Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context - that's what we're looking for in the journalism we read, isn't it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use.

NewsTrust is a media technology organization funded by the Omidyar Network and MacAurthur Foundation. Yesterday it launched a personalized news filtering tool called MyNews. The tool helps users review the quality of journalism from all over the web and discover high-quality content they and their friends might enjoy. A light-weight, crowd-sourced, personalized recommendation engine that adds value on top of existing content? Sounds like our kind of app!

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When reading content from around the web through NewsTrust, the user is presented with a well-designed interface through which to review the quality of journalism in question. Users are prompted to evaluate stories based on things like how well they were sourced, whether both sides of a controversy were explained and how enterprising the story was. Short and long reviews are supported and it's easy to review a story in less than 30 seconds if you feel so inclined.

The ability to post links to Twitter and Facebook with a single click means that users who already share articles around social networks have an opportunity to pause briefly and add another layer of value by using NewsTrust.

The new MyNews product released yesterday leverages that network of reviewers to draw in a stream of high-quality links from around the web, on particular topics. In addition to NewsTrust reviewers, the service also delivers stories discovered and vetted algorithmically and it pulls links shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter into the NewsTrust ecosystem. It's one thing to get a vote of apparent approval from friends sharing links on social networks, it's another to peruse those links through a lens of community grading for journalistic quality.

The end result is a personalized news reader populated with generally high-quality topical stories that have been reviewed by other readers. It's a useful product and one that would work well as a mobile app, where browsing through lots of content of variable quality is less appealing.

NewsTrust and MyNews aren't for everyone, though. Only so many people will be interested in a news consumption interface so closely wedded to review activities. Many people will, no doubt, bristle at the prospect (or reality) of amateurs reviewing the quality of professional journalistic product. Some will find the site too left-leaning for their tastes. (Though it tries hard not to be.)

Many people will enjoy MyNews, though, and we suspect everyone who follows social software in general will find this project particularly interesting. Projects like this may or may not be able to change the way news producers operate, but the news consumers who use it will likely find MyNews a helpful way to enrich their time on an otherwise all-too often low-quality web of news content.

• John Gholson's pick for this past week's SFS Movie Club was the Michael Crichton directed Runaway. If you haven't seen this surprisingly sturdy, though surely dated, flick that pits Tom Selleck against robots, check it out (it's on Netflix Watch Instantly) and then join the Movie Club discussion.
• Jacob Hall takes a look at the up and downs of casting Ron Perlman as Conan's father in Marcus Nispel's fantasy reboot of Conan the Barbarian.
• Also on the casting front, Jacob runs down some new members to the Green Lantern cast as well as the possibility that Robert Down Jr. may star in Alfonso Cuaron's next film, Gravity.
• These will all make their way to Cinematical in a more elaborate post in the coming days, but in the mean time, here's what SFS has been covering at SXSW so far: Monsters, Hubble 3D.
• Gholson takes a look at the original art work for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Spacehunter in 3-D in his new Sci-Fi Movie Poster of the Day spotlight posts.

Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy

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Grant Gross / PC World:
FTC Member Rips Into Google's Privacy Efforts  —  Several major U.S. Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, need to “step up” and better protect consumer privacy or face tougher penalties from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, a commissioner said Wednesday.

From the time we wake up in the morning to the moment we call it a day, and every moment in between (think bedroom, bathroom and dinner table), we’re checking in on our favorite social media sites.

This conclusion comes from data gathered by an independent study (commissioned by Retrevo), which surveyed 1,000 online individuals.

Per the report, our Facebook and Twitter activities continue even after we’ve hit the hay, with 48% of respondents checking in on activity when they wake up in the middle of the night or as soon as they wake up in the morning. Unsurprisingly, these night owl social media behaviors skew heavily toward those under the age of 25.

iPhone users are the most social of the respondent pool and were significantly more likely to check or update Twitter or Facebook from bed — many before turning on the TV in the morning. Several also use these sites to consume their morning news. The iPhone’s app and web experience is clearly making it even easier for the young socialites to maintain their Internet presence regardless of their physical station in life.

