Internet Broadcasting, a local media network for broadcast publishers, announced today the official launch of Slantly, an online opinion tool. Slantly is intended for web publishers to integrate into their site to create discussions and spark debate. Several major web publishers have already partnered with Slantly to use the tool, including Meredith Publishing and NYCtv.

Slantly offers several key features to online publishers. With their customizable polls, publishers are able to create polls on news and issues to engage their readers. Through these polls, users can vote and add comments to a forum attached to each poll, after they vote. These polls and discussions, while hosted on each publisher’s site, are all available on the Slantly site. A very useful feature to publishers is the ability to track the demographics of your voters and commenters. All of this is available on the Publisher Dashboard, where you can create, moderate, and manage your discussions, track activity, and customize the look and functionality of your discussions to match your site. Slantly also offers an open API, enabling publishers to customize the tool to suit their needs. I’ve included a widget from Slantly that rotates through several popular opinions.

There are several competing online opinion sites, in the form of polling sites like Polldaddy, Survey Monkey, dPolls, SodaHead (recently received new funding, covered here), and Vizu. Slantly does offer a similar service, but a bit differently. After playing around with the site a bit, they focus more on the opinions, not the polls. Given the nature of the associated sites (local news outlets), the audience is a bit older, and presumably a bit more opinionated and educated. This allows for more consistent users, as opposed to SodaHead, for example, which is marketed mainly for MySpace pages.

Internet Broadcasting, a company established in 1996, has been leading the market in local media online solutions. Originally, a web development company for major TV stations, IB saw the potential in the local media market. They have developed a system to optimize the way TV stations converge with the web to enable viewers to access and interact with the local news. Their network currently reaches 16 million unique visitors per month nationwide. Some of their clients include Hearst-Argyle Television Inc., Mcgraw-Hill Broadcasting, NBC, Meredith Broadcasting Group, Cox Television, and CNN.

IB is hoping that Slantly will bring their network a better user experience by enabling users to interact with their local news station and media outlets. Their intention by offering Slantly to any web publisher, in addition to their partners, is to engage readers in active discussion in order to provide meaningful interaction on their sites.

For most people on the Web, if Google or Yahoo cannot find something, it doesn’t exist. That has been one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a Website or application that displays itself as a Flash (SWF) file. Search engines could see the file, but they could not see what was in it. Until now.

Adobe has come up with a way for the search engines to read SWF files and index all of the information they contain. That means any text or links in a Flash application can now be indexed. This is a huge step forward for Adobe and anyone who develops in Flash/Flex. Michele Turner, Adobe’s VP of marketing for its platform business, explains:

We are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo that enables them to crawl and index SWF files. They are now searchable. This will open up millions of Flash files to search.

Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them.

Turner acknowledges that this invisibility so far “has been a big problem for those developing rich applications.” After all, it doesn’t matter how pretty your Website is if nobody can find it. Flash applications and Websites (many ironically created by ad agencies) have not been able to take advantage of any of the search-engine juice that so many online ad campaigns depend upon. This should be seen as part of Adobe’s larger efforts to remove any remaining restrictions associated with Flash (in April, for instance, it opened up the Flash runtime as part of its the Open Screen Project).

Google is already rolling out the SWF-indexing technology, while Yahoo still “has some work to do,” says Turner. Even so, this won’t solve all the problems with Flash content showing up on search engines.

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

Update: More info from Adobe here and Google here.

Slide and Vh1 excel at making products geared towards America’s lowest common denominator. The first makes SuperPoke, a popular social network app that lets you send text messages saying you’ve done “stuff” to your friends. The latter produces reality show classics like “Flavor of Love”, “Rock of Love”, and “I Love New York”. And next week, their powers will combine to bring you VH1’s SuperPoke!Fest: a four day reality show marathon to promote a new show called “I Love Money” that will give users a chance to see their very own SuperPokes live, onscreen!

Beginning July 2, Facebook and MySpace users will be given a choice of 30 Vh1-branded SuperPoke actions that will let users “get romantical with” and “slip the tongue to” their friends. Each of these special Vh1 SuperPokes will be entered into a lottery, and the luckiest 10,000 users will get to see their poke displayed for a few seconds on TV.

I’m sure this sounded like a great idea during a marketing meeting, but did anyone ever pause long enough to realize that SuperPokes can be annoying, even when you know the people involved? I don’t care if OLIVER B has slipped the tongue to some girl I’ll never meet. And why is VH1 taking up about 40% of the screen to display these things?

