Artlog Brings Artists And Art Aficionados Together
June 4, 2008 — 01:34 PM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — Add a Comment
Would you consider yourself an art and design buff? Like to peruse galleries once in a while? Maybe watch what happens at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in your downtime? If so, Artlog may be right down your alley.
Built with the intent of connecting people who are interested in photography, sculpture, and other forms of art, Artlog is part social network, part gallery directory, and part portfolio display case. Yes, even those who wish to share pieces from their own collections can do so.
The number of hotspots and resources for art aficionados is pretty tremendous on the Web. There are sites which catalogue galleries in various locations, like Artnet, ArtScene, Asianart, Carmel Art Galleries and Chelsea Art Galleries. Then there are unique places like Cool Hunting, which share with visitors a myriad of interesting art and design finds. What Artlog appears to do is provide a multifunctional space in which artists, their fans, and the venues which showcase their work can all exist as a whole, much as they do in the industry’s physical and social dimensions.
Most other sites which offer one or more components similar to Artlog are constructed in relatively simple fashion. They offer some visual representation of what resides in galleries listed within their databases, and some basic address and contact information. Artlog, meanwhile, offers a more expansive set of information. Some galleries in Artlog’s catalog offer captures of items on display for particular events. Users can even take a peek at where they plan to go before they head off to the gallery, 
if the gallery falls in line with Google Street View. Such previews can help if a specific city or neighborhood happens to be chock full of artistic locations - particularly nondescript outlets.
Of course, the ability to quickly see what shows are opening or closing is also enormously convenient, considering that one is eventually bound to lose track of the abundance of events occurring at any given time in major metropolises like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Getting back to the point made above concerning user portfolios, the tool provided for uploading such content is free, and allows registered members to establish custom-designed galleries complete with resume and subdomain. Which is a pretty stellar deal, considering the all-in-one, interconnected nature of Artlog and the probability that the artist will see a good amount of traffic flow their way as more and more people join the network. As for gallery aesthetics, the finished product, looking at some of the presentations that have so far been made available, can look quite attractive indeed.
In all, Artlog is a quality effort for a service that has been in beta for all of a few months. It’s definitely something few who hold a regular craving for all things artistic would likely have no reservations in joining. It’s well crafted, well balanced, and seemingly off to a reasonably good start as far as gallery tracking goes.
Artlog co-founder Dylan Fareed mentioned to us that the site had, in partnership with the LES Business Improvement District, organized a large event with a collection of 25 galleries from the Lower East Side of New York as well as the Bowery’s New Museum. The name for the evening is Collect LES ’08, and they’ve offered a promo for Mashable readers to receive half-price tickets ($6 instead of $12). Attendees will enjoy free wine, beer, and liquor. Just enter the code “mashable” (sans quotations) to get the discount. Ticket holders must be 21 or older. Collect LES ’08 happens the night of Friday, June 13. Spooky? You decide.
Ping This!Facebook Friend Recommendations Invade Your Requests Page
June 4, 2008 — 12:25 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 4 Comments
Making friends and connecting on Facebook is getting easier–or more automated, at least. Facebook has already added a few features like “People You May Know” (which recommends possible friends based on mutual connections in your social graphs), and suggests actions you can take to help friends that are new members become acclimated to the Facebook environment.
Today, another feature called “Friend Suggestor” has taken the friend recommendation tool to another level. You’ll now see potential friends on your home page notifications, right along with new friend requests. Facebook has even applied a similar icon to the one that is used for new friend requests, so the enticement to check out the friend recommendation is even greater. A few users may be tricked by the proximity and similarity of the Friend Suggestor–I almost was.
Some Facebook users have indicated that they don’t like all the new automated friend recommendations, The Observer’s Doree Shafrir notes. I wonder if the new Friend Suggestor will have any larger implications on the way in which we make friends online. Users weren’t too thrilled with the automated updates that newsfeeds provided when Facebook introduced them either. Pretty soon we won’t need to visit Facebook at all–the site will do all the work for us, maintaining our relationships automatically.
But in all seriousness, does the continued automation of relationships on Facebook speak to a larger privacy issue? LinkedIn is another network that has recommendation options for building on an existing network of friends and colleagues, and I personally think that some of the action items Facebook suggests for helping new users navigate features on the site are quite helpful, but when does such automation begin to cross the line?
Twitscoop’s Tag Cloud Tracks Buzz in Twittersphere
June 4, 2008 — 12:06 PM PDT — by Alana Taylor — — 1 Comment
Just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be more Twitter tools, yet another Twitter mashup has crashed the party. The latest application to hit the scene is Twitscoop, a site where you can see the hottest conversation topics that are buzzing around Twitter at any given moment.