The study also found that 56% of social media users check Facebook once a day, 32% don’t mind being interrupted by an electronic message while eating and 24% of respondents under the age of the 25 have no problem with digital communication while on the pot.

A few other interesting data points from the study include:

- 12% of respondents check/use Facebook every couple of hours

- 62% of individuals over the age of 25 see electronic communications during a meeting, meal, sex or bathroom act as unwanted interruptions

- 23% of iPhone owners primarily get their morning news from Twitter and Facebook

While we can’t verify that the data is representative of the entire population, most of these stats — which might be surprising on first look — should be expected. Now that smartphones with apps are ubiquitous, it’s quite logical that these devices would accompany their owners even in the most private or intimate of scenarios.

[img credit: Markus Bollingmo]

Tags: facebook, social media, stats, twitter

Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme, citing examples from campaigns run on Funny or Die and AdMob, told an audience of marketers at OMMA Global in San Francisco today, “If you can harness social media marketing, you don’t have to pay for advertising any more.”

Kvamme, whose experience in advertising dates back to the 1980s, when he led advertising agency CKS Group, justified his argument using Neil Borden’s “Marketing Mix” theory. He said Borden’s elements of promotion — advertising, direct marketing, PR, point of sale and word of mouth — are still valid for marketers today, just in different ways.

The biggest difference can be found in the word of mouth category, said Kvamme, who subsequently called it a tremendous — and cheap — opportunity. “If you take what’s going on on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Digg, the masses are starting to make their own media, and it’s basically free,” he noted. “So if you can figure out how to work in this world, you can get your message out very quickly.”

Funny or Die’s (one of Kvamme’s Sequoia investments) recent Presidential Reunion, which brought together actors who’d portrayed U.S. presidents throughout the years on “Saturday Night Live” at a cost of $20,000 (primarily flying all the participants in), according to Kvamme, yielded some 3 million views.

Presidential Reunion was a bit of a passion project for Funny or Die co-founder Will Ferrell, but Kvamme also pointed to last summer’s relatively unsuccessful movie “The Goods” starring Jeremy Piven (and produced by Funny or Die co-founder Adam McKay), the expected box office returns for which were lifted 15 percent through a Funny or Die campaign including prizes for retweets on Twitter (which led to the movie becoming a Twitter trending topic), featuring on the front page of Funny or Die and its Facebook fan page, two appearances on the front-page of Digg for custom Funny or Die content, live-tweeting from the premiere and a live conversation with McKay on Ustream. It generated “several million dollars in sales for something [the studio] probably didn’t pay Funny or Die enough for,” said Kvamme.

But the next big opportunity is in mobile, said Kvamme, using AdMob to illustrate (again, another Sequoia company, but at least one that’s had a successful exit, with Google beating out Apple to buy it for $750 million). With more than twice the global penetration of the Internet, mobile — especially smartphones — represent an opportunity to harken back to that “Marketing Mix” theory, because they can encapsulate all the elements of promotion from one single screen that’s attached to its owner at all times. An AdMob campaign for the movie “Wolfman” had ads on mobile media sites ad within applications that users could click on in order to get more information, share it with their friends, buy tickets directly and set up a mobile calendar alert.

Sure, Kvamme is pitching his own investments here, but to his credit he said that one of his favorite and most-visited sites is search.twitter.com, for keeping up with what people are talking about online. He also talked about Facebook’s opportunity to become the new mass media — with half its 400 million users logging in every day, “that’s almost like what broadcast television was 20 or 30 years ago” — and to dominate and grow the market if it ever does launch its own payment platform inside its trusted environment, just as PayPal revolutionized eBay.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Why 2010 Still Won’t Be the Year of Mobile Advertising

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) has hinted for several months that it would be making more acquisitions and it’s finally made one—buying up social sports startup Citizen Sports, which it says will compliment Yahoo Sports, the top sports site in the U.S.

