TechnoCloud

Google News is taking on Twitter by trialling a real-time news trends service. In the trial, a list of trending key words appears beneath the ‘Top Stories’ tab, in addition to a personalised news box, that allows users to add topics of interests. It’s still at the trial stage, so only certain users will see it until Google decides whether to add it to the default feature set.

Earlier this month Google began adding a personalised news tracking service, which allows users to star a story so they can keep track of updates to the story.

Facebook is fast catching Yahoo and Google as US web users’ home on the web, having already overtaken MySpace and Microsoft in the past year. It has doubled in the past 6 months to nearly 30 billion total minutes usage, against Yahoo’s 40bn and Google’s just over 35bn.

And why? Mobile access is certainly a factor, but isn’t it just human psychology in that news is interesting, news about your friends even more so. Indeed perhaps it’s news about ’strangers’ that is a big factor in MySpace’s fall from 17.5bn to 8bn in a year.

As Apple passed another milestone in mobile with 3 billion app downloads, Google stepped up its competition in the Smartphone market with the launch of its Nexus One phone. Obviously, this uses Google’s Android operating system, also in use on an increasing number of handsets, including the much hyped Droid phone from Motorola.

The phone is initially sold directly from a Google website, with consumers able to choose their preferred operator for the $529 device (a $179 2 year T-Mobile USA deal is also available, more coming soon including Vodafone in Europe).

But is it an ‘iPhone killer’? It’s certainly close in size and shape to the iPhone and boasts finer screen resolution and a removable battery, plus a number of innovations including free GPS navigation. However, with a still limited Android app store and no bundled ‘iTunes’ equivalent, the iPhone may well still have more of its nine lives to use up…

Google has made concessions to publishers by scaling back some of its plans to digitise millions of out-of-print works from US libraries.

Google is nearing a book deal in the US with publishers and writers. The number of books it will digitise has come down by 60%, following the exclusion of most foreign language books, although books by UK, Australian and Canadian authors held in US libraries will be part of the programme unless the authors or publishers opt out. Furthermore, the service will only be available in the US.

According to Paul Aiken of the US Authors Guild: “Amazon (through its Kindle) has 90% of the e-book market in the United States, and 75% of the online print book market - Google has roughly 0%. Google entering the market for out-of-print books just isn’t going to change the equation.”

Google has announced an agreement to acquire AdMob, the mobile ad network and technology provider, for $750 million in stock.

The move increases further Google’s share of the advertising market after 2007’s key acquisition of DoubleClick and the mobile market after the launch of its rapidly growing operating system, Android. With mobile advertising still in its infancy and lagging behind the growth in media consumption on mobile devices (as we saw with the desktop internet), this gives Google a significant early share of the market both in terms of ad volumes and ad technologies.

Google has entered the online music market with a new service for finding and buying music online, OneBox, through a partnership with music sites Lala and MySpace-owned iLike. The US-only service allows people to search using song titles, artists or snippets of lyrics. The songs are then available as ad-supported streams and paid downloads.

As the service appears in Google’s search results, it provides an alternative (albeit streaming rather than free downloads) to illegal torrents when searching for tracks.

Enjoy Fake Steve Blog’s wonderfully cynical take on this here. Certainly Google and many others would beg to differ…

As part of the ad trial I’ve been running on the blog, I said I’d keep readers in touch with progress as thanks for putting up with the ads on a previously ad-free blog.

In part two of the trial, I experimented with adding Adsense Link Units, between the article and the comments on individual posts.

It’s been about five weeks now and I have sufficient data to make a judgement for this blog at least.

The Link Units on the page have been clicked on nearly twice as much, but they have got a much lower CPM (virtually nothing, but statistically 25 times less), no doubt the requirement for the second revenue-generating click on reacing the Google search engine results page playing its part.

This does raise the question about trialing Ad Units in that space to see the relative click-through rates, although I’ll hold off for a while as Technocloud is not a revenue generating exercise.

Needless to say I’m removing the Link Units to declutter the site, but would be interested in hearing about other people’s experiences.

The history of the internet is littered with failed experiments to shoehorn print online. From PDFs simply stuck online, to ‘turn the page’ user interfaces, to a dump of reams of text into HTML, simply trying to replicate print online misses the point of what makes digital different.

Slowly though, momentum is building for digital print. Let’s look at some of the main reasons for this:

1) The relative success of the Kindle. While the reported 250k+ Kindle 1’s sold is not huge, it does demonstrate that there is a market for e-books delivered over a well designed device, even at an early adopter pricing point. The Kindle 2 will only advance this. Now we are even starting to see newspapers and magazines available in the Kindle store.

2) Related to the point above, the advances in e-book technology, seen in the Kindle and the Sony Reader (among others). I was somewhat cynical until I actually got one in my hands a couple of weeks back and yes, it really does look like paper. Flexible e-paper is also on its way.

3) Google and Amazon’s combined weight. Amazon announcing its intention to put all books into e-book format, Google putting 1.5m public domain works online and its settlement with publishers over out of print but in-copyright books.

4) Public domain works. From the complete works of Shakespeare in an iPhone app to the Canterbury Tales in a blog, Chaucer’s Tales, there are numerous ways that innovators are experimenting with delivering out of copyright public works.

5) The environment. Books are beautiful objects and remain my preferred reading format, but it’s a powerful argument to remove the physical print and distribution costs from the equation through an e-book.

6) Mobile. While reading a book on an iPhone is a far from ideal experience, it can be a convenient way to dip in and out of text when it’s difficult to lug around multiple books. Again I was previously a cynic until having the Complete Works of Shakespeare available to me via the iPhone app has helped me get back into old school texts and rediscover some of the Sonnets while stuck on The Tube.

Books are wonderful objects that are here to stay, but they are going to have to co-exist with e-books as the reading experience, search functionality and storage capacity of digital print starts to make an impact.

In a post last year, I explained that I was looking to run an ad trial on the site to test ad optimisation service Pubmatic as a way to test it for some much larger sites.

That test is now over, partly as this site doesn’t really get the traffic to provide precise enough data, but also because it became quickly apparent that Google Adsense was providing the higher quality ads and higher click-through rates of the ad networks tested.

So, to cut out the middle man, I’ve kept Google Adsense in the hopefully unobtrusive position on the right-hand column, as it’s fascinating to see the responses on different categories and pages.

I’m keen to learn more about the impact of ad positioning and ad unit, so if you’ll bear with me, I’m going to trial another style of unit on single posts in between the post and the comments.

Again, as payback for the ads, I’ll share the results in due course.