Here’s what Facebook said back when they rolled out this change:

You may notice some of your News Feed stories are now grouped together by topic. We want to show you the most relevant and interesting information, and this test is designed to show you trends among what your friends are saying.

One of the obvious observations about the aggregated tag stories was that ti could be great for brands. for instance, even if a user didn’t mention tag Starbucks himself in his post about Starbucks, this feature would put his status in a group that does tag Starbucks. Users are then directed to the Starbucks Facebook page if they click the tag.

And that’s where that link has always gone – to a brand, public figure, band, etc.’s Facebook page – not their personal site or another web resource on the topic. Now, it appears that Facebook is testing linking to external sites from those aggregated tags.

First spotted at Maypalo, Facebook used the aggregated tag of Indian Cricket player Sachin Tendulkar to link to an ESPN page on him, not his official Facebook page.

Check it out (click for larger image):

A Facebook spokesperson told All Facebook that ““We’re always testing new features. We have nothing to announce at this time.”

Aggregated tags have always been a way to “advertise” topics on Facebook – as they send traffic to brands’ official pages. But linking out to external sites could make these aggregated tags even more of an advertising factor. Have you seen anything like this? Let us know in the comments.

Yes, actually post – not simply comment on another user’s post or share another user’s post, but create your own post on the topic for which you searched. They say it’s all about “starting conversations,” making it so that it’s easier for users to join the discussion about certain topics in real-time.

Here’s what they had to say:

Today we’re introducing a new feature that lets you share directly from Google+ search results, and contribute to a topical Google+ stream. For example, if you search for basketball and then want to make a post about how your favorite team or player is doing, you can share right from the search results.

Just look for the sharebox after searching on Google+, and you’ll see an opportunity to “join the discussion” about whatever you’ve searched for.

When you post from the search results page, it automatically includes a link back to the original search stream. This way others can join the active conversation as it unfolds.

When you search a topic (in this case “SOPA”) within Google+, you’ll now see a new box above the activity stream. It will prompt you to “Join the discussion” about your topic. From there, you can make a post – photo, link, video, plain text, whatever.

Each post made from the search results include a link back to the activity stream on the specific topic – they’ll say “Shared from the Google+ ________ stream.” Presumably, this will prompt others to join in on the conversation about hot, trending topics.

Considering that Google is adding more Google+ content to regular Google searches in order to “personalize” these results (Search Plus Your World), is it only a matter of time before people can post to their Google+ page straight from the the main Google SERP?

The company’s description says that it chooses blogs based on a number of factors, including their Technorati “authority” — another ranking system that we know very little about, and which consequently carries little or no weight (I for one can’t even figure out the numbering system). So far, the new feature is getting panned by many. Topics, incidentally, is not to be confused with the last new service that Technorati launched: that was Technorati WTF, a Digg-style ranking feature that appears to be a ghost town.

As Duncan Riley notes at TechCrunch, it would be easy to be unkind to Technorati, and to poke fun at how they are shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic — so easy that I plan to do it. What the heck is this company thinking? They have no CEO, their database comes under fire repeatedly for its lack of reliability, and this is the best they can do?

When I first heard about it, I thought Technorati Topics might be going after Techmeme.com, but having seen it I think Gabe Rivera can sleep easily — Topics is just a scrolling list of posts with no organization or ranking that I can see, whereas Techmeme (for all its inscrutability) pulls threads together for you and makes it easy to see a story evolve over time.

Dave Sifry says that this is just the first in a series of releases and announcements, and for Technorati’s sake I hope they improve.

Comments

Tag:

It turns out that topics are just a live feed of blog posts that are under 6 unfeasibly large categories of Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life. Needless to say these topics are updated every second or so, leading to a pretty useless stream of unrelated blog posts, from popular blogs. Read/Write Web where I picked up this story agrees:

Now Read/Write Web suggested in their headline that Technorati might be taking on Techmeme and I really wish that was the case, but it’s not, Techmeme actually pulls together blog posts that are talking about the same thing, which is really valuable if you want to understand the context of a story. IMHO if Technorati did try and take on Techmeme that would be a very good move, Techmeme is extremely limited in the topics that it covers and the blogs that it indexes. It seems to me that Technorati with it’s link tracking, tags, and authority could blog Techmeme out of the water on more niche topics. Imagine a techmeme for marketing, or social media, or secondlife, or twitter.

