Addicted To 1’s and 0’s

Pretty much everyone’s who has grown up in the United States and is at least 10 years old knows what the Encyclopedia Brittanica is. In fact, the older you are, the more familiar you probably are with the collection. Any type of research, especially if it took place while in elementary school, would usually start by rummaging through the library of books to find sources for your work. Even now, this 250 year old company still offers their yearly updated 32 volume set (with free shipping for only $1395!) and the digitized DVD/CD version (for a lesser $39.99, probably because it doesn’t involve shipping 90 pounds worth of books) via their website. Topics covered in the collection are written by leading experts in their field, including Nobel Peace Prize winners and authors with equally impressive backgrounds. For the last two centuries, Encyclopedia Britannica was the quinnesential source for knowledge for just about any topic….That is of course, until the arrival of wikipedia.

Now, searching wikipedia for definitions, articles, etc.. has taken the place that once was held by the shelf of encyclopedias that could be found at every single school and library. This put the publishing company up against a monsterous rival. How do you compete with something that is completely free? Books, DVD’s, enticing accomplished writers to submit articles all cost money, and Chris Anderson’s “Free” plan wouldn’t help them ensure a 2009 version of the series would be released, but they knew that something had to change.

What ended up changing was…… you guessed it…. their website. They’ve gone all web 2.0 on us. Now you can embed a variety of widgets, all via RSS feeds, into your own site ranging from specific topics of interest as well as neat little feeds that give you a Daily Quiz, Quote of the Day, Featured Contributer, Featured Media, On This Day In History, and much more. Specific topics and articles can be pulled from their massive online archives by signing up to a free new service they’re now calling WebShare. Using this service you can not only reference one of the premier authorities in subject matter directly on your website, but also interact with the company if you require something that isn’t already offered.

They’re giving fun, useful widgets away to the public for free, then are providing resources to authors, webmasters, and bloggers alike with hopes of enticing their readers to sign up for the online service.

For instance, If I was writing an article on one of our past presidents, I could pull a sample snippet from the massive presidential section of the Encyclopedia to accompany my article:

Users wanting more would then have the ability to sign up to learn everything there is to know about the man via Britannica’s subscription online version of their encyclopedia. Unlike wikipedia, you would know that the information you were reading was authentic, not to mention the fact that it would include more media/resources than your average wikipedia page.

Go checkout Britannica’s new website, as I said, they’ve revamped it to incorporate Flash, RSS feeds, widgets, and even now have an official Twitter account. So for all you twitter folks, feel free to add www.twitter.com/EBWebShare and tweet with some books from your childhood.

Introducing SocialThing, the latest in social-media site aggregators.
It’s still in beta mode, but as of 12:45pm EST the invite code: “techcrunch” still worked.

Interesting site. Instead of just asking for the location of all of your public feeds like FriendFeed does, it actually has you enter in your login and password to each of the social sites it pulls information from. This is what makes SocialThing different than FriendFeed (and other similar services) - It uses the various API’s, including OAuth with each site so that you can interact with the various feeds as if you were on the site itself. For example, If someone were to send me a message via twitter, I wouldn’t have to leave SocialThing’s site in order to respond. The same goes for the rest of the sites they currently aggregate (Facebook, Pownce, Twitter, Flickr, LiveJournal, and Vimeo).

The purpose of the site is to “Get your digital life together.” And once they start adding more social sites, this should kick services like friendfeed in the rear as it will allow you to actually use this site as a one-stop-shop for your social-networking needs, whereas other social aggregators tend to be just pretty representations of all your RSS feeds. Needless to say this could turn out to be a very useful tool, especially if they were to create some sort of application that could interactive with it (perhaps using Adobe AIR?), a la what twitter + pownce have done.

Taken from their site, it allows you to:
“See everything that’s going on with your friends in all the sites you use, easily figure out where you’re missing connections with your friends, interact with multiple sites at once, and more!

Socialthing! makes it easy to see all the things your friends are doing. It’s a news feed for every site that you use in one place.”

Now lets just see if this thing can actually take off, it seems like every day a new social-feed aggregator is released….I guess that goes to show you how its never good to be first in the sandbox… all it means is that the next killer app to come out in your genre will just incorporate all your positive innovations and most likely learn from your mistakes.

Introducing Alltop.com, the latest venture from Nononina (the same company behind Truemors.com - an increasingly popular source for the latest internet rumors). Alltop.com, which is still in beta form, is an ever-growing collection of RSS feeds broken down into various categories, including everything from “Moms” to “Sports.” They essentially have attempted to categorize the web in what you could consider a one-stop-shop for whatever type of late-breaking-news you might be seeking. The sites featured in each category seem to change as better suited feeds come to light, however the most interesting part of this collection of data is just the sheer number of sources that they pull from. As I said, each set of feeds is based on a particular category, even including an “Ego” (where you’d find Scoble & Mark Cuban’s blog) and “Celebrities” (TMZ, Dlisted, and all other Britney-obsessed tabloids) category thrown in there for those who secretly fiend for celebrity gossip. The idea originally stemming from another multi-source RSS portal, Popurls, and piggy-backed on the success of Truemors, this new venture has already been widely talked about in both press and (obviously), the internet. Nononina is run by infamous mac-evangelist/idea-generator Guy Kawasaki, Will Mayall, and Kathryn Henkens. This trio also were the founders of Fog City Software, producers of the long forgotten (unless you were a mac/apple geek like me) Claris Emailer.

From personal observations, I’ve noticed that only a select crowd use their own custom RSS News Aggregator (a la Google Reader), or even social bookmarking services like del.icio.us. That positions this site as a convenient alternative to having to rely on iGoogle or a “customized” Yahoo! homepage. With those the user would have to already know which feeds he or she was interested in vieweing, whereas here the average internet user would be able to explore not only the sites they typically frequent, but would also be given the opportunity to discover a whole new realm of similar content. With that in mind, I applaud the trio for creating this news-portal, the only catch is whether or not they will be able to create enough “buzz” about the site to draw that targeted user demographic away from their most likely “widgetized” homepage. Hopefully posts like this will help the cause. I look forward to seeing how it evolves over the next year. Good luck guys!

For more information on Alltop, check-out this great post on the evolution blog featuring an interview with Mr. Kawasaki himself, or just go read what they have to say about themselves via their about page - alltop.com/about/