CityGML is a new 3D Data Standard

There is a new markup language, CityGML (City Geography Markup Language), a standard for 3d data. This markup language has been created to capture 3d data in a professional and scientific way to describe buildings, country areas and the like.

There are several types of use one may easily imagine and something that makes it an interesting topic for emedia: for functional usage there are administrative and navigational purposes and the use for every kind of a geographical information system. But what makes it interesting at this blog is the possibility to exchange 3d data between applications that are able to understand this markup language. By this it is a new way to get the picture of the real world into virtual reality worlds and other applications. Something that playce wants to do for online games.

Adgregate Markets introduces Transactional Advertising

Adgregate Markets is another advertising network offering commerce enabled banners to facilitate searchable product information or even buying a product immediately within a banner advert. Adgregate Markets is calling their product a transactional banner, because the whole shopping process may happen within the adverts. The banners are widget based. But opposite to commerce widgets adverts may rotate like it usually happens to advertising at the internet. This is why Adgregate Markets may become described as an advertising network opposite to a widget platform offering widget development and distribution. But for advertising with Adgregate Markets there is a widget development facility, too.

Redux enables Video and Product Playlists

Redux is an online playlist service for videos. To find videos there is a video search engine that connects to several popular video sharing sites. Creating a playlist is easily done by searching and choosing videos by a click to add these to a playlist. The site is social networking enables and sharing of playlists may happen at the social web. And there is a unique feature. Beside general video playlists there is a rubric with product features. By this Redux might be an additional ecommerce channel for product presentations to marketers, for video advertising, video advertising and for shopping.

Search Engine Interfaces and Virtual Reality

User interfaces are a crucial point to access and navigate information and by this these are a most important design issue, which is influenced by the point of access and purpose. The point of access might be the computer, a mobile phone or a tv set. Purposes might be information access or entertainment. Nowadays there have come up a couple of new user interfaces. So far there have been inferface introductions for search and video in particular.

Another great interface comes with Viewzi. It is a meta search engine and portal offering access to various sources by various interfaces. One may submit a keyword and choose the way fitting the purpose most. This might be a general search, news or video, shopping and much more. There are some useful tools, that are not available at other search portals like timelines. To me it seems that Viewzi has one of the broadest approach related to sources and offers the easiest navigation to information access.

A completely different way to access information is offered by yoowalk. Here sources from the web are visualized like real world shops at a fantasy virtual reality street map. Navigation happens by walking through or accessing elevators. As there is a community this is an interesting approach making the web a virtual world experiences, which can be navigated together with others.

Visualizing the real world and making it available to walk through is what EveryScape does. This is a great experience of virtual traveling the real world. The service is still in beta, but has some popular places visualized to start a journey. For example one may walk through Beijing. There is a navigation menu at the upper left to choose and visit popular places, restaurants or shopping. EveryScape invites artists to develop to add new places and businesses to present their locations or services.

Twellow is a People and Profile Search for Twitter

Twellow is another interesting Twitter tool. It is a search engine for people and profiles. This might be important and useful, because Twitter is the fastest growing social network. A good reason to look for someone or something at Twitter is the presence of important people and services offering fast or even realtime information. Nice cases are updates and information about conferences or other events. Beside this it is a nice tool as people search is popular at all.

Advertising at Newsfeeds

Business Thursday: There are a couple of services offering advertising and business opportunities with newsfeeds. Newsfeeds have become an important marketing channel. This is due to information sharing at starting pages and by the integration at major search engines and portals. The primary common usage of newsfeeds is information. A way to sell products are coupon newsfeeds and advertising.

Pheedo is an advertising network completely dedicated to newsfeeds. They are serving advertisers and publishers with standard advertising and some special text advertising formats.

RevResponse is a b2b marketing network that goes beyond the common banner and text advertising formats. They offer opportunities with feeds and widgets and do provide a content and portal network delivering and distributing articles and content.

FeedBurner is a newsfeed service offering hosting and advertising for blogs and feeds.services. FeedBurner has been acquired by Google lately. By this some integration will happen. Actually Google AdSense is offering a solution for publishers to monetize feeds by AdSense for Feeds.

For further newsfeed tools like content syndication, feed management, marketing and directory submissions visit Newsfeed Tools at FOLDEN.INFO.

Social Networking and Search Perspective by using Social Graphs

This is a hint to a series of articles about the perspective of search and social search using social graphs. Social graphs describe the relationships within social networks and especially aggregated social network usage. An already existing application visualizing social network relationships is lifestreaming.