Twitscoop, created by the self-funded startup Lollicode, uses an automated algorithim to scan hundreds of tweets per minute, and in the form of a tag cloud, posts to the site the words that are being used most frequently. Hot words are displayed in bold and even hotter words are displayed BIGGER.
Take a look at the tag cloud that formed after famous fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent died:
TweetWire and Truemors are two sites that offer similar Twitter news services, and Summize can search for certain keywords, but Twitscoop’s tag cloud is more efficient for those who want to stay on top of fresh news and topics without having to scan.
Not only is the dynamic tag-based approach a pretty nifty and effortless idea, but you can even see the latest tweets each keyword is coming from and how many times it’s been repeated in the last few minutes simply by hovering over the word with your mouse. You can also click on the word and be redirected to a page that has a more detailed graph and list of tweets (perhaps to be used as supporting material for a blog post?).
Other features the site is currently working on include a live tag cloud where users can see the tags growing, shrinking, and disappearing or appearing in real time, as well as the ability to embed Twitscoop in third-party applications.
I am very impressed by Twitscoop’s browsing and meme tracking features, and think it could be useful for journalists or bloggers who are interested in staying on top of citizen journalism.
Yahoo Address Book API Goes Public
June 4, 2008 — 10:32 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — 1 Comment
Yahoo’s Address Book may not be the highlight of the company’s repertoire, but it is unquestionably one of its most valuable foundations, providing user contact support for popular services like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, and Yahoo Go. Hundreds of millions of people continually rely on it on a daily basis. So as folks in Sunnyvale, California, announce today the public release of the Address Book API, many developers are likely to spring to attention.
Thus far, the Yahoo Address Book API has only been provided to a select number of developers. Plaxo and LinkedIn are just a couple of third parties which have employed the API. 
Now connections to the platform can be made through many more external devices and in a myriad of ways. Yahoo Address Book product manager Charles Wu offers examples such as sending invitations to build social networks, looking up everything from email addresses to phone numbers to postal addresses for shipping services for online retail, and providing auto-complete for messaging applications. Third party developers can also utilize the API to automatically enact searches for new contacts stored by Address Book users, a seemingly simple script that can help synchronize accounts across a variety of services, whether Yahoo-based or or not.
Wu says the API will eventually offer support for OAuth, which the company has already expressed visible interest in with projects like Fire Eagle.
Last.fm in a Box: Listen to Last.fm on Live Nation, iGoogle, and More…
June 4, 2008 — 10:07 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — 1 Comment
Last.fm, a Web-based music service that’s been in the news frequently as of late with its introduction of virtually limitless on-demand playback support and its partnerships with international divisions of AOL and so forth, is arriving with another update today, this one in the form of a program called “Last.fm in a Box.” In short, it allows for the service to continue building its brand while making its core function of providing streaming music freely more easily available on popular third-party websites for the convenience of their users.
The initial set of partners for Last.fm in a Box is quite an extensive one. The CBS-owned company includes Billboard, Break Media, eMusic, Live Nation, MP3.com, Meebo, Frengo, Gigya, MP3.com, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Bebo, Ning, Photobucket, Piczo, Stardoll, WAYN.com, Six Apart, and Wordpress.com. CBS’s own television states and affiliates are listed as team players as well.
Last.fm says that the new intiative will be ad-supported, “allowing brands and sponsors the opportunity to reach millions of highly engaged music fans across the Web, beyond the Last.fm site.” Martin Stiksel, a founder of Last.fm, sees it as possible to find “hundreds of millions of additional users” given the recent popularity growth of widgets in places such as social networks and start pages. Last.fm purports to have already administered its music services to “more than 19 million additional users.”
ILikeTotallyLoveIt: Out-of-the-Ordinary Gadgets, Food, Accessories & More
June 4, 2008 — 09:44 AM PDT — by Alana Taylor — — 5 Comments
I like totally found a new social networking site to share with you guys. It’s a place where people can shop for all kinds of innovative, cool, beautiful, or weird products based on how much they like totally love them.
ILikeTotallyLoveIt.com is a Digg-like site that mixes e-shopping with social networking. Users can submit products they think are neat or funky, and then watch as the community votes for which items they “love” best. Included with each item is also a link to an online shop where you can immediately buy the product.
The items are organized by topics like Entertainment, Fashion, Foods, and Gadgets, and they can also be sorted by price. On the surface, ILikeTotallyLoveIt sounds like an ordinary online marketplace, but take a closer look and you will find quite the opposite.
