Looking for Patriots news? The best source is by far Mike Reiss’ blog on ESPNBoston.com. The former Globe Pats writer updates his blog several times every day and his Mailbag is second to none. … So I’ll bet $100 that if you have both Tom Brady and Steve Slaton on your Fantasy Football Team, you’re 0-2, like me. … GoogleNews was no working for a couple of hours on Tuesday. Why did I mention this? When’s the last time you heard of anything Google-related not being up to speed? … Three links for your reading enjoyment (after you leave Decent Community, of course): 1.How XBOX360 is used to fight heart disease; 2) Hungry for some Spotted Dick? You’re in luck as a city council in the U.K. recently reversed its decision to force a local restaurant to rename it “Spotted Richard;” and  3) What better way for high school senior girls to haze incoming freshmen that to put together a Slut List. Girls apparently are upset they didn’t make it onto the list, which has been an annual tradition at a New Jersey high school for more than 10 years. Only in Jersey. … It looks like we see what side the Red Sox organization took in the Nick Green-Jason Varitek-Heidi Watney love triangle. The Sox dismissed Green from the team and sent him back to Boston to chill while Watney follows the squad on their road trip. … Had a great idea for a contest the other day. How about CBS, who’s broadcasting this year’s Super Bowl, giving away a 30-second commercial spot to a small business? It could have an essay contest or some internet vide contest with the gold being a commercial that will make your biz big bucks. Wonder if Boston Regulatory Consulting would enter? … Happy 52nd birthday to German soccer player Wolfgang Wolf. What a decent name! …  Happy 33rd birthday to Stephanie McMahon, former wrestler, daughter of WWF founder Vince McMahon and wife to Triple H. Did you know that one of her storylines during her wrestling days had her getting abducted by the Undertaker, who was going to marry her in the middle of the ring before Stong Cold Steve Austin came in and saved her? … Happy 36th birthday to former NFL running back Eddie George. Did you know that George is married to Tamara “Taj” Johnson, a contestant on Survivor: Tocantins? Did you also know that his mother, a flight attendant, changed her work schedule to be at George’s side when he signed his first NFL contract? If she didn’t change, she would have been on TWA Flight 800, which exploded over the Atlantic Ocean in 1996 due to faulty wiring, killing all 230 people on board. … Finally, happy 29th birthday to Community member Tom “Bunt” Stankiewicz, who heads up DC’s San Francisco bureau. Do you know anyone else who has damaged their car by slamming into a frozen turkey?

Search. By now an ubiquitous and intuitive approach to finding relevant information, fast. But I still remember the first time I typed in a few select words and received a string of results back – it was a defining moment, similar to the eureka! of writing a sentence into an IRC chat box and realising that another person in another part of the country was responding. There was a sense of being onto something big, of witnessing the feeble beginnings of significant social change. Granted, my first search terms were probably ‘Metallica Black Album lyrics’, but please don’t hold that against me.

Search may by now seem mundane, second-nature, but in his book ‘The Search – How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture’, John Battelle argues that the notion of search is changing the way humanity recovers and discovers knowledge. ‘Not only are we searching for that which we know; we increasingly are searching to find that which we do not know’, writes Battelle.  And it is this latter part of that sentence that seems to hold the key to Google’s unprecedented success – referring to the point where search not only helps you navigate through the territory of information you have requested, but increasingly holds your hand down alleyways of information you did not even know existed, confident you will find them interesting once you get there.

Understanding your wants/wishes/interests/dreams/fears, without you necessarily articulating these yourself, and applying this understanding to every individual who is connected to the internet, is a powerful thing indeed – the sum of which Battelle terms a ‘Database of Intentions‘. (‘Intentions’ because search is not a very deliberative process – it’s a split-second, blink-of-an-eye decision. Malcolm Gladwell would argue that it reveals more about ourselves than any considered responses to a marketing questionnaire, and I’d agree.) This is the stuff marketing dreams are made of – an increasingly sophisticated answer to the question: ‘what does the world want?’. Although that answer may most immediately relate to things that can be bought – in the way Amazon’s much-feted search engine marketing tools suggests books based on which ones you, or people with similar interests to you, previously looked at – the breadth and depth of information has a value way beyond flogging things.

