Filo and Yang surely didn't mean for their invention to land in Microsoft's parts bin. But if the alternative is the continued surrender of Web search and advertising to Google -- a competition in which Yahoo has done little to distinguish itself lately -- the company they founded hasn't left itself many other options.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at robp@washpost.com. Read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.

Getting the Edge on Global Data

by Gary Price

Let’s face it: Conducting international business research can be a stressful undertaking. Often the most challenging part is getting your bearings and getting started.

This is why I like the globalEDGE portal from Michigan State University. It’s a great place to get basic info and quickly identify resources that might be useful in your quest to answer the query. It’s also a great development tool to find resources worthy of a place in your local collection or bookmarks. Best of all, access to globalEDGE is completely free.

The site is organized into six sections each filled with content. Here are just a few highlights.

First up is the Resource Desk. This section is home to a massive and continuously updated directory of sites that have been hand chosen by the staff of globalEDGE. The directory can be keyword searched or browsed.

Other useful features are the RSS feed or web page containing new additions/updated sites. The Resource Desk section is also home to the Market Potential Index and the wonderful Database of International Business Statistics (registration required, free).

The second section is Country Insights. It contains statistical data for 199 countries around the globe. You’ll also find links to Country Comparator, which allows you to quickly compare statistics from one country with another.

Another section is titled State Insights and contains statistics, trade info and more for each of the 50 United States.

The fourth section of globalEDGE is Industry Profiles. Here you’ll find background, news, events, and stats organized by industry.

The next section contains the globalEDGE blog, with news and commentary of interest to those involved in international business. News of new blog postings is also available via Twitter.

The final section is the Global Academy. Here, you’ll be able to access academic info including course syllabi, info on publishers, conference announcements, and the globalEDGE Job Bank.

What we’ve listed above only scratches the surface of what globalEDGE has to offer. Spend some time here and you’ll come to find this site a useful companion when conducting international business research. I also recommend subscribing to the globalEdge monthly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay current with the content and features this wonderful portal offers.

Getting the Full 360 on Silobreaker

by Gary Price

Searching for news is a task both information professionals and the users we train are doing all of the time using one of many news search databases.

One powerful news search database I like a lot gets very little attention, and I think that needs to change.
The resource I’m talking about is Silobreaker. It’s been online for several years and aggregates content from more than 10,000 news sites, blogs, and multimedia sources.

Best of all, access to this London- and Stockholm-based news search tool is free. While not perfect (what is?), it’s a search tool you will want to know about.

Silobreaker is powerful due to its advanced search interface located next to the primary search box, which enables you to limit in a number of ways including by source, content type, date, etc. Even more important are the many additional resources not found on most other news search engines, providing options that can help make sense of the news. They provide not only links to news results but also useful intelligence.

Take a look on the charts and tables located on the right side of the homepage and you’ll see what I’m talking about. All of these features are also searchable via the links found directly above the main search box.

Notice the drop-down menu from the search box that appears as you enter your search terms. If the term(what Silobreaker calls an 'entity') is in the database, you’ll see it here. It can help you focus your search even before you click.

Just because a search topic doesn’t have a drop down option does not mean it isn’t searchable on Silobreaker. However, results -- like on any news search tool -- may vary. Here’s an example of a search results page for an entity not in the database.

With that understood, Silobreaker is most powerful with entities in their database. They even ask for help in identifying new entities and sources. Look for the link at the very top of any page.

At the top of the homepage, you’ll spot a hyperlink labeled '360° search'. This is the default search option. Here’s the resulting 360 search on General Motors.

Note the brief company information available at the top left of the page including a link to a Silobreaker fact sheet about GM.

This service also works for searches about people. For example, Barack Obama. Again, you’ll see brief bio info along with other information. Click the bio link and you’ll receive a full bio about the President gleaned from Silobreaker sources. Very useful. All of this is in addition to the news stories that the database provides.

The next search option at the top of the search box is called 'Network' and it graphically displays how people or topics in the database relate to other people and/or topics in the full database. This is an interactive tool. Cursor over any of the boxes and you’ll see what the relationship is via a text snippet. Here’s the 'Network' page for Global Warming.

Option number three is labeled 'Hot Spots'. Here you’ll find a map that gives an idea of where the underlying stories are about. Again using Barack Obama as the search topic, take a look at this Hot Spot map.

You'll notice lots of content about the Middle East. Obama is heading their today (6/3/2009).

The 'Trends' option gives you a graphical look at how much attention topic or person is getting in the press over a period of time. Here’s the trends page for U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.