The event is also likely to flood Facebook and MySpace with spammy messages from Slide as users vie to get their first names displayed on television. Slide probably won’t mind so long as it can maximize the number of users it reaches, but the rest of us may have to deal with a new onslaught of SuperPokes.

According to Slide, we’ve got even more of these promotions to come – let’s hope they take a different approach:

“This partnership, the first of many to come, offers our enthusiastic users the chance to become SuperPoke! stars on the television network they already know and love. Now, SuperPoke! is not only fun and social, but it might get you on TV too.”

Slide has recently been in the news for having their popular Top Friends application disabled by Facebook. The application apparently has a security hole that allows Facebook users to view portions of any Top Friend user’s profile – something that is clearly in violation of Facebook’s privacy policy.

Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp subsidiary that controls most of its online assets, has signed a 12 year lease agreement for a new facility in Playa Vista. All FIM companies in Southern California will move to the new facility starting in June of 2009. For those wondering about FIM and MySpace’s future growth, this move should settle speculation. The site will house over 300,000 square feet of commercial space and is part of a development called Horizon at Playa Vista (a rendering of the development is above). The area is quickly becoming LA’s media hub, with EA, Rubin Postaer and others now with offices in the area.

The internal memo from Peter Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive Media, is below.

About a year ago, I communicated with you about our space and parking challenges, and our ultimate plan to find a facility that could accommodate all of our LA-area team in one location. After an extensive process, I’m thrilled to inform you that we have found the ideal location for Fox Interactive Media’s new headquarters.

The new facility is located in Playa Del Rey (Horizon at Playa Vista http://www.horizonatplayavista.com/) and houses more than 300,000 square feet of commercial space. Playa Del Rey is the first newly-built community in Los Angeles in over 50 years and has become a creative hub for technology companies, including EA, the largest video game company in the world. The site itself should be amazing – including an exclusive gym, internal and external eating facilities, volleyball courts, and lots of green space for outdoor activities. Just beyond the newly-built facility will be a host of restaurants, shopping locations and living options.

FIM has experienced phenomenal success in its three-year history, and we have plans for even greater growth and achievements in the coming fiscal year. Given our tremendous track record, it’s only fitting that we should enter into the single biggest real-estate transaction in Los Angeles in the last 25 years. When we move to our new facility between June of 2009 and January of 2010, not only will we enjoy the distinction of having one of the largest corporate headquarters in the LA area, but we will be housed in a state-of-the-art facility that reflects our corporate identity and culture.

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be providing you with more information about the site and the surrounding area. We’ll also provide a schedule for the phased move, as soon as those details have been decided.

I have appreciated your patience during the past year, as we’ve shifted groups to new locations to manage our growth and endured numerous space constraints and challenges. Soon, we will have an opportunity to collaborate more effectively, as well as to create a work environment that speaks to the creativity and innovation that has come to be synonymous with Fox Interactive Media.

I hope you are as enthusiastic as I am about this exciting milestone for our company.

Peter Levinsohn

FriendFeed, the popular social network feed aggregator, has released a new version of its site that has been optimized for the iPhone. While FriendFeed has always featured a relatively spartan design, the standard version sports small fonts that make text difficult to read on the iPhone’s screen. The new version has increased the font size, and has further tweaked link placement and picture sizes to make the site more accessible to mobile users.

The site also includes a new “Post photos from your phone” link that will let users submit photos to FriendFeed straight from their iPhone. Each user is assigned a unique email address (something like jason+nota483realone@mail2ff.com). To submit a picture, users simply send photos chosen from the iPhone’s integrated photo viewer to the assigned address. The feature works well, but you’ll need to manually enter the obfuscated email address – there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to save it to your address book.

You can read more details at the the official announcement here.

The indignity of it all. On top of everything else that Yahoo is dealing with right now (testy shareholders, departing executives, reorganized employees), it also just got dumped by Maxim.

The magazine’s site, Maxim.com, now uses Quintura to power its search instead of Yahoo. Its sister sites Blender.com and Stuffmagazine.com, will also soon be dumping Yahoo as well. All three sites are operated by Maxim Digital, which is owned by the private equity firm Quadrangle Capital Partners, where former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig happens to be an operating principal.

Quintura’s search interface creates a semantic tag cloud above the results. By clicking on different tags, users can refine their search and reorder the results.

