The Latest from TechCrunch

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• Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use.
• From A Geek’s Geek: Daniel Raffel’s Favorite New Projects, Products and Features of 2009
• TenYears: The Biggest Product Flops of the Decade
• Wibiya’s Powerful Web-Based Toolbar Adds Twitter, Facebook, And Video Chat To Any Site
• The Top 10 MobileCrunch Posts of 2009
• The Google Countdown Reveals Its Explosively Colorful Secret
• Google 2009: We’re Power Bloggers And Frickin’ Love Twitter
• Twitter Reigns Supreme On The Tube
• Whiskey Media Raises $2.5 Million To Launch More Structured Content Sites

Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use. Posted: 01 Jan 2010 08:00 AM PST With all the excitement about the Crunchies awards, I thought I should cast my ballot: Twitter. No, not because it's the best product (I think Android is), but because it has impacted me the most. To young TechCrunch readers, this post will seem pretty lame. An old professor trying to seem hip by writing about social networking. Yawn. But I've never been a fan of social media. I have more than 500 connections on LinkedIn, but have never invited anyone to network with me. I've never used LinkedIn to ask anyone for an introduction. I never had a blog (I find it much more effective to write for BusinessWeek and TechCrunch). I never had a Myspace account (does anyone still use Myspace?). Even when I signed up for Facebook, I did it reluctantly because I kept getting friend requests and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. But Twitter is a different. I get a stream of concise notes from people who want to bring things to my attention and from news outlets. I can follow anyone who seems extraordinarily interesting (and doesn't tweet about brushing their teeth every morning). I can read up about people I'm not following any time I want. And I get immediate feedback to my ideas. I didn't feel this way a few months ago. To me, Twitter seemed like another silly tool for kids to tell each other how much alcohol they had just consumed. But a respected professor of journalism at Columbia University, Sree Sreenivasan (@sreenet) kept sending me emails suggesting I sign up for his webcasts on Twitter for journalists. And he kept telling me I would "be a natural" on Twitter.  Why would I send streams of short messages to people I don't know, I wondered? Sree insisted I try it. So I did. And he became my first follower. It was pretty lonely at first, tweeting to myself, and I was rapidly losing interest. Having six followers (two of which wanted me to check out their sexy pictures) seemed pretty embarrassing. Then BusinessWeek's former community editor, Shirley Brady (@shirleybrady) came to my rescue and tweeted to ask her followers to follow me. Soon I had over a hundred people to talk to and it didn't seem so bad. But my tweeting quickly went beyond conversations and into new and better ways of accomplishing tasks. Last July, my research team published a paper about the backgrounds and motivations of entrepreneurs. I created a slide show on this for BusinessWeek. One reader asked me a question which haunted me: what is the difference between a small business owner and an entrepreneur? I had assumed that everyone who starts a business was an entrepreneur. But the more I researched this topic, the more obvious it became that there was no clear answer. So I went to my new friend: Twitter.  I asked my followers if they could help me solve this puzzle. Before I knew it, I had received several insightful responses. I ended up writing this BusinessWeek piece which featured Sue Drakeford, Miss Nebraska 2001 (yes, she does tweet). Since then, I've had my Twitter followers help me with most of the articles I've written. They provide a sounding board, valuable feedback and examples. I've quoted several followers who offered themselves up as sources (see my last post on stealth companies – Preetam Mukherjee(@_marcellus) was one of my followers as was Alex Kosorukoff(@alexko3), who I highlighted in a post about the Founders Visa). More recently, I've been getting demands from my Twitter followers for articles. My post on selling and why everyone in a tech company should have sales training came about after a series of Twitter requests. I'm writing a piece on women in engineering which is inspired by Women 2.0 founder Shaherose Charania (@shaherose) and Cisco CTO, Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree). And I'm writing a follow-up to the post on stealth because twitter followers have been bombarding me with questions about protecting intellectual property. I've joked that my Twitter followers seem to be setting my research and writing agenda these days and it’s not that far from the truth. So, Twitter has