12 posts tagged “content and publishing”

TinEye: Search the Web with images instead of words

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Traditionally, Web search has relied on words or queries to scan massive indexes of pages for results. Searching for images can be a little trickier though. You're often relying on the competence of whoever uploaded the shot to provide the proper file name--and in a very small percentage of cases extra hints in the metadata to help the search tool get its hooks in.

In the real world, this isn't always the case, which is why the creators of a new image search tool called TinEye have approached image search the other way around--letting you search for sites using image files you've stored locally.

Sure this seems a little backward, but the idea is to find content related to whatever pictures you've got stored on your computer, or simply discover variations of that same shot around the Web.

Wondering where else an image has appeared? TinEye will let you know. In this case it's a shot from the Fail Blog (click to enlarge).

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The tool works best with popular or otherwise well-known images. Nearly everything else I tried didn't produce much. Some of the searches with the most results have been compiled in a "cool searches" section, but typically feature well-known art or photography. The company expects to have a better set of results as its index increases in size.

One of the more interesting uses for this technology is tracking down stolen intellectual property. We often find our posts put up on small blogs that cut out the bylines and take credit. If the blogs reused whatever screenshots we've added, a tool like TinEye would track them down even if they're using slightly altered text.

While we probably wouldn't go to such lengths to hound down a screenshot, there are photographers and other content creators who would. The company has already spun its technology off as a product called PixID, but it's geared more toward larger content rights holders than small-scale bloggers.

For users who want to spend a little less time (and bandwidth) using TinEye, there's a Firefox plug-in that will add a "search for image on TinEye" option when you right-click on any picture you come across on the Web. Users can also just grab the URL and enter it, which can be helpful if you don't feel like ferrying image files back and forth.

Several sites are already using the technology behind TinEye. Digg uses it to help search for duplicate story submissions on any post that contains an image. Adobe also uses it in PhotoShop Elements to look up related images that match the colors found in your photos.

Moving forward, the company intends to add video to its repertoire, letting you see where a video has been posted regardless of what service it's hosted on. This is something I'm far more interested in seeing than photos, as the viral spread of video clips across blogs and other pages is fairly rampant. When mixed with some sort of timeline, this service could yield some great metrics for video creators and a tracking system to follow when videos have been remixed and re-edited.

The service is currently in private beta, but we've got 100 invites for Webware readers who want to give it a spin. To get yours, fill out the Wufoo form after the break.

Twinkle for iPhone lets you surf Twitter by location

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Got a jailbroken iPhone? Then you've got to download a fantastic app called Twinkle that's doing some amazing things to make Twitter even more useful for people while they're out and about. Besides being a delightfully simple Twitter client (see also: ThinCloud and Hahlo), Twilight's killer app is its location tool which taps into the LocateMe feature introduced in iPhone firmware version 1.1.3. Using this it can narrow down not only where you are (to be included in your Tweets), but also let you see who's around you anywhere from one to 252,000 miles away using local cell phone towers or your Wi-Fi connection.

You might be wondering how this would be useful for anyone besides potential stalkers. The answer is that if you're in a Twitter-rich city, drilling down to 1-5 mile radius around you will let you know all sorts of things going on in your area as they're happening.

Twinkle's other fantastic feature, which I demo in the video below, is the built-in photo integration which uses the iPhone's camera to take pictures you can attach to your Tweets. The only catch is that you've got to be using Twinkle to see the photos. It's fantastically simple, and something I think will make its way into Twitter applications for other handsets.

We've featured disaster preparedness tools using Twitter several times before, but Twinkle puts it together in a portable, user-friendly package. I fully expect it to be released as a standalone application in the iPhone App Store in a few months when Apple updates the firmware.

Related: Twitter + Maps = Global stream of consciousness

Get Twitter friends out of Twubble

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I'm kind of a jerk on Twitter. I have more followers than people I'm following, but that's about to change due to a service called Twubble. It scans your Twitter friends to see who they're following then gives you recommendations based on whatever connections it can find. Similar to DiggSuggest, which I looked at last month, the more people you're friends with the more results you'll get. It's also nice enough to let you know which of your friends are following the people from the search results, as well as throw in their real name and a quick link to a Google search in case you want to do a brief background check.

The tool was designed by Bob Lee, who's one of the lead engineers working on Google's mobile phone platform Android. The guy's also got some ridiculous photography skills which you can check out here.

[via FaceReviews and DownloadSquad]

Twubble finds people for you to follow based on who your friends are following. It can take some of the guess work out of finding new people to Twitstalk.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

DailyMe delivers news that prints itself

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DailyMe is a customizable news aggregator with a neat twist--it can be set up to automatically print up the day's news at a selected time each morning, emulating some of the experience of having a newspaper delivered to your door.

