Amidst rumors that Google has pulled ahead of Microsoft in the race to buy a portion of Facebook, Google News now has its own Facebook application. You can select from five standard categories (Entertainment News, Sci/Tech News, World News, Sports News, Business News) or enter any number of keywords.
The app gives you a page featuring the top 3 stories in each of those categories (and you can select to see more, with a button to share them with your friends. You can also view stories sent and saved by yourself or by your friends who also have the application. Basically, you can use the application as a replacement for the regular Google News, as well as a means for socially sharing news with friends.
Since the application does not add a box to your profile or annoy you, you can install it and trust it will mostly remain out of the way while adding some nice functionality to Facebook. I like that Google has specifically avoided spamming your friends, selecting no one by default on the “Invite your friends” page. Hopefully Google will create a “Popular shared news” page, so you can see which news is the most popular among Facebook users.
Screenshot by Accuracast, who thinks the app will go unnoticed because it doesn’t annoy people like other Facebook apps. He’s right, in that spammy Facebook apps are more likely to succeed, but if a few users start heavily using it to share news stories, it will spread by being useful, not by taking up profile page space and messaging all your friends.
Marc Ecko, the fashion designer who bought Barry Bonds’ 756th home run ball for $752,467, has commented on Google News on a story about his plan regarding the record-breaking baseball. Ecko’s website, vote756.com, asks users to vote whether they should give the ball to baseball’s Halo of Fame, brand it with an asterisk, or shoot it into space.
A selection:
Although I don’t necessary agree with everything that has been written about my decision, I’m fine with it because that’s what this is about…bringing this debate over “who did what” to a public forum and letting people — reporters included — voice their opinions. I know what I’d like to see happen to the ball, but I’m only one voice. You know what you want to happen to the ball, as well, so make your voice heard by voting at http:\\www.vote756.com.
Another interesting comment left at Google News, this time from Congressman Vito Fossella of New York, commenting about 9/11 health issues and a bill that will help rescue workers receive better treatment. The congressman talks about the importance of the bill:
This bill will address several key areas to help our heroes who are sick today as well as anyone who falls ill in the future as a result of 9/11. It provides comprehensive medical monitoring and treatment for those who were exposed to Ground Zero toxins and compensation for the sick and injured. The bill goes further than any effort to date by expanding monitoring and treatment to all who were exposed, including responders, residents, workers and students in the area. It also makes good on our promise to reopen the Victims Compensation Fund to help those who fell ill over the past three years.
We have made progress on 9/11 health issues over the past several years, but there is still so much more that needs to be done. This bill addresses many of those issues and, for the first time ever, makes a true commitment from the federal government to those who are sick or injured as a result of 9/11.
I’m really enjoying following these comments. They keep getting interest comments from interesting people.
While everyone is talking abut the comments in Google News, I’d like to talk about five that came across my RSS reader today:
On a story about a dinosaur-killing asteroid that supposedly arrived 160 million years ago, Professor Gerta Keller, Department of Geosciences at Princeton University notes that the assumptions in the theory are predicted on a series of events happening, one after the other, leading up to the evidence in the article. Keller presents a reasoned look at the facts and says that the assumptions don’t have enough evidence to back them up, and that we need to rethink this popular theory that asteroids are responsible for extinction.
There’s a big hunt going on for Steve Fossett, an adventurer who dissapeared last week, with searchers using tools from Amazon and Google Earth. Captain Ross Aimer, CEO of Aviation Experts, provides a comment where he explains the frequencies and transmitters Fossett’s plane used and safety measures pilots can use in the future to avoid getting lost themselves.
By a story on a study that showed infants to have better social skill development than apes, Frans B. M. de Waal, Director of Living Links at EMORY University left a comment that debunked the study. de Waal explained that their own study showed that the only reason the human infants developed well is because they were being taught and studied by members of their own species (the humans running the study), while the apes had to learn from strange creatures outside their species (those same humans). At the Living Links Center, apes are taught by other apes, resulting in more accurate data.
After an article talked about how preteen/teenage girl suicide is on the rise, Benjamin N. Shain, Assistant Professor at Northwestern Feinberg School Medicine gave some background on the differences between adult and teen suicide. He also gives some warning signs for suicide and preventative measures parents can take.