I’m a big fan of the search tag cloud. But I’m not sure the final results are any better than Yahoo’s, and they certainly take longer to come up. The appeal to publishers like Maxim Digital, though, is that they can keep searchers on their sites longer by helping visitors find exactly what they are looking for—which in the case of Maxim readers is “hot girls” and “stupid fun.”

There has been much talk of Twitter users moving over to FriendFeed since Twitter replies were down for the majority of last week. Twitter announced that they were back on Saturday in their blog, but seeing as the outage may have inspired some users to flock to FriendFeed, I decided to take a look at the 3rd-party applications and scripts that enhance the FriendFeed functionality.

For those of you moving on to FriendFeed’s greener pastures, here are 13 essential tools for an organized, “noise”-free experience.

Gridjit is a new web application, that is currently in private alpha, that organizes your FriendFeed and Twitter timelines into columns. It spreads out your timeline by user and shows that user’s most recent posts in boxes that are distributed across three columns. You can also post to Twitter and FriendFeed from the site. It’s a very new service, so there may be bugs, but if you’d like to try it out, Gridjit has supplied us with 250 invites. Enter the code dde60be to try it out.

Alert Thingy enables you to see your FriendFeed timeline from your desktop and receive updates through notifications (covered here). You can post updates and comment from the application, as well as post to Twitter or Flickr. Alert Thingy runs on Adobe AIR.

Twhirl, a popular desktop application among Twitterers, allows for FriendFeed posting and has a timeline tracker. It also supports posting to Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku, and allows for filtering news by “rooms”. Since Twhirl is a widely-used Twitter client, this should allow for an easier FriendFeed transition. Twhirl runs on Adobe AIR so it is available for Windows and OSX.

bTT by Sobees is a desktop FriendFeed application that is part of Sobees’ desktop suite bSuite. It is currently available for download independently of bSuite. bTT allows FriendFeed updates, comments, comment replies, and likes. It is currently available for Windows.

MySocial 24×7 is a Firefox plugin that allows you to access your FriendFeed timeline from your sidebar (covered here). You can filter your timeline by friend, or by feed source (Youtube, Amazon, RSS). MySocial 24×7 has also released an Adobe AIR desktop application (covered here). The desktop application provides the same functionality of the Firefox sidebar in an attractive desktop application.

NoiseRiver is a new web application launched yesterday, from FeedEgo, that uses FriendFeed’s API to filter out some of the noise. You can login through the site, and import your keywords from del.icio.us, or input them manually, and NoiseRiver will color code your feed according to your interests or neighborhood. When you input your keywords, you can rate your them with a slider from “love” to “hate” and from then on your timeline will be color-coded, green or red, to show what you’ll probably like or not. NoiseRiver provides a full FriendFeed user experience, allowing for sharing and comments.

FriendFeedMachine is a web application that allows you to organize your friends list into close friends, and people you just want to follow. It does a lot to clean up the problem of “noise” in FriendFeed, by making sure that what your friends say doesn’t get lost in the mix with heavy posters.

Feedalizr, enables you to post text, links, images and video to FriendFeed from your desktop. You can drag and drop images into your post, or you can take a picture with your webcam. You can also post video through Feedalizr through your webcam. It hosts the video on the Feedalizr site, and includes a link in your post. You can filter your timeline, and just yesterday they added a new feature that allows you to take advantage of tabs. You can open new tabs with specific user’s timelines, separate from your main friend timeline. Feedalizr runs on Adobe AIR.

Filter by Service is a Greasemonkey script that allows you to filter your timeline by service. It displays a box with all of the service icons, and you can filter the public timelime, your friends timeline, or any user’s timeline by service. For example, if you are browsing TechCrunch’s timeline and click on the Twitter service icon, you will see TechCrunch’s tweets. A similar script, Filter Icons, places the service icons in a neat row on the top of the timeline, but it does not display all of the service icons, just the ones that are used on the page.

Remove Visited Links, a Greasemonkey script, removes links that you’ve already visited. A very useful script that really cleans up your timeline by removing content that you’ve already viewed.

Read Later, is a Greasemonkey script that adds a “Later” link under every post, and adds a “Read Later” tab to the top. This enables you to bookmark things, within FriendFeed, that you find interesting and want to save for later.

