Lili Cheng, General Manager of Microsoft’s Fuse Labs, announced the debut of Spindex, the company’s stab at a dynamic social media aggregation tool.

Aimed at bringing together the varied strands of a personal web at each point of a user’s online experience, Spindex is currently only available in a tech preview.

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“Spindex…aggregates your social streams (Facebook, Twitter, Bing, etc.), making it simple for you to find what’s new, see personalized trending topics, and generally make the most of the time you spend being social on the Web.”

Spindex seems learns from your online behavior, harvesting relevant information to a central page. It also links to Bing search information and allows you to use Evernote, another Labs innovation, within the application.

Discuss

This morning I caught up with Chris Tolles, CEO of news aggregation service Topix. I’ve been following Topix since it began, back in 2004, so it was interesting to find out how the service has evolved. Originally, as the name suggests, Topix was focused on being a news site that categorized its content into topics. Nowadays Topix is very focused on localized news, particularly for small towns across America. Tolles said that 44% of their traffic comes from rural areas, rather than metropolitan areas.

Topix has also seen rapid growth in mobile access over the past year, from about 1% of their total traffic to 10% now. Tolles told me that 70% of that mobile traffic is coming from the iPhone.

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When Topix began in 2004, just 10% of Topix’s channels were local. But soon after, Tolles told me, they noticed that about 45% of their traffic was coming from those local channels. Topix then embarked on a journey to “own local news” for towns. By 2007, Topix was focusing almost exclusively on local news. It aimed to become the “home of local voice on the Web.”

Small Town News

Topix is about discussion, rather than traditional journalism. Tolles explained that they use a community approach to get people to participate and add news for their town. The content on the site is largely driven by community discussion. Tolles said that small towns often don’t have enough news, so “discussion is what fills this out.”

According to Tolles, Topix can be a substitute for traditional press in some small towns – especially if there’s no local paper (or if there is one, it’s not daily but, for example, a weekly publication). Given its focus on discussions, Tolles said that Topix is the place to go “if you want to throw rocks at your mayor.”

As noted, Topix does well in small towns. The southeast of the U.S. is currently working very well, said Tolles, with some small towns attracting thousands of comments a day. However, by his own admission Topix does poorly in big metropolitan cities like New York City and San Francisco. Tolles attributes this to increased competition in those places, but also in smaller cities or towns locals often “have axe to grind” and so that fosters discussions.

I asked how Topix markets itself to towns. Tolles replied that the biggest way Topix is discovered is through Google – for example, people searching for their town’s news. He said that 40% of Topix’s traffic comes from Google, but that 50% is organic – meaning that people come via the URL or a bookmark. That means that a solid percentage of Topix’s traffic is return visitors. Tolles noted that when people first visit Topix, they are attracted to the comments.

Mobile Usage Dramatically Increased

Probably the most interesting factoid I discovered about Topix today is that mobile usage is increasing at a rapid rate. Tolles said that in just one year mobile traffic went from 1% to 10% of the site’s total traffic. Most of these are iPhone users: 70% of mobile traffic, as noted above.

What’s more, mobile users are good commenters, too. Tolles said that about 30% of mobile users leave comments on Topix, which is a high ratio when you consider how difficult it is to leave comments via a mobile device.

Tolles noted that Topix has an iPhone app, which was released almost two years ago. However, he said that most of the mobile traffic comes from a mobile browser. Topix supports 38,000 towns or cities, all of which are available via mobile.

Mobile is by far the fastest growing aspect of Topix currently, said Tolles. He also remarked that advertising space in mobile is an open field. Topix monetizes well on the Web, at almost $4 per CPM. However, the mobile side is not quite so high currently. He expects this to grow, but he isn’t sure if it will be Google, Apple or another company that will provide the optimal mobile advertising platform.

Discuss

When running blogs for community, and business interests, the important question of of “who” has visited has been a big challenge. This problem was one of the inspirations for the creation of OpenID and other approaches for identity sharing.

As corporate blog applications grow as operational business tools, the ability to respond to users who launch comments becomes a critical component of doing business. This requires being able to integrate this information flow into company processes as a natural extension of the blog.

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SalesForce.com has been focused on aggregation of customer prospects across all channels a company performs in. So, this is a very natural extension to SaleForce’s destiny to consider the corporate blog an important touch point for consumers.

And, with the momentum of SalesForce’s Chatter platform – which enables enterprise collaboration and hooks to services like Twitter and Facebook, this integration both helps get comprehensive and in our opinion, increases the value of the blog as a tool for the enterprise.

SalesForce provided us screenshots of the application, we’ll walk through them here.

In the SalesForce dashboard, set up a Wordpress receiver.

When configuring the Wordpress integration, set up the system to auto-respond with a custom message.

Build a form in SalesForce.com to capture user contact information using the form builder.

Embedding the connection between the widget or page in Wordpress by tying it to the SalesForce identifier.

Viewing the widget in Wordpress.

