There are so many user generated video sites available on the internet these days, but sometimes you might not want to see user generated content. Thus, I thought I would put together a very quick list of the best places to view the news online as if you were watching it direct from your television at home.
Livestation – Livestation is a free downloadable video players that streams live news, events, shows from some of the world biggest media companies. Livestation includes services like the BBC, CNN, Fox, MTV, Al Jazeera and more. The service is easy to download and it great to use. The player itself can be changed to any size and you are able to add additional news and radio sources that can be found on the Livestation website.
BBC iPlayer – The BBC iPlayer has been around for quite some time now, and even though they got a lot of harsh press at launch they have been quitely improving the service and it actually now isnt that bad. The iPlayer is a great place to head when you are looking for what has been happening from around the world in the last few days. On the iPlayer they have a dedicated section to BBC News in which will keep you up to date with the major headlines.
Hulu – Hulu is a partnership between News Corp and NBC Universal. Hulu is for USA users only at the moment and it allows them to watch their favourite TV shows, movies and of course news programs all for free. Hulu was born when News Corp and NBC werent happy with the revenues they were receiving from YouTube, so they formed a strategic alliance and launched a free online television service that has been growing at a rapid pace. Hulu has a dedicated news section which allows users to view news from major USA sources as well as smaller sources like Cnet.
Over the last few days there has been a lot of talk and discussion surrounding Ashton Kutcher and CNN. First he manages to get almost as many followers on Twitter as CNN (almost 900K). Then he challenges CNN to a race to get to 1 million followers first. If he wins, he’ll “”ding dong ditch” Ted Turner’s house.
This made me think a bit about Ashton and his original tech startup the Blah Girls. Blah Girls launched with a lot of press and publicity (mainly due to Techcrunch and Michael Arrington), but now it seems to be a very basic gossip blog with a cartoon attached.
Blah Girls produce a weekly vidoe who is pretty much a catoon spoof. The videos are very well develop and quite cool. However, these videos and Blah Girls in general doesnt seem to be getting much traction at all. The Blah Girls Youtube channel has over 3,500 subscribers but each video seems to be lucky to get more than 1000 plays. Plus for some reason YouTube has given Blah Girls a partner page, but they dont seem to meet the requirements of being a YouTube partner (apart from the fact that Ashton is quite well known).
Back to the site itself it seem that is had an initial push at launch but then has been slowly growing at the same pace as a normal gossip blog. The site has a great design, but there seems to be a huge gap of white space between the video section and where the actual blog starts. Ashton I really think you need to take a look at the design and try to piece it all together a bit better. Additionally, Ashton why arent you twittering about Blah Girls on your Twitter stream? Im sure 1m followers will really help you in pushing your site to the next level faster, plus you have a benefit that no other gossip blog has, your already bloody famous!
For the last two years we have been developing RouteNote at Insomnia Media, and in that time have been closely keeping an eye on digital music news and where the shift is going. I thought I would write a quick post and let everyone know my favourite digital music blogs to follow.
Hypebot – Hypebot is written by Bruce Houghton and is a daily report on the last news in the digital music space. Bruce is also the founder and president of Skyline Music (booking agency) and Skyline Consultancy in which he is a music and technology consultant to many music startups.
Digital Music News – Digital Music News is the news and information authority for music industry and technology executives. Digital Music News is founded and edited by Paul Resnikoff. Paul writes daily posts on Digital Music News and also send out a dialy newsletter to industry executives called the Daily Snapshot.
Billboard.biz – Billboard.biz is the digital music arm of the Billboard website. Billboard.biz discusses digital music news with normally at least 10 articles per day. Articles on Billboard.biz don’t just come straight from the USA they as encompass International digital music news, so that you get the full picture.
Digital Audio Insider – Digital Audio Insider is written by David Harrell, who writes digital music news from an artists perspective. David is in a band based in the UK and they use all kinds of different digital music stores and partners to sell/stream their music, and David’s writings are a great insight into what the average artist is thinking and what they are looking for.
Coolfer – Glenn Peoples has worked in the music industry for over eight years and founded Coolfer.com while working and living in New York City. Coolfer was a total ad free blog which is pretty unheard of these days. A week or so ago Glenn announced on his site that he would stop writing because he was offered a new job over at Billboard.biz asSenior Editorial Analyst, so you can now read his work over there.
