Social Blogging

"He was always smiling, always in a good mood, very happy."

Henry Rivera and Pedro Hernandez are dead. But the man who hit them head-on, Herman Bank, is alive and in satisfactory condition. via 10NBC / WHEC TV-10

"His friends loved him, the community loved him. He was 15 years old but at 15 years old he was a role model for a lot of the children in the community"

Toronto Mayor David Miller speaks with Canada AM from CTV studios in Toronto on Friday, May 25, 2007. via CTV.ca

If you're looking for a high quality Internet TV service with full-screen playback, a host of premium content, and social networking tools built right into the interface, Joost is just what you've been waiting for.

Brought to you by the people behind the hugely successful Skype and Kazaa platforms, Joost taps into similar peer-to-peer technologies to make distributing high-quality, full-screen video a piece of cake. With a half-decent broadband connection, every viewer effectively becomes a broadcaster and plays their part in the streaming of great looking video-on-demand content.

In addition to the ability to tune into great-looking video, Joost makes it easy for viewers to interact with one another as they watch content together. Because while Joost does an excellent job of replicating the experience of watching and navigating traditional cable TV, its ambitions do go a little further.

Using a simple interface that even your grandmother could figure out in a minute or so, Joost makes it easy to scan through the hundreds of programs worth of content from mainstream media stalwarts like MTV, down to small-scale independents. Then, if you want to engage with friends as you check that content out, you can add chat and instant messaging functionality into the mix and while you are watching the show.

Throw in an RSS news ticker, user ratings and the ability to send screenshots right to your blog, and you have the makings of a full Web 2.0 experience.

Here are the details:

Joost - Overview

Joost is leading the way in the accelerating convergence of television and online video. Make no bones about it, Internet TV is moving out of the office and into our lounges, and during the coming months we will see this trend grow from strength to strength.

What makes Joost a contender, besides its eclectic mix of quality programming, is the fact that it effectively mirrors the experience of interacting with your TV, while blending in popular elements of the web. This is far from a geek-only platform, as simplicity and usability have clearly taken the front seat inside the Joost development team.

By default Joost opens in full-screen mode, and this is the way it was meant to be experienced. While the overall Joost video quality lags a bit behind DVD, and a good way off HD, it is nevertheless a giant leap forward from the world of YouTube and company. I'm sure that this is in no small part due to the effective implementation of peer-to-peer technology, as in all of the time I used Joost I didn't experience more than a second or two wait, and never once saw the irksome buffering that has long been a staple of the YouTube experience.

What you get, quite simply, is good-looking video-on-demand content that you can easily choose from a vast channel guide, or skip through with a cable TV like control interface. Layered on top of this you have a number of widgets that bring added, though non-essential, functionalities to the experience.

The Joost Interface

Once logged inside Joost, in standard full-screen mode you will see nothing but the current video until you jog your mouse, at which point a number of simple options reveals itself to you.

In the bottom-center of the screen you have a control panel of sorts, which allows you to play and pause the current show, skip to the previous or next show, change the volume or switch to a windowed-view.

From here you can also call up the channel guide, check out what's on next, or what was playing previously, quit the application, run a keyword search, edit your user profile and even open up help files. The interface of the controller is intuitive, and icon-driven, with descriptions of the function for each button appearing as you roll over with the mouse.

At the top of the screen you can open up information about the channel you are watching. On the left is an icon to bring up your personalized channel list, which you can customize by adding in items from the Joost Channel Catalog. Finally, over on the right is an icon that will open up the various widget options available, and this is where you will find the social functions included in the platform.

Entering the windowed mode gives you a fully resizeable display with a more pared down set of controls, including volume, play / pause, skip forward and return to full-screen buttons:

Many of the shows feature extra interactive content that can be optionally activated. You can also turn on a brief TV-guide-like description of what you are watching, which can also be viewed before making your initial decision. This is useful if you get down to some serious channel surfing, as you very quickly get an idea of the content on offer.

Where with video-on-demand in the YouTube tradition it sometimes pays to take pot-luck with a video, and see how it turns out, the longer form, more TV-like content of Joost benefits greatly from adding this extra information. The difference between committing thirty minutes of your time rather than two or three is a significant one, so this feature is well received.