I’m afraid the Technorati topics reminds me of that phrase “for every complex problem there is a simple solution which is wrong”.

They have a feedback area in their forums, if you are a technorati user I suggest you check out the topics, and then go and give your feedback in the forums, I did.

Comments

Tag:

Now she and her appearance at the Toronto Film Festival have departed, rapidly nudged down the screen by the arrival of other posts, ones about the Ravens loss to the Bengals, and Star Wars meeting The Simpsons.

Hey, she’s back, this time on Vogue.

That’s life amid the rapid flow of posts popping up on Topics. The site’s Dorion Carroll posted more about it on the Technorati blog:

With Topics, we help you discover what bloggers are writing about in Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life.

Each topic features blog posts from many of the best blogs out there to help you discover what’s going on. The posts are refreshed frequently to reflect breaking news, new opinions, and the latest from the Web. We’ve set out to help you find some great blog posts to read and we’ve organized them by easy to browse topics.

We considered a number of factors to get the seed list of blogs including Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.

Though Josh Catone at Read/WriteWeb wondered if Technorati is taking on Techmeme with this addition, it’s closer to the raucous news site Fark with its tabbed layout.

Carroll has promised future changes along with Technorati’s ongoing work on search, stability, and performance. They will have to deliver on that promise, now that Google’s Blogsearch has become a solid competitor for those who want to sift through the blogosphere.

Below are details of what’s in this beta which will make it into the final release version once the testing is over and done with.

A feature I like a lot with this beta is its seamless integration with Windows Live Writer, the blog editor from Microsoft, so that you can easily blog items directly from FeedDemon.

You’ve always been able to do this if you have an external blog editor installed on your computer. With this beta, though, it can automatically integrate WLW with FD with just a click or two.

This post is a perfect example of how easy it is to blog items from FD with WLW. In this case, I highlighted Nick Bradbury’s post in FD, right click > Send to > Default blog publishing tool.

It appears in WLW editing mode in the style and format of my blog. Cool.

This new beta is worth checking out for all the other features as indicated in Nick’s post below:

I’m pleased to announce that FeedDemon 2.1 Beta 2a is now available. As you can see from the release notes, there are a lot of changes in FeedDemon 2.1, including:

• Pagination in the newspaper view.
• Popular Topics feature which shows the most frequently linked articles across your subscriptions.
• Redesigned subscription search

Keyword highlighting in watches and subscription search results.

• Security lockdown - FeedDemon now completely disables scripting in its newspaper view, which means that even if an attacker finds a way to inject script into a feed in a way that circumvents FeedDemon’s “cleansing” of feed content, the script still won’t be able to execute.
• Integration with Windows Live Writer.
• YouTube Video Search added to keyword searches in subscription wizard.
• Thumbnail images next to posts when summaries (excerpts) are displayed.

As always, please keep in mind that this is a beta version, so I don’t recommend downloading it unless you’re comfortable using unfinished software. If you do download the beta and run into any problems with it, please let us know by posting in the FeedDemon 2.1 Beta Forum.

Note: This is a minor update from Beta 2, which was released earlier this week but never announced here. Please see this forum post for a list of changes since Beta 2.

Source: ANN: FeedDemon 2.1 Beta 2a
Originally published on Wed, 18 Oct 2006 20:36:08 GMT by Nick Bradbury

Comments

Tag:

Add to Yahoo! My Web | Furl

NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Most discussions on the issue focus on the usual, such as considering your major blog themes from another angle, or finding related and complementary approaches. You know the drill. Let’s try another concept on for size.

There are probably many topics that your never write about at any time. For example, I almost never write about politics on this blog. When I mention the subject at all, it’s usually in conjunction with a preference for creating a stronger entrepreneurial climate, where startup businesses are able to prosper and grow. I mention politics as it’s one of the most popular blogging arenas. It’s one of the few types of blogs that the mainstream media acknowledges as well. I suspect that’s because of their own obsession with all things government related; but I digress.

After all of that wonderful circuitous path, perhaps we can find some value in all of this digression. I happen to like sliding off onto tangents, but I try to control that writing weakness as much as possible. On the other hand, some of my readers prefer my off topic postings, so maybe straying from the stated path has some merit after all.