FriendFeed Comments is a WordPress plugin that can take comments and likes made on FriendFeed, and place them into the related post on WordPress. On your blog, you will see the comment along with the commenter’s FriendFeed image and link. The plugin also allows (as an option) a separate FriendFeed comment entry, so your readers can enter FriendFeed comments from your blog page.

FF To Go is a mobile site that you can access from any mobile phone’s web browser. It has a simple interface that shows the 10 most recent posts from you, your friends, or the public timeline. It adds no special features, but remains consistent with the FriendFeed user interface.

Personalized home page service Netvibes has quietly rolled out a new social feature called Buzz. The Buzz section tracks what links are getting starred the most throughout Netvibes network of home pages.

Netvibes users can star any of the links they like on their homepages, RSS readers, YouTube boxes, Digg widgets, and other widgets. And when items have been starred, they show up in users’ public activity streams, which can be displayed on home pages using an activity widget. With Buzz, these starrings are aggregated and displayed on a Digg-like front page where people can see what others are starring the most.

Buzz hasn’t been formally announced yet, but this is the first new feature we’ve seen since Tariq Krim announced he was stepping down from his CEO position.

While Netvibes lags behind giants iGoogle, My Yahoo! and MyAOL, it is the favorite among many early adopters for being fast and ad-free. With 2.4 million worldwide uniques in May, it makes sense to leverage its traffic for a link popularity tracker. There are already many social bookmarking sites, but adding a feature like this to an already-popular personalized home page service makes for easy adoption.

Buzz is currently on a separate page (and probably still in development), but we expect Netvibes to provide users with a widget that can be used to track popular items on their home pages. The name choice probably won’t go unnoticed by Yahoo either.

1938 Media, the controversial (and hilarious) video blogging site founded by Loren Feldman, has been the center of attention over the last few days. Now big partners are starting to take notice, and Feldman is inking some interesting distribution deals.

The site grew in popularity after Feldman began mixing puppet parody shows into his usual punditry, specifically targeting hyper-sensitive tech industry insiders who were sure to fire back. But those parodies have drawn significant criticism from those targeted as well as a few sympathetic bloggers. In response Feldman agreed to stop some of the harder hitting stuff aimed at social media consultant Shel Israel.

The puppet videos are definitely a hit, however, drawing sponsors and, earlier this month, a distribution deal with CNET.

The CNET deal has yet to go live, and chances are it never will. The recent controversy may have given CNET cold feet. Feldman says the deal is “on hiatus” for now.

But starting today Verizon Wireless’ 3 million mobile VCast users will have access to Feldman’s video content on their phone, as well as 1 million Fios broadband cable subscribers via video on demand. The deal, which will pay Feldman an undisclosed license fee, puts the 1938Media brand next to YouTube, Break.com and other high profile partners.

Effectively Verizon has created a 1938Media channel and has given Feldman the ability to bring in third party video content as well. To start, Mahalo Daily, Revision3, Ze Frank and Jay Grandin content will be included.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s announced earlier today a deal California had made with Tesla Motors to bring that electric car company’s manufacturing to the Bay Area.

Watch above as he is joined by Treasurer Bill Lockyer and Tesla Motors President Ze’Ev Drori to deliver a few words about the significance of keeping Tesla in California.

As Yahoo prepares for its upcoming shareholder meeting, it is fighting to convince enough investors that it did the right thing by spurning Microsoft’s various offers, especially the last one which had Microsoft just buying Yahoo’s search business, in favor of doing a search advertising deal with Google. Today, Yahoo filed the slide deck that it will present to shareholders at its annual meeting on August 1 (embedded below). There is a lot of he-said, she-said going on here, and the tone of the presentation is extremely defensive.

The slides go through familiar territory, marshaling Yahoo’s arguments for why Microsoft’s offer would have been bad for shareholders. But Yahoo does make some new points. Namely:

—Microsoft’s proposed $1 billion for Yahoo’s search business would be taxable, so shareholders would see less.
—Microsoft was only offering a 70% rev-share (TAC) for search ads on Yahoo, which is low for such a big deal.
—Cost savings would be no more than $750 million, not the $800 million to $1.5 billion that Microsoft estimates.
—Conveniently, the $750 million in cost savings that Yahoo estimates is equal to the 30% of revenues it would be sharing with Microsoft under the terms of the deal, thus offsetting any impact on operating income.
—Microsoft was only willing to guarantee its price-per-click rates for three of the 10 years of the proposed deal.

