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CBS Launches Mobile Content Service

Major American media company CBS is launching a subscription-based service that will provide mobile phone users with daily updated news and entertainment content, writes MediaWeek.

The service kicks off next week under the name CBS Alerts and will present mobile users with two offerings: CBS News To Go and Entertainment Tonight To Go.

CBS Alerts will be available through all major American wireless carriers and subscribers will receive five alerts a day, consisting of text, pictures and video clips, to their mobile phones.

Eventually users will be able to customize the types of alerts they receive, so they can get the exact news they need.

At the same time the company is working on miniature soap opera episodes for mobile phones and has already been streaming 60-second episodes of a new show called The Courier to Verizon subscribers.

Is there a market for this? you might ask. Well, CBS shares rose $0.22 in recent trading, reports techie site Red Herring.

Moreover CBS is competing with quite a few other big players in the field. Both Fox and NBC offer content for cell phones.

Technorati: Mobile Phones|Content

Just Add Water

Are you a writer? And do you wanna get a lot done without actually having to do it? Then maybe this site is for you.

Instant Article Ghost Writer is the name and getting things done fast is the game. As the site explains on one of its pages: »The following article was written by a person with absolutely no knowledge or expertise on the topic [sic] in about 30 minutes.«

What IAGW does is crawl different web sites, gather a lot of sentences about the topic of your choosing, pile them all together and hand the finished text over to you. Who says you have to be an expert on tummy tucks to write an insightful article about the subject!? ;-)

Kathy Sierra has tried the software and finds it shitty to say the least: »Given that it would be virtually impossible to automatically construct anything useful or meaningful from these sentences, I reckon it's good for one thing only -- blogs designed to fool the search engines.«.

I think I'll go visit IAGW and then post an essay critiquing Einstein's theory of relativity here soon :))

Technorati: Cheating|Con artist

Search Shapes Our World

I'm taking a course in Digital Aesthetics and Communication this semester and during our last seminar we discussed search technology like the one Google and other search bots employ and how they are shaping our understanding of the world.

We tend to forget that these technologies merely represent a certain way of finding answers to online queries.

Today if you can't find something via Google most people would say that it probably doesn't exist. We have become so used to letting Google's search equations lead us to the answer that the power it has in our lives has become transparent. 

We also tend to trust the top ranking link on a search result page more than the second, third or fourth ranking. And forget about the results that are not listed on the first page!

We are in short letting a mathematical ranking formula take the steering wheel - and most of the time we don't even realize it. Google has the answer! That is true. But it is a Google answer.

Have you ever done a Google search and tried to look at the last result on the very last page. If not, try to do so and see what turns up?  It might change your life. And it might not. But at the very least you have become aware that someone is selecting for you.

Maybe someone should make a Reversed Google Search Engine - where the last result in a Google search is always the first to be shown... Or maybe that would be taking my point too far ;-)

Technorati: Search|Google|Truth

Proof: The Web Is Social

Google no longer takes the lead when it comes to traffic on the web. MySpace reportedly has 2 1/2 times the traffic of Google. Moreover the site has eclipsed Friendster as the top social networking spot on the web.

MySpace gets around 180,000 new members a day and now has more than 54 million registered users!!

The site is all about being social and finding friends with interests common to yours. Now, who said the web was for lonely geeks only :-)

Via: www.statesman.com

Technorati: Social Web |MySpace

New Tool For Image Search

I came across this new search tool for images that seems kinda cool.

Riya is the name of the site and it is meant as a solution to the problem that photos can't be searched very easily unless they've been properly tagged (like on Flickr).

The service is free and uses face and text recognition to look inside the images users upload. Riya keeps a copy of every photo on its servers, which can then be searched by typing in a name of someone in a picture.

After upload the system actually scans images for faces. If any faces are unknown to Riya the user can manually identify them by entering their name.

It all sounds very cool. But beta testing of the site doesn't start before within a few weeks. So check back later for more ;-)

Riaya was prensented at recent DEMO 2006, where it also won a Demo God Award. Watch the presentation.

Technorati: Search |Images

Off My Chest

Okay, this has nothing to do with the topic of this blog -- online communication, but I just gotta to get it off my chest:

Yes, it was indeed disrespectful of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to print the Mohammed-cartoons with no aim other than to provoke. Freedom of speech is not to be used irresponsibly like that! Freedom of the press is not a free pass to be an imbecile. Jyllands-Posten should be sorry!

Having said that, the violent response we're currently seeing from extremists in the Middle East is totally out of sync with the original provocation. Violence as a response to words or cartoons can't ever be sanctioned.

Stop the violence. Start the dialogue.

Technorati: Jyllands-Posten |Dialogue