It makes me think about the big conversation in international organisations at the moment – about really understanding the ‘demand’ side of everything we do, and having a better answer to the question about what so-called beneficiaries, or consumers of aid, really want. As internet connectivity increases and technical literacy improves, the Database of Intentions grows more global, and can offer radically different insights into countries, markets and societies we are not truly familiar with. Sure, the ethical and legal implications of having your every step of the web chartered and sold for commercial or political purposes are still present – search is never apolitical. Searching Google for ‘women’s rights’ from an Iranian IP address still gets you to a site that says something along the lines of ‘In The Name of God – These Results Are Not Available’ – undoubtedly accompanied by a nice ping to the authorities – and it is not like people entered into any contract that allowed Google to sell the details of their most pressing concerns on. 

But the implicit contract exists: what you do online is public. As long as Google works to collapse the distance between our question and an answer, this debate becomes secondary, because sophisticated and targeted advertising will increasingly resemble a service, and inspire technological innovation.  After the Twin Towers crashed down on 9/11, people’s searches reflected their attempts to make sense of a world with more questions than answers, and led to the establishment of GoogleNews. Similar consumer-based innovations dismantled the authoritative web portals of the 90’s and levelled the playing field on a web where authority is now determined by quality and quantity of links rather than any predetermined ranking, and with total freedom of mobility for the user.

Technological innovations for social good in the developing world is still a discussion with limited understanding of the demand side of the equation, and I’d be interested to know better information could lead to. Better tracking of family members you’ve lost during a sudden onset emergency? An SMS-alert system that maps the refugee outflux you are in and tells you the best way to cross the border? A GoogleEarth view of public health risks in your area? ‘Third world’ advocacy campaigns that are crowdsourced rather than produced by UN Public Information Assistants? These developments are already underway, but as the humanitarian sector rushes to clarify its digital vision, consumer insight will be key. As we fall over ourselves trying to get connected laptops to the children of the world, what do they search for? It’s certainly not all porn.

After a year of testing a new interface for Google News, Google has launched its redesign. The new design is more cheerful and visually richer than the previous design with the ability to show videos and photos as well as most of the clutter has been removed.

Click to know about redesigned spreadsheet in Google

The feature that allowed users to post comments on the newer stories has been removed, but still it will show the all comments that have been posted.

[ More ]

Google News appears to be down providing a 503 server error message. The outage started approximately 8:40AM Eastern and continues at the time of this posting.[More..]


Google News appears to be down providing a 503 server error message. The outage…[More..]

Last Thursday we launched a new format for story pages on Google News. These are the pages you see when you click the “all [#] news articles” link of each cluster of articles which cover the same news event–or “story,” as we say on the …[More..]

Google News appears to be down providing a 503 server error message. The outage started approximately 8:40AM Eastern and continues at the time of this posting.[More..]


Google News appears to be down providing a 503 server error message. The outage…[More..]

Last Thursday we launched a new format for story pages on Google News. These are the pages you see when you click the “all [#] news articles” link of each cluster of articles which cover the same news event–or “story,” as we say on the …[More..]

Speaking of cricket, it has dominated the news in the past few days. I have used Newsmap to have a look at the sports bias.  Newsmap shows a visual representation of the stories which received the most media attention at any given time. It is interesting because it aggregates news from Google services and arranges them by size. Those receiving the most attention or reportage shows up as the largest.  It provides perspective rather than content.

The first is a “map” of the national news (Australia).

The second is a map that includes both National news and sports news. The sports completely dominates the news

From the Newsmap site:

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.  A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

This would be a good tool to show students when they are analysing the news or newsmedia. I like using Silobreaker to analyse the coverage of  particular topics/subjects in the news and this is another way to analyse the news we get.

