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New Media News Every Morning

Boxee Brings NHL Game Center Live to its Updated Service in Beta

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For those of you who are currently using Boxee, which is currently in beta have a reason to rejoice as Boxee announced two new exciting features of its service. First is that NHL GameCenter LIVE is now available on Boxee.  If you are subscribed to this service on a monthly or annual basis, you can now enjoy watching great Hockey games and fights in HD mode on Boxee.

The other part of Boxee’s exciting announcement is related to updates to its service which is currently in beta mode. The latest version of Boxee beta has some interesting new features such as the following:

File Identification Progress – This feature lets you to easily see how many files Boxee is scanning, has identified, and doesn’t recognize in your media collection.  You can check the status of its media from any menu sidebar or from the Media settings menu.

Manual Movie and TV Show Identification – This feature lets you tell Boxee what’s in your media collection. It allows you to change incorrectly labeled files, find and identify unresolved files and select files to label them correctly.

Facebook & Twitter in your Boxee feed – Boxee Beta now lets you see recommendations from your Facebook and Twitter friends and contacts within Boxee. You can see shared videos in your feed with an icon on the right that tells you where they are from.

New & Improved RSS Management – The new version of Boxee Beta also now lets you better manage, discover and play RSS feeds in Boxee. You can search, arrange by category or sort through the most popular, top rated, new and HD feeds available on your Boxee account. You can then use the RSS feeds app to play back your favorites.

Bug Fixes and Fixes and Fixes, and Fixes! – Of course, just like any other version updates, the new Boxee Beta has addressed hundreds of bugs and issued various fixes to these.

Digg Launches Buttons and Widget Generator

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Digg has just launched its new buttons and widget generator tool for publishers to easily integrate Digg on their blogs and websites.  These newly improved smart Digg buttons and widget generator were launched this early to prepare publishers for the upcoming launch of the newly redesigned Digg.

While some publishers have previously integrated Digg in their websites well, the previous process however required customization work through the Digg API. The new button and widget generator can easily help you integrate as well as blend the Digg buttons and widget to your websites.

Now for some new features of the Digg button that you are about to create:

  • Buttons no longer take users to Digg, traffic stays on the publisher’s domain
  • Dynamic display of live Digg count – statistics have shown this increases likelihood of user interaction
  • Faster load time
  • Customizable look and feel – includes a new “medium” button size and an unstyled option so a publisher can create their own custom designed Digg button
  • Related stories from the publisher’s domain to users that click the button
  • All existing smart Digg buttons will auto-upgrade in the coming weeks – however, it is recommended that publishers review the new documentation for optimization tips

While Digg widgets also get the following new features:

  • Headlines now link directly to the publisher’s content with the Diggbar instead of the Digg permalink page
  • Customizable – more customization options without requiring publishers to use the Digg API
  • Tabs & columns – ability to add multiple tabs to a widget as well as make a double column widget
  • Thumbnails – by default a thumbnail is attached to each story when available
  • Fallback content logic by domain – if there is insufficient content to display, the widget has logic to backfill with relevant content from the same domain

Ready to create your Digg buttons and widgets, check this and this.

Techmeme Intros Mediagazer, Media News Aggregator

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From the same people behind tech news aggregator Techmeme comes a similar service called Mediagazer, aggregating your daily dose of media news. Mediagazer is backed by media companies such as WordPress, Seesmic, Zemanta and others.

So, if in your daily browsing of the Internet you encounter questions such as “What do news organizations need to do to survive?”,  “Will books become extinct?”, “Can video bring television and the internet together?” and other questions regarding new or old media Mediagazer will organize them in a similar fashion as Techmeme. In other words, everything else that don’t fall under Techmeme, you can find it on Mediagazer.

Mediagazer is organized through the same technology and process as Techmeme, that is combining automated aggregation technologies with direct editorial input from human editors. The media news memetracker collects relevant takes on an issue and package these into group of links.

And just like Techmeme, Mediagazer also makes it easier to share headlines via a recently introduced “share” button. A mobile site is also up and running if  need to get your daily fix of media news  via smartphones on mediagazer.com/m or through mediagazer.com/mini for simpler phones.

So there, another site to monitor for daily news coverage. Hopefully, the human editors of Techmeme and Mediagazer will be able to distinguish clearly what should be aggregated on each of these news verticals and duplication of entries will not happen.  Otherwise, they  might as well combined these two aggregators later on.

PleaseRobMe Hits on FourSquare, Other Location-Aware Services

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A new site called Please Rob Me is getting some media mileage not only because of its intriguing name but also because of its equally intriguing purpose.  Please Rob Me describes its goal as follows:

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page (link). Everybody can get this information.

So, what does the site actually does? Well, controversial as well. It compiles and lists down all the status updates published on FourSquare and perhaps soon other location-aware services as well, that pertains to individuals saying that they are about to leave their homes to go somewhere else. These are posted on the site and on Twitter.

While Please Rob Me’s goal is unquestionably noble, the way it is pushing things to achieve this goal is not. Raising the level of awareness of the public over some dangerous matters is a good feat, but actually giving the would-be perpetrators an idea about this whole thing is certainly not commendable.

The site posts those updates on their Twitter account for all its followers to see and monitor.   They say that FourSquare, Gowalla and the others are just dressed up Twitter where updates live links that anyone can click through and access.

But the thing is, those location-aware service still give users the options to set up their privacy settings and control who among their contacts they would allow access to their updates. So, I guess location-aware services are still safe, just like Twitter.

GroundMap Aggregates Social Media Streams via GeoTagging

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The GroundMap Application Demo from Eric Bieller on Vimeo.

We’ve seen various startups tried aggregating various social media streams such as tweets and Facebook updates. But none of them have utilized the power of geotagging. Until now, with new startup GroundMap and its new social media platform.

The idea is pretty simple and yet could be powerful. GroundMap lets you bucket geotagged social media streams and by that we mean all types of streams and not just tweets or reviews like what others are doing.

So, GroundMap lets you add PDF documents, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Scribd documents, Google Maps, as well as Twitter and Facebook updates, under a particular geotag. All these streams become searchable on GroundMap by their locations or geotags and the platform presents it in a timeline format called GroundMap activity stream.

In addition, you can also search for activity streams using the tag cloud on GroundMap’s main page. It also allows you to add location which are not yet in the tag cloud. Once other users starts using the geotag, it’s appearance in the GrooundMap tag cloud increases in size – meaning the more relevant the tag has become.

While GroundMap’s concept may not be ground breaking as other services might have featured it before, what makes it different from the rest is its ability to give you different sources of social media under one tag.

GroundMap is a pretty useful online tool.  It’s like other social bookmarking and recommendation sites such as Digg and Delicious done in a new way.

Check out the video demo for a more detailed explanation of GroundMap’s features.