Adding the contact widget to the Sidebar widget (for example) enables the blog to use it pre-defined presentation mechanics to bring the SalesForce powered contact widget to users. This can be done across the entire site (like shown in sidebar), or added to an individual page or widget that is controlled by the Wordpress publishing process.

In this model of the universe, the blog owner is able to connect the blog viewer to company processes. We think this may be help blogs grow to being more operational tools, bringing the ease of publishing to the ease of customer relationship management.

Do you run Wordpress and Saleforce.com today? What do you think about this merge of capabilities?

Discuss

After a seven-week-long hiatus, Google is now hosting content from the Associated Press again. The two have had a deal in place in the past, but AP content quietly went missing from Google, and that very fact became a topic of wide discussion last week. Now the deal appears to be renewed to some uncertain extent.

The statement Google has given on the matter says, "We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. The licensing agreement is the subject of ongoing discussion so we won’t be commenting further at this time."

An AP spokesman is quoted as saying, "We have nothing to add to Google’s statement."

If you’ve followed the online news industry much, we probably don’t have to tell you that Google and the AP have had a somewhat complicated, if not rocky relationship.

Last week, Yahoo reached its own deal with the AP. Financial terms of that agreement were not disclosed.

This week, the AP promoted editor and correspondent Ted Anthony to Assistant Managing Editor. He is said to have been involved in the development of the news organization’s social media practices.

Related Articles:

> Mark Cuban Takes Murdoch-esque Stance on Google

> News Corp. Blocks Content from News Aggregation Site

> Do You Have the "Right" to Link?

> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"

> Murdoch’s War with the Aggregators

> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?

Update: Cuban has now posted a lengthy explanation of his stance on Google. Essentially, he appears to view Google as helpful if not necesary for lesser known brands, but as a bad business decision for big names in the news industry.

Oriinal Article: The always outspoken Mark Cuban has contributed his thoughts on the whole news aggregation/Google News/publisher debate, one that is most often credited to Rupert Murdoch. It appears that Cuban has a similar opinion on the matter.

Cuban spoke at a keynote address this week at the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC 2010 Conference, and is quoted by numerous sources as calling Google in particular a "vampire."

"When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood," he is quoted as saying, reportedly telling newspapers and other publishers to "show some balls" and block Google News and, "There’s absolutely no reason for you guys to be indexed on Google News … if they don’t pay you."

Michael Arrington points out that at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008, Cuban said he’d like to be an investor in TechMeme, which provides a similar service to Google News and other aggregators. In addition, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land notes (in great detail) that Cuban is an investor in Mahalo, which actually "touts to advertisers how it taps into Google to generate page views."

While on the topic of the news industry debates, the topic of charging for news is always a conversation starter. The Wall Street Journal has taken down its pay wall for the day, giving users access to articles that would otherwise require a subscription to access. The effort comes as the result of a sponsorship from Acura (Via SIA).
 

Related Articles:

> News Corp. Blocks Content from News Aggregation Site

> Do You Have the "Right" to Link?

> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"

> Murdoch’s War with the Aggregators

> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?

The always outspoken Mark Cuban has contributed his thoughts on the whole news aggregation/Google News/publisher debate, one that is most often credited to Rupert Murdoch. It appears that Cuban has a similar opinion on the matter.

Cuban spoke at a keynote address this week at the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC 2010 Conference, and is quoted by numerous sources as calling Google in particular a "vampire."

"When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood," he is quoted as saying, reportedly telling newspapers and other publishers to "show some balls" and block Google News and, "There’s absolutely no reason for you guys to be indexed on Google News … if they don’t pay you."

Michael Arrington points out that at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008, Cuban said he’d like to be an investor in TechMeme, which provides a similar service to Google News and other aggregators. In addition, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land notes (in great detail) that Cuban is an investor in Mahalo, which actually "touts to advertisers how it taps into Google to generate page views."

While on the topic of the news industry debates, the topic of charging for news is always a conversation starter. The Wall Street Journal has taken down its pay wall for the day, giving users access to articles that would otherwise require a subscription to access. The effort comes as the result of a sponsorship from Acura (Via SIA).
 

Related Articles:

> News Corp. Blocks Content from News Aggregation Site

> Do You Have the "Right" to Link?

> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"

> Murdoch’s War with the Aggregators

> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?

News aggregation startup Thoora is celebrating its public release just one day after ReadWriteWeb’s Real-Time Summit. In June, we wrote about the fact that CNN was hours behind Twitter in reporting news from Tehran. As real-time services continue to trump traditional media outlets, companies like Thoora have jumped on the chance to build a better news source. Since Thoora’s recent demo at TC50, reviewers are already questioning whether the company can survive in what is proving to be a crowded space.

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Based out of Toronto, Thoora indexes stories from across the web and categorizes them under 25 verticals including science, technology, video games, mobile, world politics and television. Similar to Techmeme, Thoora aggregates real-time news stories; however, in addition the company also provides an open analysis of real-time trackbacks.

Thoora aggregates interesting posts from a variety of different verticals in what resembles a Digg-like news dashboard. However, instead of displaying the number of in-community “diggs”, Thoora displays “reactions”. Reactions entail the number of news stories, blog posts, tweets and comments that can be linked to a particular story. Stories with the most reactions rise to the top of the list, whereas less popular stories remain lost in the news river ether.