The service lets you pick all the topics you're interested in and will group them together on a single page that's updated throughout the day. There are broad topics to choose from, and each one has its own menu of subtopics in case you want to hone your feed. There's also an option to call out keywords you want to track, which can help narrow a wide topic such as technology or sports.

Users can pick what kind of topics they're interested in to shape the news that comes in. Even terrorism.

Besides keywords, advanced users can fine tune the topics by the source. Sources are listed in a directory and with a specific grouping of feeds. In that sense DailyMe becomes more of an intelligent RSS reader, as you can pick the news sites or blogs where you want your stream of information coming from.

DailyMe provides several ways to ingest your news. As mentioned above, using a small desktop application DailyMe will phone home at whatever time you select and automatically print out the latest news from those topics. You can also set up multiple alerts per day if you feel like filling up your e-mail in-box with news feeds.

I found the actual reading experience to be somewhat bland. The news is spread out over several pages instead of being in one place like other news aggregation services. It's not a deal killer, but I found it to be too much work to browse through each category. I think a lot of people who are used to getting a ton of stories on a single page on major newspaper sites or news portals will feel a little out of their element.

The one nice thing is that the stories are all hosted on the DailyMe site, meaning you're not just on a portal page that's going to jump you off. There's also an integrated commenting system that's separate from the original site, as well as a one- to five-star rating system that helps track what's hot on the site. At the moment DailyMe doesn't seem to be taking advantage of these ratings or comments, as they're disjointed from the rest of the content.

Earlier today the company announced that Neil Budde, former vice president and editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Sports is its new president (see News.com story). Budde is also the same guy who helped create The Wall Street Journal Online--so I see big things from DailyMe in the coming months.

Other services that aggregate news based on your tastes include: Tiinker, FaveBot, Spotback, and LeapTag.

DailyMe grabs news from topics you're interested in. If you're feeling old school you can even download a desktop plug-in that prints out the news for you.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

PingerCast: Easy voice marketing for mobile phones

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As if Twitters and Seesmics and Tumblrs weren't enough, there's a new short-form multimedia format you now can publish to: Pinger's PingerCast. The service lets you record short audio clips and sends SMS alerts to your subscribers' mobile phones every time you have a new file. The SMS message contains the phone number that your subscribers call to get your audio.

Designed originally as a marketing platform for media brands (movies, popular music artists), it's now available to everyone, and at least for the moment, it's free to use.

It's like a podcast in that the content is audio, but almost everything else is different. The format is length-constrained (five minutes max), and the delivery mechanism is independent of a computer or MP3 player: It goes straight to subscribers' phones. (Registered users can also get the content on their computers.) Sign up for the Webware PingerCast on the widget below -- but read to the end of this review first, for a privacy warning.

Setting up and recording a PingerCast is very easy. You can record from your PC, upload a file, or dial in to the Pinger service to record your updates.

Once a subscriber listens to a PingerCast message, they can reply by voice. These replies are sent to the administrator's online Pinger console, and can then be downloaded. But although PingerCast does allow audio replies to its messages, it's not a conversational medium like Seesmic. There's no easy way to set up a back-and-forth audio chat.

The service also gives its publishers useful reports on who's listening to what. The reports are a little too rich, I thought: They reveal the phone numbers of the subscribers.

I don't think any of the Web 2.0 bloggers I know will adopt this medium, since the alerting function, SMS, is rather intrusive compared to social update services like Twitter that you can jump into and out of on a whim; and since it's not conversational. But it's a creative service and I can see how brand marketers who are trying to reach a more mainstream audience than Web junkies would find it attractive.

Previous coverage: Pinger: When you want to talk at, not with.

Coordinatr is a new events communication service that's been designed for creating spontaneous get-togethers amongst tight knit groups of friends. The setup is similar to MyPunchbowl and Crusher, with just a few form fields that need to be filled out in order to create an event. What makes the service particularly useful is its integration with high profile media sharing sites and a great mobile service that lets you send quick distributed messages to the rest of your party friends.

While MyPunchBowl was one of the first of these services to really embrace that people using these services share their party media elsewhere, Coordinatr takes the process a step further by simply giving everyone with access to the event page a special tag to use. Adding that tag to photos (on Flickr) and videos (on YouTube) will automatically add them to the community page without requiring anyone with administrative access to the event to have to link up content manually.

There are all sorts of notifications options for Coordinatr. All of them can be toggled through various e-mail addresses and even SMS text messages to various phones. (click to enlarge)

Coordinatr

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Besides media sharing (usually an afterthought when the hangover wears off), the core part of the service--inviting and adding friends, is all handled through Plaxo, which lets you plug in your e-mail credentials and nab contacts without having to create an invite in each e-mail service. Pretty standard stuff really, but Coordinatr is smart enough to let you create custom groups of friends from those contacts that you can send out quick invites en masse the next time around.