become a very useful tool. I hope I never become like Sarah Lacy (@saracuda), though. On our recent trip to Jaipur, India, she tweeted while sitting on an elephant. I kid you not. She wanted to let Twitter founder Evan Williams (@ev) know she was the first to do this. At present I have 3600 followers and they keep coming out of the woodwork. Many are amazing people. I follow only a few because I can't keep up with all the conversations. If a follower looks very interesting I do try to at least read some of their tweetstream. I click on their names on Tweetdeck and read their last 20 posts. I have a few people I like to read closely for different purposes and topics. In that way, too, Twitter is amazing as its the most efficient mechanism I have ever seen to allow me to peruse the thoughtstreams of others who live all over the world. I firmly believe that of all forms of social media, Twitter (or more accurately, microblogging) is the only one that could have achieved this sort of effect. Writing a full blog post is time consuming and comments can be lengthy. Who wants to read or police all of them? IM is essentially a one-to-one communications tool. Facebook has elements of microblogging but it's not really the kind of place where I want to share thoughts about immigration reform, if you know what I mean. With Twitter, I learned it in an hour, became proficient in a few more, and spend no more than 20 minutes per day on this. Because the message size is so concise, I find people say important things (or silly things, but at least they are short silly things). So Evan and Biz, you have my vote for the Crunchies, guaranteed. Editor’s note:  It should go without saying that Vivek doesn’t get any special votes for the Crunchies other than what any TechCrunch reader gets.  You can vote for your favorite startups for the Crunchies here. And you can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

From A Geek’s Geek: Daniel Raffel’s Favorite New Projects, Products and Features of 2009 Posted: 31 Dec 2009 04:17 PM PST When Daniel Raffel emailed and asked if we’d be interested in publishing his list of favorite stuff from 2009 we quickly agreed. He has worked on some of the more interesting projects in Silicon Valley over the last couple of years, and has his finger on the pulse of new technology. His post is below. As the year winds down, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at my favorite tech launches this year. As I started assembling my list and bouncing them off friends I started to group them into the following categories: New Projects, New Products and Services, Feature Updates, and iPhone Apps. This list is an admittedly subjective batch. For instance, you’ll notice I am clearly interested in these trends: games, geo services, HTML5, identity, mobile, music, social updates, and web development. I’d love to hear what you think were exciting developments this year! New Projects Dive into HTML5 There are so many reasons to be excited about HTML5. Mark Pilgrim’s book illuminates many of them. When it’s finally published on paper in early 2010 it is likely going to be one of the most beautiful computer text books ever. Music Hack Day Get a bunch of passionate, competent technologists in a room and inspire them to hack on music projects all day, cool! While I didn’t get to personally attend the Boston event I was inspired by my friend Brian’s wrapup and Anthony’s too. Both posts contain great tips for anyone running a good, hackfest. Hope to see these events continue and look forward to attending one myself. OAuth WRAP (Web Resource Authorization Protocol) For a variety of situations where a developer simply wants to integrate with an API via POST the OAuth dance can a bit of a headache. OAuth WRAP is not much different than OAuth except that a client only has to pass the Access Token in the HTTP Authorization header, so it completely eliminates the need for signatures. All server-to-server WRAP calls happen via SSL. An additional benefit of eliminating signatures is that one can curl OAuth-WRAP requests without requiring any special libraries. There is an active working group fleshing out a spec and I expect to see widespread adoption of this in 2010 coming via products from the major service providers (specifically Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!). Playdar Started by Richard Jones, Playdar is “designed to solve one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now.” While it’s definitely not ready for the general public I am very excited by the progress it has been making. And, I am looking very forward to the types of projects it is likely to enable in 2010. In the meantime, if you’re super curious checkout a few demos to see where things are starting to head. PubSubHubbub and Simple Update Protocol