Left to its own devices, Joost will continue playing content from your currently selected channel until you stop it from doing so, which effectively gives you a TV-like constant flow of programming. However, as each channel is arranged into video-on-demand playlists, it is quite possible to skip straight to the content that interests you the most.

You do this by calling up the current channel guide, and selecting the video you are interested in watching. Each video has both a thumbnail image, title and complementary information about each episode.

Shows begin after no more than a couple of seconds of load time, generally have a brief sponsorship spot at the beginning, with some shows containing ads as you watch and others having only ads between an episode and the next. This is, of course, how Joost funds the enterprise. The sponsorship spots are short and cut straight to the point as compared to their televisual counterparts, although I did find myself wishing for a slightly better transition between show and commercial, as at present the jump from one to the other can be a little jarring and unexpected.

Content

Besides the individual channel guides and your personal list of channels, Joost also has a useful full-screen channel catalog, which you can browse by keyword search or category. The range of offerings is already impressive, with a minimum of five channels per category and in many cases several more. The categories featured are:

• Cartoon and animation
• Comedy
• Documentary
• Entertainment
• Lifestyle
• Music
• Music Entertainment
• Sports and Games

Furthermore the catalog displays featured channels, and has listings for 'staff picks', most popular channels and new channels, so it is very easy to find something to suit your tastes.

The quality of the content does vary, and not just in terms of production budget. A lot of the stuff I enjoyed was from smaller video publishers like Channel Frederator, and I did get the sense that larger players like MTV were holding back on the content delivered.

Nevertheless, with a bit of poking around there is plenty worth watching, and I think that the offerings will expand significantly as the platform goes into public release, both in terms of independent channels and larger content suppliers.

Widgets And Community - My Joost

One of the key features that sets Joost apart from regular television is the inclusion of a set of optional widgets. While these are in no way essential to the viewing experience, they do add a social dimension to proceedings, in addition to bringing in other functions, such as the ability to read a customized news ticker as you watch your show.

Clicking on the 'My Joost' icon from the main interface brings up the list pictured above, which lets you select and activate as many or few of the available widgets as you deem necessary. The widgets range from a simple clock that you can position anywhere on-screen - useful for keeping an eye on the time in full-screen mode, as hours of your life disappear into Joost - right through to social networking features such as GTalk / Jabber compatible Instant Messaging, and show-related chat rooms. It would be nice to see Meebo-like support for other IM platforms built in at a later date.

For the multi-taskers and news-hounds among you, the RSS news ticker will doubtless be of interest, in that it gives you the chance to make sure you are abreast of the very latest news from your RSS resources, even as you are watching a show in full-screen.

You can configure this to display news feeds from any sources you'd care to enter, and if you click through on a post-title from the news ticker, Joost automatically resizes to windowed mode, allowing you to take a look at your news website while the action continues. This is well thought through and executed.

Further to that, you can invite friends to come and check out content you are enjoying direct from the interface, read the latest Joost information via a bulletin board, give a show a one to five star rating and several other features that enhance the Joost viewing experience without overpowering it.

I'm looking forward to seeing how these widgets develop over time.

System Requirements

Joost currently runs on Windows and recent Mac models, but you should also note that it can take up some serious bandwidth. If you are on a bandwidth-capped Internet account, you might want to be careful about how much Joost you watch.

Windows requirements

• Windows XP Service Pack 2 with DirectX 9.0c
• Pentium 4 processor, 1GHz
• 512Mb or more RAM
• A modern video card with DirectX support and at least 32Mb of VRAM

Mac requirements

• Any Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.4
• 512Mb or more RAM

General requirements

• About 500 MB free disk space. The Joost software is a 15 MB download, expanding to 35-40 MB on disk. The remainder is used as a cache.
• Broadband/ADSL (1Mbit/s downstream, 512Kbit/s upstream recommended, although lower speeds may well work)
• In 1 hour of viewing, 320 Mb will be downloaded and 105 Mb uploaded, which means that a 1 Gb cap will be exhausted in about 10 hours

Need an Invitation?

At the time of writing the only way that you can get into Joost is by being invited by another user. If you haven't already been invited, and want to give it a try, leave your email address in the comments section and we will make sure that you get an invitation as soon as possible.

If you don't like the idea of publishing your contact details, think about using a temporary, disposable email address like those supplied by Mailinator or MailExpire.

