The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘google-news’

Google launched a new service today in from its Labs called Google Reader Play. It is a more visual way to browse through the most popular items being saved and shared on Google Reader. When you launch it, you are presented with a large photo, video, or text excerpt on the main part of the screen, and can flip through by clicking on arrows or selecting an item from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen.

Google Reader Play doesn’t require you to sign in, but if you do then you can star, share, and like items, and it starts to recommend things to you based on what your friends share, star, and like in Google Reader. The user interface seems to borrow a lot from StumbleUpon, with its concept of randomly flicking through the best stuff on the Web. In particular, it’s very similar to StumbleVideo, except it includes more than just videos. It is very image-heavy. The user interface reminds me of some elements of enjosythin.gs as well in the way that it presents images and text excerpts in a blown-up manner. The arrows are very Fast Flip, another Labs experiment for the Google News in making magazine and newspaper articles more visually browsable.

Like many of its other recent efforts, especially with Buzz, Google Reader Play is an attempt to encourage more direct sharing and to capture that sharing data. More and more Website referral traffic is coming from sharing service such as Twitter and Facebook. Google wants to be in the sharing game as well.

Google News is testing out a new design, as I reported earlier this month. It includes trending topics on the left and new personalization options. But today someone in the bucket test noticed something different. The sharing options changed. Each story can be shared via email, Google Reader, or Facebook.

Most people won’t see this. It is just in a limited test. But it does suggest that Google is starting to seriously think about ways to drive more sharing of content across the Web. But why push content to Facebook and not to Twitter? And for that matter where is the Google Buzz button?

Of course, sharing to Google Reader is the same as sharing to Buzz (that’s how sharing works on Buzz), but Google should push the Buzz brand here if this feature ever becomes widespread. Google Reader itself has long had many sharing options, including the ability to send posts to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Blogger, and StumbleUpon. It’s about time Google News got better sharing options as well. Currently, the only sharing option is via email.

The fact that Google is testing with Facebook is also interesting, and shows a growing embrace of its social rival. Some Facebook updates are now appearing in Google’s realtime search results. In which Google product will Facebook turn up next?

(Hat tip to @JoeHobot).

Our constant rants on the PR Industry do not go unnoticed. In return our tips box is filled with humorous anecdotes, articles and now, a video. Here are two we’ve received in the last week. Which we’re posting in honor of Yahoo breaking its own embargo, and the AP sending the launch of CODE advisors completely sideways by breaking an embargo by nearly 24 hours. Outcast PR was on both stories.

First, the job description. Even a decade ago everyone thought PR was just about the worst job around. Forbes did a roundup called “Five Crappiest Tech Jobs,” and “PR account executive for a dot com startup” was on the list. Other winners included “porn sifter for filtering company” and “packer for dogdoo.com” (a site that actually sold dog excrement online):

PR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE FOR A DOT-COM STARTUP—Here’s the perfect job for people who want the worst of all worlds. For starters, everyone hates flacks. Journalists hate them because they think they’re incompetent whores. Businesspeople hate them because they think they’re incompetent whores. And flacks hate themselves because deep down inside they suspect that they might be incompetent whores. But what’s particularly bad about doing publicity for Internet startups is that everyone in the media has already heard every story with every angle about every product and every service a thousand times and never wants to hear from another PR firm as long as they live. But flacks can’t explain this problem to their nitwit 23-year-old CEO clients because the CEOs have all persuaded themselves that their generic success story is the stuff of legend. Flacks get personally abused by clients, insulted by journalists, stiffed out of their fees by customers, ridiculed by colleagues, and humiliated by their superiors. One flack for a major software company says her boss got so upset that he ordered her to attend charm school. Another had to go shopping for underwear for a skivvy-less journalist. How uncouth. All in all, being a dot-com flack is exactly like being a whore, except the hours are worse.

Second, this video (in fact created by TechCrunch Europe Contributing Editor Steve O’Hear) which recreates a conversation between a PR professional and a blogger or journalists. We have this same conversation oh, five or more times per day:

Transcript:

PR Pro: Hi I’m just checking you got the email I sent.

Blogger: When did you send it?

PR Pro: Five minutes ago.

Blogger: Oh. I get a lot of email.

PR Pro: Shall I send it again?

Blogger: No. What did it say?

PR Pro: I’d love to tell you, but you’ll have to agree to the embargo first.

Blogger: Ok whatever, I agree, now tell me more.

PR Pro: Can you email back first saying you agree to the embargo?

Blogger: I get a lot of email.

PR Pro: Please.

Blogger: Look, I honor the fucking embargo. Now tell me more.

PR Pro: A Silicon Valley based startup is going to announce a new revolutionary software as a service for social media companies targeting B2B. It will change the way social media marketing is done forever. Are you interested in a briefing with the company’s CEO.

Blogger: No, I don’t cover B2B.

PR Pro: But I thought you wrote about social media.