Polling feeds is no fun, it’s costly and too slow. These protocols are exciting to me because they offer novel solutions so that products depending on realtime updates can more efficiently, and quickly, aggregate update notifications. Webfinger Webfinger is an emerging standard that is being designed to return metadata for a given email address over HTTP. It could be used to publish metadata about an email address such as a URL to the user's Profile, a link to a user's Calendar, etc. This is strategically important for OpenID because it can be used to determine if an email address is OpenID-enabled and if so kick off the OpenID authentication flow. New Products and Services Cloudkick With more businesses moving their infrastructure to the cloud there will be a need for new tools that help businesses manage their ops. Cloudkick provides a hosted service for managing infrastructure on multiple cloud platforms. They are already managing over a hundred thousand servers. As they build in support for more and more platforms it’s a natural assumption that they will attempt to support functionality that will allow users to migrate from service to service. As an early user I have been impressed with the teams response time to issues I have encountered. While Cloudkick isn’t ready to compete head to head with Ganglia, Nagios and other popular ops projects I’m looking forward to continuing to use the service. Flavors.me Technically, not launched yet, but I’ve been playing with it for a little bit. Think of it as a simple vanity site for people with either no web development chops or little interest in investing time building/hosting their own website. The default templates are very aesthetic and can be easily customized. Since there is little functionality on the site other than creating a simple, web based, business card, it’s a bit unclear how much juice they have. That said, I like how easy it is to create a public profile and share your identity with the public. Foursquare There’s a competitive aspect to Foursquare that makes it both satisfying and addictive. After using it for a few months earlier in the year I decided to abandon it because I didn’t see the point of using the service. A compulsive urge sucked me back in and I have to admit that it has led to some wonderful, serendipitous moments. I’ve taken a look at a few other competitors and frankly there isn’t a huge difference (for instance, Gowalla is prettier but I have far fewer friends on it, and it has terribly obnoxious Facebook integration). The LBS space is getting crowded with FSQ wannabe’s so I’m eager to see how they continue to evolve and add user value. It will also be interesting to see if any of these apps can build a sustainable business around them, at the moment FSQ seems best positioned with their Mayor deals/etc. Google Chrome Browser Ever since the beta launched for OS X I’ve been spending more and more time in this browser. It’s elegant and very fast. There are definitely missing features but honestly 85% of the time its current feature set suffices. If Firefox and Safari mated this would definitely be its more evolved offspring. I’ve had mixed luck with Chromium and installing extensions but then I have no business running nightly builds. In fact, I’m impressed with how hard they make it to find the link to nightlies, smart. I’m looking forward to bookmark syncing and non-buggy extension support in 2010. In the meantime, I’m happy with the beta – it’s great to see so much attention to detail, you don’t get there packing on every single feature you can think up. GDGT C|Net has to be a bit worried because GDGT feels like the new place where folks are talking about tech products and figuring out what they wanna buy. There are significantly more reviews, I can quickly qualify the reputation of the contributor(s), there’s a community to ping for advice and suggestions, and there are significantly more useful stats to help me make a purchasing decision. For someone interested in making informed decisions about the gadgets they buy this is a great new resource. For those who are passionate about the gadgets they already own this is a great place to evangelize and discuss hacks/etc. Hunch I have a tendency to enjoy making well-researched, informed decisions. So it seems natural to share what I’ve learned once I’ve invested the time and found the perfect water bottle or picked out a portable digital audio recorder. Hunch provides simple tools that make it easy to roleplay through scenarios that have already been explored by others. One might choose to think of it as a wikipedia for decisions. Kickstarter It’s exciting to see a platform that enables makers to raise the funding they need to do their thing. It’s also inspiring to see so many successful projects that have already