Yahoo’s strongest argument is that separating display and search advertising makes little sense strategically in a world where those two forms of advertising are colliding. (The Microsoft deal would have required that Yahoo give up its search advertising business and prevented it from re-entering that market in the future).

Towards the end of the presentation, Yahoo takes on activist investor Carl Icahn (who wants to replace the board with his own slate of directors) by pointing out that his track record with companies he has become actively involved in trying to change (Blockbuster, Motorola, Time Warner) has not been so great in recent years. It also points up the weakness in Icahn’s five-point plan to fix Yahoo.

Meanwhile, investors are not sure that Yahoo has a plan either. In a note today, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney wonders if maybe an AOL-Yahoo merger isn’t the best remaining option. Excerpt:

—Yahoo!-AOL merger possible – Four motivations: 1) $900 million of annual synergies, 2) Yahoo! gains display scale and keep search options open, 3) Time Warner gains Internet scale via a passive equity stake in larger entity, 4) Yahoo!’s clear interest in remaining independent.

The $900 million in “synergies” he sees are mostly from cost savings. But he also thinks there is value in keeping display and search advertising together. In fact, in another note today he made Google his top Internet pick, in part because of “continued marketing budget shifts to Search.”

Now, if Microsoft were to come back to the table with a serious offer for all of Yahoo, many of these objections would go away.

(Disclosure: As a former employee of Time Warner, I own shares in the company).

AstleyClarke.com, a high-end fashion jewelry site based in London, has announced a $5.5 million (£2.75m) in funding from Index Ventures in London. Despite gloomy, credit-crunch market conditions, big spenders continue to do so, and they are doing more of it online in the luxury bracket. The move reflects Index’s recent interest in the eCommerce industry with Betfair, Lovefilm and Glasses Direct. Index partner, Danny Rimer, will join Bec Clarke from AstleyClarke and Mark Esiri from Venrex on the board of directors.

Online luxury players are in a good position, as they can be more nimble and bold than established brands, which are normally afraid of making their cherished brands look cheap by selling them online. In fact, they have badly mis-read their own audience. Forrester’s Consumer Technographics data says that eight out of ten “high net worth consumers” are hammering the Net with their platinum credit cards faster than I can type this sentence.

Bec Astley Clarke, a former executive at Tesco.com, founded the website in 2006 and will use the new investment to boost marketing and build the company’s infrastructure, including hiring an operations director and an IT director.

Amazon’s customer reviews are an indispensable feature on the online mega-store, allowing shoppers to get a quick read on products without having to turn to magazine reviews or external sites like epinions. But many products, particularly electronics, have hundreds of reviews. Who has time to read through them all?

Pluribo, a new startup out of New York, has just released a Firefox extension that looks to filter through the noise of Amazon customer reviews. The plugin automatically culls through every review on a given product and generates a concise two sentence summary that highlights the most common positive and negative comments. For the time being automatic product reviews are restricted to electronics, but the site plans to implement support for other products, like books and kitchen appliances, in the near future.

Beyond providing a condensed summary, Pluribo also tries to justify its conclusions. To see the plugin’s explanation, users need only mouse-over one of the underlined terms, which will generate a list of excerpts from the relevant reviews. For example, hovering over “This product scratches easily” will show a list of quotes that contain phrases related to scratches, scuffs, and other similar terms.

So does it work? Sort of, but I wouldn’t go by Pluribo’s word alone. The system seemed to work well enough for ruling out obviously bad choices, but when it comes down to making a final selection, it’s best to turn to the reviews themselves. Pluribo doesn’t always seem to catch the most obvious problems, and the quotes it uses to justify its conclusions don’t always make sense. There’s also no way to tell which products Pluribo has indexed without opening each individual product page.

It’s also unlikely that many people will be willing to install a Firefox extension to get reviews from Amazon alone(the company says more stores are on the roadmap). Even with its problems, Pluribo is a handy tool and one that could gain some traction once it expands its supported product base.

Second-tier social network Hi5 has acquired app developer PixVerse for an undisclosed amount, just four months after launching its app platform based on the OpenSocial specification.

PixVerse offers several applications such as Pix Chat and Pix Wall, which are Flash-based and run on not only Hi5 but other social networks like Facebook as well.

The company was founded in February 2007 and is financially backed by Venrock. It was also one of the earlier adopters of Google App Engine.

We’re just minutes away from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s joint announcement with Tesla Motors, but we already hear that he will discuss how Tesla plans to build its electric sedan factory in the Bay Area, not New Mexico as previously expected. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear as though Tesla will actually unveil the sedan itself.