Conclusions

Joost is a big step forward for the constantly evolving Internet TV genre. Deftly fusing content from mainstream media producers and smaller-scale independents; bringing together a rich, TV-like experience and the community aspects so important to the web; and upping the overall quality of streaming video, Joost is a good indication of the way things are going.

As more and more people use their computers as entertainment centers, or stream content over to their TVs, we are going to be seeing more services like Joost evolve over time - hybrid services that bridge the gap between our experience of the web, and of Cable TV, TiVo and DVD technologies. Joost does an excellent job of leading the way.

The interface is easy to use, and while it is capable of being customized quite extensively to the tastes of a particular viewer, the hordes of extra features are not essential to get up and running. Anyone that has have ever navigated their way through a DVD menu or cable TV channel guide is going to be instantly at home with Joost, which should broaden its overall market penetration.

While the platform isn't focused around user generated content, as is YouTube, it certainly looks like there is going to be space within the network for smaller-scale independent operations to get their work distributed. Already Joost offers a good blend of mainstream staples, such as MTV, with edgier more home-grown micro-producers. This could be a very big opportunity for those looking to make their mark in the pioneering days of web / TV convergence.

Overall Joost provides a well-designed, well-delivered platform with an already impressively eclectic range of programming. As the platform grows further I can see it entering a lot of homes over a short space of time.

While it might not quite yet be time to cancel your cable subscription, you might not be waiting too long before that seems like a wise move. Watch this space.

Additional Resources

If you'd like to learn more about Joost, you might want to check out the following links:

• The Joost website
• Online listing of current Joost channels
• An introduction to the service, including a short video
• Anil Gupte's 7 reasons why Joost could fail

Originally written by Michael Pick for Master New Media and originally published as: "Internet TV: Joost - The New Online Television With Social Networking Built In

Over the past couple of years the internet has changed drastically on three fronts: Broadband Video content has exploded and become more accessible. via Web TV Wire

The old axiom in business is that it's not what you know, but who. With so much collective knowledge now available online for free, the saying holds more than ever. via NewsFactor Network

Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, May 26, 2007 Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B7 Electricity reached one-quarter of Americans 46 years after its introduction. via Sacramento Bee Newspaper

We've got a great team of N2Y2 bloggers and vloggers who will be covering the Conference so you can follow along online. via NetSquared blogs

Ambient Sound Investments , a company established by the four co-founding engineers of Skype, have invested in the Hong Kong based 3D social networking company Frenzoo as part of a Series A round of investment ... via TechCrunch

RSS newsfeeds have become part of the mainstay of the new web. But where do you go when you want to search through the thousands upon thousands on offer? A new project has set itself the ambitious target of gathering no less than one million feeds together for you to search through. Here's how:

MillionRSS, which originally launched in February, is that project and its simple goal has inspired hundreds of people to get involved. The website essentially offers a great, free way to promote your web content to interested readers, while contributing to a vast library of RSS news feeds freely accessible to anyone with a web connection.

Bloggers benefit by tapping into the buzz around the project, and having well-targeted traffic driven to their posts from specific categories within the MillionRSS framework. And MillionRSS benefits by growing in stature as a resource for those looking for fresh web content.

But in the short life of the project so far, MillionRSS has already garnered some controversy, and undergone a change in direction. For while upon its initial release, and until recently, the site offered full and partial feeds that viewers could read directly from the MillionRSS website, issues over intellectual property raised by users have led to a change in tack. Visit MillionRSS today, and you will find that each blog listed has a description, an image and a collection of post titles, but if you want to read their actual content, you are going to have to click through to the source.

This change will be welcomed by some, and considered inconvenient by others. Nevertheless, it does not detract greatly from what is fast becoming a definitive source of the latest RSS feeds live on the web.

In this review of the service I look at:

• The idea behind the project
• Why RSS is so important, and RSS directories can make your life easier
• The main features of MillionRSS
• The issue of blog scraping raised early on in MillionRSS lifespan

Here are the details:

MillionRSS - Overview

MillionRSS is an ambitious project, and has already seen a great deal of success along the way to its end target of busting the one million feed mark. At the time of writing there are some 124,607 feeds gathered in the directory, and it doesn't look like things are slowing down.