launched. There are all sorts of ways to pursue the things you’re most passionate about and Kickstarter is one more toolkit in your arsenal. BTW it also feels great to fund someone with a creative idea. New Super Mario Bros. Wii I probably hadn’t turned on my Wii in over a year until this game came out. The gameplay is essentially a 2D scroller that’s very similar to the original Super Mario Bros for the NES. The characters have a few new moves and the levels are significantly more creative than earlier franchises in the series. I never got tired of the original game and this version feels like it has a lot to keep me coming back for more. The multiplayer version is also very entertaining. Square It’s hard to remember the last time I paid for something and had a delightful point of sale purchasing experience, but that’s exactly how I feel everytime I pay by credit card at Sightglass Coffee. The software that a customer interacts with at a Square vendor is just lovely. But, it’s the business plan (and hardware approach) that’s brilliant – Square is reducing the barrier for small businesses to setup a merchant account and providing inexpensive hardware that enables them to offer credit card services for next to nothing. I’m sold as a consumer and a small business owner. I’m very excited to see this running on more devices and in more types of sales environments in the near future. I also hope to see them explore premium readers with more advanced industrial designs, such as the Incase reader that Apple stores are already using. Feature Updates Android 2.0 While Android is still a bit too rough for me to consider ditching my iPhone (and 3rd party apps) for the 2.0 software update demonstrates that it’s quickly catching up to the iPhone OS. If you use multiple Google services the integration is all the more compelling. At this continued pace, 2010 is going to be a massive year for the Android ecosystem. Apple iPhone OS 3.0 It’s rare to get excited again about a phone that you’ve had for years but the Apple iPhone OS 3.0 update included many great new features that brought my 1st gen iPhone back to life . It also rubbed in how much faster my new iPhone 3GS really was. The features I most appreciated were: cut/copy/paste, ability to create meetings via Exchange using ActiveSync, and wider use of landscape mode in a variety of apps. I’ll spare you the internet tethering gripe. Apple Snow Leopard I’m a big fan of doing less stuff better so I was very supportive of seeing Apple focus the majority of this release on under the hood performance enhancements. Their investments show too, I have a few older Macs around the house and upgrading to Snow Leopard freed up on average around 10gb of disk space, required less operating RAM during most common tasks, and caused all of my macs to feel a lot more responsive (fewer spinning wheels of death.) While there were basically no new features that got me excited the speed enhancements were well worth the minor upgrade costs. Boxee Beta While I haven’t logged significant time playing with the latest beta of Boxee the user interface changes are very promising. This is on my list of things to further investigate. It’s exciting to see innovation in both the 10-foot experience and internet TV space. Facebook Facebook launched a number of impressive new things this year, the things that stand out the most to me are: an awesome new iPhone app, the Facebook Connect for iPhone SDK, a live streaming box for 3rd party sites, the Facebook Desktop Notifications app, and what felt like a few re-designs. It’s inspiring to see a company stay true to its original objectives and still manage to innovate. Flickr Photo People Tagging One of the most compelling Facebook features is the ability to tag a friend in a photo, doing so creates a viral thread that triggers a lot of clickthru’s and engagement. It was safe to assume that Flickr would eventually add similar functionality and this year they did. I was pleased to discover that people tagging on Flickr was designed with additional sensitivity around a users privacy. You can explicitly define which contacts of yours can people tag you in a photo. And, Flickr explicitly spells out what happens if you remove a photo tagged with your identity (nobody else can add it back). There’s nothing wrong with borrowing a feature a competitor has but this is an excellent example of how to add your own flavor to it. Google Voice GrandCentral was shutdown this year and logically rebranded as Google Voice. After being ported to the Google platform and re-launched users were given a slew of awesome new features. While I’ll admit I’m still holding out for a number portability feature I’m a fan of how disruptive they are attempting to be. And, I’m a fan of numerous enhancements they’ve shipped this