SUPER EMBED: Cool Discovery from within ONE Window

I've been playing around with Pearltrees' very cool "Super Embed" feature, launched this week. They'll be at the Moscone Center on Wednesday for Launch Pad, one of only 5 companies to present on-stage at Web 2.0 Expo.

Here's what I did to create the embedded Pearltree below. FREE and QUICK, I signed up for an account at Pearltrees and created a Pearltree called Down the Avenue, the name of my primary blog. Then, within the Pearltree, I created "Pearls" for about a dozen categories within my blog, largely categories of industries and areas of interests in recent years.

Next, I click on the Pearltree and hit SHARE and Voila, I'm given code to embed in my blog. It's that easy. Now, I can display one quick snapshot of a number of categories (which comprise a series of posts, articles, videos, etc) in one window, and people can view all of it without leaving my blog.

Each Pearl will take you to all the blog posts in my blog under that category. The Video Pearl will show you all the videos I've created. How cool is that?

With the onslaught of information we’re being hit with daily online, it’s impossible to keep up with content and even harder to discover or curate that content into something that is meaningful and relevant for us.

Imagine the possibilities using Pearltrees for your own blog or website. What's more, you can grab other people's Pearls and discover new people and interests within Pearltrees. This is creation, organization and curation at its best. SO, GO - Create, Envision and Explore!! Try it out.

Search & Social at The Marker’s Com.vention

The social life of the search engine: does it get any hotter than that? At The Marker Com.vention in Israel, client Answers.com CEO and founder Bob Rosenschein spoke on a panel titled, Search Engines: Steady State or a Gathering Storm?

From the Answers.com blog, Bob spoke up on the necessary mix of search engine support, as well as participation on social platforms. "The future is one where Google is certainly still strong, but social media, including Facebook, are just as important."

Other panelists included Yoelle Maarek, Senior Research Director at Yahoo! Israel; Arkady Volozh, Co-founder and CEO at Yandex; and Barak Berkowitz, Managing Director at Wolfram|Alpha.

Here’s the direct link to the video segments on the Answers.com blog, which includes links to the video segments from the panel.

Part I here. Part II embedded below. Part III here.

Pearltrees Unveils SUPER EMBED at Web 2.0 Expo

Client Pearltrees is unveiling its new “Super Embed” feature this week at Launch Pad on Wednesday afternoon at the Moscone in San Francisco. They announced their new feature and other updates in a Beta 0.7 release today at Web 2.0 Expo.

If you're not familar with Pearltrees, it's a tool that allows you to organize and curate a series of web pages quickly and easily. You can not only discover new people and interests from within Pearltrees, but you can now display, share and display those web pages as "Pearls" inside your blog or website, hence the cool and appropriate name for the new feature: "Super Embed."

With this latest release, bloggers, journalists and Internet users can identify and organize a series of web pages about a particular topic, create one ‘tree’ that houses all that content and then embed that Pearltree in their blog or website so people can view everything they have discovered about that topic in one single window – all without leaving the blog.

Additional major improvements featured in this release include a Pearltree add-on for Chrome, real-time notifications about comments a Pearltree has received, as well as when other Pearltrees’ users “pick” or subscribe to a particularly Pearltree, a simplified user interface and a new social search engine that gives users a visual representation of the relevance of search results based upon proximity. This helps users see at a glance which results are closest to their search.

Pearltrees’ latest version transforms the process of discovering, organizing and sharing the things people find on the web while enabling bloggers, journalists and other content creators to add a new level of depth and context to the articles they post online.

Easy to integrate into all sites and blogs, Pearltrees’ new beta brings transforms web navigation and discovery. Simply click on the Pearltree you want to embed, click share and you are given options to share in Facebook, Twitter, or to embed directly into your blog, customizeable by size.

WHY THE SUPER EMBED WILL MATTER TO BLOGGERS & JOURNALISTS

For writers, users can discover a series of web pages and explore them in-depth without ever leaving your site. Users are exposed to a complete experience about a topic in one easy-to-navigate window.

With readers spending more time on your site, you have more time to engage with them and build a deeper relationship.

Easy-to-use, simply copy an HTML code from Pearltrees, not unlike you would grab HTML code from YouTube, and paste it into your site or blog. One click activates the window and simple arrows permit navigation from one page to the other. Suggested downloads are clearly signposted so you can start using it within minutes.

WHY PEARLTREES SUPER EMBED WILL MATTER TO THE REST OF US

There is simply too much content in too many places on the Web and while various engines help filter what you’re looking for, user-generated content, aggregators and contributors such as Yelp, Digg and more, can only get you so far. While useful, they do not curate the web for you nor do they allow you to participate in the curation process.