NewsMap Positives: Nice categorization and use of colour,  the ability to customize (allows the reader to refine news topic by world news, national news, business, health, sport, technology and entertainment), you are able to capture everything at a glance, the ability to filter news by country and, whilst not all countries are catered for, most of the bigger ones are.
Things that could be improved: No visual support at first screen, news images are not taken into account (sometimes images represents news better than words) and it is restricted to English language based content.

There are more and more ways to look at current news. Another site worth a look is OurSignal.com.It looks at currently popular items on the top social news sites  (Digg, Reddit,  Del.icio.us,  Hackernews and Yahoo buzz) and mashes it all together. Viewers then get a rapid overview of the latest headlines. The bigger the box, the more relative votes a story has; the warmer the colour, the more the story is on the rise and cooler colours denote that the story is becoming “less important”.

We could have our students compare each of the above, looking at the similarities and differences and then trying to come up with the why.

Ever thought that a change in a place could impact another place although the populations in the two places don’t know each other? Yes it can, and it can happen in the world of the internet.

Let’s look at the statistics. Type “élections USA” (French top query for “US elections”) and you see that tf1.lci.fr (news channel website, referred hereafter as “LCI”) hits the 1st rank in google.fr with a French IP (todays’s data). Great stuff indeed, because the query is currently bringing a lot of traffic on the French market.

The query “Obama” is as well, but LCI did not rank as high for it. Consequently LCI opts for sponsored links. The current adwords cost-per-click of “obama” query with a “broad ” match type is currently worth € 0.96 ($ 1.22) while “obama video” query hits € 2.22 ($ 2.83), a relatively expensive keyword. There are nevertheless very good opportunities in employing keywords such as “obama muslim” – currently worth € 0.05 – that in average has brought a heavy traffic in France in the past 12 months!

The stats show that LCI has been right to invest on the PPCs, but the most interesting part is how tough the competition is within the Google News ranking. Why’s that? Well, It’s been weeks that the Google News box appears as the 1st organic result for those top queries and it’s of course cheaper (it’s free) to get the traffic through Google News than Google Adwords…

This phenomenon is now happening for all queries. Type “pizza nyc” and you’ll see Google Maps on top. Google the name of your favourite actress and you’ll see Google Images or Google video on the top of the list. The boxes are actually not recent, yet you’ll notice that these boxes appear more and more on top of organic results. I’m not even yet talking about new boxes such as Google Transit (you’ll know what time the next bus is) or worse, the new Google products such as Google showtimes (so you know quickly enough where to go to see Quantum of solace close to your place).

What it means for seo:

• if your textual content appears on top of the other organic links in the seach engine result page, internet users might still have to scroll down in order to click on the link to your site. The top of the Google page is indeed full of PPCs and boxes.
• It is now more crucial than ever to make sure all your rich media content is fully optimised. Rich media means images, videos, news and, soon coming, audio documents, etc.
• It also means that Google is trying to push its own products using data it buys from authority websites. For instance Google would buy feeds of cinema showtimes and serve them on top of organic results in response to your query. So negociating partnerships with Google becomes increasingly important.

On-page SEO (vs. off-page SEO based on popularity and therefore on inlinks) is not dead yet in spite of the fact that search engines increasingly understand all computer languages and all technologies. e-marketing is going back to the basics and its related simple but noneless fundamental questions: what is your target audience? What content are they looking for? Under which format?

Peu d’article ces temps… hé oui…je fini mon mémoire ce jeudi. Et ensuite je suis bénévole au Festival du film Français d’Helvetie.

Je ne trouve pas le temps pour écrire tout ce qui pourrait etre vu. Et l’actualité est pas mal chaude ces temps-ci.

Dans les autres nouvelles, jerôme est parti en stage chez culturepub. Et oui…monsieur à des idées de grandeur. Souhaitons lui bonne chance. D’ailleurs, il est toujours à la recherche d’un appart. Si vous avez des contacts, des tuyaux, faites passer…jerome( a)marketingalternatif.ch

Et pour donner au moins une news. aller jeter un coup d’oeil sur ce site…très interresant…

D’ici la semaine prochaine, je serais de retour, en vacances, avec deux-trois autres nouvelles…croustillantes !