Social Graph Search Engines Part I
Social Graph Search Engines Part II
Social Graph Search Engines Part III

Internet Advertising with Chitika

Chitika is an internet advertising network offering an unique banner format especially suitable for the upcoming shopping season. This advertising format is the Chitika eMiniMalls. These eMiniMalls are commerce enabled banners showing targeted product features. Targeting may happen by keywords or behavioral targeting. Behavioral targeting is a technology targeting users in their intention.

In particular the Chitika eMiniMalls show up hot products and do have some further functions at the menu. There are tabs with hot deals and a search function to find other products. The banners are fully customizable by colors and available in a broad range of standard banner sizes to fit into a common ad inventory.

Further advertising formats offered by Chitika are relevant product features for websites, in text advertising transforming text parts into linked items and an advertising service for parked domains. Information about advertiser services is available at the Chitika homepage.

Chitika has a great service and payments are handled by paypal. It is an option at all and might be a most suitable supplement for the shopping season to any website.

Live Blogging with Scribble Live

Scribble Live is another extended blogging platform for instant publishing and live conversations.

Scribble Live has some unique features that start with the login. There is no registration required. Logging in happens by using an existing account. Actually this may happen by OpenID, a Facebook or a Microsoft Live account. Secondly there is a function to invite others to follow a live coverage and furthermore to let them participate in a discussion. For invitations and participation there is an invite function sending out invite codes for collaborative blogging. By this it is most usable for events. Last but not least it is multimedia enabled. Multimedia files may become added either by linking or uploading.

By these features Scribble Live has an interesting approach. The site is still in beta and further features and tools are likely to follow.

Citizen Journalism Award

This is a real interesting project, a citizen journalism award organized by a well known organization and supported by several technology companies. The award is a partnership between the Pulitzer Center and YouTube and supported by Sony VAIO and Intel. The award is targeted at non professional journalists and aims to get reports about otherwise not covered and unknown issues. So everyone who likes to report something is encouraged to upload a video. More about the award at the Project Report homepage.

Technorati Study of the Blogosphere

Technorati, the blogger news and research source, is releasing its yearly 'State of the Blogosphere' study, which they do since 2004. Releasing, because the study is released in five following days. Up to now there is an introduction and day one available.

The study covers general trends like the size of the blogosphere, the size of the audience and of course popular topics. For the first time for this years study the motivation of bloggers has been examined and how blogging does affect their lifes: State of the Blogosphere

AdBrite Internet Advertising Marketplace

AdBrite is an internet advertising marketplace offering a broad range of advertising formats. Advertisers may buy and publishers sell their advertising space and set a desired price. AdBrite has started with basic banner and text advertising. Meanwhile there are various advertising formats offered making it an interesting network to monetize multimedia and video. The newest feature that is announced at the website is behavioral targeting.

At first there are full page ads also know as interstitial advertising. These ads will display before a visitor may see a page. Visitors have the option to visit the advertised service, wait or skip the ad to go immediately to the content. Next there are Inline Ads, which is in text advertising transforming keywords within a text automaticly into paid advertising links referring to an advertised service.

Something that seems to be a unique feature is BritePic. BritePic enables to monetize images and photos by adding interactivity. This happens by an overlay format as it is used for interactive video. What makes it even a useful tool are some further functions. Beside an ad there is a menu added, which enables to share an image. Another feature is a watermark to protect an image. There is a particular website with an introduction to BritePic.

Another multimedia format offered is video advertising. The AdBrite InVideo advertising format uses a proprietary video player, which again enables video sharing and embedding videos at other sites and which protects media by watermarking. Video advertising works by uploading. To support a larger amount of videos there is an api offered.

Favtape.com for instant Music Playlists

Favtape.com is a service to easily create music playlists. Playlists are edited like microblogs as it happens at Tumbltape for music sharing. But the Favtape.com has other focal points. There is a music search engine and there are integrated interfaces to Last.fm and Pandora, another music sharing site and a music search engine, to create playlists of bookmarked songs and tracks. Another great feature are lists of top songs from the year 1901 until today. Here is a playlist of the roaring twenties: favtape.com/top/1925

Favtape.com has also been featured at the up to date music and video news at traexs.com, which you may follow by feed or at twitter.com/traexs.

Live Video by Mobile Phone Camera for Bloggers

Personal broadcasting by using a mobile phone camera is one of the most amazing new applications, which has already often been covered at this blog. Posts about this are sampled by live video.

One of these services is Kyte.tv now offering a solution targeting bloggers and small sized publishers at their company homepage. The solution enables to stream live and recorded video either from a webcam or by mobile phone directly to a blog or website. There are a couple of nice and useful features integrated like chat, rss and sms notifications. All features are included at the players at the Kyte.tv homepage.