And, indeed, the move immediately gives Yahoo clout in the social networking and mobile spaces, where it is weak. Citizen Sports owns a series of popular sports apps on the iPhone and on social networking sites, including what it says is the most popular fantasy football app on Facebook. While Yahoo has long been the top player in the online fantasy sports market, only last September did it release a fantasy football iPhone app and, as far as I can tell, it does not have any sports apps on Facebook.

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) has hinted for several months that it would be making more acquisitions and it’s finallly made one—buying up social sports startup Citizen Sports, which it says will compliment Yahoo Sports, the top sports site in the U.S.

And, indeed, the move immediately gives Yahoo clout in the social networking and mobile spaces, where it is weak. Citizen Sports owns a series of popular sports apps on the iPhone and on social networking sites, including what it says is the most popular fantasy football app on Facebook. While Yahoo has long been the top player in the online fantasy sports market, only last September did it release a fantasy football iPhone app and, as far as I can tell, it does not have any sports apps on Facebook.

More to come.

Back in early February, while aboard a red-eye to New York, Dave McClure wrote a long, humorous, rambling, profanity-laden rant of a blog post that focused on startup business models. While it makes for an entertaining read, McClure's post is also very insightful and makes a solid case for why startups should shift from advertising models and instead build their new businesses on subscriptions and micropayments. Earlier this month I had the chance to visit the headquarters of ZooLoo, a startup that witnessed this very shift first-hand with their own business model.

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During my visit I spoke with Aaron Baer, Director of Communications at the Scottsdale-based ZooLoo, a site that provides individuals with the ability to share and manage content on their own domain. Like many startups in the past decade, ZooLoo opened for business under an advertising business model, but eventually caught on to the changing trend McClure evangelized on his blog.

"[ZooLoo's original model] was an advertising platform, we had a shopping page, we would do affiliate marketing, you could buy and order prints off of our website - we had a very broad business model," says Baer. "We discovered that didn't work."

They also realized that it wasn't the model their customers wanted. Under the old model, users were presented with two options: a free basic service, and a premium service with more features in an "all or nothing," fashion. Customers complained that they wanted to upgrade and purchase premium services, but that they weren't willing to pony up the full price for a bunch of other features they didn't want.

In January, ZooLoo fundamentally changed their business model by creating a storefront through which customers could pick and choose features on a micropayment level. Now if a user wants to purchase their own domain name, but doesn't want to pay for ZooLoo's SEO services, they can do that instead of being forced into picking from a tiered package.

While customer feedback was a substantial motivator for the change, Baer says that potential investors also played a role in the addition of the storefront. "The investors said, 'You have a solid product, but I want to see you find a better way to package it, and a better way to sell it'," he says.

And the change worked. Since adding their micropayment storefront, ZooLoo has seen an increase in purchases of their premium services. The company is making more money marketing virtual goods in a micropayment system than they were when they bundled everything together at a higher price and relied on advertising and affiliate marketing. This is the exact paradigm shift in online marketing that Dave McClure preaches in his post mentioned earlier.

"Gradually we are discovering that the default revenue model on the internet should probably be the simplest one," writes McClure. "That is: basic transactions for physical or digital goods, and recurring transactions (aka subscriptions) for repeat usage."

Without repeat usage, McClure says that the biggest obstacle in the way of getting users on board with micropayments is that they forget their password. Honestly, if I was asked to login to my Amazon or PayPal accounts right now, I would be playing a guessing game with a handful of passwords because I don't use those services too often. But for iTunes, Google and Facebook - the services McClure says will be the leaders in eCommerce login in five years - I use those every day, and surely remember my password.

ZooLoo realizes this too, which is why they foster repeat usage by connecting their services with Twitter, Facebook, and other popular online social networks. Users can also log into ZooLoo using Facebook Connect, which eliminates the problem of remembering a less frequently used password. ZooLoo and Baer are fully on board with this emerging model, and suggest others hop on as well.

