As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Gizbuzz post frequency hasn’t been at its finest over the Christmas period. It seems all of us have had much better things to do than post about the latest tech news (ranging from coding to singing to eating), and I for one have spent no more than about 1 hour on a computer over the past 10 days. That’s probably a good thing!

Peter, Chris and Jacob (all members of Team Oratos) are also working on a super secret project which isn’t part of Oratos and is launching in the new year. They’re accepting names for a private beta so if you’re interested head over to the site. They also explain a bit about the project there.

Gizbuzz’s first birthday is also coming up thick and fast, and hopefully we’ll be able to talk about some exciting new things coming up for Oratos then.

See you in 2007. For a look at what’ll be happening, Chris’ predictions are a good way to start.

The following are my unsolicited and rather unorganized predictions for 2007. Think I’m wrong? Think I’m crazy? Let me know in the comments.

In 2006, we conceptualized Web 2.0. We determined what it was about, the theories and ideas that made it happen. We perfected our AJAX and polished our gradients, creating the beginnings of a social web.

The problem though, was that Web 2.0, generally, did not get past the tech community. Really, does your family share in the joys of social bookmarking? Do your friends obsess over the wonders of The Long Tail? I’d venture to say no. It isn’t anyone’s fault, it is simply that we have built up the architecture for a revitalised internet, but haven’t brought in the general public to experience it.

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We’re really on fire with the Gizbuzz podcast at the moment - we’re even managing regular episodes! This will, however, be the last one before Christmas.

This one breaks away from our trend of doing interviews with people behind web applications, although you can’t get much more Web 2.0 than what the folks at the Participatory Culture Foundation are doing with the Democracy Player, and associated services. Chris (editor of YouMakeMedia, another Oratos blog all about how to jump into the world of new media and do a good job) and I interviewed Nicholas Reville, executive director of the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation.

Some of the things we discussed in the interview were:

• The goals of the Democracy Player project
• Whether new and old media can co-exist. What will old media’s role be in 10 years?
• The importance of the long tail
• Running an open source project
• New media’s place in encouraging engagement in politics, and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

You have a couple of options now:

Subscribe to Gizbuzz (you can also add this to iTunes, via Advanced >> Subscribe to podcast)
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Digg announced several new features today, the most interesting being a new category of podcasts. As Digg say on their blog:

Now you can Digg your favorite podcast series and individual podcast episodes. Not only can you see a list of the most popular podcasts by section, you can also dive into any individual podcasts to see the most Dugg individual episodes. And don’t forget - every time you Digg a podcast or podcast episode that is bookmarked in your profile and shared with your friends.

What this tries to solve

This may fill a niche; in my opinion there are few, if any, places on the internet at the moment where discoverability of good podcasts which are outside the realms of tens of thousands of listeners is possible. Odeo tries to solve this problem, with their ‘recently starred’ section on their homepage. However, that’s too random to be of any use. Pluggd is trying, too, but a quick glance through the upper echelons of their directory merely reveals podcasts I have already heard of. As far as I can tell the benefit Digg brings to this, which could potentially solve the problem, is the time-critical nature of its social bookmarking. In other words, the top of the directory will hopefully be different every time I look at it, because of the site’s basis in social news. This increases the chance that there will be something new which I haven’t seen before, but which the community has judged is interesting, presented to me.

However, I fear that whilst this may be the most effective attempt at solving this problem so far, it still doesn’t take an approach which stands a real chance of helping me find that gem of content which only appeals to a very few people. Read on after the jump for why, and what I think the solution might be…

Getting down the tail

The phenomenon which Chris Anderson called the Long Tail (in the context of media, essentially that anyone can now create and publish their own content, resulting in a far greater quantity of content with each item potentially able to reach some sort of audience) has meant that there is likely to be the perfect podcast or blog out there, just ‘made’ for me, covering exactly the subjects that I am interested in. However, it may only appeal to a very small number of people, perhaps less than 100.

Digg fails

An example: A plumber starts a podcast about domestic plumbing; he talks about the latest tips, new products, funny anecdotes. A really well put together podcast, of great interest to all plumbers but of no interest to anyone not a plumber. Our podcasting plumber submits his podcast to Digg to promote it. Just by chance, 10 of the Digg members who are plumbers, and the podcasting plumber’s friend, who isn’t a plumber, find the podcast in the depths of the site and digg it, delighted that they have found such an interesting podcast.

