Google News adds attribution metatags to content to give ‘credit where credit is due’
By Chris Hogg
In an effort to give “credit where credit is due,” Google has announced new metatags to be used in Google News. In a blog post by Eric Weigle, Google says it’s experimenting with tags so news outlets an define whether content is original or comes from a syndication source.
“News publishers and readers both benefit when journalists get proper credit for their work,” Weigle writes. “That can be difficult, with news spreading so quickly and many websites syndicating articles to others. That’s why we’re experimenting with two new metatags for Google News.”
The two tags address two different scenarios, Google says, and both are intended to give publishers and journalists credit for their work. The metatags can be used in the following ways:
1) syndication-source indicates the preferred URL for a syndicated article. If two versions of an article are exactly the same, or only very slightly modified, we’re asking publishers to use syndication-source to point us to the one they would like Google News to use. For example, if Publisher X syndicates stories to Publisher Y, both should put the following metatag on those articles:
<meta name="syndication-source" content="http://www.publisherX.com/wire_story_1.html">2) original-source indicates the URL of the first article to report on a story. We encourage publishers to use this metatag to give credit to the source that broke the story. We recognize that this can sometimes be tough to determine. But the intent of this tag is to reward hard work and journalistic enterprise. For example, to credit the publication that broke a story you could use a metatag like this:
<meta name="original-source" content="http://www.example.com/burglary_at_watergate.html">
Google says the code can be implemented to point to the current page URL, or multiple “original-source” metatags on one page in the event multiple sources were used.
“Although these metatags are already in use by our systems, you may not notice their impact right away,” writes Weigle. “We’ll need some time to observe their use “in the wild” before we can make the best use of them. But we’re hopeful that this approach will help determine original authorship, and we encourage you to take advantage of them now.”
[Via Chris Hogg]
Google CEO Schmidt: Broadcast TV execs don’t understand Google TV’s potential
by David Silverberg
At a conference yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt defended his company’s latest TV innovation, Google TV. He suggested broadcast TV executives don’t fully comprehend the idea of Web-enabled television. He believed that fear and confusion were forcing their hand to resist bringing premium TV content to Google TV.
Speaking at the keynote interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Schmidt “relayed the comments of one network executive in a slightly mocking voice, ‘Don’t you realize that you are taking a dumb TV and making it smarter?’” Mediaweek reports.
He added: “The concern is that the enormous revenue stream is going to be somehow affected by Google TV. I disagree. People are going to watch more TV.”
So far, Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC have all blocked Google TV from accessing their online content. AP reports Google TV software can still “access networks like any regular TV, just not the online versions.”
Schmidt envisions a future where network execs can tap into the lucrative applications market. “The way to create more revenue is to create more revenue streams,” he added.
Facebook launches messaging service combining chat, SMS, email
by David Silverberg
Today Facebook launched three new updates to create a “modern messaging system”, allowing seamless integration between various technologies and a new display of conversation threads.
“Email and messaging should be simple,” declared Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a press conference Monday. He explained three pillars to an overhauled messaging system on the social network site: seamless integration, conversation history and a social inbox.
Sending a message to multiple technologies will soon be available, Zuckerberg said. A Facebook blog post explains this makeover: “You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time.”
In short, you can send a Facebook message to a friend, and that message can appear as an instant-message in Facebook Chat. Or it can be sent as an SMS to a cellphone. Email won’t be the sole means of communication, Zuckerberg stressed.
Director of engineering Andrew Bosworth said people are more connected today to various devices, it’s practically essential to reach out to them in multiple ways. “I shouldn’t have a table in my head of what means of communication my grandmother prefers, my friend prefers,” he noted.
The Facebook team added users will be able to get a yourname@facebook.com email address as well, to be rolled out (with the other launches) in the next few months.
Trying out the new products is on an invite-only basis for now. Facebook Canada told DigitalJournal.com: “It is important to note that this is a US-only announcement and the International rollout will happen over time.”