"There is this social media bubble forming where all these services are saying, 'We're free, come use us!', but eventually those services need to make money," says Baer. "We think micropayments are the next big thing."

Photo by Flickr user r-z.

Yahoo Inc. has announced at the 201 IMG World Congress of Sports that it will be acquiring Citizen Sports, a social and mobile application development firm focused on sports. Terms of the deal were not announced.

The acquisition, according to Yahoo, helps strengthen its “social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the entire Web.” Our guess is that Citizen Sports will provide Yahoo more distribution channels to promote its content and expand its reach, something we recently discussed at length.

Citizen Sports will be deeply integrated with the Yahoo Sports property, one of the most popular in terms of athletics. Citizen Sports provides Facebook, iPhone, and other apps for filling out brackets, checking scores, and participating in league partnerships. Having talented developers create the apps that will spread Yahoo Sports across the web seems like a sensible move.

When we learn more details, we will bring them to you.

Tags: citizen sports, Yahoo, Yahoo Citizen Sports

I don’t trust Yelp any more. And that’s not a conscious decision. I’ve largely ignored the well-publicized allegations of how the ad side manipulated ratings and reviews to drive sales, instead continuing to turn to the site for recommendations on everything from restaurants to plumbers to airport parking. But they’ve nonetheless seeped into my subconscious and tarred my view of the service. Indeed, Yelp is learning that trust is a hard thing to win, but amazingly easy to lose. And that’s why it needs to be protected with the corporate equivalent of the Praetorian Guard.

Here’s what happened: The other day I was looking for a decent long-term lot at San Jose Airport; Yelp’s recommendation page was near the top of Google, so I clicked over to check it out. As usual, I scanned the top 3-4 results, then read through the reviews of the most likely suspects. Quick Park SJC, ranked No. 1, seemed to have everything I needed -– a rating of over 3, pretty decent reviews and a nearby location.

But then I started looking more closely at those reviews -– and noticed an interesting pattern: There were a few from the last month or so, then nothing for nearly a year. And the last of that group was complaining about how the lot had recently raised prices and had a bit of a surly shuttle driver problem.

So why the gap? I didn’t know, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure this was such a great place to park. So I clicked over to TripAdvisor to look for airport parking information there. Since I couldn’t find any — and I was admittedly in a hurry — I ended up selecting Quik Park SJC after all. But I was far less sanguine about my choice. Yelp, alas, was no longer in my inner circle of trust.

Which leads me to three key trust rules:

Got a Problem? Deal With It Quickly: I learned that the hard way during my early years running the test lab at PC Week in the 90s. We had a columnist, Will Zachman, who was an ardent proponent of an early Windows competitor from IBM called OS/2. Microsoft, in those days, advertised incessantly in tech magazines, and Zachman felt that his editor was shaping his OS/2 diatribes to please Microsoft. So he publicly declared independence from the magazine on July 4th, accusing members of the business side of leaping over the “wall” and smacking down the EIC until he censored Zachman’s opinions to appease their biggest advertiser. Zachman had been kvetching about his supposed “censoring” for some time leading up to his Independence Day action, but the editorial team just ignored him — until it was too late.

Notably, I never saw any evidence supporting his accusations. Which leads me to my second tip:

Manage Not Just the Facts, But the Perception: Lack of evidence aside, just the merest whiff of perceived bias was enough to tar us with a wide brush. It took us a long time to cast off that perception. And that’s why, about a year later, I immediately fired a junior lab staffer who falsified test results, and not for money or influence, but because he was being run ragged by an overbearing manager. He was young. Impressionable. He probably only deserved a warning. But he violated a trust, one that, had it become public, would have been harmed us even more. I had to take quick action to preserve the trust that our readers had in our reviews.