MillionRSS is described by its creator as:

''...a project to collect over 1,000,000 RSS feeds that are out there in the wild west of what we know as 'the blogosphere'. We offer free submission for anyone to easily send us their RSS feed details (along with their site description and branding information). In turn, we will syndicate your feed for our readers and will give you a permanent link from our site. That's it, pretty simple.''

It is this combination of simplicity and ambition that makes the project jump out at you, just as the boldly conceived Million Dollar Homepage did before it. The big difference is that MillionRSS is more than just a self-serving money spinner. In fact it has the potential to be become a very useful resource to both bloggers seeking to promote their content, and consumers hoping to find fresh, quality feeds in the ocean of garbage and detritus littering an increasingly overpopulated web.

Everybody wins - bloggers get exposure, users find new feeds, and MillionRSS gets a reputation for itself, and some nice ad revenues on the side.

But what's so important about RSS, and why do we need another directory to help us sort through the feeds available?

Why RSS?

Photo credit: Alex Kalmbach

RSS has changed the way that a lot of us engage with the web. Rather than having to go and manually check page after page of web content to see if there have been any updates or new blog posts, RSS makes it possible for new content to come after you.

Using a news aggregator like Google Reader you can subscribe to as many website RSS feeds as you like. These feeds then bring you summaries of any new content created on your favorite websites, giving you the chance to go and check them out for yourself.

The end result is a lot of saved time and the ability to almost instantaneously view a snapshot of the parts of the web that interest you, without having to go and explore them afresh each and every time. For an excellent three minute video introduction to how it works, and what makes it so cool, check out Lee Lefever's down-to-earth summary.

Once you get familiar with RSS - and it really isn't rocket science - you'll be amazed how many functions it can serve. Robin Good notes, in his post on What you can do with RSS that the possibilities include:

• Monitoring news and online newsgroups
• Checking the weather and classified ads
• Tapping into your friends' hot online discoveries
• Watching auctions, and finding bargains
• Creating custom, niche-targeted News Radars for your website visitors

Of course the list could go on almost ad infinitum, as RSS makes it possible to stay on top of the very freshest information as it flows right into your content aggregator, like emails to your inbox.

Directories like MillionRSS make the process of finding relevant, personalized content for personal or professional use a whole lot easier than seeking out suitable websites by web-surfing and search engines alone.

Certainly, MillionRSS isn't alone in seeking to fulfill this function, and should you want to check out some of the alternatives you might want to pay a visit to Robin Good's regularly update RSS Top 55.

MillionRSS - Main Features

MillionRSS is very simple to use and navigate, whether you want to submit your own feed to the directory, or check out those submitted by others.

The easiest way to find content is by running a keyword search, using the prominently placed search-bar at the top of the screen:

This is a great way of narrowing down feeds if you have a very clear idea of a particular theme, subject or even event that you want to find related feeds for.

However, if you are less certain it is possible to browse through content easily by category. The categories are very diverse, and cover a range of subcategories. While there is a strong emphasis on blogs and blogging, as is also the case in the blogosphere itself, you will find content that ranges from baby blogs to technology, academia to sports.

Here are just a small handful of the offerings spanning the world of blogging:

Once you have made your category selection, content is browsed based on popularity, as voted for by other site visitors. As you scroll through the feeds available, you can instantly subscribe to any that take your interest by clicking on a large blue RSS icon. This will open the feed in a new window, effectively allowing you to subscribe with a single click.

Should you wish to check out a little more in the way of details before committing to subscription, clicking on the name of the blog will take you through to a summary of its content, along with a list of recent post titles in reverse chronological order. If you then decide to read those posts rather than subscribe, clicking on the individual titles will link you back to the original blog. This is a recent change, replacing a previous feature that allowed you to read the content from within MillionRSS, and was made in response to complaints surrounding intellectual property issues, which I take a look at a bit further in the next section.

If you particularly enjoy a feed and want to see it gain in popularity, you can click on the Digg-like 'Bump it!' button, which will add one to the current score of the feed. The feed with the highest score appears first in the last, and the lowest last. This applies within each separate category, as well as the 'all categories' section on the MillionRSS homepage.

That aside, you can click through to a section to add your feed to the directory, learn about RSS, find link codes for promoting the site on your blog, or provide feedback, making MillionRSS a very streamlined, focused interface intent on fulfilling a simple, but effective purpose. This simplicity works for me, and I am glad that things haven't been overly complicated. What MillionRSS does, it does well.