Today we have added a new feature on Crenk that we hope will help many other blogs promote their great content. This new feautre is called Community News. The Community News section can be found in our sidebar and it is basically a submission process that lets any user advise us of a great blog post.
The articles that will be shown in our Community News section will be related to startups and will either be great start lists or reviews. We hope that by adding links into our Community News section other sites will get some great promotion and traffic, while at the same time receive a linkback from our site.
Submissions to the Community News section is completely free and only takes a minute to submit. So please feel free to help us promote some of the best content on the web.
Why Did I Start VOIS? Why Did We Launch The First Social Sourcing Site Now?
There are a lot of bad websites out there. A lot.
Websites with 8-bit graphics seemingly ripped from Atari games, with laughable copy errors that immediately diminish credibility, and with such awful usability that you need a Dr. Phil intervention to calm down after surfing through the third-rate portals.
This is one reason I co-founded VOIS.com (pronounced VOICE), or Virtual Outsourcing is Social. Not only can VOIS’ collaborative approach to completing projects produce superior results – from slickly branded and intuitive websites to fun, traffic-churning widgets – but it can also make it more affordable for businesses.
Don’t get me wrong; this is not the business owners’ faults. As a blogger for a major food website, I can say first hand that these are good people with the best of intentions. But just because someone knows how to make donuts, pizza or surfboards, it doesn’t mean they should know how to create a compelling online storefront. And hiring expensive firms on retainer often isn’t a workable business model for small and medium-sized businesses, or even larger firms that don’t have the bandwidth to handle their current business needs.
That’s why VOIS seeks to connect clients with expert Web professionals – from designers to developers and copywriters – to work on a project basis. What separates us from other business match-making platforms is that we allow and encourage the clients and talent to get to know each other first by exploring robust online profiles and messaging back and forth.
Click-and-mortar, web-driven start-ups have also had to change their game plan, and VOIS was developed for these businesses, too. With start-up capital tougher and tougher to attract, it’s no longer feasible for someone to hire developer and a CTO, build an infrastructure from scratch, then roll out and ramp up a product. I’ve met many people who have burned through $500,000 before looking at a more cost-efficient way of doing things.
And I really feel VOIS is that new way of doing things. We’re keeping VOIS wide open in terms of the scope of projects we accommodate – no niche focus or specialized tunnel vision. This will help us attract more users and offer truly turnkey solutions for our users.
So as the VOIS community grows, fueled by this added interpersonal dimension, I look forward at seeing some truly amazing work forged through the power of online collaboration. In other words, no more bad websites, or half-completed start-ups that could have been the next big thing.
There aren’t very many social media applications yet on the iPhones that are based around social news or social bookmarking. Digg has a an unofficial app which is much improved than the last unofficial app that was in the iTunes App Store which is no longer available. Delicious has quite a few apps that are decent but lack a few important features. Disappointingly, StumbleUpon doesn’t have any applications and neither does Mixx or Yahoo! Buzz.
Reddit is currently leading with three apps to make the mobile experience much more enjoyable. One of theirs is an official app from the Reddit creators themselves. Will Digg be releasing an official app soon?
I’ve taken the liberty to do a review of the three Reddit apps and Digg app that are in the iTune App Store. I am in no way associated with any of these apps, know any of the owners, or am promoting any of them in any fashion. This is merely a review from an avid Reddit and Digg user with a love for social news and social media.
Shovel is an app that provides top stories from the social news website Digg.com in a native application. Browse the front page stories, or delve deeper into an array of topics and subtopics of interest.
Personal Review:
Shovel is a great application for viewing Digg.com content easily on the iPhone. Overall, the design and interface is pretty clean and simple. It gives you a variety of topics and listings to select to view so you can access all of the content on Digg.com. You can view:
Popular Stories
Top Stories
Movers & Shakers
Brand New Stories
All listings are applicable to any category or sub-category in Digg.com. If you select a Digg story you can then scroll down the commentary to see what people are saying, who’s replied, how many votes each comment has received, etc. After that, you can click further to view the story live on the Web. Which is nice about it is that it doesn’t load Safari as a separate app to view the content so there’s no back-and-forth between the apps.