Trust has to be carefully nurtured and ruthlessly defended. It’s why TechCrunch fired the intern who asked for a MacBook in exchange for covering a new company. It’s why IDG moved quickly to cut off any association with Randall Kennedy and why Facebook has such a big problem on its hands with the hacking allegations against CEO and Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. It’s because:

If You Trade in Trust, Everything You Do or Say Is Relevant: At our live Diggnation show last weekend at SXSW in Austin, the wacky folks at URDB.Com convinced the crowd of 3,000-plus people to perpetrate a huge hoax — that Conan O’Brien was onstage and coming over to Revision3. Hundreds of partygoers tweeted out the “news,” and it quickly became the biggest Twitter hoax ever.

It was all fun and games, up to a point. Some pretty influential and trusted people tweeted and retweeted the hoax to their followers. Unfortunately, more than a few journalists saw tweets from people they had come to trust and were subsequently convinced that they had to be true. And once they discovered they’d been punk’d, they lashed out. In the end, more than one social media “expert” damaged their credibility by engaging in a little bit of pranksterism.

In Yelp’s case, that delicate tissue of trust has already been perforated — perhaps fatally. For even those of us that have willfully ignored the allegations against the site are ready to go elsewhere.

Jim Louderback is CEO of Revision3. He was previously vice president of Ziff Davis Media and Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine and PCMag.com.

Today we improved journal replaying from 1050s for my test of 25249 resources to 58s.

Journal replaying happens when your cache database gets corrupted. Also when you restore a backup: restore uses the same code the journal replaying uses, backup just makes a copy of your journal.

During the performance improvements we of course found other areas related to data entry. It looks like we’re entering a period of focus on performance, as we have a few interesting ideas for next week already. The ideas for next week will focus on performance of some SPARQL functions like regex.

Meanwhile are Michele Tameni and Roberto Guido working on a RSS miner for Tracker and has Adrien Bustany been working on other web miners like for Flickr, GData, Twitter and Facebook.

I think the first pieces of the RSS- and the other web miners will start becoming available in this week’s unstable 0.7 release. Martyn is still reviewing the branches of the guys, but we’re very lucky with such good software developers as contributors. Very nice work Michele, Roberto and Adrien!

Yahoo has just confirmed that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Citizen Sports.

Press release below:

SUNNYVALE, Calif, March 17, 2010 — As part of its ongoing commitment to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Citizen Sports (www.citizensports.com), a company that brings the world of sports to fans’ favorite social networking sites and mobile devices through innovative applications. This acquisition will strengthen Yahoo!’s social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the entire Web, and offering a highly customizable social experience.

“Yahoo! is in a unique position to combine our deep expertise in content and aggregation technology to offer a highly personalized social experience,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!. “Sports has been among the earliest online categories to experience rapid social proliferation, and the combination of Citizen Sports leading products with our world-class sports experience on Yahoo! Sports is a win-win for sports fans globally.”

Millions of people across the globe use Citizen Sports’ array of social and mobile products to play fantasy sports, fill out brackets, check live scores and read up-to-the minute news on sports including football, hockey, soccer, baseball, racing, rugby, hockey and cricket.  Yahoo! Sports’ content will be integrated into these products, creating a seamless experience for sports fans wherever they are.  On Yahoo! Sports, users will be able to broadcast their allegiances, create or join a conversation with friends and fans and cheer for their teams through Citizen Sports’ applications. This integration will further transform Yahoo! into a more personally relevant experience, drive deeper user engagement and create opportunities for advertisers to interact with audiences in new environments.

As the #1 destination for online Sports with more than 39 million monthly unique users in the U.S.*, Yahoo! Sports provides people with the most timely, relevant and comprehensive sports news, information and programming.  Citizen Sports’ network of popular applications for Facebook, MySpace, hi5, iPhone and Android span professional, college and high school sports.

“Citizen Sports was founded with the intent to enable fans to access news, scores and fantasy games on the platform of their choice,” said Mike Kerns, founder and CEO of Citizen Sports. “We look forward to becoming a part of Yahoo! and bringing our social experiences to their 600 million users around the globe.”