And finally, regarding the news that a B-52 bomber accidentally flew with nuclear weapons loaded due to some sort of potentially horrific error, Hans M. Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Info Project expresses his concerns about the state of our nuclear arsenal and issues with the storage and cataloging of our most powerful weapons.
So, what to we have? Rather than participants in the actual stories, Google is receiving opinions from experts who have a desire to say something intelligent about the news. Google’s comments are more academic in nature than social, providing context, background, peer review, and even supplementary sidebars to the stories.
After one day of reading all the comments, I’m convinced that this is a great service. I hope Google finds a way to make it financially worth it, because the addition really expands on and improves the news coverage, taking it a little away from media and a little closer to academia.
Whoever put this together, I’ll bet Larry and Sergey are proud.
Google’s deal with the Associated Press, the world’s largest wire service, has finally produced something. Google News now contains AP news stories, hosted on Google and presented on an extremely clean simple page (compared with the mountain of ads other news sites put around AP content). Google isn’t making any money off the AP stories, but the inclusion allows Google to eliminate duplicates of those same stories from cluttering up the rest of Google News, by pointing only to the ap.google.com version.
This is wonderful news for anyone who is sick of the whining and moaning of news websites the last few years, worried that Google was stealing their content. Google will now send less traffic to those websites, keeping more of it for itself. Google will hopefully be smart and start archiving (and maybe change the permalinks to something more search engine friendly) so that its own news archives can start showing up in search results, both its own and those of its competitors.
By the way, this post contains one of the blog’s useful new features. The image above resizes based on the size of your web browser windows, up to just around its full width, 700 pixels wide. If you have a bigger screen, you get to enjoy larger screenshots, and if you have a smaller one, you don’t have to worry about horizontal scrolling. I completely ripped off the idea from Engadget, and I think every blog should implement it, especially considering how easy it is. You like?
Google has added some video to Google News. Now, Google News publishers who also partner with YouTube to put their video on YouTube, like CBS, can have their video appear on Google News. You can see a video right now if you click this link, otherwise try the different categories, searching for the word “video”. The video appears as a simple link, which, if you click it, expands to reveal the video.
Google News added a new feature last week that lets participants in news stories leave comments below the stories in the search results. The feature is an expirement in the U.S., designed for people or companies who are mentioned in news stories and felt they did not receive a fair shake. If you want to comment on a story that mentions you, email news-comments@google.com and “your comment, a link to the story, your contact details, and information how your contact information can be verified”.
For example, if the Tooth Fairy wanted to comment on a recent story about dental hygiene, she may sign her comment:
“Sincerely, Tooth Fairy.
Verify my identity by losing a tooth and placing it under your pillow. I’ll leave you a business card along with a small payment for your tooth. Alternately you can call 1-800-TEETH-4-ME and speak to my assistant, the Tooth Mouse, who can confirm my email address and comment.”
It’s important that we’re able to verify your identity, so please include clear instructions with your comment. If we need further information, we’ll email you.
Yeah, I didn’t make that up. A little too jokey, right? Tone it down next time, Google. Time and a place.
Personally, I think it’s a great idea. There are a ton of cases of journalists getting the story wrong or deliberately skewing things to match their point, completely ignoring the truth. If I trusted other journalists, I’d still be working with them. Google is turning the news into a two-way street, something that’s been tried before, in a way that could work. They just need to get the system to scale better.
In time, these comments could become a huge supplement to the regular media, to the point that they render some of the news media irrelevant. At the least, they give Google exclusive content for news junkies. Anyone can index the news, but only Google has the other side of the story.
Interestingly, during the experimental phase, Google has said it will not be leaving any comments on stories about itself. Good idea. After that? Oh boy, if they try, it’ll start something…
I’m in Atlantic City with my wife, celebrating our one-year wedding anniversary, so here’s a post featuring a bunch of items I should have blogged weeks ago.
Google News Launches Image View
Google News launched a very cool image view, letting you track the news visually by looking at a page of images taken from the latest news stories. You see a block of twenty-five images, with headlines next to them, and an arrow to scroll through the list of headlines (you can navigate the list with your keyboard, even). A very cool way of browsing news stories, and a good alternative to the sea of text that is the regular Google News.