year alone, some of my favorite include: voicemail to text transcription (needs more tuning), free web based text messaging, the ability to change your number, and easy steps to allow you to forward your mobile voicemail to Google. Kindle Software Update 2.3 There’s nothing like a little competition in the ebook market to cause Amazon to add basic features to the Kindle 2 that it could (and should) have supported all along. Regardless, thanks to this software update it’s nice that my Kindle 2 now natively supports PDFs. Firefox and Webkit Support for Geolocation APIs in HTML5 It’s very satisfying to see my browser starting to have a clue regarding where I am. While very few services are actively using this functionality today the fact that browsers now support it is wonderful! Firefox Support for the HTML5 File API It’s unfortunate that most webservices have to use Flash to support decent file uploading experiences. Now that Javascript can read the contents of local files web developers will have the opportunity to create more refined file sharing experiences for both online and offline applications. I’m not sure if this is currently available in Webkit but beta’s of Firefox 3.6 support it. Spotify For the past 2 years I’ve been using Spotify as my default streaming music player and it just keeps getting better. This year I was impressed by two specific features: their massive increase in library size and their approach to the mobile experience. If you depend on the cloud for your tunes the size of the library matters. Spotify has spent the past year aggressively growing their library by tens of thousands of tracks per week. That’s much easier said than done, particularly when you’re trying to add compelling media that people actually want to listen to. I am consistently impressed when I search for something random and find they have it. While Spotify will never have absolutely everything under the sun their library consistently satisfies my very demanding appetite for both the latest releases and older classics. This year Spotify also released mobile applications that allow you to locally cache media on your phone so that you can listen to your favorite music whether or not you have a internet connection. In the year ahead I look forward to seeing how they innovate around discovery, sharing and library resolution (ie building up a list of stuff they know I already have in my local iTunes Library.) Twitter Lists Twitter has long had a discovery problem. Finding and surfacing what you want to follow isn’t easy. The lists feature still requires you to invest time if you want to make one but it also gives you the opportunity to track things that others have put the time into assembling (such as food carts in San Francisco or Great Chefs.) For me, the nicest part is your main feed isn’t polluted so you can casually and passively track things without adding a lot of noise. YQL YQL is a developer tool that treats the internet as a giant source of data. The team was on a tear this year, amongst other things they launched the execute element to enable arbitrary server-side code to run inside tables, open data tables to enable anyone to create their own API bindings for YQL, hosted storage tables to build on top of Yahoos cloud store (sherpa), and “query aliases” that let developers name their YQL queries using meaningful short names. iPhone Apps Dropbox My data, backed up, and now available on my iPhone too. Brilliant. Drop7 A very creative puzzle game that will quickly get you addicted. Eliss An addictive game that sets the bar very high: creative use of multitouch capabilities, beautiful graphics, innovative gameplay, and great music. Overall, an inspiring piece of work on multiple levels. Evernote The Evernote iPhone app got a series of major updates this year that makes it an even more useful productivity tool for note taking and backup/sync. Orbital I particularly enjoy games that you can drop into for a few minutes. This game has great graphics and a simple concept that turns out to be rather complex to master. Tweetie 2 Super attractive Twitter client for the iPhone, lots of nice little touches. Zillow Ever checked out a new neighborhood and wondered what property there might cost? This application is extremely interesting to launch and drive/walk around with. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

TenYears: The Biggest Product Flops of the Decade Posted: 31 Dec 2009 02:22 PM PST It's almost January 1st, 2010 and we've been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment of our "TenYears" list. We already did the biggest losers in the tech industry but why not talk about the biggest product flops? Here are a few of the biggest failures of the decade, starting with one monster release from a fairly well-known company.

