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New Media News Every Morning

Google Voice Local Search Launches

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Google Voice Local Search Google Labs has launched their latest experiment; Google Voice Local Search. This is a free automated phone service that allows you to search for local businesses.

The concept is simple, you call Google-411, tell them your location and the business name or category you want to search and Google-411 quickly responds with a list of results to choose from. Google-411 will then return the address and phone number of the business you selected and gives you the option of being directly connected to the business of your choice free of charge (regular charges may still apply depending on your service provider). You can also say “text message” to have an SMS text message sent to your cell phone detailing the information you requested.

On my first attempt, I was being connected to the business of my choice within 15 seconds of calling Google-411. In my experience testing this service, it couldn’t have been simpler or more intuitive to use (especially if you’ve ever tried dealing with tech support via an automated phone system). Though this shouldn’t come as a surprise being that it is a Google service. It should however be noted that I do live in a city (Madison, Wisconsin) that isn’t too small or too big, so I can not attest to the quality of this service at other locations.

I would love to see this service expand to provide more features like directions or to give you the option of permanently setting a location to your particular phone number or predetermining your location based on your land line phone number, or triangulation of your cell phone signal. It will be interesting to see how this service improves over time.

I’m young and have never needed to use the “Yellow Pages” because of the convenience of the Internet and Google’s services, now with the addition of Google Voice Local Search I’ll never be without that convenience. Google-411 is like having the Yellow Pages with you wherever you go.

To try out this service for yourself just dial 1.800.GOOG.411 (1.800.466.4411).

Originally posted on April 7, 2007 @ 1:28 am

Facebook Gets A Facelift, With The Help Of The Community

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FacebookEarly this morning Facebook decided to release an update to the site’s user interface. This new design changes are the result of collaboration with the community, which gave them a great amount of feedback prior to the launch of the new design.

Three weeks ago Facebook launched the Facebook Sneak Preview group, which was intended to allow the Facebook community to see upcoming design changes that the Facebook team had been working on and to give the community an outlet to give feedback. This was a clear attempt by Facebook to avoid a recurrence of previous controversies, like the addition of the News Feed feature and allowing open registrations on their site.

The Facebook team has learned that they can’t ignore their community when making decisions that affect them. They learned this lesson the hard way when they saw unique visitors decrease while those controversies were playing out, as reported by BusinessWeek. This attempt to include the community in the design process is a effective and useful preemptive measure to prevent further controversy over site changes.

The new design is centered around three fundamental changes; the simplification of site navigation, the consolidation of “My Shares” and “My Messages” into an “Inbox,” and making the Networks pages more social. The changes that have been made to navigation seem fairly natural, and the adding the social aspect to Networks should prove to be a success. Overall the changes shouldn’t be too much of an adjustment for anyone to make and certainly shouldn’t cause any controversy like previous site changes have caused.

Update: Facebook has posted a Redesign Tour page to guide you through using the new user interface.

Originally posted on April 11, 2007 @ 1:35 am

The MPAA Lists The Top 25 Movie Piracy Schools

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No MPAAThe MPAA has decided to “copy” the RIAA’s List Of Top 25 Music Piracy Schools, and release their own Top 25 List Of Movie Piracy Schools. If some of the schools mentioned in this list look familiar, it’s because 10 of these schools were dishonored on the RIAA’s list as well, with Purdue University taking the highest average rank in the two lists.

Number of “dishonor roll” students identified who are making unauthorized use of copyrighted material according to the MPAA:

  1. Columbia University – 1,198
  2. University of Pennsylvania – 934
  3. Boston University – 891
  4. University of California at Los Angeles – 889
  5. Purdue University – 873
  6. Vanderbilt University – 860
  7. Duke University – 813
  8. Rochester Institute of Technology – 792
  9. University of Massachusetts – 765
  10. University of Michigan – 740
  11. University of California at Santa Cruz – 714
  12. University of Southern California – 704
  13. University of Nebraska at Lincoln – 637
  14. North Carolina State University – 636
  15. Iowa State University – 586
  16. University of Chicago – 575
  17. University of Rochester – 562
  18. Ohio University – 550
  19. University of Tennessee – 527
  20. Michigan State University – 506
  21. Virginia Polytechnic Institute – 457
  22. Drexel University – 455
  23. University of South Florida – 447
  24. Stanford University – 405
  25. University of California at Berkeley – 398

You can read more over at ArsTechnica.

Originally posted on April 2, 2007 @ 1:11 am

Barenaked Ladies Support Music Industry Change With Their New Album

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Barenaked Ladies Are Men AlbumThe Barenaked Ladies have decided to send a message to the music industry by distributing their new album’s songs through Amie Street. Amie Street has a potentially lucrative business and distribution model that may be the tipping point for the downfall of DRM and could revolutionize the way in which we download music.

Amie Street offers music in DRM-free MP3 format, which initially is available for free download, and rises in price the more downloads they receive until it hits the $0.98 price cap. As if that isn’t enough, they give 70% of the revenue generated goes directly back to the artist or label that posted the music on the site. Amie Street gets everything right by offering DRM-free MP3 music that’s cheaper than any other legal music outlet, and most importantly allows the bands themselves to profit most from their own creations.

Amie Street also allows for musicians to get a better understanding of what their fans like by being able to follow the market determined prices of their music and see the recommendations and comments fans leave on the site, rather than just following music sales.

The Barenaked Ladies throwing their weight behind the revolutionary business and distribution model of Amie Street could be just what is needed to push the concept into mainstream culture.

(via TechCrunch)

Originally posted on March 6, 2007 @ 7:54 pm

Why Digg Doesn’t Make Buries Transparent

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digg Recently, Kevin Rose felt compelled to speak out and explain Digg’s stance behind blocked sites and the so-called “bury brigade” which has been the subject of much attention lately in the blogosphere. The blogosphere regularly and often unreasonably attacks Digg with inaccurate evidence and unfounded claims because of their failure to look at any “scandalous” situation from another perspective. So it’s time to cut through the spin and explain why Digg won’t make buries transparent.

I was the first advocate for the transparency of buries back when Digg first implemented the bury button, because of my philosophy that if you are to disclose who is digging stories, then you must disclose who is burying stories. My reasoning being that one bury report was clearly carrying more weight in the promotion algorithm than one digg was. I realized that buries by users not only carried the convenience of anonymity but furthermore the veil of secrecy, which made the feature a haven for irresponsible and abusive actions by community members. Because of the secrecy behind buries, the community lacked the ability to monitor and expose bury abuse, like they can with digging abuse. However, it wasn’t long before I realized that making buries transparent will do more harm than good as Digg crosses the chasm into mainstream culture.

Transparency is a term that is to quickly tossed around by many, as the end all solution for everything in social networking, without actually looking at the ramifications it may have on each particular issue. I’ve long known the reason Digg does not make buries transparent is because it further exposes the logic behind their promotion algorithm. Further understanding, by the community, of their promotion algorithm will inevitably lead to greater manipulation of their system, and makes it even more difficult for them to prevent such malicious gaming attempts that they find themselves battling on a daily basis.

Kevin’s words reinforce my contention:

For the same reason that we don’t expose all of our back-end methodologies for the Digg promotional algorithm, we also don’t expose the details of how the burying algorithm works. We spend a lot of time analyzing our data and understanding how people Digg and bury content. We have spent the last 2.5 yrs building systems that ensure a diverse group of users promote or bury stories.

Ultimately, the greater transparency Digg permits for their promotion algorithm, the easier it will be for Digg gamers to develop stronger methods of promoting content to Digg’s front page illegitimately without detection.

Originally posted on March 5, 2007 @ 1:40 am