Those same people on your quick lists can also elect to sign up to a mobile notification service that lets you send out SMS notifications, be it a quick location change or other important information. If I were to go back in time to my high school days, I could see this being a helpful way alert the rest of my fellow party goers if the cops had just shown up.

At first glance I was quick to dismiss Coordinatr as a late entrant to the events planning game, but it brings to the table a few handy features that innovate the space. Whether or not that's enough to push it into people's minds when they're planning events might be a stretch. I often run into a lot of resistance urging some of my friends to try out some of the newer events services we write about. Many are simply engrained in old systems like Evite, with too much fear to try some of the next generation planning services like Socializr, MyPunchbowl, and Crushr in order to avoid confusing their guests.

The best way going forward may simply be a convergence app for all of these events services, similar to what we've seen with tools like FriendFeed, Profileactic, et al. People want one place to view all this information, and there's still not a service that does it.

Your party start page has your events, plus events your friends are taking part in. (note: we'd never have a Webware party on a Monday)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Twiddla takes home SXSW award despite sluggish performance

Collaborative whiteboarding applications can be handy tools for small groups looking to do some brainstorming despite geographical displacement. Meet Twiddla, a free tool that lets you mark up media and live Web sites, or simply organize ideas together on a virtual whiteboard. It also tacks on live communication with text chat and free VoIP conference calling that doesn't require additional plug-ins or software.

The application won an award for technical achievement at last night's SXSW Interactive Web Awards. While technologically fantastic, in my testing I ran up against some noticeable speed and local resource problems. At times I found the application to be nearly unusable despite its simple interface and snappy menus. At other times it was incredibly responsive.

In any case, Twiddla's packing a lot of features that might attract users of premium paid collaborative services such as ConceptShare and Octopz who are seeking a very simple way to get feedback on Web design or photography. It could also easily replace WebEx for a large number of people who use the tool simply for its text chat and shared work space.

One of Twiddla's killer applications is the built-in screenshot tool. It will snap the current iteration of the whiteboard and save it into both your saved media folder and the meeting's history archive. For photo or Web design consulting, this gives you the option of coming back to a work space and editing content asynchronously.

I'm holding off on giving Twiddla a thumbs up for the time being. It simply didn't perform as well as I think it should to make me ditch some of the alternatives. However, I'm happy to see some little guys come up and show WebEx and others like the recently Google-acquired Marratech what can be done on the user interface side to make these tools simple and attractive.

Read Web pages at the same time with others, and make live markups to a site on the fly. You can also chat live with others either via text or VoIP conference calling.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Let's get this out of the way before I go any further. Poodz is a terrible name for a start-up, but I'm willing to give the founders a break since the more understandable Podz.com is parked, and the developers are French--so maybe there's something lost in translation. The default brown on brown color scheme however might be in poor taste.

The service is best described as a Twitter that adds photos, videos, and sound clips. This can be managed over the web or on your mobile phone. Any combination of content can be sent via MMS, which includes whatever videos or photos you've captured on your mobile device. The entire operation is similar to Pownce, in throwing mixed media sharing together into one big pool and seeing what happens.

While the site is entirely in French, once you've registered you can swap back and forth between French and English localizations; however, users of both languages are kept in the same pool, which can result to some trips to Google Translate or simply ignoring responses or messages you don't understand.

Poodz lets you pick what type of content you want to microblog. In this case it's video.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Poodz does a few things better than the competition. For one, it's got tags and a robust search engine. While the search engine is limited to users and channels (more on those later), the tags are really well implemented and let you dig through posts you've made quickly and easily. It's also very good about separating your post types, by placing little photo, video, text, and audio icons to the left of each of your post. Each of these also constitutes a specific RSS feed, so if you felt like only subscribing to a friend's video feed, you could skip the other message types entirely. You can also take any audio or video recorded on the site and embed it elsewhere. Twitter-a-holics can even plugin their login and cross-post messages to the service every time they tweet.

The other key differentiator is the integrated social discussion network called channels. It's the equivalent of e-mail newsgroups, but it uses the same system as the content posting, letting members post whatever they want as long as it has to do with the channel theme. Each channel can have casual observers, or full on moderators who get to treat the channel content like posts on their own accounts--editing and deleting at their discretion. It's an interesting concept, and something that's been a requested feature from Twitter users for a long time now.

So is Poodz worth ditching Twitter, Pownce, et al to join? While more feature rich, and customizable, the crux of these services is all about the community and where your friends are. It's an unfortunate truth that nearly all of these services face a similar battle for user attention that any other new social network has when launching in a world of giants like MySpace and Facebook. However, if Orkut's taught us anything, your service can be hot in a few specific parts of the world and do just fine.

Related: Seesmic, Utterz, and EyeJot.

Poodz shares a lot in common with other microblogging services with the exception that it lets you share audio, video, and picture files, as well as interact with others in groups both public and private.

(Credit: CNET Networks)