OK, that was a lot to take in. Let’s review using a 360° degree search for Gordon Brown.

Note the main search results like you would find with any news search tool. The entities located below each article are clickable.

On the right side of the page take note of the following:

Video search results (if available)
'In focus' (people, places, events related to Brown (clickable)
'Content volume' for searches about Gordon Brown broken down by source type
A 'Network' graph that identifies and shows relationships
'Hot Spots' that illustrate where the news is coming from (clickable)
A 'Trends' graph that illustrates the amount of content about Prime Minister Brown versus other people in the news.

Finally, while Silobreaker offers many options the learning curve does not take a long time. It’s actually quite fun. You’ll be up and running in no time. Pages on the site also provide more help if needed.

Jun 17, 2009

Facebook Readies Rival to Twitter Search

Mashable, June 16, 2009 08:05 PM PDT

Facebook is testing a realtime search engine for users’ news feeds that will challenge Twitter search, the company revealed on its blog today.

Let’s face it: Facebook Search really isn’t all that impressive of a tool. It does a good job of searching for people, groups, and apps, but doesn’t fare well at all if you search a general term like “Iran Election.” With all of the information available on Facebook, wouldn’t it be nice to find images, videos, links, and status updates relevant to a search keyword? Meanwhile, the lack of such a feature means that Twitter search has become the go-to place for realtime information.

Facebook isn’t blind to the issue. The world’s largest social network revealed today that it’s experimenting with a new type of search that could actually make it a social alternative to Google, Bing, and other major search engines. Most importantly, however, it can begin to challenge Twitter in realtime search. Soon, when you search for a recipe or the latest on the Iran crisis, related status updates and photos from friends and public Facebook profiles will appear. In fact, it’s already active for a small group of users.

In a blog announcement, the social networking giant explained that it believes our friends are a strong source of relevant information. If I care about the season finale of Lost, it stands to reason I would want to know how my friends felt about it. This new search feature would do just that. From the Facebook blog:

Those of you in the test group will see new layouts for search results that will continue to include people’s profiles, Facebook Pages, groups and applications, and some entirely new Search features. With the test, you will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. You will also be able to search for status updates, posted links and notes in Search from people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone. As always, you can control what content you’re sharing by editing your privacy settings here.

The people around us are a powerful source for finding information about new and interesting information — from the latest on last night’s episode of “The Office” and suggestions on what to do for your next vacation to current events.

In short: Facebook is testing this feature with only a small group of users, the feature searches status updates, links, notes, photos, and videos, and it can search both your friends and anybody who has a public profile (like mine). This puts it in direct competition with Twitter search: a realtime search of public messages.

The key question is whether Facebook has waited too long to get into the realtime search game.

Jun 7, 2009

Internet Resources Briefs #3

With Bing, Microsoft Finds Some Good Search Ideas (search engine)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/06/AR2009060600019.html

Get the Tech Scuttlebutt (It Might Even Be True)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/business/media/07ping.html?ref=todayspaper

Blogs Falling in An Empty Forest (blogs)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html?ref=todayspaper

How to Plan A Vacation Using Social Media (networking, search)
http://mashable.com/2009/06/07/vacation-social-media/

China Squeezes PC Makers
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124440211524192081.html#mod=todays_us_page_one

Jun 4, 2009

Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media

Mashable, Josh Catone, June 3 - In March of this year, National Public Radio (NPR) revealed that by the end of 2008, 23.6 million people were tuning into its broadcasts each week. In fact, NPR's ratings have increased steadily since 2000, and they've managed to hold on to much of their 2008 election coverage listenership bump (with over 26 million people tuning in each week so far in 2009), unlike many of their mainstream media counterparts.

Compared to cable news, where most networks are shedding viewers, and newspapers, where circulation continues to plummet, NPR is starting to look like they have the future of news all figured out. Or at least, they appear to doing a lot better at it than the rest of the traditional media.

But what is NPR doing differently that's causing their listener numbers to swell? They basically have a three-pronged strategy that is helping them not only grow now, but also prepare for the future media landscape where traditional methods of consumption (TV, radio, print) could be greatly marginalized in favor of digital distribution.

