The Evangelist

The Flock browser has come far since my last post about it in 2008.

If you have been following tech news lately, you may have seen that Google has been under attack by a number of newspapers because of its Google News news aggregator.

From what I can gather from various sources these newspapers believe that Google is effectively "stealing their content" by aggregating it.

Looking at this, one should first consider that Google makes no money off of the service. It is just like many other Google services that Google provides with no other benefit to themselves but marketshare. Of course, they do make money when you go to parts of their site that contain advertising, but that's irrelevant.

Second, we should look at the fact that Google only reprints part of an article along with the headline from sources, and displays other headlines from other sources on the same topic right below. This means that Google is not showing an entire article on their site, but instead just a tiny snippet (which is not even a summary). This means that a person can read the snippet of material, and if it interests them, click on the link. This ultimately results in the reader ending up at a newspaper's website.

Newspapers may think that people are turning to Google News instead of their newspapers. The problem is that these days people are looking more and more for news from varied sources on topics that interest them, and not just the topics that one newspaper discusses in their papers and on their websites. It is my belief that, if it weren't for Google, almost none of the people that currently come through Google would view articles from these newspapers.

I can completely understand why the newspapers are doing this. Times are tough, and the newspapers need readers. But if the newspapers aren't willing to have their content aggregated, the fact is that many people may turn to alternative sources of media, such as blogs and independent news-sites. It's not as if this hasn't already started happening, at any rate.

I believe that newspapers can stay relevant. They simply need to encourage their readers to participate more, and provide new avenues to allow their readers to do this. Television news stations have already been taking advantage of this by allowing viewers to send in news stories and pictures they have taken related to news stories and the weather.

It's difficult to tell what will happen in this scenario. Google needs the news sources for its aggregator. On the other hand, the newspapers would be shooting themselves in their feet if they pursued this and Google chose not to pay up royalties to them for linking to their content but instead simply removed them from the site. At any rate, it seems that the current setup is extremely fair, and both Google and the newspapers benefit immensely. I would hate to see this relationship become unstable; I would venture to guess that the newspapers really have more to loose on their end.

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If you have been following this blog for a while, you may have read my previous post about Scour, a social search engine.

Since them, Scour has certainly come a long way. They won Mashable's Open Web Award for Best Search and Social Search Engine, facing the likes of Google with its popularity and new searchwiki social features.

If you haven't checked Scour out yet, you should think about giving it a try. The results are incredibly relevant because of the social rankings and, to top it off, you can earn points for every search which can be redeemed for debit gift card.

For years, various stock market simulations have existed. These simulations have generally been based on real stock markets, using real-world data to determine the success (and failure) of investors. This is good for those who want experience in what it really is like to trade in the stock market. Everything is very real, except for the fact that virtual investors can't really have an effect on the market. This is more significant when virtual investors are dealing with large sums of money (which they likely couldn't afford to invest in a real stock market), but when considering simulations with hundreds or even thousands of users, having no effect on the market can make trading in a simulation seem boring for some unless they are into investing.

While some might fall under this category, others do not. But that's what Thotmarket is for. Thotmarket is a social bookmarking site (similar to Digg) and stock market simulation combined. Users can invest in 'thots', virtual stocks, post coments on thots with a certain value (which may eventually lead to a payout for the shareholders of a thot) and send comments to other users (for a certain amount of credit that is determined by the user you are trying to message). Every user starts with $1000 (virtual money, of course). You can do any of the above actions with your funds, or you can even offer a new thot to the market with a certain investment. By offering stock and/or investing, you have the opportunity to gain more credits if the value of the stock increases and you can sell the stock for more than you initially put in. However, you must choose the right investments or, in the case of a new offering, set an optimal trading price to ensure that people will actually value the thot. If people don't think the thot is worth the price, think the thot will not succeed, or think that the investment will not be worth it, they will not invest in the thot. Therefore, it is best to give the thot a popular and quality link, video, or feed.

Thotmarket is certainly an excellent way to spend some time, and a great alternative to trying to boost your site through massive social bookmarking sites such as Digg, where the small bits (even if they are valuable) are drowned out by big sites and larger news. And Thotmarket's emphasis on new thots for their front "marketplace" page is bound to help newer thots gain more attention. This, in turn, means more people clicking the link to your site, video, or feed of choice. This could be very good for webmasters who want tp get something out of their time spent on the site.

Check out this page for more information or visit http://www.thotmarket.com to get started.

The Evangelist is already listed. You can see its ticker below and visit the thot here.

When it comes to social software, I haven't always been extremely enthusiastic. There are plenty of bad things about sites such as Myspace and even Facebook. From identity theft to viruses that create vast botnets, social networking applications do present new problems. This isn't to say I haven't used a good handful of them (including the professional LinkedIn), it's just to say that they have their downsides.

Some of these appliances, however, can't be overlooked. They offer something totally new and never seen before. One recent innovation that is just starting to get more mainstream is social searching. Google has started dabbling with this with their new SearchWiki. The feature can be used on Google by anyone logged in with a Google account to either promote or remove a result from your personal listing as well as comment on any page. It is unclear, however, what effect this will have on a page's Google ranking in the end.

While Google is the largest search engine and therefore the largest to operate social searching, it is still a mainstream search engine, and it has its limitations when it comes to social search. That's where Scour comes in. Scour combines results from the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Live Search from Microsoft) with social searching methods. This means that the relevance of results for searches is ranked by the users themselves. This can be superior to the traditional algorithm-based search because unrelated results (which may contain sites with spammed keywords or meta-tags) typically get ranked down, as opposed to them getting ranked because of their keywords by search engines (this has been a tough problem that Google has worked hard to deal with). With Scour you can do everything you would expect to be able to do with a social search engine, such as comment on sites and vote on the relevance of results.

Scour, however, takes social search to new heights. With user-controlled options on how many top results you get from each search engine and the option to favor results from a specific search engine, Scour certainly offers more customizability than most other social search engines. Scour also has an innovative points system. For every search, ranking, and comment (up to one time per each search), you get a point. These points can later be cashed for Visa debit gift cards after getting an appropriate amount of points. Scour gets the money for these payouts from their advertising on the site. To ensure that nobody abuses the system, Scour checks all accounts manually before payout. This means they can ensure that the searches and comments aren't spammed or bot-generated. In the case of some, they promise only to remove points for those who mean no harm to the system. The check keeps those who are there only to earn, however, from ruining it for everybody. This has made it so that nobody has gotten an incredible amount of money from them so far. But it also means that unlike many other programs that offer you money or prizes for doing something such as viewing advertising, Scour's promise is not absurd.

For more information on how Scour works, or to get started, you can visit the Scour website. You do not need to be registered to see how a sample search works.

Speaking of social networking, a new and useful service, Ping.fm, has emerged.

Do you have many accounts across multiple social networks and blogs? Then Ping.fm is for you. The site allows you to send a message to your profile on tons of different social networks simultaneously, meaning you don't have to copy and paste the message to each profile across the networks.

To top it off, you get a posting email address so that you can post from a remote location.

The service is in beta, so you will need a beta code. The current beta code is "dreamofping."

I hope you enjoy this service as much as I do.

Are you a member of many social networks? Do you feel like you have to run around to many different sites just to check up on all of your friends and contacts?

Then you need Flock, the Social Web Browser. Flock 2, based on Firefox 3, allows you to easily stay connected to your friends online. Flock makes it easier to share with others and to keep up-to-date when a contact updates their profile.

Flock is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.