Another great service that enable video broadcasting by using a mobile phone is zaplive.tv. I already heard about several events that have been streamed there live. They got a schedule to be informed about upcoming shows.

At a first post in May about live mobile video I estimated that this is a niche with about some thousand active users. Meanwhile popular channels have been visited several 100.000 times at Kyte.tv.

Start an Internet TV Shopping Channel

Starting an internet tv shopping channel becomes easy with Talk Market. It is shopping destination and an ecommerce enabled video service to represent goods by videos. Merchants can upload own videos and sell their products. Sales may happen at the portal or by links and video sharing. The service is equipped with social networking tools like described at social shopping services to share links by email or placing videos at blogs or popular social media sites. Furthermore there is an affiliate program, so products may even become promoted by third parties.

Participation and uploading a video to Talk Market is free. If a product becomes sold, a commission is charged. Talk Market manages the communication between a customer and the merchant and informs about sales, which have to be handled by the seller.

Visit the following for further business opportunities with video and social shopping.

The Social Shopping Business

Business Thursday: Social shopping enriches the shopping experience of consumers and offers some business opportunities. The opportunities to users are another way to find products and especially product recommendations and product reviews made by others. Depending of the features of a social shopping site members can take notes about desired products to bookmark and reseach items, discuss product features with others or share experiences. At some services there are product ratings and ratings for deals.

There are a couple of business opportunitis offered by social shopping sites. Some do share advertising revenue, some pay for reviews like it happens with paid posting at blogging and others do supply commerce widgets or even whole shops.

Favorite Thingz enables everyone to put a widget on a page with personal favorites. The items may be promoted at the web and social media services. Revenue becomes generated by selling a featured item.

Rate it all, Rasba and SharedReviews.com are shopping communities that do not require an own homepage to earn money. Rate it all is about reviews and does share the advertising revenue generated by activities. Rasba and SharedReviews.com both are social networking sites to discover new products and share them. Rasba pays, if an item is sold by the profile page, SharedReviews.com again shares the advertising revenue as well as possible commissions with the community.

The most comfortable solutions to participate in social shopping are own shops. Shop It and uSuggest are supplying customizable shopping sites or stores. Both are offering widgets to spread the products across the social web.

Social shopping sites are as social as the social web is. A strategy to get involved with own products is to encourage users to write reviews or to place a product widget at an own page or blog to facilitate a viral marketing effect. A solution to sell own products and to participate in social commerce is offered by Terapad.com. It is a shop solution equipped with blogging and social media marketing tools.

Click the following to find further social shopping pages.

Social Media Statistics and Trends

Up to date statistics about social media usage have been reported today by several blogs. Here are some key figures.

The most amazing number is about Twitter, which by 419 % has had the largest growth rate compared to one year ago. This may explain the many tools and the popularity of microblogging. Ning, a supplier of customizable social media software is second with 387 % and third Tagged with 352 %. The only vertical network within the toplist is Last.fm, a music site. MySpace is still the largest social media site followed by Facebook, but the growth rates have been 2 % compared to 100 %. In the following there is the article with an embedded sheet.

Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422 % in 12 Months

Another remarkable figure is about the usage of social media within enterprises. It is adopted to about 70 %. It is either used for marketing purposes and public relations by about 60 % of enterprises and to about 75 % for other business purposes. Enterprises have adopted various means from blogs to video sharing.

Report: Nearly 70% of Businesses Allow Social Media Usage

Video meanwhile has reached almost everyone at the net with 75 % of the US internet audience having watched video online in some way. The article is questioning the reliability of this figure and has a poll on the site. I added some further sources to the article stating that 48 % have visited a video sharing site in January and 70 % percent watched video online in March.

Comscore Says Almost Everyone (75%) in the US Now Watches Video Online
Increased Use of Video-sharing Sites
Internet video poised for explosive expansion in viewing

Last but not least there has been a coverage of a press release by blinkx stating that they are the fastest growing video site in the US and UK. blinkx offers several business opportunies with video.

blinkx Fastest Growing Video Site

VidyUp, a Video Upload Widget for Websites

VidyUp is a video upload widget, that may become placed at websites and blogs. It is a customizable widget that enables the upload of video from within a page and to embed the video. Uploads may happen to YouTube or Magnify.net, the supplier of the widget. After uploading a code to embed the video is supplied.

Magnify.net is a video solution provider offering further opportunities to manage videos that range from free video channels for websites to professional enterprise solutions. To bloggers by Magnify.net Publisher there are further ways to get a weblog video enabled. All options are represented at their product page.

