TechnoCloud

As you may notice, I recently added a Flickr feed to the sidebar of TechnoCloud. In part this was to experiment further with Wordpress plugins on a hosted blog, but it was also to give a wider audience to some of my Flickr photos after the original burst of activity died down.

To get a simple feed of thumbnail images to appear on the blog, I experimented with several of the Flickr plugins available on the Wordpress Plugin Directory, but was frustrated that either my version of Wordpress was not compatible, the plugin resulted in a code error or it wasn’t the functionality that I wanted. I won’t name names of the plugins, but needless to say it was a very frustrating evening messing around with code…

Equally frustrating was not spotting the Flickr badge tool buried in the Flickr site nav. Setting it up through the simple wizard was quick and intuitive and mercifully it worked first time.

If only I’d read a blog post like this, I could have saved myself a considerable amount of time…

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Mashing is heading for the mainstream. YouTube are set to rollout their Adobe-powered remixer, Photobucket released more Adobe-powered functionality in early 2007, not forgetting of course Jumpcut’s purchase by Yahoo last year and a number of start-ups, including Eyespot and MuveeMix.

Even with MySpace’s (FIM) purchase of Photobucket earlier this year, they still also invested in the more advanced functionality offered by Flektor, no doubt wanting their own in-house software to complement the existing Adobe deal with Photobucket.

Despite all the activity from the big players in the market, start-ups are still emerging and innovating. Among the new entrants are JamGlue (tutorial here) with an intuitive music mashing tool, similar to SpliceMusic mashing tool. It’s a familiar mixing interface, with layered timelines and drag and drop editing points, plus some handy right-mouse options in Flash to repeat and cut layers.

The community is slowly establishing itself with a reasonable level of user generated clips and samples up there to embed into your remix, plus evidence of rights management.

It’s fun and relatively easy to use, albeit sometimes frustratingly slow to load, and offers more advanced music-mashing functionality than the more video focused offerings above, suggesting it may have enough of a niche to survive.

Either way, mashing is heading for the mainstream.

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Interesting to see that BBC News is trialing the use of a Flash player which will allow users to embed video clips into their web pages (T&Cs plus code for the video below here). So, in the spirit of a trial, let’s give it a go using a report on the current UK alternatives to the ‘i-Hype-Phone’.

Easy to do for anyone familiar with embedding code and works fine for me in Wordpress and on MySpace. Work OK for you?

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Now you can add TechnoCloud as a widget to your blog or space courtesy of Widgetbox’s Blidget. Widgetbox also comes with a built-in stats package which allows the publisher to see not only subscriber numbers, but also the number of views of a particular widget. The widget can also be customised in terms of size, colour and function.

As a test, I’ve just setup TechnoCloud as an RSS feed using the Flickr toys broadway poster image from earlier in the week. To get it click on ‘Get widget’ at the bottom of the widget.

One initial observation. I originally installed the widget on my sidebar, but couldn’t help noticing that the page took much longer to load, so decided to restrict it to this post. Perhaps I’ll be sticking to straightforward RSS in the future…

If it’s taking an eternity to load, let me know in the comments and it’ll be consigned to the widgibin.

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MTV parent Viacom is allowing web users to embed videos from a number of MTV sites, including Pimp My Ride, into their web spaces. This comes at a time when Viacom requested the removal of 100k+ clips from YouTube.

While this move shows Viacom’s desire to control the source of their content on the web, they are prepared to let users consume it at least partly on their own terms, whether embedded on a blog or in their social networking space. With the content contained in their player, they can potentially place advertising around the player or within the content to monetise their content in this space.

Check out our example below to see it in action.

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One of the joys of opening up your product to the development community is that you get applications that you would never have thought of and would never get budget approval to complete. Plus, their quirkiness can lead to great viral marketing.