Blogger: I do, but not B2B.

PR Pro: But it is revolutionary.

Blogger: So are all the others.

PR Pro: Really?

Blogger: Yes. Look, when every new social media service is revolutionary it is no longer news.

PR Pro: I didn’t know that, but we are working on an API.

Blogger: I’m not interested.

PR Pro: Oh.

Blogger: Sorry.

PR Pro: Can I still email you the details?

Blogger: If you must.

PR Pro: And you’ll honor the embargo?

Blogger: Yes, I’ll honor the embargo. In fact I’ll make you a better offer.

PR Pro: Oh.

Blogger: I will honor the embargo for the rest of my working life. As I have no intention of writing about your new revolutionary software as a service for social media companies that will change the way social media marketing is done forever. So, yes, I’ll honor the fucking embargo.

PR Pro: I can’t thank you enough.

Blogger: It’s nothing. Really.

Our past rants:

The PR Roadblock On The Road To Blissful Blogging
One PR Firm’s Lack Of Ethics: Reverb Caught Astroturfing The App Store
The Reality Of PR: Smile, Dial, Name Drop, Pray.
Meet Lois Whitman, The Poster Child For Everything Wrong With PR
Death To The Embargo
The Last Has Fallen. The Embargo Is Dead.

Google is already taking a page out of Twitter’s playbook with the recent launch of Buzz, which lets everyone on Gmail broadcast public status updates, share links, blog posts, photos, videos, and more. But Google, which tried and failed to buy Twitter last year, is still studying its various features and building some of them into its own services. The next one it might borrow from Twitter is trending topics. Twitter exposes the keywords people are using the most or growing fastest at any given time under Trending Topics in the sidebar or in Twitter search.

Now some people are noticing similar trending topics in the left sidebar of Google News when they are logged in. Joe Hobot captured the screenshot at left on his blog. Some of the trending topics earlier today were “Greece” (which is considering an economic austerity plan) “Iran” (which is facing U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program), “Mobile Technology” and “smartphones” (no doubt due to the Mobile World Congress kicking off in Barcelona today). Google already shows the relative popularity of news topics in Google Trends, but showing them in Google News is probably more helpful.

The trending topics, though, appear to be part of a larger redesign. We’ve been getting other reports and images of a Google News redesign bucket test. (See image below). The redesign also has personalization options which let you customize Google News by location or category (business, world, etc.).

Of course, MyYahoo did this ten years ago, but it’s good to see Google News finally getting around to letting people personalize their news pages.

I’m still scratching my head at Mark Cuban’s comments about news aggregators being freeloading vampires that should be blocked by news sites.

As Danny Sullivan points out, Cuban is an investor in Mahalo, which is an aggregator extraordinaire.

And in 2008 at the TechCrunch50 conference, Cuban said he’d like to be an investor in news aggregator TechMeme. He says: “Gabe from TechMeme, I’ve been running after him for two years to try to let me do something with him because I think its a brilliant idea and I think I can add value…I try to stick to things that are strategic to me that I think are fun that I think are game changing.”

Cuban was mostly railing on Google News in his talk, but TechMeme has a similar model of linking to stories with a short excerpt. You can watch the entire interview here.

I’ve emailed Mark to get see if he wants to talk more about this, because I continue to be more than confused.

Maybe the single most useful feature of Gmail for me is how you can “star” items to highlight them to come back to later. In Google Reader, this starring feature also exists and is hands-down the best feature of the service. Today, Google News added the same feature, and it’s also awesome.

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Google News. In fact, I think it’s pretty awful in many ways. But this is a great addition. Much like with Google Reader, I can now scan through Google News and pick out the stories I want to save to read later simply by clicking on the empty star icon to the left of the headline. Even better, by using these stars, Google News is actually able to better tailor its news surfacing experience for you. When there is new news about a headline you previously starred, Google News will bold it for you, making it easier for you to find on a quick scan.

There are a couple of downsides to this feature. Sadly, you can only star the story that Google News deems to be the most important in the cluster (that it places first). Clicking on a more detailed view removes the option to star any articles. Also, they say that you can only keep track of your last 20 starred items in the new Starred area — that seems pretty low. Also odd is that if the cluster changes after you star it (meaning a different story rises to the top), it appears to also change in your starred items area.

Still, this makes Google News much more interesting to me already.

[image: MGM]

Research firm Outsell has published its third annual News Users’ report, which is based on a survey about the online and offline news preferences of 2,787 US news consumers.

The Outsell report unsurprisingly predicts ongoing, steep drops in US newspapers’ print circulation as consumers continue to head online for news consumption and sharing, forecasting 3.5 percent annual declines in both daily and Sunday circulation by 2012.

Interestingly enough, the research also talks of what is referred to as the “dramatic effect” aggregators like Google and Yahoo have had on print and online readership.

Says analyst Ken Doctor: “Though Google is driving some traffic to newspapers, it’s also taking a significant share away. A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers’ individual sites.”

