Feed Pile is a relatively new project that lets you combine a collection of feeds into one, and new content from them is displayed in your Feed Pile page. It even creates an RSS feed with the latest news from the pile, and an OPML file so that you can import the feed collection into your reader of choice.
I created an example here that combines five of the Google news blogs that I read most often. Give it a whirl.
CNN has a new video service called CNN Pipeline, that lets you view any of four daily live video feeds. Each day they pick the four most interesting commercial free live streams, and for $2.95 a month or $24.95 a year you can view them. There is a free two-week trial, or you can get a day pass for 0.99 cents that lets you access the service for 24 hours.
I’m tempted to try this out, but when CNN originally announced it on their channel I imagined it was completely free. And then I wondered how they could afford to make a service like this available for free. Well that answers that question.
It seems that Starz has just launched a new movie download service. Vongo is available for a monthly subscription of $9.99 and will include 1,000 movies and short films. Their website is up and running, and it has some very creative flash guides to learning more about the service. You can even view a free movie clip. The service seems to be geared more toward portable devices and it uses Microsoft video files, but it is the dream service I always wanted. The flash commercial explained that movies are available almost as soon as they leave the theaters on Vongo, but for a pay-per-view fee of $3.99.
Source: PaidContent.org
Update: From the Vongo license agreement: “Except for Pay Per View Content, each Content file downloaded will allow you to have 10 24-hour periods to view the Content, provided that the Content does not otherwise expire due to availability. You can view the file as many times as you like during each 24-hour period. If you use up all 10-24 hour viewing periods, you can always download additional copies of the Content, and thereby obtain an additional 10 24 hour viewing periods. ” And Pay Per View Content lasts for 1 24-hour period. Also you may not have more than 10 Content files in your download list. If you transfer a file to a device you can then download more, but the file will expire after a set time and be unusable.
It seems to me that the devil is in the details. It remains to be seen how restrictive these rules turn out to be for a Vongo customer, but it may not be as great a service as I thought.
Topix has been redesigned with a cleaner look. No longer does it look like a bad local newspaper. They are a news aggregator similar to Google News. They are now enabling visitors to comment on news stories, and when you hover over a tag you can see the 3 most recent articles in that tag.
Via SiliconBeat
AOL is beta testing a new feed reader. You can check it out here. Some of their preset feeds are powered by Feedster, such as the News one and the Blogs one.
It’s a fairly uneventful test, that looks like it is trying to be Start.com. But without any extra bells and whistles it’s just another meaningless feed reader that offers no great features. Though they do let you copy your feeds to another computer with a special URL. And they now have the ability to let you search for a feed, but this again is powered by Feedster.
On a personal note, I created the logo for Feedster and never received a penny even after they started rolling in cash. Oh well. C’est la vie.
Tags: AOL
Philip Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped recently unveiled a new site called Forty Faces. It is a novel idea that displays a blogger’s photo when he or she posts something new on their own site. Forty Faces runs off of a list of bloggers who chose to be added to the site, and the 40 most recent posts are displayed and updated every half hour.
It’s a great idea and it really makes the posts more personable as they are tied to the site operator’s identity. It could be abused if the quality of the included bloggers degrades. Personally, I don’t want to flood the site with meaningless posts on the changes I make here at Shiwej.com. So if I start doing that again you can just ignore my face when it pops up.
Frappr integrates Google Maps with an easy-to-use interface to setup your own map and allow people to add themselves as points on the map. “Frappr (Friend Mapper) lets you see the zip code where your friends live or work, letting you find out who works in the office building next door and who lives in the apartment complex across the street.”
I found out about this cool new site a few days ago, and it has taken-off so much recently that they setup a domain for it. Check out Frappr and check out the Shiwej.com Frappr.
I first heard about YouTube a few days ago when it was announced that they received funding, but I never really looked at it until coolz0r posted one of the videos on his blog. YouTube does for video what Flickr did for photos. What differentiates YouTube from Google Video is their focus on building a social network. You can rate videos, you can view other videos by the same users, you can contact the video’s submitter, you can leave comments, and you can see who has been linking to a given video (uses a blog ping type system). YouTube has been around for a while, but I only now found it.
Now if only the videos weren’t mostly from teenagers. It just feels wrong to watch their videos, even though there is no inappropriate content. Dancing like that should be illegal.
Tags: YouTube
Yahoo has released a new beta to allow you to easily find Podcasts of interest to you. The site design of Yahoo! Podcasts is one of the most colorful and creative to come out of Yahoo, and their integration of user-created reviews makes the service that much better. You can easily subscribe to Podcasts as the site opens up a file in your client of choice, either Yahoo! Music or iTunes. Or you can listen to the latest Podcast in your browser (though it hasn’t been working for me; it keeps asking me to download the mp3 instead). They even have a nice to tutorial on how to publish your own Podcast.
The best feature has to be the tagging that allows you to easily add tags to any Podcast, and they size tags by how popular they are. This is a great use of social tagging and it really seems to shine in this service. Go check out a search for “technology” or check out Diggnation.
Tags: Yahoo
By now you may have heard of 30Gigs, a new email service that promises to deliver big. If you haven’t then you aren’t missing much. The mail service itself is a rebranded Squirrelmail installation that says it offers 30GB of space. Time will tell as to whether or not this is true, and how long they can keep it up. The service seems to perform well, but aside from the promised space it doesn’t currently offer anything that would differentiate itself from the other email offerings out there.
First person to go here gets an account.
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