So those 10 plumbers have found the new podcast. Great. But the podcast didn’t make it onto the front page, because 10 diggs isn’t enough to do that. That means that the rest of the plumbers who watch Digg, but don’t have time to look any further than the front page, didn’t find the podcast, which means that that podcast has only reached a tiny fraction of it’s (tiny) potential audience.

We can see that a new system is needed - the Digg model doesn’t work.

One possibility

There are two options, then, which could have worked. If there were such a site as ‘Plugg’ (Digg for Plumbers - get it!), to which a reasonable percentage of the potential audience of this plumbing podcast were subscribed. So, to widen this out from the example, someone within every ‘microcommunity’ (in this case plumbers) could set up a Digg-like site for the community to recommend content to itself. The problem with this model is that the audience could potentially be too small to effectively prevent gaming. The podcasting plumber would only have to pay 5 friends to get his podcast to the front page of ‘Plugg’ if he wanted to cheat, rather than 100 or so for Digg.

My preferred option

The other option is a robust recommendation algorithm. We’ve seen this sort of thing for websites with Stumbleupon, and for music with Pandora. To use my example, the podcasting plumber submits his podcast to this service, which has the same broad audience as Digg. Those 10 plumbers find the podcast in the depths of the system, and recommend it, because they find it interesting. The algorithm then first sees what those 10 have in common, and notices that they all liked a plumbing blog that was submitted a while ago. So it works out that this podcast probably appeals to everyone that that plumbing blog appealed to, so it automatically suggests it to everyone who liked that blog. Whilst it would obviously be more complicated, you get the sort of approach I am suggesting. If this were technologically possible, and it could gain traction (remember, you have to have those 10 plumbers who find the podcast without it being recommended to them, and you also have to keep people patient whilst the recommendation engine works out what they like) then it would seem that this would be the superior solution.

Digg is excellent, but it takes the one-size-fits-all approach. It is valid, and it is genuinely useful. However, it can’t and doesn’t solve all our content discovery problems. I think there is room for another company doing something similar to what I outline above, and I hope we see one.

Apologies for the obscenely long post. I’ve stuck this post in the future challenges series, as I was planning on writing a post about this problem in that series anyway, but it made sense to do it in the context of Digg. The series talks about some of the problems which we need to solve as the web, and new media, go forward. We’ll know we’ve reached Web 3.0 when we’ve solved them!

PS: Warm welcome to Sam Davyson.

Google Maps now allows you to add more than one stop off point on your journey, so you can choose where you want your trip to be via. This is a very fundamental feature for any route planning service to have, and it is one that Ask and Yahoo! Maps have had since conception. The implementation in this case is very slick, and quite subtle with no major changes to the way the award winning service looks.

The side bar of driving instructions gets one new link at the bottom entitled “Add Destination…” which does precisely that. Once added you can drag-and-drop the locations to reorder them, and you can use the small plus signs to expose the directions between two stop points.

For a sample query this is how the sidebar now looks:

One point of note is that the computational time with just three locations is significantly longer that with two. And as you add more and more it becomes even more sluggish. I think it only feels so slow though since everything else about Google Maps is so fast. I am not convinced that it is taking Google longer to work out the route than it takes a traditional internet mapping service like say Multimap. When the map is finally rendered it features the new pause icon for the stop off point, but is otherwise no different to any other Google Map.

The syntax for the feature is very simple. You specify the starting point with from: and then write the stopping points in the order you wish to visit them each with to: prefixed. And one real positive from this release is that it was rolled out simultaneously across the international versions meaning it works today in the US and throughout Europe.

Sam Davyson is a new writer for Gizbuzz, you can find out more about him on the About page.

GigaOM is reporting that Google may be in talks with UK mobile phone service provider Orange to produce a mobile phone pre-loaded with Google’s software that would allow even easier access to Google’s mobile services on the move.

From the original Observer article:

Their plans centre on a branded Google phone, which would probably also carry Orange’s logo. The device would not be revolutionary: manufactured by HTC, a Taiwanese firm specialising in smart phones and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), it might have a screen similar to a video iPod. But it would have built-in Google software which would dramatically improve on the slow and cumbersome experience of surfing the web from a mobile handset.

It’s likely that we’d see things like Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and perhaps the Docs & Spreadsheets apps on this phone - but where would this leave Google services on other handsets?

Google already have done some good work into getting their online services into the mobile arena, with Gmail available through XHTML and a Java application for phones and many of their other services having mobile incarnations.

What would this device uniquely offer in that case - a better experience, additional services that haven’t been ported to the mobile platform yet or what?

