Blogging

Mippin, a mobile feed reading service I looked at back in late 2007, has undergone a world of change in the last 10 months. On Tuesday night, the site is launching a new version aimed specifically at iPhone users–a growing segment of the market which will soon be even larger with the forthcoming release of the 3G model.

This new version follows in the footsteps of older iterations, but has been tweaked to fit the screen a little better, as well as deliver an overall performance increase in page load times. The company has also laid the groundwork for an upcoming recommendation system (launching in just a few weeks) that will learn from and adapt to your daily reading habits to give you suggestions of blogs and stories you should be looking at. This new system is based not only on keywords and previous reading history, but what other users have been reading and subscribing to.

Earlier Tuesday, I spoke with Mippin co-Founder Scott Beaumon about this new version, along with what’s changed since I last looked at the product. Beaumon says that in 10 months Mippin has gone from covering 1,500 to 2,000 sites to tracking more than 92,000. From those, it’s accumulated 12 million articles that can be searched in Mippin’s story index.

One other thing that Beaumon is really excited about is how Mippin now handles the media found in blog posts. Besides pictures, audio and video regularly make their way into blog posts. Mippin would previously ignore this type of content. The new version will now convert Flash videos via a third-party service (in the background while you continue to browse), as well as natively play any audio files that have been embedded in posts. I gave it a spin on a non-YouTube video earlier–and while slow on EDGE it should be fairly nimble on the newer 3G handset or a hearty Wi-Fi connection.

The company has put together a comparison video of reading an RSS feed in Mippin compared with how long it takes to visit the normal page using gadget blog Engadget as a control. They’re calling it the Pepsi challenge, but I think a far fairer comparison would be to stack it up against Google Reader for the iPhone, which can accomplish a similar feat albeit without the back and forth buttons to skip articles.

Another major difference between the two is that you can set Mippin up to act as a mobile Web start page, with a select group of feeds you want to read, along with customizable content Widgets (a la iGoogle). Google Reader mobile offers no such feat, but does let you open up several articles at a time on the same page. Beaumon says the team is working on an upcoming developer platform to let people create widgets for the start page element of the site, and share them in a centralized directory–something that should be popping up in the future.

I’ve embedded the Pepsi challenge video below.

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Mobile feed reader Mippin gets iPhone flavor

BuzzFeed, a startup trend-tracking site, has received $3.5 million in its first round of funding, the company said Tuesday.

New York-based BuzzFeed tracks and delivers the content that is grabbing the most eyeballs on the Internet. Hearst Interactive Media and Softback were among the group of investors.

Sure, the company sounds like another Digg clone. What’s different about BuzzFeed is that it doesn’t rely on votes to determine the popularity of a video, blog, or photo.

The company blends click tracking with its own algorithm and human editors to figure out which piece of content is about to go viral.

Jonah Peretti, one of the founders of The Huffington Post, was among those behind BuzzFeed and he says that the company is in the information business.

For example, advertisers can use BuzzFeed’s data to see how their ads are faring among Internet users or to spot emerging trends. That kind of data could conceivably help clothing companies stay on top of the latest fashions.

BuzzFeed was founded in Oct. 2006 and now has a million unique monthly visitors.

Continued here:
Trend tracking site BuzzFeed gets $3.5 million in funding

BuzzFeed, a start-up trend-tracking site, has received $3.5 million in its first round of funding, the company said Tuesday.

New York-based BuzzFeed tracks and delivers the content that is grabbing the most eyeballs on the Internet. Hearst Interactive Media and Softback were among the group of investors.

Sure, the company sounds like another Digg clone. What’s different about BuzzFeed is that it doesn’t rely on votes to determine the popularity of a video, blog, or photo.

The company blends click tracking with its own algorithm and human editors to figure out which piece of content is about to go viral.

Jonah Peretti, one of the founders of The Huffington Post, was among those behind BuzzFeed and he says that the company is in the information business.

For example, advertisers can use BuzzFeed’s data to see how their ads are faring among Internet users or to spot emerging trends. That kind of data could conceivably help clothing companies stay on top of the latest fashions.

BuzzFeed was founded in October 2006 and now has a million unique monthly visitors.

Read the original post:
Trend-tracking site BuzzFeed gets $3.5 million in funding

Flickr on Tuesday entered a partnership with Getty Images to offer its users a way to potentially make money off their photography.

The Yahoo-owned photo-hosting community will be a new resource for Getty, which can now contact Flickr members directly through the site and ask them if they want to share one or more of their images for use in a special Flickr-branded Getty collection.

Flickr members interested in getting their images featured in the special Getty gallery will have to simply wait to be contacted. Otherwise, Getty and Flickr are encouraging aspiring photographers to post their content on the Getty-owned iStockphoto, which also happens to have been a hotbed for Flickr photos in the past.

Flickr-hosted images that have been chosen to be included in the new collection will get a special button with an option to purchase a microstock license via Getty. This will jump users to a page where they can pick which size they want, along with options to pay for it on the spot.

In order to get paid and allow their images to be used, Flickr members must sign a Getty Images contributor contract, which stipulates that the photographer is the owner, and has any necessary model releases and originals. It also outlines the various rates based on size and intended commercial usage.

Those rates, not yet available, are likely to follow some of Getty’s standard rates. As part of the deal, Yahoo will be getting a cut of the revenue, though neither company is disclosing how much that would be.

The move is a special deal for Flickr, which currently does not allow for commercial transactions on the site outside of using partners for services such as photo printing. It’s long been expected that Flickr would get around to implementing a system like this, if only to take advantage of the size of its collection, which averages thousands of user uploads every minute.

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Select Flickr photos to sell via Getty license

Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets service went down for approximately 45 minutes earlier this morning.

The service, Google’s online productivity suite, went from having some features not working, like the log-out button and the document creation drop-down menu, to coming up with a 404 page.

The downtime calls into question the importance that online Web applications play in business use, as well as how Google’s free document services have come to replace software solutions such as Microsoft Office for some users or teams that use Google’s real-time collaboration features.

As a reminder, outages for Google Results should not result in data loss. Google’s GFS (Google File System) backup method is one of the most rigorous systems used by any data host. As I mentioned in a post from last year, a lost copy of your data on one server is backed up in a dozen other places, so you won’t even notice.

The rest is here:
Google Docs goes down, user data does not