Vertical Microblogging Service for Media and Convergence

Vertical services always arise where there is something popular or a proven concept and where a particular topic might be of interest to a particular group. This now happens to microblogging. Just a couple of days there has been the release of Yammer with a microblogging enterprise solution.

blippr is a microblogging service for all kind of media, books, games, movies and music. They got a modern social networking approach by integrated up to date services like lifestreaming to follow posts of others and by enabling discussions. Furthermore profiles may become connected with other social media services. Other features are for voting and to organize information about media.

Another trend is to merge microblogging with other social networking features like Dwigger does for voting of Twitter posts.

A service with a strong social networking emphasis is Weplug. Whereas post are still limited to 160 characters, there are a lot of social networking means integrated. At the homepage there is are typical news ratings with popular and upcoming messages. People may organize in groups for discussions and there are lifestreams for following.

Utterz, now Utterli, is completely multimedia enabled service, where people can send in text and audio messages, photos and videos. It is a real comfortable service with groups for discussions. By widgets messages may even become posted to webpages. Utterz is primarily made to communicate by mobile phones, but has a web interface, too.

Something fascinating about microblogging and the social networking scene is the speed of development. It is remarkable that within the social web there already happens media convergence between these new media services. Click the following to find more microblogging services.

Making own Online Games

Online games are popular and especially casual games played by nearly everyone. At Sploder everyone can play free games or make their own games by drag and drop. After creation the games are stored within the community and may become shared or published at an own page. Additionally there are weekly contests and most popular games are featured at the homepage. It is a place to find and share something new and extraordinary.

Atmosphir is a similar service actually in private beta that has been introduced at the TechCrunch 50 Conference, a place for start ups. Atmosphir is a software to easily produce games without comprehensive development knowledge. At a social network people will be able to exchange ideas, collaborate and play.

An interesting and most different approach to online games has playce, too in private beta modus and introduced at the same conference. They take a step that I personally already have awaited, because of the real world maps meanwhile available everywhere. They will make a virtual representation of the real world and make this a playground.

mixxt, a free hosted Social Networking Solution

mixxt is another hosted social media software for private and business usage. People and professionals may build their own community and public social network or stay in closed groups.

The mixxt solution by its design and tools is primarily dedicated to discussions and networking, collaboration and conferencing. There are tools like event calendar, forums and wikis and an ecommerce facility to promote events and sell tickets. The design of the communities is customizable and enabled to upload and share media. mixxt is a free service.

Dwigger is voting for Tweets

Dwigger is a new tool to vote and discuss posts submitted to Twitter, the Tweets. It is rather a service than a tool as Tweets need to become submitted to Dwigger. Nevertheless it is already a success as it is populated and by actually above 700 diggs a top story at Digg, where obviously not only the D is coming from. Members can submit their own or noteworthy posts by others to the service and start a conversation beyond the reply option offered by Twitter. Furthermore it might be another way to increase the reputation as Twitter profiles are integrated and to get new social networking contacts. Especially for the latter and for brief fast news I do appreciate Twitter myself (twitter.com/emediablogger).

What else Dwigger is offering are some integrated research tools to find country specific top stories and people. At Hit List there is a real time search to find up to date posts with a submission function.

As there are permanently new tools upcoming for Twitter here is a related source with a comprehensive coverage: EverythingTwitter.com

Another WiFi Network Success Story

The Fon wifi network and community welcomed its 1.000.000th member. The network consists of people who share their wifi connection established by the La Fonera Router. People may either share their connection and get worldwide free network access to actually about 400.000 access points or buy an daily access tickets, if they do not like to share their connection. At the same time Fon enables participants to connect in a global social network as the similar and in June covered wifi network WeFi does.

Additionally Fon offers business opportunities for resellers and owners of the community router by offering wifi access to others.

Advertising Revenue by shortened URL's

Shortened url's have been around for a while and beome mostly used to shorten long terms for blogs or email. Lately they have become popular and necessary beside nice at microblogging because of the limited text length.

Now Adjix is offering a new service for short links that monetizes. It works like every link abbreviation service, where the most popular probably is TinyURL.com. At Adjix outcoming links are supplied with an unobstrusive advertisement. This advert is displayed at the top of a page within a frame. Here is an example. It seems to be a thoughtful concept as even the ad may become switched off to visit the original url. This is even a unique and useful feature.

For microblogging power users this is a business opportunity that might generate a reasonable income.

Another short url service with a unique feature is twitURL (.de). This one has a suggest feature for the resulting abbreviated url. This is nice to get a shortened url with a generic name. I needed a brief url for a Twitter post and generated twiturl.de/business for the weekly Business Thursday column.