Google already offers its search engine and other services on mobile phones. It has a partnership with Vodafone and last month announced a broadband agreement with the operator 3. It is working to make youTube, the video-sharing site it bought recently for £870m, easily accessible on handsets. But it is eager to expand in what experts see as a huge potential market, possibly the key to the future of the internet.

Manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola are working to make the mobile internet commonplace. Earlier this year Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice-president of Nokia, said at a product show in New York: ‘In the mid-Nineties I said that if you don’t have a mobile phone you will be making a declaration that you wanted to be outside organised society. People said I was crazy, but now everybody has a mobile phone. Today I’m saying that in 10 years’ time the same will be true if you don’t have the full internet in your pocket.

A spokesman for Google said: ‘We don’t comment on market speculation and rumour, but we are focused on mobile and there’s nothing new in our commitment to that space.’ Orange declined to comment.

Interesting… very interesting.

Google have launched Google Patent Search - as the name suggests, a search engine for patents.

On the main page, Google show some interesting patents - like the toothbrush and sunglasses, which randomly update and you can obviously search an impressive number of US patents (Google claim 7 million) for what you are looking for. All of the content is sourced from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

But aside from the amusement value, what does this actually give you? The USPTO is already searchable, so apart from slapping the Google name and brand on top of the database - and perhaps providing some of Google’s algorithms to make the results better, how is this actually helpful?

Or am I missing something?

We have a Gizbuzz Exclusive today. As you can read everywhere, Sam Sethi, the publisher of TechCrunch UK was ‘dismissed’ yesterday, and TCUK has been put on hold. Mike Arrington’s been dealing with the issue over at CrunchNotes. I managed to catch up with Sam to ask him for his side of events, which haven’t really been heard yet. Sam seems far calmer about the whole thing than anyone else!

We discuss what actually happened, what he was hoping TCUK would achieve, the UK startup scene and what his future plans are.

Sam has now managed to get back into his website (listen for details!), which is at vecosys.com.

Just a note of caution - the ‘Mike’ that Sam’s planning on working with in the future is Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch UK, as opposed to Arrington. I wonder why!

Listen to the podcast

Subscribe to the podcast (We have already recorded episode 5, which is a good one - coming soon)

Mozilla have just released Firefox 3.0 Alpha 1 (codenamed Gran Paradiso).

The Alpha release is only for testing purposes, although it seemed fairly stable when I ran it for a while. Featuring in Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 are mostly under-the-bonnet changes at the moment:

• Firefox now uses the Cairo text and graphic rendering engine
• The Gecko HTML rendering engine is now updated to version 1.9
• Better support for the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format
• Updates to the internal engine, including rendering changes and some small tweaks
• Now uses native Cocoa graphical elements on Mac OS X.

Some bad news for users of old operating systems, though, is that Firefox 3.0 will no longer support Windows 98, ME or Mac OS X Jaguar (10.2).

What astounds me is how quickly the Mozilla team can do this sort of work. Firefox 2.0 hasn’t even been out for two months, and Mozilla have already pushed out an Alpha release of 3.0. Being quite honest, I’d be very surprised if the IE team within Microsoft have already put out an alpha release of Internet Explorer 8. Arguably Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 wasn’t as big a leap as IE6 to 7, but still the pace set by Mozilla is quick.

This pace of innovation may prove to be quite crucial to Firefox’s success. As I’m sure you’re aware, Firefox has almost literally taken the browser market by storm; in its very short lifetime so far it has already conquered 10% of the world-wide browser market share and is set to continue eroding Internet Explorer’s dominance.

Will Firefox continue? Well, IE7’s bundling with Vista will no doubt be quite a hurdle to overcome for Firefox. IE7 finally supports some modern browser features like tabbed browsing, and people might not be so convinced to switch if the gap in functionality between IE and Firefox is less.

Only time will really tell us if this Mozilla golden age will continue.

[via Lifehacker]

Owners of the iTrip gadget (a nifty device which streams your iPod’s audio signal over FM) in the UK can now be a bit happier, as Gadgetell are reporting that Ofcom, the regulatory body, have officially legalised them and similar FM transmitting devices.

I reported on Ofcom thinking about legalising them a while back on Gizbuzz, but it’s now officially done.

The ban actually stretched back to the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949, which banned the use of FM transmitters without a licence or exemption. New laws have just come into force which now exempt this kind of gadget.

And that means that Griffin (the maker of the iTrip) and other manufacturers can finally start selling their gadgets in the UK and people won’t be breaking the law by using them.