Emad Fanous

I’m sure you’ve heard about the iPod Video by now. [more info]

Here’s a tutorial to rip your own DVDs for the iPod.

As a side note, with the ability to download popular shows from major networks, will this cut into Tivo’s adoption/usage? The major networks should have no problems making their shows available since they make no money off of Tivo (at least no direct ways I am aware of) but could directly make money off of these downloads.

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First we heard about MSN merging with or acquiring AOL (well, not first…but first in this latest pattern of events)…

When that happened, Google must have been concerned that they could lose all the ad revenue from the AdSense revenue on all of AOL’s properties, including those from its subscriber base as well as high traffic sites it owns such as Mapquest, Digital Cities, and others. (Mapquest and DCI are both good sources of local content…not to mention having a subscriber base implies you have a billing address so ads can also be targeted to them locally). If MSN pulled this off, it would have been a big deal for their ad product, still in its infancy.

Then, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger form an alliance that makes users from both their networks able to communicate to each other, forming a large network (though still not as large as AIM’s.

The question that came to mind was: Did they do that to take away market share from AOL or was it a preemptive move against Google (in which case, based upon what I’ve seen thus far from Google’s product, they must know about some future release that I don’t know because I haven’t felt even remotely compelled to switch to the talk product yet).

On top of all the sites AOL already had within its network, it added Weblogs, Inc..

Now, Google and Comcast have teamed up to buy a minority stake in AOL. Perhaps this was done to block any future attempts to merge/buyout MSN or others (at least for the near term).

Seems as if, with CPC ad revenues on the rise, content is making a comeback and those making the most money will be those who either have the customers, the consumers, or both.

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Check it out.

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PANICS/Machinima has put together a video series.

They make shows by “acting” within video games, recording it, then editing and voice dubbing them.

The result is a series of funny videos. Check out this 3-episode series.

Link forwarded to me from Pabloe and Ed

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I participate in the Yahoo Publisher Network beta which is Yahoo/Overture’s competitor to AdSense.

I have been doing A-B tests to see how they stack up to each other. I got a call this morning from a Yahoo representative that asked for input, provided recommendations, and let me know of future plans for the product based on my request (such as new categories for the targetting feature in order to increase relevance).

Good to see someone actually using the beta test results to accomplish something. My best goes out to Yahoo on this one!

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A good friend of mine pointed me in the direction of localonliner.com by Peter Krasilovsky.

I don’t know Peter but he has information about what is going on in local. For example, I was interested to find out Dane got into VOIP after the YellowPages.com acquisition by SBC & BellSouth…but I had to chuckle at article like this one. he he.

Anyway, pretty interesting information and commentaries…I have subscribed.

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Anyone see VGMap yet?

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Yahoo has finally launched a beta version of their blog search.

It appears to be attached to their news search. When you search for news, blog results appear on the right…then you can click to “see more results” to get the full list of blog results.

Sorting is available by relevance or date.

Results tend to be better than Google’s…they don’t have as much spam…but they still lack the ability, like google, to provide good matches to the authoritative sites, even when sorting on relevance. Whereas Google provides searching for blogs (at the top of the results) and searching for blog entries (below it), yahoo seems to only search the entries. If you search for yahoo, google, or even emad fanous, you do not get the best, authoritative matches at the top of the results….

but searching for yahoo turned this up as the top result for me…an entry from insidegoogle:

Verdict: When it comes to timely search, the older engines have it better (but not perfect), and Yahoo and Google have a lot to learn. Relevancy is where the future’s at, however. I’m thinking a Memeorandum solution might be better than just regular old search. Of course, Memeorandum doesn’t have a search engine, so the first person to steal their UI and give it full-blogosphere search capabilities will be my new best friend blog search engine.

My only thing is that both Yahoo and Google have some improving to do on the relevance portion. Until then, only the sort by date is decent and the best person at that will be whoever has the freshest content.

The most interesting thing is the integration with News. Jeremy says:

Option one is to build Yet Another Blog Search Vertical (Technorati, Feedster, Google Blog Search, etc.) that most people would never see.

Option two is to integrate the results somewhere that millions of people could see them in context.

Which would you choose?

We decided that blogs had been captives of specialty search engines long enough.

Interestingly, many news search sites have included blog results within their news results. However, these have always been kept to blogs that tended to be considered more authoritative or popular. Yahoo hasn’t integrated the results with news in that fashion but has, instead, provided a different section where blog searching is integrated. So why the heck would they not create a new page where they have its own vertical search…simply slapping onto the news page doesn’t mean it is part of the news search. It’s not…it just happens to display a few results on the news page.

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Google Labs launched an RSS Reader.

As with most of Google’s products, this one also makes extensive use of AJAX. I’d like to provide you with more details but I’ve been waiting for a verrrryyyyyy long time as it tries to import my subscriptions OPML. There’s no need to take that long! How disappointing.

I suppose I’ll have a followup later…however, here are Gary Price’s first impressions.

Knowing which feeds matter based on subscription rates and could ultimately benefit their Blog Search’s rankings and/or freshness (crawl the ones that matter the most to people more often, find feeds not currently in their index when someone subscribes to it, etc).

[via…fyi also interesting in that article: “Google also announced its work on determining sex of a person using pattern recognition in photos”]

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I’ve mentioned Trimpath and their TrimSpreadsheet application.

Well, the Trimpath people have provided us with Num Sum which takes the open source online spreadsheet and makes a site out of it where you can tag and share your spreadhseets with others…similar to Writely…but I still like all the features and UI of Writely much better (although I am expecting Num Sum to improve…after all, it is currently flagged as “beta”).

You can view others’ spreadsheets and, yes, you can mark your own as private. A nifty little feature is the ability to post the spreadsheet to your blog (click a link, copy a snippet of iframe code, and paste into your blog). Check it out:

This application is free but they’re planning a paid version with additional features (it is yet to be determined what those features are). A list of available functions is available here.

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