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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.

Originally posted on March 8, 2010 @ 5:05 pm

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.

Originally posted on February 17, 2010 @ 5:44 pm

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.

Originally posted on December 30, 2009 @ 9:05 pm

Netvibes is Relaunching to Catch Real-Time Feeds

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Screen shot 2009-11-03 at 3.17.07 AM

Netvibes, one of the most popular web dashboard, start pages which can also serve as an aggregator for all your favorite news feeds is planning to relaunch soon.  This time around Netvibes is taking a cue from the hype build by the so called “real-time” information produced by “real-time” information producers such as Twitter and Facebok to come up with a web dashboard that mines these real-time information. [Read more…]

Originally posted on November 2, 2009 @ 3:21 pm