Results matching “google testing”

The Associated Press and Yahoo Inc. are closing in on a deal that would impose tighter restrictions and potentially a higher price tag on AP stories distributed on Yahoo's news site, sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

The deal that could be reached in the next few weeks could set a precedent in the resolution of an increasingly urgent issue in he media industry: how news organizations deal with the major Internet portals, which some news publishers say unfairly profit from their work and cost them tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

YouTube is releasing a new open-source interface called YouTube Direct that aims to make it easier for news organisations to have access to relevant clips from citizen journalists, it was widely reported. The application, to be unveiled today, will allow media outlets to integrate a video upload tool into their sites, where they can accept and screen user footage, described TechCrunch. All content uploaded will also appear on the YouTube site.

As more and more of the public are equipped to record video on cameras or mobile phones, and it becomes easier to upload, citizen contributions are being welcomed at more and more news outlets, particularly as financial difficulties are cau. So many videos are uploaded to YouTube each minute, however, that it is hard to find news-worthy content and very difficult to ascertain its reliability.

A/B testing is a standard of user research that randomly presents one half of your audience with one version of content and the other half with a different version to compare the performance results. The version with a higher rating, be it more clicks or views or qualitative performance, then gets chosen as the only version presented.

On Friday, the UK's Media Standards Trust called on news organisations to adopt consistent microformats for online content, as the Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust launch a new proposed format via Value Added News.

The new microformat "effectively encapsulates content and metadata so that critical information about every news story is available," according to a press release. This includes what the story is about, where it was written, by whom, where it was published, the news principles it adheres to and any usage rights associated with it. It hopes to become a standard to be used by anyone producing news content, and the Media Standards Trust has launched the Value Added News site to "coordinate discussion of the proposed news formats, host technical specifications, explain the benefits and detail how other organizations can integrate news formats into their own content."

After testing the practice with a small percentage of users, Google News has started recognizing Wikipedia articles as news sources in its round-up of the web's top stories. For many Internet users, the popular online encyclopedia represents a handy source to quickly learn about a subject that's in the news.

The number of Wikipedia links on the Google News landing page is not overwhelming; a recent visit revealed just three of the dozens of links on the site belonged to the online encyclopedia.

Google is upping the browser war against Microsoft in considering pre-installing its Chrome browser on personal computers.

Chrome, launched in September, is direct competition for Microsoft's Internet Explorer in a "battle to dominate how users access and interact with the web," The Times is reporting.

Yahoo! unveiled Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) on Wednesday, a rebranding of its IndexTools product.

Yahoo! report that the product will, "provides powerful data and insights reporting that help website owners evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs. They'll get custom real-time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to amp up their visitor satisfaction."

According to CNet News, it is a free service and has one up on Google Analytics in that the information is updated within a few minutes of user activity whereas Google stats can take about 24 hours.

Yahoo said that the updated version of the service is already available to advertisers and third-party application developers, with Yahoo Small Business. Currently, if you try to sign-up there is a waiting list where you can subscribe to updates.

Source: Yahoo! and CNet News

Google News is testing a new design; the search engine is experimenting with a visually-rich design that shows images, videos, quotes, and popular stories.

There new design also contains a "featured photo" section that utilises images from AFP, The Associated Press, and Reuters. This is the first time Google News has promoted stories just because it has the permission to show associated images. The new interface personalises all the content.



In June, Google News blog announced: "Over the course of the next few weeks, you may notice a few changes to Google News... or maybe not. You see, we'll be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback, as well as the evolving state of online journalism."

Source: Cyberjournalist.net and Google

Here's a quick sum-up of some of the big media stories outside of the newspaper industry, which you can also read more about on our sister site, the SFN Blog:

- Photo-sharing site Flickr, owned by Yahoo!, announced the launch of a video-sharing function on its site. Videos will be limites to 90 seconds and 150Mb in size though. "While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse," wrote community manager Heather Champ. In broadening its span to video, Flickr will attempt to distinguish itself from market leader YouTube, by sticking to "what quickly bubbled up was the idea of 'long photos', of capturing slices of life to share," wrote Champ. The video service will only be available to "pro" users who pay $24.95 a year.