Unfortunately, what you cannot participate in digging, burying, or commenting through this application. The developer disclaims, “Now we’ve gotten the message loud and clear that the one thing that would turn this 3.5 star app (currently 3 stars) into a 5 star one is the interactivity of the original Digg site. You guys (and gals) want to be able to Digg, comment, and bury, and who can blame you? Right now, however, there is no way to do this using the legitimate Digg APIs, and quite frankly, it makes us sad. I’ve been trying to court the help of Digg in making this app all that it can be, and if you want to help that along, you should drop them a line yourselves requesting the same!”
Another drawback is that you cannot personalize this application because there is no way to login. Therefore you can’t weed out content you don’t want to see, view your account profile, see your friend’s submissions, etc.
In doing some research the Shovel app used to be named “Diggerific”. Apparently, they have changed the name of it and redid the UI just a bit as you can tell from the video review of Diggerific below:
Overview
Pros
Easy to use
Clean interface
Ability to access all Digg content
Cons
Free of charge
Can’t Digg, comment, or bury content
No Digg account profile/community features or functionality
The official Reddit iPhone app. Never be bored again. With this app, you’ll only be a tap (or shake) away from the most interesting stuff on the web.
All of your favorite Reddit functionality is here: view the hottest, newest, top, and most controversial stories of the moment, explore, individual subreddits, vote, comment, share, and save links for later. The entire commenting system has been optimized for the iPhone app so you won’t have any trouble contributing to an epic pun thread.
Save time by never having to reload the Reddit homepage. You can even use handy next/previous navigation to move between websites without going back to the main list. And those sites work in portrait and widescreen modes too.
It’s never been easier to be entertained. Just shake your iPhone to enter “serendipity mode” where you’ll be served a random, interesting site. Pro-tip: Turn on “play sound on shake” for a special treat with every jostle — the iPhone is an elegant phone for a more sophisticated age.
And if you’re feeling the economic downturn (what are you doing with an iPhone?) there’s a tree, ad-supported version to come.
Personal Review:
The Official Reddit application is pretty cool. You can input your username and password so that you can vote and comment on stories. Initially, you come to the Reddit homepage. Along the top you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Top”, and “Controversial” stories. When selecting a story, there is an overlay on the footer that allows you to upvote/downvote the story, go to the comments section of the story, save the story, and email the link.
Three subreddits will fit on the bottom bar overlay that you can quickly navigate to. You can edit the subreddits with the ones you want to use the most, but you only have a small selection of subreddit’s to swap out with. Those subreddits are:
Programming
Funny
Science
Tech
World News
Entertainment
Business
Comics
Gaming
Best Of
Economics
Cappuccino
It is the most expensive application but I feel it’s the cleanest and easiest to use. Unfortunately, you can’t browse all subreddits and there’s no search function. Nor is there a function to view your account’s saves, karma points, submissions, comments, etc.
I would recommend this app to anyone looking to quickly and easily view Reddit news, vote, and participate in the more popular subreddits. The free Reddit app doesn’t allow for this.
Overview
Pros
Easily vote on stories from the actual story page
Save links to view/read later
Comment participation
Customization of footer subreddits
Cons
Most expensive Reddit app
Not a wide-range of subreddits to customize on your footer
The Reddit application allows users to view the stories from www.reddit.com without having to deal with loading massive webpages. It displays the stories in a nice table view, providing details about each submission, and allows the user to easily view the submitted content. The ability to vote on a submission is currently being added.
Personal Review:
This app is very bare bones with very limited functionality. If you’re looking to vote on stories or participate in the comments this app isn’t for you. If you’re just looking to read “Hot” news from a select few subreddits then this is a good app for the cost of nothing. The included subreddits to choose from are:
reddit.com
bacon
politics
pics
WTF
funny
technology
programming
The nice thing about it is that it’s open source and the developer leaves it open for people to add on what they want to it. Hopefully, in the future, this will be a great application for Reddit.
Satellite 2.0 is now available and brings a host of improvement to the mobile Reddit experience.
Change in this version includes:
Greatly improved performance
New, Controversial, and Top views are available for all subreddits
An overlay displaying the full article title and comments count shows while loading an article
The subreddit list is reorderable
A beautiful new icon and splash screen have been added
New lower pricing.