For the first time (of undoubtably many to come), a judge has cited a YouTube video in rendering his decision. The case is a strange one, with the judge so annoyed at perennial copyright abuser Leo Stoller, that in supporting Major League Baseball Hall-of-Famer George Brett, he invited participants in the trial to check out a complicated incident in Brett’s career.
As background, Evans included a description of what baseball fans remember as Brett’s famous Pine Tar Incident in a 1983 game against the New York Yankees over whether the bat was legal to be used. Brett’s home run was nullified by an umpire, the Yankees won, but on appeal to the American League his team got a second try and eventually beat the Yankees 5-4.
Evans wrote: “Baseball, like our legal system, has appellate review…It ended after 12 minutes when Royals’ closer Dan Quisenberry shut the door on the Yankees in their half of the ninth to seal the win. The whole colorful episode is preserved, in all its glory, on YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Cu1WXylkto (last visited June 6, 2007). See also Retrosheet Boxscore, Kansas City Royals 5, New York Yankees 4, at http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1983/B07240NYA1983.htm (last visited June 6, 2007).”
Ironically, Major League Baseball had the video removed by filing a copyright claim.
From Google Earth to Google Solar System
GEarthBlog points out a mod for Google Earth that turns the Earth into the Sun and adds scale 3D models of all the planets in the solar system, though not in their proper places. Watch this video to see it in action:
Google Docs Adds Readability Statistics
One of my favorite features I always turn on in Microsoft Word is to always show the readability statistics, which analyzes your document and tells you a bunch of things, like what grade level you write at (I’m not a third grader!). Now, Google Docs enjoys the same fun and useful feature, with maybe a little more depth. Click the Word Count button, and you get your Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and Automated Readability Index scores. Then, you can spend hours criticizing your education!
Gadget Lets You Skin Your iGoogle
Not satisfied with the options for customizing the look of your iGoogle personalized homepage? This Gadget gives you a bunch more skinning options, including a built-in searchable directory of skins, a skin creator, and a way to submit your own skin to the directory. When it’s all said and done, you can wind up with a pretty cool look, like in the screenshot above.
One website is selling “Google News cushions”, little pillows with the top ten Google search terms of a specific ear, based on Google’s published Zeitgeist data. You can get pillows for 2003 (Britney Spears! The Matrix! Kobe Bryant) for $250, and 2005 (Janet Jackson! Xbox 360! Britney Spears!) or 2006 (cancer! podcasting! Celebrity Big Brother!) for just $130. The pillows do say Google News in tiny letters on the back, so expect them to get shut down eventually.
Before that happens, you can outfit your couch with the whole set for a measly $510. Huzzah!
(via Better Living Through Design > Digg)
Google has settled a portion of its dispute with Belgian news organizations, restoring their websites to Google web search eight months after removing them. The sites are still not represented in Google News, and won’t be until that dispute is settled. Google removed the sites in the first place in responce to the sites’ complaints over use of their stories in Google News and the Google cache. Google now no longer caches archived stories, so the websites can charge readers for those.
So, do you think Google’s ban affected lesoir.be’s traffic? Decide:
Google, fresh out of making copyright deals with several major news syndication firms, is aknowledging that recent news articles can hold a very important place in Google web search results. Previously, it accomplished this by including a little box above search results, letting you know if your search term has been getting a lot of media coverage and inviting you over to Google News. Now, Google is actually going to put news results ranked within the regular search results, combining the two in a more convenient way.
Google crawls the entire web, reading every single page on the internet, and it is a time-consuming process that takes a lot of work. More popular websites, and more frequently updated sites, are crawled at a higher rate so that Google gets to them faster, but that still isn’t fast enough. Google News has a seperate crawler that crawls only news sites, and does so constantly and extremely fast, getting newly posted news articles almost immediately.
Google’s new plan involves mixing those news results within the regular web results, instead of putting them in a seperate search engine or in a little box. You may be able to tell the difference between news and web results, but they will be mixed together and used together. It really pushes the news results to the forefront, and is going to be a great change if the algorithm mixes them in right.
It’s also a great boon to sites that are in Google News, getting them top search rankings on major newsworthy search terms. Instead of buying ads on major news items, like some news organizations do now, they will be able to rely on their position in Google News to take care of that. That means less opportunistic ad buying that makes everybody look bad.
