Digg, a very popular online social networking site, has announced that its going to implement a new recommendation engine that will find users stories based on their past voting habits compared with other users.
I think this is a very smart move on Digg’s part as they are making another reason for people to use Digg.
As said in the video, Digg has been previously plagued with overwhelming amount of information while there not enough pixels to list ALL the top stories at Digg.
With this new feature, I am hoping to find Digg a more useful service for finding new stories to blog about.
The Recommendation Engine is a cool way to discover new content on Digg. Now that there are more than 16,000 stories submitted to the Upcoming section every day, it’s difficult to sort through everything to find the best content. The Recommendation Engine uses your past digging activity to identify what we call Diggers Like You (who you can see on the right hand nav) to suggest stories you might like.
Google will be launching adsense ads for feeds next week. This will be great since I have been using Yahoo publisher as Google Adsense doesn’t currently support feedvertising.
If you have a lot of subscribers, you might be able to make some more money with the new feeds addition. But for most of you, it might not make a difference if you are not making money with Adsense anyways…
This is huge news for content publishers. As we know first-hand, monetization on RSS feeds to-date has been mediocre at best compared to Web-based advertising, and with an increasing amount of reading and conversation taking place off-site, that’s a brewing problem in the world of content publishing. It also means that the few remaining hold outs who only publish partial feeds (I’m looking at you CNET and The New York Times) may finally offer full feeds, since they can now be effectively monetized. On the other hand, for RSS consumers, it probably means the free ride is over.
Here’s an interesting ghost/UFO social networking site in the works by the famous movie director, Steven Spielberg. I don’t know how it will go but should expect some good stuff.
More details on Steven Spielberg’s upcoming ghost and UFO based social network, which we first wrote about in early March and followed up with additional details a week later. The site will reportedly be called “Rising” or “The Rising” (our understanding is that they have acquired both .com domain names), and the logo above and animated logo below are at least preliminary versions of the final.
Powerset will be launching soon. It’s a natural language search that makes me wonder it could possibly be the next big thing. All the Web2.0 geeks are talking about semantic web, natural language search, and all that bizaaz, this search engine could prove to be one of the first to implement those ideas.
But as I said when the product was demo’d to me a few weeks ago, it is compelling nonetheless: “When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search.”
