Tag Archives: user

Hulu Captions Search a Preview of General Video Search to Come?

Hulu has a new captions search feature available via Hulu Labs. The feature allows Hulu users to search the captions of videos across hundreds of different shows. Show and video pages now have a "Captions" tab, and search can be found there. "Recently I watched an episode of House, and they made a funny joke about the resemblance between Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps) and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment of within the episode," says Hulu's Eugene Wei. "With the new caption search, I just type in 'mike tomlin', and voila." Users can hover their cursors over images to get quick previews. It will show a short segment of a video centered around the search term. This will play in the thumbnail. This is a good example of how video search is going to be improving significantly. YouTube, the world's most popular video site (and 2nd largest search engine) recently announced that it would be including automatic captions on videos . This makes videos much more searchable as far as dialogue goes. "One bonus that comes with caption search is what we're calling the heat map. This is a visual graph of the user interest throughout the span of a video and is available on any captioned video that has accumulated enough user views," says Wei. "It appears at the top of the captions tab for those videos. We analyze a variety of viewer behaviors to generate the heat map." The heat map can be used as a navigation tool, and to find popular segments of video. Wei talks a bit more about the heat map aspect here . Hulu's Caption search is still just a beta feature, so it is subject to imperfections. The site is openly encouraging feedback via feedback@hulu.com. Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged Business, coach mike tomlin, dr foreman, house, hulu, imperfections, search-captions, user, video site | Leave a comment

Hulu Adds New Options to the Queue

Popular online video destination Hulu has added a new default view for the user's queue. The new view groups all videos within the queue by show. In the past, users could only sort everything by show by clicking on the title and information column. "As we've added more content and as users' queues have grown in size, grouping by show as a default was a logical update," says Eugene Wei VP, Product at Hulu. With the new layout, there are two display options. One of them is a vertical text list of videos for each show, and the other shows them more visually with thumbnails, horizontally. You can see both displays below. Both views contain a link that says "Play All," which will allow users to simply play the videos in order from oldest to most recently aired. "As before, clicking on any video within a show in your queue will activate continuous play, but in this new 'group by show' view, we’ll only play through all the videos from that particular show," notes Wei. In addition to the new display options for the queue, Hulu has made it easier to add entire seasons of shows. On show pages, there is now a link that says "+ all". Clicking this will have a whole season of a how queued up for you. Related Articles: > Hulu Adds "Coming Soon" Page > Hulu Launches 2 New Labs Features > Hulu Makes Changes to Search Results Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged default view, hulu, particular-show, play-the-videos, product-at-hulu, queue, queues, search, search-results, thumbnail, thumbnail-view, user | Leave a comment

Lime Wire’s Plans for Working with the Music Industry

Earlier this year, we spoke with Lime Wire CEO George Searle about the music industry and the company's future, as it offers one of the most widely used file sharing services. Now we have engaged in a Q&A with Zeeshan Zaidi, who came to Lime Wire as the company's Head of Global in July, with a background as a record label executive, a musician, and a lawyer. WebProNews: We're told the LimeWire software has been translated into Arabic and will soon be translated into Persian, while the software and website are translated into a total of 23 languages. How are languages chosen and what does this means for the global peer to peer community? Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged 50 million, amp, Business, languages, limewire, middle-east, network, north africa, plans, searle, time, torrent, user, videos | Leave a comment