- In a move interpreted as a retaliation to Microsoft's hostile takeover offer, Yahoo! announced it will be testing an advertising sales deal with Google that will last for up to two weeks. Yahoo! will run Google's AdSense service along its own search results. Microsoft's reaction was straightforward: "Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidated over 90% of the search advertising market in Google's hands; this would make the market far less competitive," said Brad Smith, Microsoft's lawyer.

Source: SFN Blog - Brand Republic - Guardian through European Journalism Centre

Search giant Google, after Wikipedia’s success, is about to launch its own online encyclopaedia, “Knol”.

Director at Google’s offices in New York, Tom Phillips, joined a wide array of speakers at the 77th annual International Newspaper Marketing Association’s (INMA) World Congress taking place in Paris, April 25 to 27, to talk about one of the projects he heads, Google Print Ads.

Keeping readers on their sites is perhaps the biggest problem for individual newspapers on the Web. If readers have the print product in hand, it is likely it will be the only publication they will read. But online, choice is abundant and interests are fleeting.

After Google announced its bid to provide free WiFi in San Francisco last Friday (see, for example, this article), there has been some discussion about what that means to telecom firms and internet service providers. That Google's move could actually be a threat to local newspapers is an interesting perspective, brought in by Preston Gralla, former editor-in-chief of a local newspaper chain, on networkingpipeline. He writes, "the key to local newspapers' survival is their ability to get money from small local advertisers... Local classified ads are a sizable source of revenue as well ... Papers get those ads because the papers cover local news, and so attract local readers. Advertisers don't have to spend money trying to reach people who can't buy their goods. But Google's WiFi service can make that kind of local targeting look crude. It will be able to deliver ads literally on a block-by-block basis... It could deliver localized classified ads, as well, which are the financial mainstay of many local papers."

After Google announced its bid to provide free WiFi in San Francisco last Friday (see, for example, this article), there has been some discussion about what that means to telecom firms and internet service providers. That Google's move could actually be a threat to local newspapers is an interesting perspective, brought in by Preston Gralla, former editor-in-chief of a local newspaper chain, on networkingpipeline. He writes, "the key to local newspapers' survival is their ability to get money from small local advertisers... Local classified ads are a sizable source of revenue as well ... Papers get those ads because the papers cover local news, and so attract local readers. Advertisers don't have to spend money trying to reach people who can't buy their goods. But Google's WiFi service can make that kind of local targeting look crude. It will be able to deliver ads literally on a block-by-block basis... It could deliver localized classified ads, as well, which are the financial mainstay of many local papers."

After Google announced its bid to provide free WiFi in San Francisco last Friday (see, for example, this article), there has been some discussion about what that means to telecom firms and internet service providers. That Google's move could actually be a threat to local newspapers is an interesting perspective, brought in by Preston Gralla, former editor-in-chief of a local newspaper chain, on networkingpipeline. He writes, "the key to local newspapers' survival is their ability to get money from small local advertisers... Local classified ads are a sizable source of revenue as well ... Papers get those ads because the papers cover local news, and so attract local readers. Advertisers don't have to spend money trying to reach people who can't buy their goods. But Google's WiFi service can make that kind of local targeting look crude. It will be able to deliver ads literally on a block-by-block basis... It could deliver localized classified ads, as well, which are the financial mainstay of many local papers."

Google has now started to expand its advertising business to print. As the New York Times reports, Google, in what resembles "ad brokering", started buying ad space in technology magazines and resells the space in smaller parts to advertisers of its online system. Jason Young, president of Internet and consumer technology publications for Ziff-Davis, the publisher of PC Magazine, said in the New York Times: "We're thrilled for PC Magazine in print to be presented to Google's fantastic base of hundreds of thousands of smaller advertisers."

Google is offering the print ads to its advertisers for a fixed fee, but "some in the industry predict that it may ultimately experiment with auctioning off space and perhaps set rates based on the number of responses to an ad, as measured by calls to a certain phone number or visits to a Web site", writes New York Times. News.com states: "The experiment ... is Google's latest foray into display advertising and another big step toward becoming a one-stop shop for ad sales, whether online or offline. The trial also marks the first time the company has ventured offline with any of its products, according to industry watchers."

Up to now Google's experiment is restricted to technology magazines, including Maximum PC and PC Magazine. But if Google continues to expand in print, it could mean a major change to newspapers as well, for instance through Google Alerts and Google News. At the moment Google doesn't sell advertising when it links with a newspaper article. But if Google starts to build partnerships with newspaper companies, it could be the beginning of a new stage in relationships.