Satellite is a full-featured client for Reddit.com, a social link aggregation site. With Satellite, you can browse links appearing on the front page or drill down into the Subreddits you are subscribed to. When viewing an article you can vote the link up or down, save it to your Reddit account, or share the link with others. With the click of a button, you can shift into commenting mode to browse comments or post your own back to the Reddit page about the link. The interface provides a substantially more streamlined experience over the mobile Reddit site and incorprates the unique capabilities of the iPhone to make your day to day Reddit’ing much more fun.
Additional Satellite features include:
Shake the app at any time to explore random content from Reddit
Next/previous buttons are available at the screen edges to move through content without returning to list view
Full portrait/landscape modes, including upside down. Great for handing the phone across the dinner table to share your discoveries!
Returns to the content you were browsing at start-up. Pick up right where you left off when that call came in.
Highly addictive content discovery available anywhere, at any time!
Personal Review:
This app is definitely worth the 99 cents. After entering in your login information you can view ALL of your subscribed subreddits. It also gives you an option to edit your subreddits for your account. After selecting a subreddit you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Controversial”, and “Top” categories in the footer bar. Once selecting a story, it takes you to the story and overlays the story title, submitter, and point count. At the bottom footer you can choose to vote, go to comments, save the link, or email the link. Again though, there’s no search feature with this app either.
This app is a lot like the official iReddit app except it’s more personalized. You can also view your saved Reddits on your account to follow up on how your saves and submissions are doing.
Finding quality articles can be time consuming in today’s era where we are hooked to reading interesting and worthwhile info on topics we like. Regator is such an aggregator portal which searches and provides interesting articles and latest news and happenings in technology, health, entertainment, sports, and latest happenings in business and finance sector, all organized and categorized at one place.
Regator is a portal where you can find links to various interesting article published on web from time to time. So you don’t have to search and keep looking for an hour for something useful and interesting to read. The Site has various categories where you can find articles of that niche and click on the link to read it. Actually regator has a team of few people who work to search these articles from sites and blogs that provide quality content and put them at one place for people to read.
You can even search posts and articles on your favorite reality shows or episodes. There is a ’search’ and even ‘advanced search’ feature for you to search for specific reviews of products like your favorite ‘iPhone’ or cool new ‘Nokia N97’ and you will find tons of posts on it. Also you can register on site and rate the posts you read on regator and the highest rated articles are shown on the front page of regator, just like the other social bookmarkers like Digg. You can personalize a lot on regator including organizing, saving and rating your favorite articles and posts.
Not only does it have article search but also audio and video posts for those who like watching more than reading. If you specifically like reading content from blog, they also have that search category – ‘Blog results’ on front page. Regator has nearly 2 millions posts archived by them till now. Its actually archiving the best of weblogs content and presenting it in a organized and searchable way.
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Sagar Trapasia from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog.
Comfy news theme is a free news / magazine style theme for WordPress. It looks really clean, stunning and professional. Comfy comes with many features, some of them are basic magazine features such as dropdown navigation, feedburner subscription, advertisement spots, featured entries, ajax tabs, widget-ready, gravatars built-in, and more.
Torrent giant The Pirate Bay has launched an interactive map showing where people are seeding and leeching torrents around the world, with data for every country giving a percentage of users, and how many connections are going through that country.
It’s a Google Maps mash-up, which is already serving up some fascinating data. “In the near future more statistics will be added, such as the type of BitTorrent clients people use, and the average download and upload speeds per region,” claims TorrentFreak, which reported the news.
US music site Jango announced the launch of Jango Music Network (JMN), dubbing it as the world’s largest and most targeted cost-effective ad network for the music vertical.
The current JMN inventory of music sites reach a collective total of 30 million unique monthly visitors in the US alone. JMN also features a unique methodology that maps brand preference to musical taste and uses it to help advertisers target audiences that will be particularly receptive to their brand.
Techcrunch has changed their theme yet again. A few months ago the theme was changed for the 3rd time in a year and I thought it was really moving in the right direction. The navigation was clean, there were a lot more options to find the articles you are looking for, and the theme had some colour and character.
Techcrunch today have launched a new theme which keeps the same navigation principles but totally gets rid of all the character and colour on the page.
have burned through $500,000 before looking at a more cost-efficient way of doing things.
(at the time of writing)