A Focus On Local

Though most people think of NPR as a radio station, it's actually a news gathering and production organization that sources and creates content for member stations (which are different than affiliates in that they're completely independent entities). According to new CEO Vivian Schiller, that means that NPR has a culture incredibly devoted to local coverage. "To me, local is the big play, because local commercial radio has abandoned the local market. Local newspapers are withering or sometimes dying. The big national media companies, including excellent ones like The New York Times, cannot afford to be covering every single community. So that leaves a big, gaping hole to serve Americans' local coverage," she told mediabistro.com in April.

radio Focusing on local information is a very smart approach for two reasons. One, because as Schiller says, it fills a gap in coverage, and two, because many people feel that delivering and aggregating hyperlocal content will be an important part of the future of media. In 2007, Alex Iskold, the CEO of semantic web application company AdaptiveBlue, predicted the rise of hyperlocal information, indicating that extremely targeted local advertising could be the path forward for the ad industry.

"Despite globalization, hyperlocal information is very valuable both to people and advertisers. In the coming years, we will be seeing the rise of a new way to look at information - geography. Inspired by utility and the promise of hyperlocal advertising, startups are racing to build businesses that deliver highly relevant, local information to users," he wrote.

Earlier this week we noted here on Mashable just how much more useful information can be when it is locally relevant. So for NPR, going local is a way to reach disenfranchised listeners, provide more utility, and potentially offer greater value to advertisers when the ad market rebounds.

A Focus On Social Media

Another aspect of NPR's winning approach is their adoption of social media. Social media tools are changing the media landscape by allowing consumers to define what's worthy of attention. NPR hasn't sat idly by — they're one of the few mainstream media organizations that is leading the charge in social media channels. Their Twitter account has over 780,000 followers, making it one of the top 25 on the social network (and third among news organizations behind only the New York Times and CNN). Their Facebook Page has over 400,000 fans.

But NPR has embraced social media in more ways than just having an active presence on top social media channels. They've also put social media to work for them. In October of 2008, for example, NPR asked listeners to factcheck the US Vice Presidential debates and communicate findings via a Twitter () hashtag. And in February, NPR's social media strategist (@acarvin) talked about Twitter on air, including hundreds people tweeting back comments in the conversation. Their conclusion? Twitter lets us all share the media consumption experience together, and that's a very positive thing.

NPR doesn't stop at social networking, either — their social media efforts extend to podcasts (they have over 650), blogs (they publish almost 20), mobile apps, and even their own social network. NPR has been recognized for these efforts year after year with multiple Webby Awards.

Social media is helping NPR reach new audiences and connect better with the one they have (which, of course, helps with audience retention).

A Focus On Ubiquitous Access

Perhaps the most important aspect of NPR's approach to new media, is that they have an organizational level commitment to allowing listeners and readers to access their content on their own terms. Schiller, who prior to joining NPR at the start of this year was the SVP-GM of The New York Times web site, told mediabisto.com that NPR aims to bring people access to content "online, mobile, whatever people want, podcasts — you name it — so that you have that same sense of the NPR experience wherever you are. As far as NPR.org — sure, I want the traffic to increase, but to me the ultimate goal is not just bringing people to this walled garden that is NPR.org."

mix-your-own-podcast-tool That's nothing new for Schiller, who at the Times led the charge to shut down their pay content service, TimesSelect, even though it was pulling in tens of millions of dollars. "Change is happening so fast in the media and the economy that you have to be able to say, 'Forget about what we did then — let's look at what makes sense now,'" she said, which is a very enlightened view for someone who holds a position of power in a mainstream media culture that has for so long been resistant to change.

The same sentiment is echoed by NPR's Senior SVP for News, Ellen Weiss. "We need to put NPR wherever the audience is, and that has to happen online and has to happen on the radio," she told PBS in January. And NPR has delivered.

In July of 2008, for example, the radio organization released a content API that allows developers to remix and reuse any content created by the network. That's led to interesting mash ups like NPRbackstory, which attempts to figure out the news behind trending topics by searching through NPR's archives.

More recently, NPR released a mix your own podcast tool, which gives listeners the ability to easily create their own programming schedule from the organization's audio archives. That, as Schiller and Weiss promised, is NPR at work allowing users to consume media on their own terms.

NPR's commitment to going to its audience rather than making its audience come to them is a smart strategic move. Schiller is convinced that walled gardens and pay walls just drive audiences to "lesser quality news content that is free." If that's true, NPR's blueprint is not only about attracting eyeballs (or in this case, ears), but creating an environment where quality reporting from trained journalists can continue to exist.

Not Everything Is Rosy

Unfortunately for NPR, even while their ratings soar, they have not been immune to the economic woes gripping most industries. They cut 7% of their daily news staff in December of 2008 and axed two underperforming shows. NPR faces a projected budget gap of $8 million in 2009, though that's better than 2008's $23 million shortfall.