I like to think of it as Digg meets eBay meets Party City.
For instance, under the Personal Care category you will find pink toilet paper, shower soap dispensers shaped like breasts, and an electronic eye massager. Each product has been submitted by a user and voted by the community.
Today, ILikeTotallyLoveIt announced new features that have been added to the site to help make it even more loveable.
Some changes include larger photos on profiles, pictures of “neighbors” who have similar tastes, and users now have the ability to define why they love certain products, where they found them, and how much they cost.
In addition, there are various bookmarklets, buttons and widgets that serve as useful tools for active users. And at the same time, the creators have expressed a focus on trying not to clutter the site or create confusion with too many random features.
ILikeTotallyLoveIt is not the first site to adopt the Digg style. Sites like Neoows, CafeMom, and FeVote have also highlighted the scoring system as their own “revolutionary” feature.
However, what sets ILikeTotallyLoveIt apart from all the various shopping social networks, such as ThisNext and DealBundle, is not only its catchy domain name but the fact that it is not constrained by rigid labels. Users are free to submit any product they find from around the internet — everything from gadgets to food — and express why they are so excited about it.
As a girl who enjoys online shopping, I can tell you it’s easier to find what you are looking for when products are specifically labeled and categorized by price and description. But as a geek who loves running into new and completely unconventional toys, accessories, clothes and gadgets, ILikeTotallyLoveIt has won me over.
Pandora Releases Air-Based Desktop Application
June 4, 2008 — 09:00 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — 3 Comments
Pandora, described as a custom Web radio service, has been quite well-received over the years. Though it started off solely as a Web page catering music streams based on users’ personal musical preferences, it’s grown to provide a voluminous catalog to everyone from PC owners to mobile broadband subscribers to those keen on bringing Web-based audio to their home theatre systems in streamlined fashion. This week Pandora added another option for listeners, once more with a focus on computer users, through the release of an Adobe Air application called Pandora Desktop Beta.
Suffice it to say that upon installation of the browser-less utility Pandora loyalists will feel right at home. Within the confines of the Adobe Air platform, Pandora is virtually indistinguishable from its ancestor. It only seems to lack a subtly-placed square button, in evidence in the browser version, which would be useless for Desktop Beta users anyhow. So, on the whole, Pandora Desktop Beta is a carbon copy of the original.
As a person who thoroughly enjoys what Pandora offers within the browser, I must say I enjoy this launch very much. Yes, it would have perhaps been interesting to see the company work to construct a fresher item for its first PC-based out-of-browser experience (that wasn’t in the form of a glitchy widget, which they released many months ago, and which in my own daily routine, fell into complete disuse not long after). But the fact of the matter is Pandora has slowly grown to become a well-engineered system, whether it’s used on an old graybox, Sprint mobile phone, or a 
Slim Device’s Squeezebox or whathaveyou. So if you’re the type of person who wants to consume free custom music streams, PDB will likely serve you well.
In the brief time I spent with the Air application, I came across no flaws to speak of. It functions the same as it would in, say, Firefox or Internet Explorer. It should be said that the links located within the topmost menu on the page will trigger your default Web browser installations, rather than open within the application, which may annoy some users. But if music is your main focus, not sharing a QuickMix or reading the company blog, then Pandora Desktop Beta will prove useful in most circumstances. And I wouldn’t think it too far-fetched to say that more refinements to the download are in the works.
(Note: Pandora’s developers mention a CPU-intensive performance issue for Mac users, which has been determined to be an issue on Adobe’s end. However, being a Mac OS X 10.5 user, I can vouch to have had no problems . Do let us know if your own experiences differ.)
Crowd Science Launches New Demographic Research Tool [Invites]
June 4, 2008 — 08:01 AM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 3 Comments
As the landscape of online advertising changes, the type of data that needs to be collected by site owners is also shifting. There are a few ways in which to go about gathering data from users, like just asking. Polls and surveys are viable options for this particular method, and a new service called Crowd Science launches its new research tool for gaining demographic information from your users and site visitors.
Funded for $2 million last December by Granite Ventures, Crowd Science is specifically focused on demographics and attention data, so it’s more narrow in its offerings than some other tools that provide detailed heat maps or trafficking data as well. From there, you can gain some analytics based on your gathered data, and summaries are built on page, site, group data, etc.
Crowd Science’s method is based on context and time-related data, which could minimize its extensibility for other subsets of indirect data-gathering, but Crowd Science is also hoping to work, on some level, with other analytics tools like Compete or comScore.