Wibiya’s Powerful Web-Based Toolbar Adds Twitter, Facebook, And Video Chat To Any Site Posted: 31 Dec 2009 02:00 PM PST There’s no shortage of web-based interactive toolbars to choose from. This week, a new Israeli startup, Wibiya, is publicly launching its compelling web-based, customizable toolbar to publishers. Wibiya’s toolbar for blogs and publishers integrated services, social media sites, applications and widgets. Everything is customizable, giving publishers the ability to add Facebook Connect, enabling Twitter alerts, and more fairly easily. The toolbar has a fairly in-depth integration with Twitter, Search, latest tweets, Tweets about each page and more. Publishers can also bring their Facebook Fan Page stream to the toolbar. Interestingly, Wibiya has an “app store” of sorts, where publishers can customize their bars with a variety of apps, including Google Translate, YouTube, games and more. Unfortunately the app store is limited with only 25 apps at the moment. Wibiya also has deep integration with TinyChat, which lets publishers have their own video/text chat feature on their sites. As users login to chat, they can Tweet out the URL to the page they are in, helping publishers build traffic. Of course, Wibiya is still not as feature-rich as some of the other toolbars but it’s certainly off to a good start. But it’s a competitive space with Conduit, Meebo, MySpace, Yahoo, Digg and many others in the game. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The Top 10 MobileCrunch Posts of 2009 Posted: 31 Dec 2009 01:02 PM PST Ever wonder what stories of 2009 the people of the Internet found most interesting? I can’t really help you there, but I can tell you which stories on MobileCrunch got the most pageviews. Now, you might assume that most of our popular stories involved the iPhone, but — well, actually, you’d be right. The iPhone isn’t alone on the list, of course; Android makes a handful of appearances amongst our most popular stories, including one that I never would have seen coming. Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The Google Countdown Reveals Its Explosively Colorful Secret Posted: 31 Dec 2009 12:31 PM PST A few weeks ago we wrote about a mysterious Easter Egg on Google’s homepage that we dubbed The Google Countdown. After clicking the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with no search query entered, the page would display a countdown timer ticking down the seconds until… something. A little trickery with our computer clocks revealed that the timer was counting down until January 1, 2010 at 12:00 AM (the New Year, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention). But nothing happened once to timer reached zero. Today, Google has flipped the switch on its New Years surprise. No, it isn’t an amazing new free web service. Instead, it’s a cheesy digital fireworks display that overlays the classic Google homepage with multicolored stars and ‘Happy New Year’ banners dancing across the screen. I can’t help but be slightly let down, but then again, it’s only five more days until the rumored launch of the Nexus One. And it is kind of funny. If you’d like to see the fireworks for yourself, head over to Google.com and adjust your computer clock to midnight (note that this could possibly mess up your Email or other programs). Hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with no search query, then sit back and enjoy the show. Thanks to Michel for the tip Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Google 2009: We’re Power Bloggers And Frickin’ Love Twitter Posted: 31 Dec 2009 12:21 PM PST Many bloggers take December 31 each year to do a recap of their year in blogging. Google is no exception. The multi-billion dollar company has a post today patting itself on the back for a solid five years worth of blogging. More notably, they talk about how the amount they’re blogging has increased significantly over the years. In 2009, Google had 423 posts on the Google Blog, which is just one of dozens of blogs they run. That represents a 15 percent increase over 2008. They also note that just about 14.5 million people stopped by the blog this year, which is a 21 percent increase over the previous year. Make no mistake: Google is taking its blogging very seriously. So what were Google’s most read posts this year? By far, their post about Chrome OS was read the most. Over 2.5 million people read it, and it contributed over 12 percent of their total unique page views. In second was the post about Google Wave. And in third was one about Google Voice. All of this makes sense as these are arguably Google’s three most potentially disruptive products. And these stats are also pretty much inline with what we saw at TechCrunch this year in terms popularity among posts about Google. (Though Nexus One is quickly catching up.) Google also takes the time to note how committed they are to using Twitter. Since starting to tweet in February, Google has sent over 1,000 messages (almost all of which are self-promoting, like any good Twitter user). And while their account isn’t quite as popular as Lady Gaga’s (something which they bemoan), they