Still, the future looks bright at NPR. Their 26.4 million weekly listeners are 11 times more than the daily circulation of USA Today, and greater than 9 times more than the prime time viewership of the #1 cable news channel in the US, Fox News. They have 860 local stations in their member network and operate 38 news bureaus around the world — 18 in foreign markets, which is greater than any other news gathering organization. NPR's amazing growth over the past 10 years prompted FastCompany magazine in March to call NPR the "most successful hybrid of old and new media," and wonder if NPR could be the savior of the news industry.

And they owe that success to the culture of open access and audience participation that they've cultivated over the past decade.

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/03/npr/

Google Squared: Your Search Results in Spreadsheet Form

Mashable, Jennifer Van Grove, June 3 - At Google's Searchology event in May, Google announced the impending arrival of Google Squared, a Labs project that would return search results in spreadsheet form.

Today it appears as though Google Squared has been released out into the wild. Now your search results can take a completely different form, so you can remove content, add suggested columns of your own, and even save your squares for future access.

Since Google Squared is just your search results in column and row form, you're best off making queries on groups of things. So, you can search for television shows and get back a list of shows, accompanying images, descriptions, language, and run time in a format that's much easier to consume than typical search results. You can add additional columns and Google will try to help you fill in the blanks.

google-squared

The cool thing about Google Squared is that columns are dynamic, so they mesh with the content displayed in the squared results. Cell content is also customizable, so clicking on a cell will let you search for other possible values and display a confidence level (eg. low confidence). We're also big fans of the fact that you can save your Squares, a small but important feature that could turn this into a quick and powerful utility for research.

google-squared-stumped

If you stump the square, you can manually enter a few of the items you want to see compared, and Google () will automatically work to find similar entities and build out a comprehensive square.

Based on our initial use, we see Google Squared being a potentially huge time saver for professionals and consumers who need to do quick comparisons. It's incredibly useful if you know what you're looking for, ie. photo sharing sites, and are hoping to see side-by-side comparisons.

Though we wouldn't say that Google Squared is revolutionary, or able to compete with these 5 things Wolfram Alpha does better than Google, we do think that it's an interesting departure from the status quo of standard list search results. Plus, with the recent release of Bing, it's important that Google continue to innovate and experiment to maintain their dominance in search.

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/03/google-squared/

See also - http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-06-03-n25.html

Mahalo 2.0: Search Result Pages Built on Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter

Mashable, Ben Parr, June 2 - Mahalo, the human-powered search engine and web directory, has been busy recently expanding it's array of content. In December, they launched Mahalo Answers, which offers payments to users that can provide the best answers. Yet, since it's a human-powered website, Mahalo has only been able to grow as fast as people have been able to create content. So now, it's turning to social media to fill in the gaps.

The company has just dropped the beta tag from their logo and launched Mahalo 2.0. Along with a new logo and a design facelift, the startup has improved user control of pages. Most notable of all, however, is that Mahalo has created a system that pulls information from multiple social media sources to create web pages for every search term.

Mahalo pages of old contained byte-sized summaries, questions and answers, quick facts, reviews, and some social media content, like Youtube () videos. Mahalo 2.0 has added a lot more content. The service is utilizing multiple social media APIs to add images (via Flickr ()), videos (via YouTube), and discussion of the specific topic on Twitter (). While we can't post the full screenshots (because these pages are incredibly long), take a look at Bob Dylan's page on Mahalo, before and after, to get an idea of what's going on:

Mahalo: Previous Layout

Mahalo 2.0 Layout

From what we can tell, this can nearly double the amount of content available on a Mahalo page. Unless of course, the search term doesn't exist in the Mahalo system, in which case it will create a page based on the same social media APIs. This means Mahalo can create a nearly-unlimited amount of pages with content - pages that can be indexed, shared, and edited.

User control has also gotten a boost. Users can edit these new, automatically-generated pages with a one-click interface and become page managers. This is important because page managers get 50% of a page's revenue, so this new release could spark a new push by regular Mahalo users to become the admins of these newly-created pages. Page managers can even embed pages on other websites. However, it still comes with a catch: you've got to edit the page every week or you lose it.

Mahalo is smart to create pages that users have not via social media. This content is rich, dynamic, and filled with the keywords and search engine optimization (SEO) juice that has helped Mahalo grow in the Google () rankings. Yet there has been controversy with Mahalo pulling questions from Twitter for its Mahalo Answers program, and it's possible that some users may argue that this as stealing their social content for Mahalo's gain. Regardless, Mahalo has become even more useful, if not a bit too cluttered.

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/02/mahalo-20/