Toolgether, a new Web Apps and Widget Platform

Toolgether is a new platform for the development, hosting and distribution of widgets. The service targets developers and private entrepreneurs. There are tools at the platform to transform existing applications into web apps and host them for distribution. At the same time Toolgether is a marketplace to monetize web applications. The service has just come out of private beta a couple of days ago.

Social Media Software for Citizen Entrepreneurs

Social media already lets everyone participate in business by commerce widgets and other revenue sharing models. Some social media software suppliers do enable citizens to run and manage a whole social media communty. This becomes feasible by software as a service and is not necessarily limited to private usage.

Such a community service is supplied by slinkset.com. The basic setting is a news sharing service with popularity index and user news submissions. The communities are customizable and other features like voting and requests may become added. This all gets a professional touch by the ability to put the community into an own domain.

Webjam offers a hosted social media software dedicated to content sharing and social networking. It starts the same way with a basic template and is designed for private as well as for professional usage. By enabling members to connect it is a social network of social networks.

Ning is something like a pioneer in this business and has one of the most flexible solutions. Ning is both, a service offering social media software for everyone by ready to use solutions and a hosted software solution and platform for developers. New developed communities again may become used by others to generate a similar service. By this there is a broad range of solutions available for nearly every purpose. They got an own framework to customize existing solutions and to develop completely new social networking services. Here are examples of some of the popular hosted social networks.

Find more social media software by this source.

Lifestreaming and Blogging

Lifestreaming has not been an issue for now at this blog, but it is popular and by this necessary to become mentioned. Reason gives an article about the relationship of blogging and lifestreams related to the most popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed and microblogging services, too. Lifestreaming may become described as another particular social networking format, by which social media activities become aggregated. This happens by submitting the user name of other social networks to a lifestreaming service, which automaticly generates a stream or timeline of social media activities. These streams show when a member writes a blog post or share a video and the like. It enables others to follow someones activities or the lifestream may become embedded at homepages to tell others about own activities. It is useful for relationships or may be used to increase the reputation.

The article mentioned above is talking about the impact of lifestreams related to blogging and shows the popularity of lifestreaming services. It is telling that bloggers who do use lifestreams do restrict their blogging activities, which is a noteworthy impact. So lifestreaming services and as well other services like microblogging may substitute rather early social media services. This is a remarkable and speedy development. In the following there is the article.

What is FriendFeed’s Effect on Blogging?

As it happens with popular services there become tools developed around them. This happened to FriendFeed lately. One of the first tools is FFholic, which is a popularity index for shared entries, comments and rooms (groups). Some further tools have become compiled by Mashable at Top 10 Web Applications for FriendFeed. Another noteworthy lifestreaming service is Lifestream.fm, which I already saw often embedded at homepages. This service, which has coming out of private beta lately, enables to put a stream on a site and even facilitates streaming to mobile devices. Further lifestreaming services you may find at FOLDEN.INFO - Social Networking

If you like to connect at friendfeed, click the emediablogger profile.

Virtual Reality Worlds and Social Networking

There have some further virtual reality worlds entered the market. Some do stay on their own and some do offer social networking facilities.

sosauce is a social network offering 3d features to represent themselves. The social media community is build around three main issues: writing, photo sharing and travel documentations. Members may arrange their media in an own virtual 3d space, where they can meet and chat with others.

Twinity, already mentioned for a film festival and a virtual replica of Berlin, now has opened this week for public beta and invites everyone to join.

Another community combining social networking and virtual reality is the still in beta invite and invitation by request Just leap in.

If there will come up as many virtual worlds as there are coming up social media sites, these new worlds probably will need approaches like the Open Grid for collaboration or an immmersive web strategy to succeed. It seems to become a similar scenario like it happesn today with the social web, where services have started to collaborate to stay up to date with the newest features. If services act alone and do not have an outstanding feature, they will not be able to attract and keep their customers.

A hint for researching: Today virtual reality is also called the Metaverse, a term is based on an utopian novel used by developers and some services.

Microblogging for Enterprises

There is another business solution for social networking. Yesterday it has been a post about a business solution for social network aggregation. In this case it is microblogging for enterprises by Yammer. This is interesting and promising as the original Twitter application has been used at first within the company that has developed it to stay connected with others. So it is a proven product.

There are several most useful features a microblogging application supplies for enterprise usage. These of course are updates to be informed. The most important next step is personalization, which allows to filter the updates. At all one is informed about the company in general, what is nice, and secondly one is able to receive work related updates to improve the productivity. Another most interesting feature is to find someone like an expert within the company by keywords or profiles. So if someone needs e.g. some extraordinary information for an unusual task, one is able to easily connect and check for relevance, make a call or arrange a meeting.