RSS, Scraping and Intellectual Property

Photo credit: Marc Dietrich

One recent change in the MillionRSS website is a shift away from displaying the latest posts from a feed directly within the interface. While initially it was possible to head over to MillionRSS, run a search for feeds, check out the blogs from the search results, and even read them there and then, things have since changed.

Now, if you find a blog that looks interesting through the MillionRSS directory, you are presented with a description, image and a list of the most recent post titles only. Clicking on these titles will take the reader through to the original website to access the content gathered in the feed.

Some are likely to find this a little inconvenient, given that it is obviously easier to read everything from one single destination or application than it is to have multiple windows open on your screen. Without so much as content summaries for posts, readers are left at the mercy of blog authors' titling skills. While good bloggers generally pay attention to making their titles as descriptive as possible, not everyone takes this approach, which can make for an element of pot-luck being involved when selecting something to read.

Nevertheless, the main reason that this approach has been taken is as a response to criticisms of 'blog scraping, considered by many to be a breach of intellectual property.

Professional scrapers tap into the content of other blogs, and republish them in their entirety elsewhere, making a profit from advertising-revenues without having to write a thing. This is a growing problem that has effected this very blog. You may even be reading this on a site other than Master New Media, unaware that this is where the content originated.

While personally I do not see what MillionRSS was doing originally as scraping, any more than Google blog search could be accused of scraping, I can see the incentive of bloggers to crack down on this kind of activity. If a reader views your content on MillionRSS, and then clicks on one of their ads as a consequence, you have effectively lost that ad revenue on your own website. For those trying to make a living from their writing, this can be a frustrating experience.

However, I would argue that quality content found through MillionRSS would ultimately lead to RSS subscriptions, and direct future contact with the source blog, MillionRSS perhaps having profited from the introduction on a single occasion.

Whichever way you look at it, intellectual property issues are a minefield in the age of easy digital duplication.

Conclusions

Whether you are a web-surfer, news professional, PR-agent or blogger MillionRSS might very well make for a useful addition to your online toolbox.

Anyone that has a website with an RSS feed - and if you don't, you really should - will benefit from having targeted traffic driven to them from the MillionRSS search directory. Users access your content by checking within categories they are interested in, or else using a keyword search tool. This means that the people that access your content via your feed are likely to be interested in what you have to offer from the outset.

From the end-user perspective MillionRSS is a goldmine of content, and whether you are looking for web feeds for professional or personal reasons, you will manage to find endless hundreds of relevant blog posts in your area of interest. Categories span from baby blogs through to wikis, and from academics to women and blogging.

At the time of writing the project has a long way to go before it arrives at its final destination of a million feeds, but given that it has only been up and running since February and has already managed to gather well over a hundred thousand, the chances look good. Regardless of whether a million RSS feeds are ever collected there, you are likely to be spoilt for choice in all but the most obscure of content niches.

MillionRSS is a great addition to the existing range of RSS directories, and is well worth checking out if you are looking to find new content, or promote your blog or website to a wider audience for free.

Additional Resources

If you would like to learn more about MillionRSS, you might like to check out the following links:

• MillionRSS website
• MillionRSS news bulletin
• Add your feed to MillionRSS
• What is RSS?
• Report on the death of MillionRSS 1.0

Originally written by Michael Pick for Master New Media and originally published as: "RSS Newsfeeds Search Gets Ambitious: MillionRSS"

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Launched only in October 2006, WidSets today announced that it has reached 1 million registered users worldwide. via TMCnet

Carolina Moreno smiles as her new husband, Airman Carlos Moreno, who is in Afghanistan, blows her a kiss at the conclusion of their wedding ceremony by video feed at Vandenberg Air Force Base Saturday. via Lompoc Record

A teen arrested after police found his pictures of potted marijuana plants and drug paraphernalia posted on MySpace.com will serve 30 days in jail. via La Crosse Tribune

"To run a television network used to require expensive cameras, a satellite connection and studios. But the production costs have gone down to zero. Now you can share your life over a phone and someone is always connected, watching."

Other than the mobile phone companies that will obviously profit from an extension of social networking to the cell phone, how will the social networking companies make a profit on this phenomenon? The answer ... via E-Commerce Times