Conversation history is another branch of today’s announcement. The blog post explains: ” All of your messages with someone will be together in one place, whether they are sent over chat, email or SMS. You can see everything you’ve discussed with each friend as a single conversation.” So if you have messaged your girlfriend for three years over Facebook, all those messages can be archived in one place (this is familiar to iPhone users who can see a thread of their SMS messages from a particular person).
Zuckerberg said, “Five years from now, you can see a rich history of your relationship with individual friends.”
Lastly, he explained how a social inbox would work: You’ll have three folders – Messages, Other and Spam. In Messages, your inbox will only include messages from your friends and their friends. In Other, you’ll receive messages that you might care about, but aren’t high priority, such as updates from Pages or invites to events or messages from non-friends. Unwanted messages will be sent to Spam.
This new feature also gives you the ability to tweak your account settings to limit even more emails and bounce any emails that aren’t from friends. Gmail users will also find this feature familiar, especially those who tried out the service’s “priority” inbox this year.
Zuckerberg stresses these technologies are “not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as part of it.”
Before discussing the product details, Zuckerberg dropped a few key stats about Facebook messages: Facebook messaging and chat are used by 350 million of the 550 million members of the social network site; also, four billion messages are sent daily.
Newsweek merges with Daily Beast, Tina Brown named editor
by David Silverberg
Newsweek magazine and The Daily Beast have announced they will merge to create The Newsweek Daily Beast Company. Tina Brown, currently the editor of the Daily Beast website, will also serve as editor of the 77-year-old magazine. She hasn’t edited a print magazine since her tenure as New Yorker’s editor in the mid 1990s.
Brown described this “media marriage” in a blog post as a way for The Daily Beast, part of the IAC portfolio, to “add the versatility of being able to develop ideas and investigations that require a different narrative pace suited to the medium of print.” The popular news site – garnering 5 million monthly pageviews – will “raise the profile of the Newsweek’s bylines and quicken the pace of a great magazine’s revival.”
IAC Chairman Barry Diller said in a statement: “In The Daily Beast, Tina and her truly great team have in Internet-time created an hourly, daily news magazine and now will have the ability to revive the weekly venerable Newsweek with all the tools and sensibility they’ve perfected in the Beast.”
Stephen Colvin, the president of The Daily Beast and now the CEO of the combined venture, added, “Consumers and advertisers value media distributed across multiple platforms. The merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek audiences creates a powerful global media property for the digital age.”
In August, Newsweek found a new buyer after enduring the economic challenge of the past two years. Sidney Harman, a 91-year-old tycoon and founder of a worldwide audio manufacturer, bought the legendary weekly news publication from Washington Post Company for $1.
New cameras can watch moviegoers to collect ‘powerful marketing data’
by David Silverberg
When you watch a film, you never expect the film to be watching you. But monitoring how filmgoers react to movies and ads may soon be part of the future of media marketing.
A new technology will build upon anti-piracy cameras used to monitor people illegally filming movies in theatres. Harnessing 2D and 3D cameras, the project “would be able to measure emotions, groupings and movement to ‘revolutionize market research’ at movie theatres,” the Toronto Star reports.
Led by Dr. Abdul Farooq of the Machine Vision Laboratory at the University of the West of England in Bristol, the technology aims to revamp market research so advertising companies can better learn how audiences react to their spots, for instance.
“Within the cinema industry this tool will feed powerful marketing data that will inform film directors, cinema advertisers and cinemas with useful data about what audiences enjoy and what adverts capture the most attention,” Farooq told the Daily Mail.
The cameras will capture both the facial reactions to what’s being projected on screen and also the audience as a whole, Farooq adds.
Capturing audience reactions to films is just the beginning, the project leaders believe.
“‘It is envisaged that once the technology has been fine-tuned it could be used by market researchers in all kinds of settings, including monitoring reactions to shop window displays,” said Farooq.