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At 3pm BST Splashcast launched a new feature for podcasters, called My Podcast Network. Previously Splashcast allowed users to create a ‘channel’ of various different pieces of media, allowing formats including audio, video, images and PowerPoint presentations. This media had to be either hosted by Splashcast or online at a small number of locations including Flickr and YouTube.

The rubbish part, as I understand it, is that you couldn’t make the channel update automatically in any way, unless you were using either Flickr or YouTube. That made me initially ignore the tool (despite the fact that ex-TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick helps run it).

Now, however, Splashcast has made the link from essentially being a content provider to being an aggregator and re-processor, by allowing the input of new shows into the channel via RSS. This immediately makes it vastly more useful for many people, including us. We can use Splashcast to create a widget for the GizBuzz podcast. This updates whenever we add a show and allows easy playing right on our site. Previously this would have been achievable, but only after what I imagine would have been a lot of coding by either Peter, Jacob or Chris (or some or all of them!).

Update: Since the post has been live, I’ve tried to put the widget in the sidebar to use as a player for the GizBuzz podcast (I couldn’t publish it before because of an embargo). It turns out that Splashcast won’t do what we want it to do. It won’t actually produce a widget of all the items in an RSS feed as far as I can tell; I want an option to display all our podcast episodes, but it will either display one episode at a time or the whole feed as one option. However, Marshall Kirkpatrick has told me that this is a feature currently in development, and that he may be able to think of a work around. It would be great if it came together, because it would be genuinely valuable to us.

They also have a few usability issues with the console used to create the widget, which aren’t present when initially creating it (all I did yesterday), but are present when you’re trying to tweak it. To some extent this is down to confusing vocabulary (players, shows and channels are all very different, but in the context of Splashcast I wasn’t initially sure what was what), which is perhaps inevitable given how unique the service is.

Embedded below is a video from Kirkpatrick which probably explains the feature more clearly than I have. It also demonstrates the nice Splashcast video player, which doesn’t show any branding or controls unless you hover over it (unlike YouTube etc).

I’m not particularly a fan of software patents. Apple have just been sued by a company called IP Innovation over their use of tabbed interfaces in Mac OS X. Yes, that’s right, over tabbed interfaces.

“AppleInsider is reporting that an Illinois-based company and its Nevada partner have filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc., alleging that Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ infringes an interface patent relating to the OS’s nearly universal use of tabs. The suit was filed in the patent troll’s and forum shopper’s favorite venue: Marshall, TX. The patent in question is 5072412, which was originally issued to Xerox in 1987, but is now owned or licensed to IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation. ‘Category dividers triggered by Spotlight searches, as well as page tabs in the Safari web browser, bear the closest similarity to the now 20-year-old description’ of the patent, according to the article. IP Innovation is requesting damages in excess of $20 million and an injunction against future sales and distribution of Mac OS X 10.4. Software patent reform can’t come soon enough!”

The patent filing dates back from 1987 and if you take a look at it, clearly describes something which isn’t exactly considered amazingly innovative nowadays. I’m struggling to think of a single graphical application that doesn’t make use of some form of multiple ‘workspaces’ as they are referred to in the filing. IP Innovation simply bought the intellectual property rights from Xerox, who pretty much invented most of the concepts of the graphical user interface as we know it today.

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The idea of the ‘Attention Economy’ is well defined by Alex Iskold at Read/WriteWeb. Companies have always endeavored to find out as much information as they can about their customers in order to improve the services they deliver or in some cases to sell this information to other companies. Information about people has always been a valuable commodity. The Attention Economy is about digging deeper and extracting more detailed information about where people devote their ‘Attention’. The history log of your web browser is a good example of your where your recent attention has been devoted to on the web and it is interesting, and perhaps inevitable, that Google is seeking to make use of this information with its Web History product.

There are already a host of services our there such as StumbleUpon which uses your browsing behavior to recommend sites you might like to visit. Even Last.fm uses your ‘Attention Information’ on your iTunes playlist (how many times you’ve listed to various songs) to create a personalised radio station which is tailored to your particular taste. Particls, which Huw will be reviewing shortly, is another application which is using attention data in a fascinating new way. What all of these services have in common is their use of past attention to predict what you will be interested in now and in the future. This could be extremely powerful in solving problems like information overload and content discovery in the long tail media economy (previously discussed here).

Such information is extremely valuable, and as such there is an effort to standardise the way in which it is stored, therefore making it portable. As a result, the APML (Attention Profiling mark-up language) has sprung up to try to standardise the way that “Attention Information” is formatted. This is certainly a good thing as I feel that the ‘Attention Economy’ really shines when attention information can be shared between services in a meaningful way. However, agreeing on standards and persuading companies to adopt them is notoriously difficult. It will be interesting to see how the effort develops in the coming months, and you can be assured that GizBuzz will be there to cover it!

Just as they’ve released their quarterly earnings report, Google sneakily launched a new feature today, “Web History”. Offering a web-based alternative to your browsers similar feature, Web History aims to organize what you visit into a concise and easily browsable archive of data.

The feature appeared for me in a small box on Google’s search results and I’m presuming this is where the feature will see its search integration. I’m too paranoid to install it (privacy concerns) however it looks like an intriguing idea from both ends (user and Google). I’m frequently losing websites that I visited earlier in the day or week; sometimes even months after visiting a page I’ll go back and try to find the page in question. Google is looking to eliminate this problem by creating a navigable database of everything you visit, and by throwing Google’s famous search on top of it they are looking to make your net archeology a bit easier.