Smart curation online is necessary in the next generation of the web – users will demand smarter ways to find content and services that help them save time and find their passions and interests faster and easier.

SOCIAL SYSTEM & SEARCH

When you pearl the same pages or use a Pearltree (part of another user account), you construct your account of course and automatically constitute your “interest graph”. Simultaneously, a search engine explores which connections already exist between users. Therefore, when a search is launched, you are presented with suggested Pearltrees which are relevant and of interest to your world.

Pearltrees addresses web curation by enabling anyone to individually organize their web and extend it to other people’s organization of the web. By doing so, you can discover new content from people with common interests.

Check out a couple of bloggers who have used the "Super Embed" feature to show the power of curation and discovery with Pearltrees: Michelle Kraus from Huffington Post uses an embedded Pearltree to show article references for her article and Beth Blecherman shows Parent Online Content in an embedded Pearltree on her TechMamas blog (moms and dads alike).

Answers.com Unveils New Twitter Hoopoe Service

Answers.com unveiled a new Twitter service code-named called Hoopoe this morning at the 140 Character Conference in New York.

Answers.com Hoopoe, now in alpha, delivers instant instant to users who tweet their questions to @AnswersDotCom or include the hashtag #answersdotcom. Answers.com will search for a good match and offer a reply with a snippet and link to the full answer, if available.

People are spending more time communicating through Twitter and other social media, so it's a perfect extension to Answers.com service on the web. Some example tweets might be:

• @AnswersDotCom What is Jim Carrey’s Twitter username?

• @AnswersDotCom - What caused the Eyjafjallokull volcano in Iceland to erupt?

• @AnswersDotCom Who is Ashton Kutcher?

Since its currently in alpha, they would love to receive feedback on the service, and for you to follow them on Twitter.TechCrunch covered the announcement and here's a quirky, fun demo of the Hoopoe service on YouTube.

Media Post's OMMA Behavioral: #answers @answersdotcom

Media Post's OMMA Behavioral series kicks off 2010 with a hands-on exploration of best practices.

Panel topics include:

Offline and Online Data: Match Made in Heaven

Which Data Finds the Right Audience

Thoughts on Agency Operations in a Exploded Media World

Building the Better Attribution Model

Make Behavioral Targeting Drive Sales and Revenue for Your Brands

Today in New York, client Answers.com Bruce Smith is on a panel titled: When Data Drives Publishing, together with Saul Hansell with AOL's seed.com, Patrick Keane from Associated Content, DemandMedia's and Josh Stinchcomb with Conde Nast Digital.

Other questions the event will address include: How are media buyers judging its effectiveness and using it in concert with online data? How are planners actually triaging the data to find the right audiences this year? Where are we seeing and how are we measuring real-world ROI?

“Attribution” has become the new holy grail of marketing mixes, but how are planners actually modeling effectiveness now? We talked a lot about privacy in recent months, but now real policies and plans for speaking with consumers about their won data finally are in the field.

Pearltrees Delivers Real-Time Human Curation of the Web: Feature Updates

Pearltrees, the first human-organized network of interests on the web, unveiled a number of new features today, to manage your own web - instantaneously, in just two clicks.

Users organize their interests and passions on the web using intuitive drag and drop functionality, while discovering new information from people who share common interests.

Client Pearltrees now offers users an experience closer to how humans manage items in real life. For example, the “pearls” in Pearltrees represent the Web content a user finds interesting.

Below is a search that I did on consciousness. The window pop-up on the left shows my results and I can dive deeper into a user's pearls depending on the number of hits they received or more importantly, where my interest interjects with theirs. By clicking on a pearltree, a whole new world opens up for me to devour. I can add some of this user's content to my own, or create new content from what I learn by exploring his pearls and so on.

Much more than just bookmarks, pearls are Web objects that can be manipulated. I find this feature addictive. I can organize pearls by dragging and dropping in just a few clicks and suddenly I have created a "new story." Users also can organize and reorganize accounts instantly without the need to tag and re-tag to keep and retrieve new content.

When users pearl online content, it appears instantly on their pearltree and is visible to all other Pearltrees users. A key component to Pearltrees is that users organize their own web of interests in real time, similar to how we organize information outside of the digital world.

Unlike a traditional social network, users can connect through specific interests, not friends. When users share the same pearl, there is a connection that ensures users have a common interest. By adding another user’s Pearltree or branch to their own Pearltree, a user can follow the topic as curated specifically by that user. AND, continue to follow along or not, depending on the degree of interest.