For sure there will come up further features at microblogging in general and for business networking in particular.

Blogging Tools, Blog Advertising and Social Networking

Business Thursday: Using aggregators to organize social media activities has already been an issue at this blog. This post contains an update about social media aggregators and aggregated blog posts. There are interesting new services available, which in part are dedicated to enterprise activities. For social media marketing and monetization there are a couple of new blogvertising services available for advertising at blogs and the social web.

Aggregated Blog Posting

WriteToMyBlog is a free online word processor for aggregated blog postings and post management, which means that articles are administrated online and might become posted to several blogs. It is an advanced social media integrated tool that enables to fetch images and videos from other social media sources and post these within an article. The output comes along with trackback url's and tags. Posts may become edited and deleted within this online tool. Other software tools for aggregated blogging are w.bloggar, which is available as computer software and by a portable version to become installed at usb sticks.

Blog and Social Media Advertising

Technorati Media is an advertising network managed by Technorati (review). The ad network is dedicated to blog and social media publishers and the advertisiing format is described as an innovative conversational approach suiting the needs of the social media sphere.

Mog Music Network is a vertical advertising network for music blogs and sites. Posts become syndicated with mog newsfeeds and publishers get a share of the advertising revenue.

Nuffnang offers blogvertising for the asian blogosphere like Advertlets.

Social Media Aggregators

Anywr merges social web activities with other every day internet tasks like email. It is a social networking tool and organizer for all contacts. It aggregates social media as well as email and other contacts. The service makes updates of contact data and synchronizes these across various devices. For social networking there is a microblogging feature available and lifestreaming to stay informed about activities of friends and others.

Moli is a social media aggregator available in several languages and with solutions for enterprises. For professional usage there is the ability to manage several profiles and groups. Furthermore it is a social network for private sharing and business networking.

You may find further new social networking tools at the update of FOLDEN.INFO:
Social Networking Update and Social Networking

By the way: You may have recognized that FOLDEN.INFO has been cited and linked by this blog several times. It is just an associated service and a comprehensive internet marketing and interactive media source and by this used to refer to further services, if useful. You may also read the monthly emarketing articles at the left.

New Twitter Apps and Research Tools

Some new and great Twitter applications and tools have been introduced to ease the use, for marketing and researching the Twittersphere.

Phweet is for conferencing and to make phone calls using Twitter. It works with the original login data and by appointing a connection. To connect with someone a message will be sent with a special Phweet link. If the recipient accepts the call by clicking on this link, the session will start.

Tweetake is a service for data back up.

TwitStamp creates buttons with the title and link of the latest post and profile cards. These buttons may be used at other social media pages and websites.

twitterfeed.com is a tool to automaticly post newsfeed updates to twitter. To use twitterfeed.com an OpenID is needed.

twittad facilitates advertising at member profiles. Advertising prices start with under 1 dollar and are up to about 20 dollars, usual durance is from 7 days up to 1 month. Choosing adspace is conveniently done by a list. What is unusual is that the ads are pure display ads and not clickable.

monitter does real time research for customizable terms. A nice feature is to narrow the research locally by a box at the upper left. To follow posts about a particular term there are newsfeeds available and widgets.

Last but not least a Twitter inspired digital art installation: Waiting

Visit previous related posts.

Connected Virtual Reality Worlds

On 31th July Second Life has announced the public beta of the Open Grid Protocol. This new technology enables to switch with one unique avatar between different virtual reality worlds and might be described as a virtual reality aggregator. This is done by seperating the creation of avatars from the surrounding environment. Now by Syntronik a first service has started for creating avatars independently from a virtual world. Entering virtual worlds with an independently created avatar is enabled by the Open Grid Protocol. Below there is a video introducing at first Syntronik and later on the functions of the protocol.


Syntronik.de Screencast from MrTopf on Vimeo

There is already a large list of participating or developed virtual worlds supporting the open grid protocol. Developers and webmaster may start their own world with the open source software OpenSimulatur. Further information for developers is available at the Open Grid Public Beta and Open Grid Protocol homepages, current news by the Second Life Blog and OpenSimulatur News.

Navigaya, Meta Search Engine and Surfboard

This is a must see meta search engine and surfboard. To me it is the best designed search engine and board I saw for long, which I may describe in the range of new interfaces. For searching the most important search engines are available and for surfing and daily tasks a lot of informative and useful tools. I started this post with a brief description because the site appeared a bit slow to me, probably because of the multimedia features and the amount of tools.