Et avez-vous répondu a notre grand sondage? Merci d’avance

News outlets were told they had nothing to fear from GoogleNews. Google would simply aggregate their stories and drive traffic to their sites — not create its own, competitive, original news content. But this convention season, that line is becoming a blur.

When GoogleNews provided live streaming coverage of the Republican convention this week, wasn’t that original content that competed directly for viewers who might have otherwise turned to TV news outlets? Or was that not considered competitive because it was offered in CSPAN style, sans reporters? In any event, each GoogleNews step away from being a news aggregator is a step toward becoming a news competitor. And, there are no steps news outlets can take to stop it.

Son las 21:19 en Madrid. Veo la segunda edición del Telediario de TVE.  Salto del sofá cuando Lorenzo Milá lee directamente desde su ordenador que Ingrid Betancourt ha sido liberada. Mi salto, claro, se habrá quedado corto comparado con el que habrán dado mis compañeros de la redacción de internacional.

Después de unos días de inactividad en el blog, atado por la interminable cadena de corrección de exámenes y trabajos, abro esta entrada, en primer lugar, para saludar el regreso a la libertad de una mujer valiente y para hacer votos por una verdadera paz en la castigada Colombia, y, en segundo lugar, para publicar un pequeño test hecho sobre la marcha sobre la circulación de la noticia en la televisión y en los medios on line.

La nnoticia la lanza EFE a las 21:19 por sus servicios tradicionales a bonados. Después de verla en TVE a las 21:21, a las 21:23 entro en rtve.es. Tiene la noticia, una foto de Betancourt, dos pestañas con material documental y la relación de noticias relacionadas. Voy a BBC.news. A las 21:24 no tiene todavía la noticia. Entro en BBC en español y, claro, sí está y material documental relacionado. Y por este orden voy recorriendo páginas y televisiones. A Cuatro llegó cuando Gabilondo termina de dar la noticia con foto. Vuelvo a TVE: conexión telefónica con la corresponsal en Bogotá, que confirma la información difundida por las fuentes oficiales. El País tiene la noticia y el vídeo de la última prueba de vida. A las 23:32 entro en Google.news y no hay nada. Yahoo.news la tiene en todas sus versiones. TVE vuelve a conectar con su corresponsal en Colombia, que amplía la información; desde París, Ángel Gómez Fuentes da las primeras reacciones en Francia. Y por fin, a las 21:41, TVE pincha en directo la rueda de prensa del ministro de defensa, Juan Manuel Santos, que desgrana nombres de los liberados en la operación.

Lecciones. Primera: los medios on line son tan rápidos como la televisión -siempre que ésta esté dando información en directo. Y es que, increiblemente, los dos canales de información permanente en España, Canal 24 Horas (TVE) y CNN+, siguen con sus emisiones pregrabadas, eso sí con rótulos advirtiendo de la noticia. Segunda: Yahoo.news bate a Google.news, porque detrás de Yahoo hay periodistas y detrás de Google un algoritmo de búsqueda, que sólo funciona cuando la gente busca la noticia… que ha conocido por otros medios. Tercera: los anglosajones siguen siendo poco sensibles a lo que ocurra en español. Cuarta: la televisión vehícula mejor la información en directo (ninguna página estaba dando en directo la rueda de prensa del ministro de defensa.

Para otro momento queda un análisis de la noticia propiamente dicha. A vuela pluma, las FARC se debilitan todavía más y Uribe parece haber ganado otra importante baza y sin duda intentará utilizarla para su campaña de reelección. Pero habrá que ver que papel juega una Ingrid Betancourt en libertad.