A few new updates:

**Pearltrees has updated its Firefox and Internet Explorer toolbar plugins to more easily organize the Web directly from the toolbar. Now users can see a hierarchical text image of their pearltree and immediately add a new pearl in its correct place.

**On Pearltrees, everyone’s interests are constantly changing within their own online worlds. To monitor activity and continually discover new content, Pearltrees has established a reporting system that simplifies access to news. This access is now a single click, regardless of the location of new pearls.

**Pearltrees has updated the user interface of the site to make management more visual and ergonomic, creating a smoother and richer experience.

**Updated TwitterSync, allowing for further synchronization and intuitive capabilities with Twitter. TwitterSync automatically pearls URLs tweeted to a user’s pearltree. Now with TwitterSync, users can directly add a tweeted URL to a specific Pearltree branch by adding a hashtag that denotes the correct branch, i.e., #exactnameofthepearltree. The feature also now catches common mistakes such as spaces and spelling and will retrieve the correct pearltree.

Google's Gobbling: How Will it Impact Innovation?

On Google becoming a start-up incubator, Clint's article begs a few questions, at least ones I think about: what will they not touch? Are there any off-limits anymore? How will incubator strategies with Google and others impact innovation?

How do such trends affect the ability and interest for entrepreneurs and 'real' inventors to create beyond a six month or year window before they get gobbled up by a massive entity with their own agenda? How will their behavior and acquisition trends impact what people create and why? Creation for a quick gobble or because they really care about building something meaningful and lasting?

comScore on Fastest Growing U.S. Domains in 2009

Client Answers.com’s WikiAnswers is ranked 2nd Fastest Growing U.S. Domain for 2009.

According to comScore data (comScore, U.S. top 50 Web Domains Report, December 2008 vs. December 2009 by % change), WikiAnswers’ unique monthly visitor count in the U.S. grew 74%.* This ranks WikiAnswers as the 2nd fastest growing domain in 2009, second only to Facebook.com, of the top 50 U.S. domains in December 2008.

*comScore information based on panel-only data for comparisons of growth.

Vator.TV's VatorSplash Makes a Splash

Bambi Francisco and her team at Vator TV pulled together an incredible evening of start-up pitches, networking, table-top demos and music, at San Francisco's Cafe Du Nord earlier this week.

VatorSplash was the first event they've done in this format, hopefully the first of many others we'll see on the calendar in 2010.

Client Answers.com sponsored the event, one which brought start-ups and emerging technology companies to the front stage and demo-pit from as far away as Europe.

The RentCycle won the crowd and judges over, winning the best of at the end of the night.

Other companies that presented new and innovative solutions on-stage included Control Box, which is all about protecting consumers from fraud.

Your Version's Dan Olsen started his pitch with the notion that the current ways of finding content is broken. As a real-time discovery engine, their goal is to help people share public discoveries, by incorporating autotagging, bookmarking, and allowing you to upload your interests through a thumblist. "RSS for the rest of us," touts one of their users.

Robert Scoble acted as host, moderating questions from the audience in between demos and pitches.

Myegamer connects all video gamers through one website. Given a growth industry that they tout was $5.3 billion in December, they feel that they're primed to tap into an audience who is yearning for more. With 3,000 gaming cafes in the U.S. alone, these two very young entrepreneurs who drove 28 hours from Kansas to participate in the VatorSplash event, feel that their solution is filling a missing hole.

Cuneyt Özveren of Intelligent Papers shows a demo of iTextbook. Their goal is to do for education what Apple has done for entertainment. iTextbook allows students to highlight text in an e-book. It supports notebooks, video, flash and video, and you can pick your own paper types. "It's also incredibly durable," he says as he throws it down on the floor. Their goal is to sell it for about $100 a device.

Those who didn't present on-stage took a table upstairs and practiced their pitch.

Bambi and Scoble unveil the winner....drum roll please....

Judges Patrick Chung, Dana Settle, Ezra Roizen and Brian Ascher drill winner RentCycle at the end of the evening.

Cortexica's Steve Semenzato demos Winefinder

The below photo was taken to demo Pixelpipe at their booth. It was immediately sent to Twitter, as well as to my email. The goal is to upload photos, video, and audio files once through the Pixelpipe Media Gateway and then be able to distribute your content across over 100+ social networks, photo/video sites, blogs, and other online services.

Answers.com's Powerful Dictionary

The LA Times on client Answers.com's dictionary power and the Google relationship.