While New Mexico offered a $7 million incentive package to locate the factory there, California upped the ante by offering sales tax exemption for the purchase of manufacturing equipment, and by providing grants for the training of new employees.

We’ll have a recording of the webcast here once the event finishes. In the meantime, head over to the Office of the Governator to see it live.

Most people know Tesla for its fancy electric sports car (seen above), which can be glimpsed driving down highway 101 near its discreet headquarters in San Carlos. But with $146 million in the bank, Tesla plans to expand into a more mainstream market with a $60,000 sedan, slated for production in two years.

Digg has released some materials around their new Recommendation Engine, which we wrote about last night, and say that it will be released this week. Two overview videos are below, including an interview with Digg Lead Scientist Anton Kast. We’ve also included the text of a white paper on the Recommendation Engine.

The Digg Recommendation Engine
People love Digg because it’s a place to discover and share great content from around
the Web. The Digg homepage always has the most popular stories, but many Digg
users find their content in the Upcoming section, which gets over 15,000 new stories a
day. To help users filter this enormous amount of content, we have created a new
feature: The Digg Recommendation Engine.

When you Digg a story, you tell the Recommendation Engine two things: that you
recommend the story to other users and, less obviously, that the users who Dugg the
story before you are good at finding content. The Recommendation Engine keeps track
of users who Dugg particular stories before you did, and it recommends you the stories
they Dugg. The more content you Digg, the smarter the Recommendation Engine
becomes.

Finding Diggers Like You
The Digg Recommendation Engine uses your Digg history over the last thirty days to
make Recommendations. (You can see the number of items you have Dugg over the
last month on the right-hand side of the Recommended view.) Every time you Digg a
story, the Engine matches you with other Diggers who Dugg the same story, and keeps
track of all your Diggs in common with them.

When it’s time to calculate your Recommendations, the Engine draws from this pool of
matched Diggers. For each matched Digger, it computes a correlation coefficient
between you and them. It then picks a cutoff for this correlation coefficient, and the
Diggers who make the cut are called “Diggers Like You.”

It’s easy to understand how the correlations are calculated. For each user with whom
you Dugg something in common, the Engine determines how many stories the two of
you Dugg in common, and divides that number by the total number of stories you or they
Dugg. The ratio is a correlation coefficient, a number between zero and one (zero if you
and the other user never agreed; one if you always did). Such a ratio is sometimes
called a “Jaccard coefficient.”

This scheme automatically accounts for the overall level of Digging activity. If another
user Diggs a lot, they have to agree with you on many stories to become a Digger Like
You. If another user Diggs rarely, then a small amount of agreement can suffice.
2
From Diggers Like You to Recommendations
Once the Engine has determined your Diggers Like You, your Recommendations consist
of stories that your Diggers Like You have already Dugg, minus the stories you already
Dugg or Buried. There are some extra steps, like the diversity rules and the
promotability constraint described below, but this is the basic idea.

Recommendations are always displayed together with your Diggers Like You and their
compatibility percentages. These percentages are just correlation coefficients. You may
notice that you are more compatible with a user that has fewer Recommendations than a
user with less compatibility but with more Recommendations. This is because although
you have Dugg more items in common with the more compatible user, that user has not
Dugg as much.

The Recommendations you get from any particular user will come from topics (such as
Technology or World News) where you have a shared Digging history. We figure that
two users may have similar interests in a subject like ‘playable web games’, but one
person might be into politics while the other follows celebrity gossip. So we actually
compute correlations, Diggers Like You, and compute Recommendations in several
collections of topics independently.

Promotable Stories
Since the Recommendation Engine works only with Upcoming stories, all the stories you
get from the Recommendation Engine are “promotable”, meaning that they are recent
enough to be eligible for the Digg homepage but haven’t appeared there yet. This
means that whenever you Digg one of your Recommendations, you are helping select
stories for the front page of Digg!

Diversity
Just like stories on the homepage, we want your Recommendations to be diverse: a
balanced number of stories, not all on the same topic, and not all Dugg by the same
people.

To make sure that your Recommendations are diverse, the Engine imposes limits that
keep things from getting too focused. It makes sure that no one Digger Like You
determines too many of your stories. It attempts to make your Recommendations reflect
the spectrum of topics that you’ve Dugg in the past, and it adjusts the compatibility cutoff
for Diggers Like You so you don’t get too many or too few stories.