New APIs Should Help MySpace Stay Relevant

MySpace has announced a new set of APIs . These include APIs for real-time streaming, status and mood commenting, open search, photo uploading, and an updated version of the post to/share API. "MySpace sees huge value in real-time data and believes sharing it will mature the socialization of content on the Web," said MySpace COO Mike Jones. "MySpace is building the next-generation content distribution platform and is opening up our floodgate of public data for developers to make compelling real-time experiences around the Web." The Real-Time Stream API allows the full MySpace activity stream to be pushed to third party sites in real-time. It is already being used by Google, OneRiot, and GroovyCorp. "MySpace made it really easy to integrate public MySpace data into our search engine," said Tobias Peggs, GM of OneRiot. "With access to this real-time data, we’re offering more comprehensive and meaningful search results to our users." "MySpace users are making a huge contribution to the realtime, social web by sharing millions of links with their friends each day," said Peggs. "We're delighted to have access to that information through the MySpace Real-Time Stream API." We've already seen what Google is doing : The Status and Mood Commenting API lets third party sites use MySpace status and mood updates and allows people to comment from those sites. Comments then appear in the user's MySpace activity stream, and users can interact with that stream without leaving the third party site. The Open Search API allows third party sites to include public MySpace profile information in search results. Users can search for people by name, profile type (such as musician, celebrity, comedian) or email address and filter search results by gender, age and location. The Photo Upload API lets users upload photos to MySpace from third party sites or MySpace Apps. It also enables creation of public or private photo albums. The updated version of the Post To/Share on MySpace API allows for the sharing of content from third party sites with a MySpace user's friends. When a user posts content from another site, it goes directly to his/her MySpace activity stream, creating a link back to the third party site. MySpace is even going so far as to host a " developer challenge " competition starting January 4 to encourage developers to come up with some cool apps utilizing the APIs. Developers will have the chance to win cash prizes and promotion on MySpace. These MySpace APIs could go a long way in keeping MySpace relevant in the era of Facebook and Twitter. Frankly, they are long overdue. The APIs mean that there can be a lot more useful apps implementing more functionality with MySpace. That means more ways users can keep using it. This and MySpace's acquisition of imeem could be huge for the future of the social network. Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged activity-stream, apis, application development, mike jones, realtime, time stream, tobias peggs, user | Leave a comment

Google Adds DNS To its List of Services

Google has announced the launch of a free global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, simply called Google Public DNS. People can opt-in to use this as an alternative to their current DNS provider. You do not need a Google account to use it, and it is an independent service, meaning it does not depend on any other products. Google says the service is part of its ongoing effort to make the web faster. This is an initiative that the company stresses time and time again. In its announcement, the company says : Most of us aren't familiar with DNS because it's often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another. The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can slow down the browsing experience. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable. You can read about the specific technical improvements we've made in our product documentation and get installation instructions from our product website . Privacy Google says Google Public DNS complies with the company's main privacy policy. Google collects the IP address (temporarily), ISP, and location information (in permanent logs) to make the service "faster, better, and more secure." Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged dns resolver, google-provides, google-public, independent service, layer-protocol, meaning-it-does, product documentation, provider isp, related, switchboard, unique, user | Leave a comment

Google Changes How it Handles Paid Content

Google has made a change to the way it treats its "first click free" option for publishers. The option was designed for legitimate publishers to get around Google's cloaking policies, which discourage the showing of one web page to a crawler while the user sees something different. With the policy, Google users have been able to access one article from a publication that has a pay wall in place, but are then unable to access other content via links on the site without registering. However, users have been able to get around this in the past, simply by searching for the desired piece of content and starting over from Google. Now Google has implemented a change that will only allow users to view five pages of content from such a source in a 24 hour period. In a post today on the Google News Blog, Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen explains , "If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day. We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis." "In addition to First Click Free, we offer another solution: We will crawl, index and treat as 'free' any preview pages - generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story - that they make available to us," Cohen notes. "This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it's not cloaking." Google would label stories like this as "subscription" when indexed in Google News. According to Cohen, they would rank based on the same criteria as other sites (paid or free). He points out that paid content may not rank as well, simply because of the popularity of the content. Less people are likely to link to content that requires a subscription to read, particularly if there is a similar piece of content that is available for free. Google has always favored links and it would be not different in this case. Related Articles: > Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged blocking-news, Business, business product, crawler, crawlers, josh cohen, online, paragraphs, paywalls, product-manager, street, user | Leave a comment

Making Money with Content By Covering More Ground

Those new to blogging or article writing have often been told to focus on one very niche topic. One narrow vertical. That has commonly been considered the way to gain credibility, readers, links, and ultimately traffic, which assuming the blog/site itself isn't your primary source of income, could lead to sales of your products/services. But is keeping it narrow really the best way to go? For some, it is. Another way to go would be to cover as much ground as you possibly can. Throw a wide net out there and see what you catch. Once you see what you've caught, maybe you can catch more in the same area. The thinking is that the more ground you cover, the more people you are potentially exposing your work to. It's going horizontal, rather than vertical. Do you think you could find greater success by keeping it narrow or broad? Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged algorithm, aol, content, fashion food, games sports, internet, internet auto, mea, primary source, travel gadgets, user, video-games, work, writing | Leave a comment