Content

Content still king on the Net

The Internet offers everything from searching to shopping to social networking, but Net users still spend most of their time on plain old content sites, according to a survey from the Online Publishers Association.

In the latest installment from its monthly Internet Activity Index, the OPA reported that Internet users are now spending 42 percent of their time online using content sites, more than any other category. That figure represents a 24 percent jump from 2003 when Net users spent 34 percent of their time on content sites.

Content sites include those that offer news, information, and entertainment, such as … Read more

Product management goes open source

One of the hardest parts about launching a new product is knowing what prospective customers want to buy. Sure, some companies like Apple can impose their product visions on the public, but most vendors need to fulfill pre-existing product requirements, not create new ones. For everyone but Apple open source offers a great way to perform product management.

When I was working on my juris doctorate, I signed up to be a guinea pig for Microsoft. (It's not as bad as it sounds.) The company would send people out to my house to observe me using my computer, and … Read more

HealthBase--medical search engines maturing

It all started with Content Intelligence--focusing on understanding the actual meanings of sentences independent of grammar, lexicon, etc., and creating structured semantic indexes from massive volumes of content to power search experiences.

It wasn't until after the Mountain View, Calif.-based NetBase Solutions developed its content intelligence platform that the company decided to test it out in the world of medicine. Their just-unveiled HealthBase is to medicine what Kayak.com is to travel--the mother search engine of not just content, but other search engines.

Culling through 10 million health articles and sorting search results on two types of … Read more

Examiner.com scoops up NowPublic

Citizen news site NowPublic has been sold to another company in the "hyperlocal" space, Examiner.com, the two companies announced Tuesday.

The two sites will operate independently, but Examiner will integrate NowPublic's technology into its site and will encourage NowPublic's contributors to also write for Examiner--right now, the buyer says it has grown 200 percent since the beginning of the year (it launched in April 2008) and has 15,000 active contributors, hoping to hit 30,000 by year's end.

NowPublic's executives, including CEO Leonard Brody, will join the management team of Clarity Digital … Read more

Blogger touts SharePoint, but uses Drupal

Baris Wanschers has posted a great review of 10 cool Web sites running Microsoft SharePoint, apparently to prove how good SharePoint is as a Web publishing tool. But I can't help but smile at the irony that Wanschers' site runs Drupal, not SharePoint.

Wanschers writes:

Because so many friends and colleagues of [mine] think of SharePoint as a boring, team-site-only Document Management System I decided to show them some great-looking SharePoint publishing sites and prove them otherwise.

He then provides several examples (Ferrari, Starbucks, and more), but the best counterexample to his post is the "paper" his … Read more

Sync devices to your iTunes collection

Up until last week, Palm Pre users could manage their media content on iTunes. Apple's iTunes update swiftly put an end to the openness. Yet Pre users and owners of other mobile phones can use a similar program as a workaround.

DoubleTwist (for Windows and Mac) is a beta effort led by a Norwegian man best known for reverse engineering DRM controls. In this How To video, CNET Editor Brian Tong shows how DoubleTwist easily syncs your mobile phone with your iTunes music collection, even when iTunes won't.

Disney's Iger: Content need not be free

PASADENA, Calif.--Disney CEO Robert Iger said he appreciates the fact that his company helped pioneer user-generated video with "America's Funniest Home Videos," but acknowledges he missed a big opportunity.

"Unfortunately, I didn't come up with YouTube," Iger said Wednesday during the opening interview at Fortune's Brainstorm: Tech conference here. Although it has yet to be profitable, he noted that those who created the site did sell it for a "chunk of change."

But, Iger insisted that free content isn't going to be the only game in town.

"People … Read more

Entertainment: Is it a rent-to-(never)-own market?

Even as the decline in DVD sales--both in the U.S. and abroad--has accelerated since 2006, DVD rentals through services such as Netflix (adding 25 percent more customers since 2008) and Redbox (adding 500 machines per month) have been booming.

The reason, as The Economist surmises, may be a shifting view on how consumers prefer to consume entertainment:

The real worry (for the movie industry), then, is not that people are abandoning DVDs but that they are abandoning the notion of owning them.

This is perhaps exacerbated by an industry that can't seem to make up its mind … Read more

Masterfully manage your notes

Tinderbox is a professional-grade information-management tool for creating, organizing, using, and sharing notes--especially large or complex sets of data, whether you're composing a novel, drafting a presentation, or performing academic research. Tinderbox has a very visual interface that provides a lot of flexibility, giving you multiple options for viewing notes (in map, outline, chart, treemap, or explorer windows), which you can drag and drop into hierarchical "containers" along with various contextual properties and links. A powerful, open-ended system of "agents"--basically, persistent searches--scans your notes continuously, identifying patterns or attributes and then executing macro-like actions. … Read more