The Engine also limits the influence of any single one of your Diggs. For instance, if you
are Digg number 1,000 on a popular story, you will have 999 similar users from that one
Digg alone, and those users are not necessarily more compatible with you than the two
3
or three who may have Dugg a less popular story you also liked. The Engine limits the
total pool of users you can get from a single Digg to balance things out.

We hope you enjoy using the Recommendation Engine and look forward to helping you
uncover even more great stories on Digg!
Digg on!
Anton Kast – Lead Scientist Digg

Amazon, watch out. Earlier today, Google launched an affiliate ad network. Or, rather, it rebranded Performics, the affiliate ad network that came along with its purchase of DoubleClick, as the “Google Affiliate Network.” As with other affiliate networks such as Amazon’s, participating Website publishers get paid a fee for each referral that results in a sale. Existing advertisers include Bank of America, Barnes & Noble, Citi, Target, and Verizon.

The service isn’t yet integrated into Google AdSense (publishers and advertisers still have to set up separate accounts), but that would be a logical next step. An integration with AdSense could add a contextual element to the affiliate ads placed through the network. The more relevant Google can make those affiliate links, the more that consumers will actually click through and buy (in theory).

Google also continues to experiment with a pay-per-action advertising program, which is still in beta. At some point, it might make sense to consolidate that effort into the Google Affiliate Network as well.

Update: Google will actually be phasing out the PPA program at the end of August as part of the integration with DoubleClick. You can read more details at the blog post here.

CBS announced the closing of its acquisition of CNET today. The deal, first announced last month, will bring CNET under the control of Quincy Smith’s CBS Interactive division, “the premier online content network for information and entertainment.”

An email to all CNET employees from Smith and CNET CEO Neil Ashe (now CBS Interactive President) is below. It’s interesting that there’s no mention of Dan Farber, CNET News.com’s editor-in-chief, in the leadership section. Just an oversight, or is CBS just making it clear that they don’t think much of CNET’s newsroom?

Read the full email below.

Update: We’ve added a second email from CBS CEO Leslie Moonves to all CBS employees. He at least mentions that CNET is in the news business, listing “news” before business but after technology, entertainment and sports. Read More

One of the most compelling features of the Dash – Wi-Fi updates – is finally here. Dash users simply connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi and the Dash GPS unit will download and install the update automatically. Try doing that with your TomTom.

After the update the devices will include a new feature called MyRoute, a system that maintains a list of your popular routes and adds your personal preferences to its routing suggestions.

Here’s a rundown of the latest goodies:

MyRoute™ – With the new MyRoute feature, as you travel from one point to another, Dash Express will automatically learn your preferred route in the background. The next time that you drive between the same origin and destination, the first route choice will be MyRoute, complete with traffic-based arrival time data. MyRoute can be compared to the computed Dash routes, including traffic detours, to decide which is optimal.

Search Along Route™ – Finding whatever you need on the road using Yahoo! Local search just got even easier. With the new Search Along Route feature, you can now search for anything you need along your selected route, shortening diversions on the way to your destination. Want to grab a latte on the way to a meeting? Simply do a Yahoo! Local search for “Starbucks” and select “along route” to be presented with the stores that are most conveniently located. Results are displayed with the distance from your current location, the distance off the route and the direction of the destination relative to the selected route.

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Google signed a five-year deal with Tele Atlas to keep getting the map data that helps power Google Maps. The deal extends to Google Earth and mobile apps, and covers 200 countries.

Google also gets map data from Navteq, which is being bought by Nokia for $8 billion. Tele Atlas is owned by Dutch GPS-maker TomTom.

Up until now, the deal between Google Maps and its data providers has been a one-way street. Google licenses the underlying map data that forms the basis for Google Maps. Once it’s up there, anyone on the Web can enhance the maps, correct faulty data, or add their own. But up until now, Tele Atlas did not benefit from those edits. As part of the new pact, Tele Atlas will have access to edits made by the Google Maps community to update the underlying maps. (The company already collects similar corrections from the Map Share feature in the 20 million TomTom GPS car navigation systems out there).

Once Nokia completes its acquisition of Navteq, it too will collect data from consumers to improve its maps. But it will tap into their cell phones.

It is almost a wiki approach to making better maps (presumably with more controls). How soon before other providers of real-world data catch on that sometimes the best source of data are the users themselves?