ReadWriteWeb recently recognized Thoora on our top 100 real-time web companies. To check out the service, visit thoora.com.

Discuss

Google has introduced a new Lab called Google Fusion Tables, which is described as "an experimental system for data management in the cloud." It allows users to upload tables of up to 100MB and share them with collaborators.

"Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing," Google’s Alon Halevy and Rebecca Shapley explain. "Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users."

With Fusion Tables, users can upload tabular data sets and share them with collaborators or with the general public. You can choose which data to share, and keep certain parts hidden if you wish. You also have control over which collaborators see certain parts of data.

Filters and aggregation can be applied to data, and it can be visualized on maps and other charts. Data can be merged from multiple tables, and it can be exported to the web or csv files. Discussions can also be conducted at the row, table, and individual cell levels.

 

As with Google Labs in general, you have to take into consideration that Fusion Tables is in the experimental stage. This means that there are probably some bugs and some things missing. Google is encouraging feedback, and perhaps eventually, it will work its way out of Labs and into the full-blown product stage.

Just recently, Yahoo! launched a “Placemaker Service.” This is basically a simple web-based service that has the ability to geo-locate any type of un-structured information like plain text. According to Yahoo!, the Placemaker Service is more of a “geo-enrichment” rather than the more advanced geo-coding. Using this service, you can get results including the location like 53rd County Street as well as the location type like the country or city.

The Yahoo! Placemaker will provide web developers with a platform and a functionality with the help of which they can geo-enrich all their content including that of blog posts, web pages, RSS feeds, status updates, news articles, and various applications that use similar information. The Placemaker is basically an open API and it will now help developers across the world to make aware different types of applications as well as location of data sets.

This web service was released at Where2.0 and will enable the accessibility of GeoPlanet Data to the public with the help of a Creative Commons License. The Placemaker’s geo-enrichment services are being seen as a competition to Google’s Geo-location API. According to the description provided by Yahoo! regarding the Placemaker, “This service will handle any free-from text and “identify places mentioned within the text, disambiguate those places, and return unique identifiers (WOEIDs) for each, as well as information about how many times the place was found within the text, and where in the text it was found. It will provide the geographic developer community with the means to mark-up and index their content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner, and assist with geographic discovery and aggregation across the Internet.”

The Yahoo 360
At the same time, Yahoo will be closing the Yahoo 360 service officially on July 13, 2009 according to their internal blog. According to Yahoo! Blog: “Over the past two years there has been a lot of discussion about the closure of Yahoo! 360° and the transition to our new profiles experience that we’ve had in the works. Today, we’re able to firmly say that on July 13, 2009 Yahoo! 360° will be closing down and you’ll be asked to move into your new profile on Yahoo! by July 12, 2009.”

The Yahoo 360° service was actually launched as a social networking and blogging service in March 2005. But over the years it has not gained popularity as was expected. Several experts and analysts believe that the failure of Yahoo 360 lies entirely with the fact that they were unable to cash on the rising popularity of blogging and social networking over the Internet.

The Yahoo 360° service will follow the footsteps of Yahoo Mash, the social networking site that was shut down in September 2008. In order to keep Yahoo! social networking alive, the group launched Yahoo Profiles with some of the basic social networking functionalities. But the truth is that with the closing down of the Yahoo 360° service, Yahoo! will not have any strong social networking services for the global audience.

News is provided by Joel McLaughlin @ Dataflurry search engine optimization and website marketing team located in Phoenix Arizona and Los Angeles California.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Yahoo: Launching Placemaker Service and Closing Yahoo 36

Yes, the AP (Associated Press) is desperate. Yes, the AP has lost control of the news. And yes, bloggers are more and more going local with their focus. That leads to an obvious question, will bloggers eventually replace the AP and other news organizations?

Wall Street Journal columnist Mark Penn points to statistics which claim that in the U.S. alone there are over 20 million bloggers, of which 1.7 million get paid for it. Mr. Penn also references a Technorati report which says that there are close to a half million bloggers receiving there primary income from this activity.

I don’t necessarily buy into these exact numbers but clearly there is an important game changing trend at work here. With likely millions of bloggers worldwide and many making their living blogging it’s only a matter of time that all news is covered in blogs.

The current problem with blogs is not unprofessionalism as many in journalism will tell you, its a lack of central distribution channels. The local court house in your community may have blogger coverage but do you know about it? New restaurants open in your area all the time and bloggers are reviewing them, but are you reading? Your high school won their basketball game last night and it was covered by 2 blogs, 4 twitterers and one Facebook post, but did you notice?

The challenge for us Internet entrepreneurs is how to bring this coverage to peoples attention. News aggregation sites and search engines are working at it but they have not yet succeeded at replacing the local newspaper. However, once real-time local news which is covered by hundreds of local bloggers, Twitterers, Facebookers, YouTubers, etc… can be integrated into high-traffic websites then who needs the AP!