So the name and the link is Navigaya and what a visitor sees first are music videos. These are arranged by top DJ's. To navigate the site one needs to learn and try a bit. Everything works by mouse over functions. If one navigates the mouse to the middle of the site, the box of the meta search appears..While searching the music keeps playing and some popups come up. This is what happens to all tasks. All popups may become expanded to full screen.

At the top left there is a music and video search box with a player to pause the music. When searching for music or videos another popup comes up at the middle of the page. Now one may edit own playlists or choose from one of the DJ's.

Further tools are available at the bottom of the page, which become visible by navigating with the mouse to the bottom. There is a lot of stuff available, the playlists again, links to well known email and social media services, office tools and information like news and weather. There is also a log in to share with others. For news there are two further menus at the middle and the right of the top.

More about new interfaces.

Widgets for Live Chat and Communications

Some new widgets came up for live chat and communications. Even video chat on blogs is feasible.

The first one is SideSparks. It is a free chat application that enables live chat on a blog or website. What is great with this chat widget is its immersive web features, which enables chat with others at the blogosphere or the web beyond the own site. This feature is named tagged chat. It is tagging topics at participating sites to led people find interesting topics. Cross border features are great for sites with low traffic to populate an application.

Toksta is an instant messaging and video chat widget. It works by webcam and is designed for usage at social media sites. It is free and offering a business opportunity by revenue sharing of the advertising income.

Similar features are offered by mabber, a mobile connected instand messaging widget, meebo me with chat and Wengo Visio with audio and video. There are a couple of further services offering text messaging and phone widgets.

Music Sharing Trends

Cool music sharing sites have come up. At some one can be the dj and create own channels and playlists to share music with friends and even at the internet. Here are some sites and a brief review about the history of music at the internet and some hints.

One of my favorites is Blip.fm, which is a new and modern music sharing site. Members get own homepages and can create playlists from a pool or upload own music. By the latter it is a service for independents to promote their music. There are tools available to vote for dj's, to share music at the internet and to promote songs at other social media sites.

Another one is Tumbltape. This services automaticly picks up music files, which are posted at the Tumblr microblogging service. Too, the playlists do look like microblogs like e.g. the tuneage's Tumbltape. Nice and easy.

Both are for social networking, too, and if one uses Blip.fm one can send tracks automaticly to Tumblr and get a Tumbltape playlist.

What is strange about music sharing is that it has started lately and there are much more video sharing than music sharing sites. Controversially to the discussion about copyrights first music pages at the internet either have been informative or made for independents to promote music. Early movers have been ArtistServer, beatmaka and SoundClick. Other pages like ccMixter do enable musicians to cooperate at the internet by exchanging sounds or by offering online music tools.

Music sharing I guess at first started with podcasting. Because of this competition by the new possibilities for independents to promote their music the discussion about copyrights rather seemed a business issue to me and annoying. Opposite to this copyrights of course remain an issue. What is difficult in the todays music business is to distinguish between promotions and unauthorized uploads. For legal sharing one may join a service that offers songs, upload own music or look for musicians that offer Creative Commons or License Art Libre licensed tracks. These are licensing initiatives to enable musicians to cooperate and fans to download and share music.

If you like to obtain more frequent information about music downloads, sharing and opportunities for music promotion, I may recommend the following just started newsfeed: TRAEXS Music and Video News by TRAEXS.COM

Video Business, Advertising and Sources

As internet video emerges so the services for video advertising and video business are doing. Another breed is related to use internet video at ecommerce. Here are a couple of new services and sources.

Cliplister is dedicated to ecommerce and a video platform for product videos, Retailers may obtain videos and manufactures may distribute videos for internet promotion. Cliplister supplies the platform and does the clearing of copyright issues to assure the legal usage of the videos.

Mixpo offers a video advertising platform for small and medium sized enterprises to collaborate with marketing agencies, advertising networks and other market participants like publishers.

ReelSEO is a source specialized in video marketing and search engine optimization for internet video. Beside this there is a broad range of related information available.

Video Breakouts does research and tracking of internet video and supplies a weekly top 100 list every monday. Furthermore there are lists of top movers and widgets to get the latest trends and videos.

Finally some industry information. At first there is standardization, which is a crucial factor because of the various video formats and players that are on the market. Related to this issue the internet standardization authority W3C has launched a group called Video in the Web. Related to video advertising best practices and information about ad formats are available by the IAB at Ad Standards & Guidelines. Last but not least a research paper about internet video and web tv (PDF) by Roland Berger is available. If video podcasting is an issue, the Podcast Downloading 2008 study by PEW Internet might be interesting.