Gegendarstellung Deutschland klickt about-drinks
Am 20.04.2008 veröffentlichte die KM Media GmbH, Betreiber des Getränkemarktportals www.about-drinks.com, eine Pressemitteilung, indem u.a. das Thema GoogleNews beschrieben wurde.
In der Meldung hieß es: “Einen großen Fortschritt hat about-drinks durch ein Abkommen mit Google gemacht. Seit März ist die Getränke-Plattform News-Partner und damit eine von 700 offiziellen Nachrichtenquellen für den Marktführer im Bereich Suchmaschinen. Für die registrierten User bedeut das, dass Ihre über about-drinks veröffentlichten Nachrichtenmeldungen innerhalb weniger Minuten in den News-Index von Google aufgenommen werden und anschließend weltweit recherchierbar sind. Damit erhöht sich der nachhaltige Distributionskanal für Unternehmensnachrichten, so dass andere Nachrichten-Portale die Meldung weiter verwenden können.”

Diese Darstellung ist falsch. Google hat zu keiner Zeit ein Abkommen mit KM Media GmbH/about-drinks.com getroffen. Darüber hinaus hat Google sich nicht dazu vertraglich verpflichtet, Newsinhalte der Plattform about-drinks in den eigenen News-Index aufzunehmen. about-drinks wurde lediglich im März 2008 als Nachrichtenquelle für den Bereich GoogleNews akzeptiert und in den Suchindex aufgenommen. Die Indexierung verläuft dabei völlig automatisch und wird nicht durch eine direkte Zusammenarbeit zwischen Google und KM Media/about-drinks geregelt.

www.rauschpr.com
Quelle: www.ahgz.de

Die Jungs von Google.News… immer für einen Spass gut. Ich hoffe nur, dass dieser Schicksalsschlag nicht das Aus für die gelbe Familie bedeutet. Immerhin gibt es ja noch ein Drittes Kind, um das man die Handlung stricken könnte. gefunden irgenwann auf Google.News- gelesen und gelacht…

Die Jungs von Google.News… immer für einen Spass gut. Ich hoffe nur, dass dieser Schicksalsschlag nicht das Aus für die gelbe Familie bedeutet. Immerhin gibt es ja noch ein Drittes Kind, um das man die Handlung stricken könnte. gefunden irgenwann auf Google.News- gelesen und gelacht…

While browsing the Tory conference stories tonight I found this link on Google news – http://www.999today.com/politics/news/story/25962.html

It’s the ultimate in commoditised news. There’s no byline on the story above, and I feel confident assuming it’s ripped off another source. The site seems to consist of several other stories without attribution, some 404 pages, lots of Google ads, and an ‘about’ page with some blah-words about a ‘global internet publishing and e-commerce network covering a multitude of locations and subjects, of interest to both consumers and businesses’. Urgh.

So Google news refers me to a website with no original content, but with lots of Google advertisements. It’s quite nauseating!

If you use Google News you may have noticed that article images don’t always match the content. Google does admit to the fact and allows a way for the users to report images that are out of context. My boyfriend spotted one of those out-of-context images today in the Health section, and it was definitely worth a screenshot (you may want to tell your kids to leave the room). Having me describe the image is unnecessary if you clicked on the screenshot…

Although it appeared next to an article about STDs, one can argue that it is somewhat appropriate, but the subtitle under it read “Dog Flu Diet and Diseases.” But that’s just half the story. A search for the headline was even more intriguing.

Other news aggregators on the web like trevor.org also had the article and even the same image. Hovering over the link to the article revealed that it was retrieved from Google News along with the image, so the infamous image made its appearance on more than one site. The original article came from Mercury News but it wasn’t accompanied by any images. Searching for the subtitle of the image didn’t return anything interesting.

Although – according to James – the Google team promptly removed the image along with the whole article from their Health section, Trever.org didn’t catch on soon enough which allowed me to take a screenshot of my own.

I don’t know who did it or whether it was intentional, but the eye-catching lime green background suggests that whoever it was, he wanted you to see the image. Thanks to the elimination of human editors and leaving the news reporting up to Google’s (so far) faulty aggregation algorithms Google News is not only a source of news but also a source of amusement.