Source: New York Times, News.com

Blogs are becoming more important. There are ever more blogs, ever more postings and most notably ever more visitors. Meanwhile blogs are gaining editorial importance. And also the advertising market is moving to blogs.

As CBS states a new report by Technorati found that a new blog is created almost every second. End of July Technorati was tracking 14.2 Million weblogs. 55 % of these blogs are active an 13% are updated at least weekly. David L. Sifry, founder and CEO of Technocrati, says on CBS: "If the numbers continue going the way that they are, you should expect to see close to 30 million blogs by March of next year and should be seeing 2 million posts a day." In the report on Technorati Sisry states that also the volume of postings grew steadily: "... at the end of July 2005, there were about 900,000 posts created each day. That's about 37,500 posts every hour, or 10.4 posts per second."

"Is Yahoo! a threat to the business model of traditional news organizations? Yeah!" Quoted on the Wall Street Journal, Paul Grabowicz, director of the New Media program at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism may not be exaggerating. Over the past six months, Yahoo! News has topped every online news site in unique visitor traffic. Agreements with approximately 100 news organizations and searches through 7,000 other online news sites, Yahoo! News appeals to the news hound who prefers to read news from various sources, which, from the latest stats, appears to be the majority. This week's testing of new features that permits the reader to jump through headlines from various sources without having to wait for source pages to reload and accompanies headlines with content from blogs and other sites, is bound to increase Yahoo's popularity. Yahoo boasts another advantage over traditional news sites in that most of their readers come from one of its other various sites including email and videogames. The popular news aggregator uses a "hybrid" editing strategy, using computers to scan the multitude of sources and human editors to decide what is page-worthy, different from Google who's news site uses only computers and established titles which use only human editors. While these news organizations are still feeling out their online strategies, they may want to take some notes from Yahoo. In fact, some papers are already attempting the mixed news source option. The UK's Guardian and the Los Angeles Times adopted an RSS strategy in January (see former postings here and here) that readers download from their Websites, but that also provides feeds from other news organizations. The verdict is still out as to if this strategy is helping or hurting brand recognition.

"Is Yahoo! a threat to the business model of traditional news organizations? Yeah!" Quoted on the Wall Street Journal, Paul Grabowicz, director of the New Media program at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism may not be exaggerating. Over the past six months, Yahoo! News has topped every online news site in unique visitor traffic. Agreements with approximately 100 news organizations and searches through 7,000 other online news sites, Yahoo! News appeals to the news hound who prefers to read news from various sources, which, from the latest stats, appears to be the majority. This week's testing of new features that permits the reader to jump through headlines from various sources without having to wait for source pages to reload and accompanies headlines with content from blogs and other sites, is bound to increase Yahoo's popularity. Yahoo boasts another advantage over traditional news sites in that most of their readers come from one of its other various sites including email and videogames. The popular news aggregator uses a "hybrid" editing strategy, using computers to scan the multitude of sources and human editors to decide what is page-worthy, different from Google who's news site uses only computers and established titles which use only human editors. While these news organizations are still feeling out their online strategies, they may want to take some notes from Yahoo. In fact, some papers are already attempting the mixed news source option. The UK's Guardian and the Los Angeles Times adopted an RSS strategy in January (see former postings here and here) that readers download from their Websites, but that also provides feeds from other news organizations. The verdict is still out as to if this strategy is helping or hurting brand recognition.

Thanks to Rafat Ali to report about Topix.net, a new and useful - but almost 100% American - news search engine. There are different categories like Journalism, Media or Blogs and the engine is now crawling 6,000 sources. And the same day, Rafat reports on Google's new services providing search results based on personal interests like "Personalized Web Search" and "Personal Web Alerts". Try both new services and compare them! I'll do it for sure.

Thanks to Rafat Ali to report about Topix.net, a new and useful - but almost 100% American - news search engine. There are different categories like Journalism, Media or Blogs and the engine is now crawling 6,000 sources. And the same day, Rafat reports on Google's new services providing search results based on personal interests like "Personalized Web Search" and "Personal Web Alerts". Try both new services and compare them! I'll do it for sure.