A TV Set with 3D Screen

I talked about the IFA fair and 3d screens and possible innovations in this range. Now a press release has reached me about a company offering a 3d tv set. Unfortunately I have not seen it at the fair, but I took some information from a press release and related reports on the internet. In former years I saw several manufacturers presenting 3d screens, which I would describe as in an early stage because of the image quality, which at least lags behind the hd trend. The reason why they have disappeared might be problems with the market entry and high product prices because of the early stage or buy out by others. What I have recognized beside the following this year has been a research project in the range of autostereoscopy.

Now there is Charisma (the homepage is german only), which at first presented its innovation in 2006 at the IFA. They have developed a solution to transform usual tv signals into a 3d experience. The up to date product has a modern flat screen and does offer an up to date or even better image quality, which is described and reported as amazing because of the natural 3d experience. While watching one looks into a horizon as one does in the real world, which means a real adventure. There are 3 screen sizes available, 46, 50 and 60 inches. The technology is already employed for medical usage. Prices are from 14,500.- up to 32,500.- Euro.

Business with User generated Content

Business Thursday: Today everybody can do business at the internet and everybody may be a producer. This may happen by affiliate marketing or widgets, citizen journalism or by video. There are really great opportunities today and another one is called user generated content. At specialized marketplaces creators of content, programers, writers and other creatives may meet with buyers to negotiate and trade.

gazhoo is a marketplace for documents of all kinds. There are four categories, business forms and presentations, legal forms, market research and last but not least reports and essays. This might be a business opportunity for specialists and creative writers.

A more social approach has hurox by being market and social network alike. There are a lot of tools to communicate and to find or to meet friends. At hurox people can create own pages and albums of their content and present it to the community and the public. Pages and albums may contain photos, music and videos. Community members are able to set a price to sell their content or to earn by content sharing. To promote content there are contests and social networking tools like ratings, recommendations and content sharing.

The qoop marketplace is completely dedicated to social media and has the broadest approach. At qoop mostly all kinds of documents and media are traded. This embraces recipes as well as creative writings, poems or paintings. Members are encouraged to make mash ups of content and to share and sell stuff at the social web.

Pikicentral is a solution for websites to enable visitors to upload or to manipulate content and to buy prints of it. It is a complete business solutions, which handles payments, does print the products and delivers the goods.

The road to Interactive Television

Interactive television is on its way to the market. There are several activities like the plan of Yahoo to develop a widget channel for tv. It is a useful strategy to transer successful business models. So it happens now with screening rooms, where people can chat while watching.

This is what the german service telewebber offers. People can chat while watching tv. This is done by an online service, which has epg features and lists the tv program so people can meet. Online streams of tv broadcasts within the service may be a future feature. This is what YouTube offers by Streams for internet video.

Another service enhancing the tv experience is blinkx BBTV by blinkx. It is an online tv software enabling full screen tv at the internet. Additionally the software suggests relevant information about what is on the screen. This feature is already offered by some digital television broadcasters.

Actually this all happens at the internet or while being connected to the internet because of the missing backchannel. Whereas this requires some installation opposite to being able to click within a broadcast like doing it on the internet, this is a real business case as real interactive television is or will be based on internet technologies at least in part. The related technology to make digital tv interactive is called MHP, Multimedia Home Platform.

A service using the technology the opposite way by streaming video signals from the internet into a tv broadcast has been introduced lately by the german news channel N-TV. For a talk show called busch@n-tv there is a software available to stream webcam video into the show.

Last but not least a link to a provider of interactive tv applications. At the right of the tru2way homepage you will find a list of licensees with a lot of big players.

Summary of the Live Coverage

Blogging while visiting the IFA has been the first live blogging experience at this blog. Here are some additional information and some tips for live a coverage. I used the Mail to Blogger function and sent the messages by mobile phone. It always took some time to type a message and to send it. Cover it Live has been an option, but time was to short to be prepared. Another thing I experienced but had expected is the need to check website addresses. The latter is because sometimes addresses are used where there is no relevant information and secondly because at fairs products are presented without additional information at a company homepage. So some corrections have been done to the posts.

The overall impression by the fair is that home netwoking has become a common facility at consumer electronics as mostly all products are enabled to exchange data in some way. This may happen by direct internet or cable connection, wireless technologies, usb or sd cards. The same is due to high definition at larger screens, where there are already improvements done leading towards ultra high definition video. My personal highlights have been the PCTV by Daewoo and BD Live by Panasonic, which both are able to enrich and even change the experience at tv sets. BD Live may offer amazing possibilities to design interactive games or interactive video.

Further information from the IFA is available at IFA International. At FOLDEN.INFO there is a further up to date coverage of new media innovations and mobile media as well as about new social media services and social networking.