I can’t wait to see this change become active (sometime this week) and test out how accurate and fair the story selection is.
Google has settled its dispute with the AFP. Last week, Google and the Agence France-Presse announced that the AFP’s suit against Google had been settled with both pleased at the outcome. While details of the agreement were not publicized, they did say that it will allow better use of the AFP’s content on the internet while protecting the copyright (and likely monetary) concerns of the AFP. Google signed a similar deal with the Associated Press eight months ago.
However, all is not well. Billionaire Sam Zell, who last week bought parts of the Tribune newspaper empire, gave a highly controversial speech alleging that Google is profiting by stealing content. While newspapers have long complained about Google News, Zell’s comments were so inflammatory, almost to suggest that all content Google indexes is stolen, and seems like the old man is gearing up for a fight. Reading the Washington Post piece on the story, he comes off as a very caustic individual, ready and almost excited at the prospect of taking on Google.
Luckily/Predictably, the comments at TechMeme portray Zell as a complete idiot, which he may very well be.
Oh, and Yahoo struck a deal with Viacom for advertising on all their websites. Yeah, Google’s stance as YouTube’s daddy may hurt them in lost ad deals more than anything. Wanna bet they get the Viacom deal if they didn’t buy YouTube? Damn right.
I’m not sure how integrated it is in Yahoo Mail and how it compares to Gmail Chat, but it’s interesting to see this becoming a trend. I wonder if Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail, which is full of advanced functionality and is on a platform known for advanced web interfaces, is planning IM integration, and if they’ve got some cool ideas on how to do it. LiveSide seems to indicate that there will be an upgrade there this summer.
Also, Google has released a cool AJAX news bar that websites can use to display news headlines and excerpts. You pick some keywords and choose a format, either a thin bar with changing headlines or a substantial sidebar chunk that changes tabs of news stories complete with excerpts, and get an easy bar, or you can heavily customize the code to do all sorts of cool things.
Steve Rubel reports that Google News Mobile now lets you personalize the layout of the page, and even add custom sections. Now you can create a Google News page to view on your cell phone or other mobile device and get just the news you want. Visit it on your device at this address, or try it out live embedded in the page below:
Steve Rubel noticed that Google News now includes a link to Google Blogsearch. I’ve wanted many times to use Blogsearch, but the URL is ridiculous (blogsearch.google.com). Couldn’t Google buy a decent URL? The link is nice, but think of how to get there:
Option 1: type blogsearch.google.com, a 21-character URL
Option 2: type google.com
Click “News”
Click “Blog search”
Consider that Google Blogsearch’s competitors, all of which have less-than-perfect URLs, are still shorter and easier. Technorati.com. Bloglines.com. Icerocket.com. Feedster.com. Even ask.com/blogsearch is shorter. What really annoys me is that the Blog Search link on News isn’t dynamic, like the other Google tabs, that you could type something in Google.com, click the News then Blog Search link and the search term would carry over. Also, the link doesn’t appear on Google News results pages.
Still, Blog Search is pretty good, and deserves the better positioning. I’d be even happier if it were in the “More” box on Google.com, but it’s a start.
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Daily Kos founder Markos Zuniga says “Google News is becoming unusable”, and has asked that Kos be removed as a source.
A “news” operation needs to present news, and credible news at that. That means get rid of the blogs (mostly opinion), get rid of the no-name sites, the conspiracy sites, and the rest of that crap.
I have no idea about the quality of Google News, if only because it was surpassed long ago by RSS readers, memetrackers, and proper personalized sites like Findory. However, I have noticed a lot of stories about bad sources making it into News in the last half-year, which would indicate that there have been some weakening of Google’s inclusion criteria.
From Elinor Mills:
The criteria for evaluating sources for Google News includes: regular updates to the posted content; the source is an organization and not an individual; the content does not include hate speech or pornography; and the source conducts editorial reviews of the content, [Google spokeswoman Sonya] Boralv said. In addition, the source’s Web site needs to be “technically conducive to inclusion,” she said.
Why doesn’t Google take advantage of all the data being indexed by Google Blogsearch to determine which sources are credible? After all, at the higher levels, the top-linked sources are almost always legitimate (the British media notwithstanding).