do have about 2 million followers of their main account now. Oh, and they’ve set up some 75 other Twitter accounts for their various properties (they actually have a directory) — something which we poked fun at in July. Even CEO Eric Schmidt finally joined up. But perhaps the most interesting stat that Google shares is that Twitter was the biggest non-Google referrer to its blog in 2009. Google notes that this is “a clear sign of its rapid growth in popularity.” That’s a nice big wet kiss to a company it was supposedly in talks about acquiring earlier this year. Something else I’ve noticed about Google’s 2009 in blogging is that they’re actually getting better at it. It used to be that we would summarize company blog posts (which, naturally, I’m doing here) because they were awful at getting their point across. Or, as a colleague of mine who shall remain unnamed put it, “thanks for five years of cheesy headlines, meandering and grandiose ledes, and self-serving misinformation about openness.” But this year, it seems that Google (and a number of other companies) are getting better at using these in-house blog posts to announce things. And I’m all for that. Not having to re-explain something that’s already out there frees us up to do better posts as well, such as deeper analysis about what the companies are announcing. That said, the point about Google’s self-serving posts remains an issue as we saw very recently. But not to worry, we’ll still be here to call BS on those posts when we see them. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Twitter Reigns Supreme On The Tube Posted: 31 Dec 2009 12:10 PM PST Snapstream, a startup that makes a device that lets enterprises record thousands of hours of TV (from both satellite and digital cable sources) and search inside the recordings for keywords, recently launched a trending topics site for TV. Snapstream has released its top trends on TV for 2009, with the mention of “Twitter” used more often than Facebook, MySpace and other social media platforms. . TV programs used the word "Twitter" in their programming three times more often in December 2009 than they did in late 2008 and January 2009, according to the data. SnapStream also released the top keyword mentions on TV, which are in order: Iran, Michael Jackson, Swine Flu, North Korea, AIG, Pirates, Hamas, (The) Inauguration, Ted Kennedy, and Balloon (boy). SnapStream also revealed that mentions of “health care” eclipsed mentions of “economy” towards the end of the year thanks to President Obama’s healthcare initiative. SnapStream’s trending topics site lets you see the hot words (those that are ascending in mentions) and cold words (those that are descending in mentions) on national television. And you can also enter couple of keywords (up to 5) into TV Trends and you'll get a graph showing you the relative frequency of mentions of those words on mostly-news national programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC and CNN. Snapstream crawls closed-captioning text for programs that they record. They filter out local programming, sitcoms, and sports and then cleans-up, analyzes and indexes data for the trends site. When you graph a keyword, the site will give you a view of excerpts of stories at selected points along the curve and you can also filter the results by network. For example, you can chart trends of the mention of "Twitter" on CNN alone. As we’ve written in the past, SnapStream's site isn't updated in real-time (it is updated every 3-4 hours), which puts its topics at a disadvantage to Twitter and Google's topics, that are close to real-time. But many of SnapStream’s top mentions did match Twitter’s top trending topics. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Whiskey Media Raises $2.5 Million To Launch More Structured Content Sites Posted: 31 Dec 2009 11:37 AM PST Cnet founder Shelby Bonnie and other angels have put another $2.5 million into Whiskey Media, which operates niche media sites such as ComicVine (comics), GiantBomb (gaming), and AnimeVice (anime). The company, which has been around since 2007, previously raised about $1.5 million in angel money as well. Whiskey Media’s sites are wiki-like content sites in the vein of CrunchBase or GDGT, which built around structured databases which can be edited by the readers. (In fact, CrunchBase was inspired by Whiskey Media’s first site, now-retired PoliticalBase). Mike Tatum, a partner at Whiskey Media, tells me via email: This last year was an important year for Whiskey Media as we saw strong growth in our portfolio of sites reaching over 3mm uniques users by the end of the year. At the same time we were able to make the necessary investments in our publishing platform that will allow us to launch many more sites in 2010. The company will use the money to launch more structured content sites on the same technology platform across different niche media, which is a popular strategy these days. Bonnie, for his part, is always thinking of new media models and thinks it’s time to kill the CPM. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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