While curation is a hot topic these days, particularly as it relates to the ever-growing legion of aggregation websites, the technology of content curation has advanced little in recent years.  The Flow plans to push curation technology  forward in a number of ways.

The Flow (www.flow.net) intends to deliver a powerful new weapon to professional and amateur content curators, including manual and automated tools for individual and group participants.  We will offer drag-and-drop goodness with fingertip access to real-time content that goes well beyond social feeds and traditional media content – to include commerce, services, classifieds, research and local content.   Granular permissioning, built in commenting, ratings and a deep set of developer APIs will enable a range of new content experiences.  In addition we plan to offer a subscription-based marketplace for proprietary data that will extend to curated content.

Coming soon to www.flow.net.

Stacey emphasizes the very real problem of what’s an app to do when an API provider changes its terms of service?  It’s not very pretty, and it’s unclear whether there is legal recourse.

But there’s another problem with traditional APIs.  What happens when many apps want to share real-time data with many apps?  Who has time to wire up so many API connections?  How can any app in the ecosystem guarantee a quality of service with so many dependencies?  How do app developers even find each other, let alone establish so many business and technical relationships?

One-to-many is pretty easy in that respect – we can all wire up to Facebook or Twitter.  And one-to-one can also work.  But many-to-many is a practical impossibility and that precludes meaningful data sharing between a large number of apps.

Think of the disadvantages faced by a real estate broker that doesn’t subscribe to Multiple Listings Service (MLS)?  His inventory includes only his own listings and he gets no help selling those listing from other brokers.  The same is currently true for every mobile app (or website) that’s trying to move inventory (whether coupons or pickup trucks).

The Flow is here to help.  By inviting any number of app developers to share very granular sets of real-time data using a single set of XMPP/REST APIS, data sharing finally becomes easy and scalable with predictable quality of service.

Sets of real-time data (each a “flow”) can have many or few required and optional fields.  Permissions can extend usage of a given flow to all apps (or end-users) or to defined number of apps.  Individual flows can be fully public when created by a Flow librarian, or entirely private (or public) if created by an app developer or individual.

Check out Flow.net and sign up for our beta program if this all sounds interesting.

The way it is

What’s coming soon

This blog (vintage 2006) was originally entitled “Alterman In Context” because it expressed my view of the internet world that providing ever more compelling context to content (and other data) is the primary job of technology innovation in this space. Twitter and Facebook providing social context to content are two obvious examples of this principle at work.

Another example comes from my previous start-up, KickApps.  KickApps is all about providing the tools of social media (profiles, UGC content, blogging) within the context of specific websites.  In other words, inviting users to share their side of the conversation within a more narrowly defined context (i.e. not YouTube or Facebook) where like-minded people can more easily discover their very specific content. Making valuable content more discoverable is the reason “context” is so important.

One of my early posts on this blog (probably ill-formatted from its import from Typepad), introduced an idea called Open Portals.  It was my suggestion to the then vital portals (e.g. AOL and Yahoo) that their paths to broader success (or survival, as it turns out) was reaching out to the entire web with an offering of both content and social functionality.  In short, my suggestion was all about providing value more contextually.  Any website could draw on an Open Portal for social functionality, media management, editorial content, relevant user generated content—analogous to the way local television stations draw on their network affiliations for content.  That was 2006, long before Facebook leapfrogged those sleeping giants with an Open Portal approach of their own…unfortunately they’re still snoozing.  But I digress…

My new start-up, The Flow, is all about providing an entirely new paradigm for context creation and content discovery. First, we take real-time data sharing very seriously! App developers, our primary purpose in life is to give you the tools to access the real-time data your customers really want.  Consumers, if you often find it frustrating finding exactly what you’re looking for using traditional search or perusing your Twitter feed, check us out.  Finally, media companies, we intend to provide you a far more efficient way to deliver your editorial content to highly target audiences.  It’s all about context!

If you’re interested in learning more, Flow.net lists articles and blogs from other writers that we find relevant to the conversation.  We’re also inviting app developers an early look at our APIs.  What exactly is the Flow?  Details to follow in the coming weeks.

You can catch Passing Strange: The Movie at the IFC Center 323 Sixth Avenue at West Third Street

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Study: Context Matters for Online Ads

June 16, 2009

-By Lucia Moses

Like print ads, context matters when it comes to the effectiveness of Internet ads, according to new findings from media researcher McPheters & Co.  Analyzing the effectiveness of Internet banner ads, McPheters, collaborating with Condé Nast and CBS Vision, found that online ads running on sites with related content were 61 percent more likely to be recalled than ads on sites with unrelated content—a finding that would seem to undercut the case for ad or behavioral networks, which target viewers based on their Internet usage habits.

“The behavior networks are more focused on who they get in front of instead of the environment sites provide,” said Rebecca McPheters, CEO of McPheters & Co. “This says the site on which your ad appears matters.”

The firm also found that not all types of sites are created equal when it comes to recall. Social-networking, shopping and food sites generated the highest recall levels (29 percent to 39 percent), while search and portal sites had the lowest (under 5 percent).

Check out:  www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Wolframalpha (annoying name, isn’t it?) makes use of contextual algorithms as compared to Google’s general keyword and link-based algorithms—so it’s pretty smart if you ask it something it knows.  Wolfram might say about Google, “to a hammer everything is a nail.”

[As a reminder, context is always king—the evolution of the web is about narrowing context to create more and more relevancy and engagement—see the name of this blog if you need proof.]

The first public version of Wolframalpha is more about discovering specific information than it is about discovering websites that contain specific information.   Of course, one of Wolframalpha’s subject-matter domains could easily be website discovery—that is, the entire business of  website discovery could be just one of the many domain-specific algorithms Wolframalpha offers.  On the other hand, what Wolframalpha provides is already a small subset of what Google currently provides, to a degree, so long as the questions posed to mister Google aren’t too tough.

It can be said that Wolframalpha is just the latest flavor of directed search with a few semantic chops on the side.  But this time around I believe there is real potential to cover much more domain-specific ground than previous efforts—wikis have taught us much.  Can Wolframalpha (or similar efforts) adequately cover what most humans currently discover via traditional keyword search?   The current “social search” efforts (let’s leave Twitter et al out of it for the moment) may be irrelevant, but there’s no doubt that capturing the world’s knowledge with domain-specific algorithms will take the work of many hands.

It’s  obvious that domain-specific algorithms are more interesting (provide more relevancy) than generic keyword algorithms.   Isn’t that why search within Twitter has everyone aflutter?   But we’ll all get over the novelty of social discovery and the real-time web soon enough because I believe something much smarter is coming, and on it we will flow.

Of course KickApps has the most spectacular drag-and-drop application for building nearly any kind of Flash container (no actionscript skill required, thank you very much), so these developments are nothing but good from my perspective.

clipped from www.multichannel.com Broadcom To Pack Adobe’s Flash Into TV Chips Joint Development Will Bring Web Media Player To Digital TVs, Set-Top Boxes By Todd Spangler — Multichannel News, 1/6/2009 2:35:00 PM In another pact aimed at bringing Web-based video to TVs, Broadcom and Adobe Systems announced Tuesday that they will work together to integrate Adobe’s Flash multimedia platform into Broadcom’s latest digital television and set-top box system-on-a-chip platforms.