While there are a number of polling services out there that can, to varying degrees, be used to collect necessary data about users and site visitors, we’re also seeing more pronounced data collection + analytics tools offer straightforward ways in which to get info directly from users, which can in turn be used in a myriad of ways across marketing campaigns, site design, and more.
Mashable is offering 50 invites. Use the invitation code MASHABLE to get yours here.
Annotations: Write Silly Messages All Over YouTube Videos
June 4, 2008 — 05:21 AM PDT — by Stan Schroeder — — 8 Comments
Google Operating System has dug up a new YouTube beta feature called annotations, which enables you to write text messages inside the actual video, Flickr style. The difference, however, is that you can only add annotations to the videos you uploaded.
YouTube lists possible uses for the feature as:
- Add background information about the video.
- Create stories with multiple possibilities
- Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video
Our estimate, however, is that 95% of annotations will be lolcats-style messages. Actually, make that 99%.
Currently, annotations are shown by default, but you can turn them off while watching a video through the standard player menu (bottom right button in the video). The feature is currently in beta, supports only English, and does not appear in videos embedded on other sites. Check out an example video below. *Update: yes, as I’ve said, you cannot see annotations in embedded videos. Therefore, embedding the video below didn’t make much sense. Or maybe, that’s what I wanted you to think, while actually I’ve embedded the video so that you can see how it looks without the annotations, and compare it with the same video, annotated, over on YouTube.
Vysr’s Next Level: More Browser “Widgets.”
June 4, 2008 — 04:59 AM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 3 Comments
Vysr debuted earlier this year at the Web 2.0 Expo, and admittedly it was one of my favorite new sites that I got to check out. Though basic, the Vysr browser add-on showed a good amount of potential as a sleek, unobtrusive way in which to take on various tasks while surfing the web. Highlight an address on a contact information page, for example, and a click on Vysr’s map icon pulls up the mapped location you’ve highlighted.
With its first major release since its initial launch, the action items available on Vysr have expanded, specifically towards a more social and fluid realm. That means there are more “widgets” for you to choose from on the Vysr browser add-on. Vysr currently supports Firefox and IE.
Perform a news or Wikipedia search by highlighting text on a website, and the information appears in a small box in the lower corner of your browser. Share items instantaneously with friends on Facebook, Gmail and MySpace with the content share option. Bookmark items across several social bookmarking sites with the ShareThis “widget” on Vysr’s toolbar.
Now that Vysr is layering in more options for this customized toolbar (you pick which “widgets” you’d like to add), its potential as a productive web-surfing tool is drawing nearer, and enables Vysr to become more competitive with the likes of Yoono and Flock. See here for a head-to-head comparison of these tools, and more.
Podcasting Giant Leo Laporte Chooses Stickam
June 4, 2008 — 03:00 AM PDT — by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — — 3 Comments
I’ve ben a huge fan of Leo Laporte since I first discovered that he was the man behind the avatar Dev Null on Soledad O’Brien’s old MSNBC tech show theSite. I now follow his exploits these days mostly through his weekly audio podcast This Week in Tech (TWiT), a great panel show that has partially served as my inspiration for the current tech panel show I host Elite Tech News. Leo has been a model citizen in terms of providing an example for independent media producers, and how they should build not just a brand but a business model out of what they do (presuming they’d like to be full-time with it).
So it was with some measure of surprise that I learned recently that Laporte’s decision was final, and that he was indeed going with Stickam for his new project, TwitLive. It isn’t that Stickam isn’t a reliable service, but as we’ve noticed in the past, Stickam hasn’t exactly built an image for being very tech-centric, seemingly going the route of BlogTV and their apparent focus more towards conferencing and a non-tech community than a serious broadcast platform.
Certainly Leo wouldn’t feel left out, as most of his TechTV ex-patriot friends reside at Stickam competitor UStream, most notably Chris Pirillo.
Then I remembered an article from last month over at Valleywag featuring Leo alleging he was getting $100,000 to broadcast exclusively through Stickam, or roughly a $51 / CPM by Nicholas Carlson’s calculations. I did a little bit of calling around on my own, and though no one would confirm it on the record or with their name attached to a quote, several sources in the know confirmed that this was the term of the deal between Stickam and Leo Laporte.
Certainly, that bit of information isn’t the greatest for Stickam, since it wasn’t purely on the merits of the technology Leo made his decision, as WebProNews stated earlier today:
Today, Stickam announced its high-definition availability, a factor they noted as a reason Laporte opted to keep TWiT Live available through the site. The show broadcasts five times a week.
Still, a hearty congratulations are in order for Leo, though. Few people are able to live out their New Media dreams like he is, and $100,000 payday is certainly a just reward for the years of work he’s put into pioneering the business of New Media.
