The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘photo-galleries’

The problem with magazines is that they are so very expensive to produce. All those writers, editors, photographers, and designers cost money. Even original news sites require a lot of resources to run. That is why Hearst is taking a different approach with a new site launching today called LMK (Let Me Know). It brings in a river of news and photos on 2.3 million people and topics from authoritative sources. In other words, Hearst is getting into the news aggregation game, but with its own high-design twist.

Each page, whether it’s about a celebrity, athlete, or company, pulls in news feeds and photos from the AP and Getty about that topic. LMK is licensing semantic filtering technology from Evri, which parses through the feeds and photos to help create the automated topic pages.

But LMK will also have specially curated pages which will have its own freelance editor and designers. The first enhanced topic page it will be launching is for U.S. college football. Bob Roe, a former assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated, is the sports expert who will be overseeing the sports pages. Once the best sources for stories about each team, player, and coach are selected from both major news sites to fan blogs, Evri’s technology does the rest.

Whenever there is game against another team, LMK will also show the most authoritative news sources for that team in a “behind Enemy Lines” column. Each page will also show stats, photo galleries, and interactive data modules which illustrate information such as which starting players have injuries. Just mouse over their position, and you can see if they are scheduled to play and what injuries they have. Or check out the “big fat number,” which compares the total weight of each team’s offensive line.

The site also lets you drill down into individual player or coach pages, which again show a feed of the most authoritative news about that person and fun stats such as how much more each college football coach makes in salary than the head of the school where he works.

LMK is the first business to come out of Hearst Entertainment’s new digital incubator under deputy group head George Kliavkoff (formerly the chief digital officer at NBC, where he helped create Hulu). Hearst Entertainment manages the company’s stakes in various cable channels, but is also now incubating and investing in startups. Kliavkoff boasts that LMK has only one full-time employee. “There is no variable cost in this business.” LMK will launch other channels around reality TV, financial news, medicine, and more.

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Head on over to YouTube right now and there’s a minor change that’s sure to catch your eye: the site’s unmistakeable logo has been modified to include a new “1BN” banner, with the words “1 billion views per day!” beneath it. It’s obviously a huge milestone for the site, but it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — back in June we reported that YouTube was seeing over 1.2 billion views a day, and it’s likely above that by now.

So why the spiffy new banner now? Turns out, it was three years ago to the day that Google acquired YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion.

One other fun note: check out the name of the logo’s image file. It’s “logo_holy_crap_1bn_a_day”. Holy crap, indeed. (Good eyes Coweybear).

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Scientist wannabes, rejoice!

Discovery Communications has released a Discovery Channel application on the iTunes App Store (link to the program), bringing heaps of video content produced by the popular non-fiction media company to the iPhone and iPod Touch. In addition to video clips, the app also boasts a collection of quizzes, photo galleries, programming schedules and updates from Discovery News. Furthermore, you can use the app to share content via e-mail and save to favorites for your re-watching pleasure.

Evidently, full episodes for Discovery’s top programming (Shark Week, Man vs. Wild, MythBusters, etc.) are not available through the free yet ad-supported application, but it does come with links to the iTunes Store where the media company offers a selection of full episodes for purchase.

The Discovery Channel app was built by Rhythm NewMedia, which has already built apps for many media companies, including AMC, E! Online, Entertainment Tonight, Family Guy, HGTV, TMZ and more.

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The race is on to become the dominant media sharing site on Twitter, with favorites like TwitPic and newcomers including PhotoBucket’s TwitGoo vying for popularity as Twitter begins to hit the mainstream. Now Posterous is looking to join the race with a new API that developers can integrate into their Twitter apps with a minimal amount of effort.

We’re big fans of Posterous, the dead-simple blogging tool that makes it incredibly easy to post text, photos, and other media online. To post a photo or post to the site, you simply send an Email message to the generic post@posterous.com address, and the site does the rest. And you can optionally have the service automatically syndicate each of these posts to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and a number of other services.

Now, Posterous is looking to become even more convenient. Its new API allows developers to add Posterous support to their Twitter clients, which means you’ll soon be able to send photos to the service from your iPhone or desktop much the same way you would with TwitPic or one of its many competitors (assuming the clients integrate the service - more on that later).

But Posterous isn’t looking to simply serve as yet another competitor offering a near-identical featureset. Instead, the company believes that its blogging platform is superior to the basic photo galleries offered by other services (and Michael agrees - he’s been posting his photos here). The service supports multiple photo uploads at once, which are automatically placed into photo galleries, and can also generate embeddable players for audio and video files (though its API is starting off with support for images only). Users can optionally use their own domain names with the service, which means that they can more easily track analytics. And finally, users can download media in its original format, while some competitors only offer compressed versions for download.

I prefer Posterous to the other image platforms because it’s much more flexible. But as I wrote yesterday about TwitGoo, the key to the service’s success (at least as a TwitPic alternative) will lie in getting integrated into popular Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Tweetie. It’s not clear how selective these clients are at this point, but they’re going to have have to start making choices, otherwise users are going to be overwhelmed with the number of services they have at their disposal. That said, Posterous is making the process as easy as possible on developers, as it uses the “exact same methods, parameters, and response codes” as TwitPic.

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