A similar feature to this was implemented in Google Desktop, allowing users to search through their web history. It is likely that we will see a merging of these two features in the future to prevent redundancy, however Google hasn’t given any word yet. One feature that has been lost (or as they say, renamed) is Search History, the functionality of which is now present in Web History.

I applaud Google for trying to make users’ lives easier, at the same time though we have to wonder what Google is doing with this data. Storing all the world’s information isn’t the most profitable business and Google has ads to make up for this, however it surprises me that ads will continue to cover for these side ventures that take focus away from the original mission of search. I don’t want to suggest Google as an Orwellian Big Brother, however they must be fast approaching some government organizations with the ability to find out about people!

Ultimately Web History is an interesting addition to the Google suite of tools, however I won’t be enabling it. I’m a bit too paranoid (and too forgetful for those times I may want it disabled).

We’re tweeting with joy - you can now get the latest updates from GizBuzz, along with the other two Oratos blogs (YouMakeMedia and FOSSwire) on Twitter, the new nano-blogging tool taking the tech world by storm (see our review).

Even if you’ve decided Twitter isn’t something you want to get involved with in the orthodox sense, our Twitter feed is still valuable for you - you can get GizBuzz content, as soon as it is written, delivered to your Google Talk account or by SMS text.

The Oratos Twitter page is here. 

A big shout out to Peter for putting this together. As I understand it, he’s created a plugin for our blog software (WordPress) which pings a script. This script then checks the blog’s RSS feed for new items, and adds any items it finds to Twitter, via its API. This means that there doesn’t need to be a cron script, which would add load to the server by checking the feed every 2 minutes even if there wasn’t a new post. It also means that you get our posts instantly, rather than when such a script decides to check for them.

Add us! 

Google has just announced that they have acquired Tonic Systems, a company which has already been developing in this area, with the aim of releasing in the summer. According to a post on the Google Blog (incidentally by Sam Schillace, who we interviewed previously for the podcast):

We’ll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.

This is no surprise; they are building a comprehensive online office suite, and presentations were always going to be an integral part of that. As Sam put it in the post, presentations are well suited to collaboration.

It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you’re almost always going to share them.

I disagree with Arrington. He does not believe Schmidt’s comment at the Web 2.0 Expo that he does not believe that Google Office competes with Microsoft’s product is genuine. I do think the comment is genuine; Google really does see their product as a collaboration tool, rather than a traditional MS Office equivalent. They’ve taken the very sensible view that rather than create a rubbish traditional office suite by using a technology not really appropriate, they will create a product that does one thing, collaboration, extremely well, without trying to compete against Microsoft, whose desktop application will always be able to provide more features.

More and more applications are moving to run on the web. With online office suites like Zoho and Google Docs & Spreadsheets and many other services that traditionally have been the realm of the desktop moving on to the web, it seems like everything is going to the web.

One of the first things to actually make this move was email. It feels like webmail clients have existed forever. Hotmail was the startup (back before Microsoft owned them) that really brought webmail to mainstream use and since then we’ve seen many other services.

Most notably has been Gmail, which was one of the first mainstream webmail services to bring a user interface built on Ajax technology. This move (and other Ajax interfaces we now see in Yahoo Mail, the beta Hotmail interface and others) has brought the webmail experience pretty much on par with that of desktop clients.

So - with webmail services like Gmail providing such a rich user experience, are desktop email clients even relevant any more? If they are, are their days numbered?

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Read/WriteWeb has the story that Microsoft have launched a technology preview version of Silverlight, a competitor to Adobe’s Flash technology.

Today at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft and Adobe have gone tit for tat with product launches that directly target one another. Our previous post covered Adobe’s launch of a new Internet video solution, that competes with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. And Microsoft has fired right back, unveiling Microsoft Silverlight - a re-branding of their WPF/E technology (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere). In its announcement, Microsoft describes Silverlight as a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. So basically it is Microsoft’s equivalent to Adobe’s Flash.

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In case you’ve been living in a cave for several months, you will have heard about the Apple TV, Apple’s new device which connects your iTunes library to your TV and allows you to play your iTunes content in your living room.

It turns out that the Apple TV box is actually a low-powered computer in a small box. Powered by an Intel Pentium M processor, the unit actually runs Mac OS X (albeit a version with some components removed).

Because of the fact that the Apple TV is just a computer, it has proved quite easy to hack new features into it. We’ve seen people getting SSH remote login to their Apple TV and subsequently launching proper OS X applications on the machine, including VLC to play extra media formats and even run the online game World of Warcraft.

The point I’m getting to is, there is a thriving hacker community around the new device.

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This week I came across an interesting little app called Mosoto. Mosoto is an instant messager for Facebook — you are able to sign on via Facebook and then see who within your network is online and chat with them. There are lots of other features added on such as file sharing and even video conferencing! I won’t go into the breadth of features since there is a really nice screencast which does a good job of explaining how it works. What I do want to discuss is the impact this will have on the major messaging networks such as MSN, AIM et al.

Is your social network more important than your messaging buddies? There has been little to challenge the dominance of the big IM networks over the years but services like Mosoto are going to do a pretty good job. Mosoto was only possible due to the release of the Facebook API and with the possibility of other social networks creating APIs we could see other sites such as hi5 and Bebo added to the mix. On the other hand, MySpace’s instant messaging client hasn’t done much to dent the popularity of the established IM services; but then again, there is a difference. MySpace created their own proprietary IM client whilst Facebook is relying on independent developers to use their API to create such services. As a result I think that features built around Facebook will be far more compelling since quality will rise out of competition between developers trying to create the best new services.

If Mosoto and others succeed in making instant messaging mainstream on your social network, the likes of MSN, AIM and Yahoo Messenger should wonder where their futures lie.