Outsell says that for “news right now”, which I’m presuming are the most current news items, 57 percent of users now go to digital sources, up from 33 percent a few years ago. They’re also likelier to turn to an aggregator (31 percent) than a newspaper site (8 percent) or other site (18 percent). This is in line with what Erick Schonfeld recently wrote about media bundles dying at the expense of smart aggregators.

That the Internet is eating away newspapers’ readership bit by bit rings true to me, but frankly I have a hard time believing that close to half of all Google News visitors never click through to a newspaper site.

In my own experience, I find the summary that gets posted on Google News or other aggregators too short when a news item truly interests me, and I always end up clicking through.

How many of you treat Google News like a destination for online news consumption rather than a starting point?

Other findings from the report:

- Only 10 percent of news users are willing to pay for a print newspaper subscription to gain online access
- 75 percent say they’d turn to a different source for local online news if their newspapers required a paid subscription
- Local newspapers retain strength with local topics, such as family events and entertainment

Through much of last year, the Associated Press threw public barbs and veiled threats at Google, while in private it was renegotiating its licensing agreement with Google News. That agreement is believed to be up for renewal at the end of this month, yet no new AP stories have appeared directly on Google News since December 23, 2009.  (AP stories licensed by other news sites such as ABC News or the New York Times do continue to appear, however).  So what’s going on here?  Is that the end of AP stories on Google News?

I’ve been doing some sniffing around, and it is not the AP that is withholding its content.  This conclusion is also supported by the fact that older AP content from before Christmas continues to be available on Google News.  If the AP were no longer licensing its articles to Google, those older articles likely would also no longer be available.  (The AP has talked about withholding news from certain licensees for a set period of time, but those were measured in minutes and hours, not weeks, and it would operate on a rolling basis.  The AP stories on Google News just stop on December 23).

So it appears that Google made a unilateral decision.  What’s going on here reminds me of what News Corp does to Time Warner Cable every four years or so when the contract for all the Fox television channels comes up.  Fox threatens to pull its channels in a very public manner, and then at the eleventh hour a deal is struck, just like what happened on New Year’s.  Google is trying its own Foxy negotiating tactic here.  It is showing the AP in a very visible way what will happen if Google News no longer carries AP stories, and they are doing this before the negotiations are up so that the AP can measure the loss in readership that Google News brings.

In the TV world, it’s the content companies such as Fox, which have the negotiating leverage because they bring the audience.  It almost seems like Google is trying to prove the opposite is true with online news: that distribution is king, not content.  Meanwhile, on Friday, Google News gussied up its home page by adding its Fast Flip project at the bottom (see screenshot below), and is highlighting other newspaper partners with its “Living Stories” project. Whether or not we ever see AP headlines on Google News again depends on which one needs the other one more, and who concedes first in the negotiations.  

Which would you rather live without, Google News or the AP?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

CrunchGear had its own booth at a CES event this year and of course we streamed all the interviews live. East Coasters may have missed out due to the late schedule though. So here they are for a second time. Daniel Brusilovsky started out the panel with a demo of mSpot video streaming Android app.

But we go on to take a look Sticker, Shapeways, a Geek Not Needed router, the L5 iPhone remote, v.Clone Iomega software, Blue Microphones, Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. mouse, LowJack computer software, an HP CTO, PocketCPR, Pogoplug and finish up two hours of interviewing with a look at the Gunman iPhone game.

Forgive all the shuffling. We did this via Livestream, after all. Click through for all the interviews and general CrunchGear hijinks.

Google’s been taking a beating from the newspaper industry lately, and Rupert Murdoch in particular. But the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal let Google CEO Eric Schmidt respond today in an Op-Ed piece which basically says: Hey, we know the Internet is killing your business, but don’t blame us. Google is here to help.

Google sends news sites 4 billion clicks a month, and Schmidt says it wants to assist the media industry in coming up with new ways to make money from their content. Google’s chief legal counsel, David Drummond, delivered almost the exact same talking points in a speech to a meeting of the World Association of Newspapers in Hyderabad, India. Drummond prefaced his remarks by imploring the assembled newspaper publishers, “don’t shoot, I come in peace.”

They shot him anyway, arguing that Google does not respect copyright—which is an absurd argument because any publisher can block Google from indexing their site quite easily. Google News now lets publishers with paywalls limit the number of free clicks per day to five per person and publishers can now choose whether they want their content to appear in Google searches, Google News searches, both, or neither.

Not even Google can save much of the dying print newspaper business, but it can help them build up their digital revenues. And that’s the subtext of Google’s message to newspaper publishers: Don’t shoot the gift horse that feeds you. (To mangle three well-worn phrases together). Those 4 billion clicks a month are a gift. While they might not add up to expense-account lunches all around at Per Se, they are nourishment nonetheless.

Photo credit: Flickr/Randy Son Of Robert

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