Citizen Sports was founded by Mike Kerns and Jeff Ma in 2004.  Since then the company has brought together millions of sports fans from around the world to enjoy sports and connect with their friends. Citizen Sports is based in San Francisco.

Yahoo! expects to complete this acquisition in the second quarter of 2010. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Battre Google sur n'importe quoi est une bonne nouvelle pour n'importe quelle firme, mais détrôner Google en tant que site le plus visité aux US est certainement une victoire qu'on peut crier sur tous les toits. Il s'agit de Facebook. D'après le tracker de l'industrie, Hitwise, Facebook a augmenté de 185 pour cent ses visites, alors que Google n'a eu qu'une augmentation 9%. Ceci dit, le tracker n'inclut pas des sites appartenant à Google, tels que Gmail, YouTube et Google Maps. On dirait que Google doit lutter contre une concurrence féroce, telle que Facebook, Apple, Twitter et Microsoft, tous cherchant à le détrôner.

Permalink: Facebook bat Google pour la première fois d'Ubergizmo FR. Aussi en Anglais

Second Porch, which lets users find and list available vacation homes via a Facebook app, has raised $1 million in a first round of funding. The company’s pitch: Because all of its vacation home listings are on Facebook, users are able to rent or trade with people they “know and trust” (ie their friends or friends of friends). Basic listings are free, while premium listings cost $99 a year. The biggest competitor in the online vacation home market is HomeAway, which has raised more than $410 million in funding, and has been buying up a string of smaller vacation rental sites.

Second Porch, which lets users find and list available vacation homes via a Facebook app, has raised $1 million in a first round of funding. The company’s pitch: Because all of its vacation home listings are on Facebook, users are able to rent or trade with people they “know and trust” (ie their friends or friends of friends). Basic listings are free, while premium listings cost $99 a year. The biggest competitor in the online vacation home market is HomeAway, which has raised more than $410 million in funding, and has been buying up a string of smaller vacation rental sites.

Facebook is cash-flow positive, could hit $2 billion revenues in 2010, has patient investors with deep pockets, and it's just now getting around to opening a payments business that could exceed its already huge advertising revenues.

On top of all that, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has no desire to answer to public investors.

Sorry world, this puppy ain't going public for quite some time.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• What Happened To The Startup IPO?
• 15 Hot Tech Companies Ready For An IPO
• Netflix-For-Videogames Gamefly Files For $50 Million IPO

Dans un communiqué publié aujourd'hui, l'Association des Services Internet Communautaires (ASIC) a annoncé l'arrivée d'un nouveau membre dans ses rangs : Facebook. Le célèbre réseau social rejoint ainsi d'autres poids lourds du web francophone comme AOL, Dailymotion, eBay, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Over-Blog, Skyrock ou encore Yahoo. Avec près de 15 millions de Français inscrits sur Facebook, ce n'était donc qu'une question de temps avant que le service de Mark Zuckerberg rejoigne l'ASIC.

MocoSpace, a social network that is primarily accessed on the phone, has reached 11 million users.

While that may pale in comparison to the 100 million people using Facebook on cellphones, it easily surpasses the 560,000 using Foursquare. However, it is more in line with the 500,000 users that MocoSpace says are logging in on a daily basis to the network. MocoSpace VP of Business Development & Marketing Casey Jones said: “Scale is a critical piece to being able to deliver on the promise of our targeting capabilities. We are very fortunate to have a large, growing, and loyal audience.”

MocoSpace, a social network that is primarily accessed on the phone, has reached 11 million users.

While that may pale in comparison to the 100 million people using Facebook on cellphones, it easily surpasses the 560,000 using Foursquare. However, it is more in line with the 500,000 users that MocoSpace says are logging in on a daily basis to the network. MocoSpace VP of Business Development & Marketing Casey Jones said: “Scale is a critical piece to being able to deliver on the promise of our targeting capabilities. We are very fortunate to have a large, growing, and loyal audience.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.