In any case,it’s often a good idea to consider your non-blogging topics. Surprisingly, subjects that never appear on your blog in print can very often lead to great on-topic blog posts.

As with my example of a political post tying in with entrepreneurship, other subject areas are very often related to your own regular blog posting themes. As new subject matter is introduced to your blog, in a manner that’s entirely relevant to your blog’s overall theme, you have just achieved some additional SEO blog power.

New topics, that are tied in with your regular posts, increase your number of keyword phrases for searches. As a result, your blog is able to rise in the search engine rankings crossing into other thematic areas. The new searches mean more blog visitors, and potential long term readers, and possible relationships.

The key is to keep the new blog topics related to your regular material. The best technique is to include a tie-in paragraph right in the new topic post. Search engines emphasise theme relevance. Make certain that you maintain it.

Here’s an example of what I mean by theme relevance. Don’t just introduce a post, out of thin air about elephants onto your crafts blog, unless you discuss how elephants are a popular design motif. Voila! Instant theme relevance.

Adding new posting areas to your blog will widen your search engine keyword phrase net. As a result, your blog will gain some additional readers.

Think outside the box.

Better yet, build a brand new box entirely.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Wayne Hurlbert provides insigtful information about marketing, promotions, search engine optimization and public relations for websites and business blogs on the popular Blog Business World.

Check out Blog Business World for yourself.

It’s good to see Matt took the advice that a bare wall behind him gave his vlogging debut a hostage-crisis feel. He added a framed “language families of the world” poster in the back to illustrate not only his flare for decorating, but also his interest in mind-numbingly boring topics.

Just kidding, Matt, you wouldn’t believe the linguistics and phonetics courses I took in college. But you should consider changing your shirt from time to time.

Cutts takes on a variety of topics in videos 4-9, answering the burning questions submitted by viewers. Here’s a list of the topics he covers:

Static vs. Dynamic URLs

Sitemaps hack alerts

Geo-targeting within Google’s Quality Guidelines

Merging acquired domains with 301s

How to create a site architecture with themes and keywords

URLs with too many parameters/serving up static HTML to Googlebot

Splitting A/B testing

Supplemental results

Analytics and SERPs

Duplicate content

How to mark your pages as porn in SafeSearch

Google terminology

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

The line-up of influential speakers is impressive and includes Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) and Kevin Kelly (former editor-in-chief at Wired). The line-up of people and companies attending is equally impressive.

Big topics will be discussed at The Next Web:

What is the influence of AJAX and other new technologies on the Web? What new business models can we expect? What will the new Web offer us, what does it want from us? What do people mean when they talk about the culture of participation? What is the state of the web today, and what does that mean for tomorrow? How will we interact/interface with the web in a few years? Where will the money be flowing? Which companies are shaping the future, today? How do these new technologies enhance our lives?

If you have a cool Web 2.0 business idea and you’re looking for backing or advice, you also have a great opportunity to pitch your idea to VCs from Atlas Venture:

Atlas Venture (US, UK, DE, FR) will host a REAL elevator pitch, where European entrepreneurs can enter the venue’s elevator with two of the managing partners to pitch their idea (any idea!) during a ride to the top floor. Attending entrepreneurs and visitors can sign up without costs.

To get all this – the conference and the elevator pitch opportunity – will normally cost you 495 plus VAT. But, for readers of NevilleHobson.com, and for listeners to the FIR podcast, you can sign up with a 100 discount off the full price if you use this link – http://www.thenextweb.org/?r=register_neville

If you sign up through the discount link here, do let me know your impressions and thoughts about the event. I can’t be there as I have another commitment on the 7th, and I wish everyone a successful day.

Add to Del.icio.us | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

This article is a follow-on article to a previous article, “Google Co-Op Overview”, which provided a high-level overview of Google Co-op. This article will go into one of the components of Google Co-Op, Topics, in more detail than was covered in the previous article.

Google Co-Op is important to users for several reasons. Google Co-Op allows users to contribute information that will help Google to improve search results for everyone. In addition, Google Co-Op allows an end-user to customize their own search experience so that information that is more relevant and trusted will appear at the top of the user’s search results. Users accomplish this by subscribing to “trusted” sources of information. Information from those trusted sources will appear at the top of a user’s search results for relevant searches.