To illustrate the point, take these examples of Skype ‘hacks’ from VoIP news:

1. From the useful: The Universal Chat and Language Translation add-on uses automated voice recognition and translation software and provides a text-only translation of many different languages. Handy.
2. To the questionable: KishKish lie detector - claims to analyse stress levels in the voice to detect whether someone is lying or not. So, when making that multi-lingual business negotiation, you might use this plugin to have the upper hand.
3. To the downright silly: the glorious Voice Analysis Love Detector. Combined with the two tools above, not only will you have the upper hand in the negotiation, but you will know whether they are lying to you because they are secretly in love with you!

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After many, many months using Bloglines, I was tempted by the hype about Google Reader and decided to give it a try to find a better way of managing my feeds. A weekend or even a couple of days holiday meant the backlog of articles soon built up to unmanageable proportions and I didn’t find the Bloglines user interface an efficient way of processing that information.

Despite my grumbles I was so used to Bloglines’ quirks that even the improved user interface of Google Reader took quite some time to become comfortable with. The ‘river of news’ available on the ‘All Items’ link is particularly helpful in managing the information overload. I like being able to consume bite sized chunks of articles rather than having to read all new posts on a feed in one go before they are lost. The number and variety of keyboard shortcuts have also proved useful once mastered.

However, today presented the first bug within Google Reader. As per the image below, on accessing my stories the article preview boxes were blank. If I rolled my mouse over them to automatically ‘mark as read’ the content appeared (see second image), suggesting the bug is related to the ‘mark as read’ mouseover functionality. It was the same issue whether reading the river of news or an individual feed.

The problem appears limited to Internet Explorer (I’m running version 6.0), with Firefox working fine.

Having had a fruitless quick search for others with the same issue, this may be a local javascript error, but I’d be interested if anyone has experienced anything similar.

Image 1: Viewing all items (no mouseover)

Image 2: mouseover a single item and it appears

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Visual search company Riya have unveiled Like.com a visual search shopping portal at present limited to high fashion items which is the talk of the blogosphere. Riya.com itself was impressive enough with its facial recognition technology, but Like.com shows several improvements. Users can search among the current inventory of jewellery, handbags, shoes and watches and through a ‘likeness search’ can query the visual search engine for products with a visual likeness.

Like.com gives searches the ability to find related objects of a specific colour, as well as by shape and pattern and rank their relative importance through sliders.

Coming soon will be the ability to upload an image, e.g. camera phone shot of an object you like, and then find its likeness, with the current example on the site being finding similar items to those celebs are wearing.

Furthermore, the technology allows you to zoom in on a particular characteristic of an item, e.g. a high heel on a shoe, and narrow down your search to items that share that characteristic. This particular functionality has wobbled here at TechnoCloud with some loading problems, but we can excuse that as alpha launch blues.

All in all, an impressive piece of technology, if not quite matched by the early doors limited product categories. The real value for this may lie in licensing the technology to third parties to allow them to improve search facilities and categorisation across a range of industries, from clip libraries to mapping/tourism (e.g. what building is that?) to myriad different shopping applications.

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In the reveal-all world of social networking, it’s no surprise to find a widget that allows you to share your TV viewing preferences on the web. The MeeVee listings service has developed a neat little Flash widget built on its listings and recommendations service. It works as a loyalty tool as well as a marketing tool for those with the debatable pleasure of discovering more about your viewing habits.

Unfortunately, it’s US only, so I can’t share the delights of my TV dinners here in London, so readers will have to make do with what I might be watching if I lived in New York. Fascinating, I think you’ll agree…

Geographical grumbles aside, it’s interesting to see that the service completes the circle by linking you through to a page to download the episode via iTunes or alternatives. It would be even more interesting to see this technology come to mobile to enable customised recommendations and downloads on the move. Now that would be something worth sharing with the world.

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Netscape have invested heavily in social software on their portal to try and reverse its decline from the heady days of early browser dominance. If you visit their homepage, you’ll see editor-generated content alongside Digg-style user submitted content, a signficant change from the me-too portal that came before it.

In the age of increasing content portability it’s interesting to see that a widget has been developed that allows you to display a rolling top stories widget (as seen below) which as ever you can plug into your particular flavour of space, be it social networking or media technology blog.

Nice enough eye candy with the pause/play button, but the real value would be in allowing you to customise this to your own news preferences.

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