Google Co-Op is a beta-test service now being offered by Google. Anyone with a Google account may participate. While still in its infancy, Google Co-Op represents Google’s efforts to embrace social web and social search concepts in a major way to help improve Google search results. Google Co-op consists of two things:

1. Topics, which are simply a means of labeling web content 2. Subscribed links, which are a means for users to subscribe to a particular web site’s content

Topics can further be sub-divided into two things:

1. The ability to create an entire categorization or labeling scheme 2. The ability to simply provide labels for web content, which Google calls annotations

The remainder of this article will focus on the annotations aspect of Google Topics.

Annotations to URLs

Annotating URLs is perhaps the easiest part of Google Co-Op to understand. It also requires the least amount of technical expertise to implement. A “topic” is simply Google’s way of saying “area of interest”. Topics are a labeling or categorization scheme. Topics allow users a way of providing labels (which may also be referred to as tags, or categories) for information on the web (represented by URLs). Labels may be provided for an entire web site, portions of a web site, or even a specific web page. These “labels” provide some indication of the topic or topics for a given web site or page. In essence, they provide additional information on what the web site is all about.

Anyone with a Google account can label web sites. Google refers to the process of providing labels for web sites as “Annotating URLs”. An annotation is simply the association of a label, or multiple labels, with a URL. For example, a travel site might get the label “destination_guide”.

Users may use labels for topics that Google already has under development, which include: health, destination guides, autos, computer & video games, photo & video equipment, and stereo & home theater. Users may also develop their own labels for topics. For example, if a user has an interest in “wine” they may develop labels for the topic wine, which may include “wine_regions”, “wine_types”, etc. They can then use these labels to annotate sites that deal with wine.

An end user may submit their annotations to Google in one of two formats: 1) in a tab-delimited format (which can be created using Microsoft Excel or any spreadsheet); or 2) in an XML file. Perhaps the easiest format for most users to deal with is simply to create a spreadsheet where the first column contains a URL or URL pattern, and the subsequent columns contain labels, one label to a column. Further information that may be associated with a URL in subsequent columns includes:

• Score – a ranking of relevance from 0 to 1 (0 to 100%)
• Comment
• Attributes – user defined attributes which may only be included in the tab-delimited file format

Annotation Examples

If I were using an XML file to annotate the same travel related web site it might look something like this:

<Annotations>
<file>travelsite-annotations.xml</file>

</Annotations>

Conventions for Labels

There are some simple conventions that should be followed when labeling content. First it is important to understand that labels may be applied to URLs or wildcard URLs. Using wild cards makes it much easier to label a lot of content with a few statements. For example:

• Labels applied to www.mywebsite.com/ would only apply to that specific page of the web site
• Labels applied to www.mywebsite.com/* would apply to all URLs that starts with the URL “www.mywebsite.com”
• Labels applied www.mywebsite.com/*tips would apply to all URLs that start with the URL “www.mywebsite.com” and contain the word “tips”

A single URL may have multiple labels. If using a tab-delimited file, each label must appear in its own column.

Labels should be all lower case with all punctuation and conjunctions (and, or) removed. For example, “hardware and software” would become “hardware_software”.

Labels should be as short as possible and as unambiguous as possible. Watch out for words that can mean multiple things.

Additional Information

There are many good places to find additional information. The first is the Google Co-Op Site (http://www.google.com/coop) where they have posted a Topics Developers Guide. The Google Co-Op FAQ is also helpful. There is also a good article entitled “How to Use Google Co-op” at Google Blogoscoped (http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-05-11-n40.html).

Why is Labeling Content Important?

The process of labeling content will benefit everyone in several ways. Labels will provide Google with a vast amount of information about web sites, potentially down to a very granular, or individual page level. If an individual’s annotations are found to improve the quality of the search results, they will be shown to everyone. In essence, over time, Google will use annotations and other aspects of Google Co-Op to improve search results.

Conclusion

Annotating URLs is a relatively low effort task for individuals that can reap benefits for everyone – better and more relevant search results. While still in its infancy, and going through the growing pains that are normal for services that are in beta test, Google Co-op clearly has a lot of promise to enable Google to provide much more powerful and relevant search results to users.

Rob Pirozzi is a contract writer for CityTownInfo.com. CityTownInfo is a quick reference web site that provides statistics and indexes on thousands of cities and towns across the US, as well as articles, comments from local residents, and more.