FeedShake

What is it?

FeedShake is a website that creates a single RSS feed from multiple RSS feeds. You can also filter out posts that contain specified keywords, and/or filter in posts only if they contain specified keywords. The site is incredibly easy to use (it takes mere moments to create an aggregated feed) and no registration or email address is required.

Similar services are listed by libary clips here. According to Library Clips, “Actually this tool is quite unique as it is the first to do both splicing and filtering…there are many blending tools, but ReFilter seems to be the only standalone filtering tool…here are other general filtering tools.” (Link)

The feed is auto-named “FeedShake” but can of course be renamed in your reader to whatever you want. It would be nice to be able to auto-rename the feed when it’s created so that other users would have the title you selected.

Other current limitations: “This service is beta. Currently it supports RSS 2.0 feeds”

We’d be happy to pay for naming and stats on the feed.

We tested the service by burning a combined feed of TechCrunch and EarningsCast, another Archimedes blog. The feed is: http://www.feedshake.com/feed.php?code=wc5mjf0wz4. The feed works great. Awesome service. We love it.

Screen Shots of “burning” process:

MSN Virtual Earth

What is it?

MSN Virtual Earth is an excellent mapping/satellite imagery application. Much like Google Earth , it is fascinating to look at, and very useful as well. There is no download required (whereas Google Earth has a 10 meg download).

In addition to excellent search features, you can autolocate via your IP address (although I am in San Francisco today and it says I am in Seattle based on IP) or via a small download, which works very well. There is also a scratch pad to keep notes (there needs to be a print function added to this though).

Mandatory first searches, of course, were of my home in Manhatan Beach and my parents home in Anacortes. The picture quality in MSN Virtual Earth was better than Google Earth, and the picture quality of my parents home in Anacortes was decent, whereas Google had nothing to show for them. Overall, MSN wins in this very limited test:

Jeremy Wright posted an excellent review of the service and comparison to Google maps:

“First, MSN’s Virtual Earth is 10 times easier to use than Google Maps. Between the little compass in VE that you can drag and it’ll just scroll with you (instead of Google Maps’ “click, drag, click, drag, click, drag”) and the ability to zoom much more easily in VE (you can scroll, you can hit the +/- keys on your keyboard OR you can double click), this is an app that is much more thought out.�?

“At the same time, Virtual Earth is much easier to use from an “exploring�? point of view. Hop off a plane, hit “Locate Me”, look for rental cars, then look for hotels, then look for somewhere to eat and then look for somewhere to catch a show. Boom, your whole day is planned and in your Scratch Pad.?

IceRocket

What’s New?

We wrote in our previous profile on IceRocket that they were changing their name to BlogScour (based on something Mark Cuban said at AlwaysOn).

Blake Rhodes, IceRocket’s CEO, called to tell me that our facts were not quite right (he also thanked us for the post). They are not going to change their name to BlogScour, but they are going to launch a site called BlogScour that will contain all of their blog search capabilities.

I saw this at Blogherald a few minutes ago (I cannot locate the mentioned SEW article), and emailed Blake to confirm the facts. He confirmed what he told me on Friday -

“Mike-

We WILL launch a site called Blogscour.com. I dont have a date for that. Basically it will be our blog search we currently have minus all the web and image search features we have on IceRocket currently. It is going to be blogs only. Have a great evening.

Blake”

So there you have it.

Personally, I don’t give a damn, I just love their search engine. They could call it searchcrap.com and we’d still use it twenty times a day to research companies.

iTunes 4.9

Launched: June 28, 2005

What is it?

As was widely anticipated, iTunes 4.9 launched today (22 mb download) for both windows and mac platforms. It includes significant new and enhanced features, including, most notably, support for podcasts.

Michael Gartenberg writes a wonderful post on iTunes 4.9: “I can download one, subscribe to a feed, keep a set number on my device and have them automatically deleted after I’ve listened. In short Apple’s done for podcasting the same thing they did with RSS in Tiger. They made it usable by the mass markets and at the same time, they have the what is going to be the most widely used podcasting client on both Macintosh and Windows and that will make their directory the one to be listed in. But there’s more. Apple also tweaked the firmware in all the iPod so there’s no a separate podcasting category, which means podcasts won’t get shuffled with my music and will support bookmarks so I can listen to podcasts and resume where I left off. So it’s not just the premier podcast PC client, the iPod itself is now first among devices with integrated podcast support. Combine this news and the new pricing and the integration of iPod photo into the core white iPod line and you see why Apple remains the player to beat in this space.”

The software is excellent and includes notable features:

- all podcasts are currently free
- downloaded podcasts show up in a single iTunes folder called “podcasts”
- easy search/find
- one click subscription to a new podcast
- option to have all future podcasts download automatically
- Tools for submitting publisher podcasts on iTunes
- stays separate in iPod, so not shuffled with music
- autodelete after listening (awesome!)

Screen shots:

Yahoo My Web 2.0

Launched: June 29, 2005

What is it?

MyWeb2.0 is a social search engine “that complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web.” We’ve used and abused it for a day, and in our opinion it’s good - a bit like regular yahoo plus furl . It was launched today as an early beta version “for a limited number of users.” There could be a cutoff, so it’s a good idea to sign up soon if you want an early look (what a great marketing idea).

Once you sign up (you can use an existing yahoo account), you can do a number of things. If you want to bookmark web pages, we recommend downloading the yahoo toolbar, which will allow you to bookmark pages you are browsing. Otherwise, you can only bookmark pages found on normal Yahoo search. We don’t like toolbars very much because nearly half our screen is taken up with them, but if you want to use MyWeb2.0 it’s going to have to be a part of your life (and hey, maybe you already use the Yahoo toolbar).

When you bookmark a page a popup appears that allows you to enter meta-data on the site, including title, notes, tags, access controls and a “save page” option (again, all of this looks and feels very much like furl:

You can also invite friends (feel free to add us - archimedesventures@yahoo.com) (techcrunch was taken :-)), and see their bookmarked pages. The whole idea is that stuff that is relevant to your friends, could very well be relevant to you, too.

This is user tagging in action (see our profiles on Celebrity Flicker and Feedster for a discussion of the perils of this), but here you have real incentives (like delicious and furl) to do it properly - both to find stuff later and to share with your friends.

Yes, it is yet another service to add friends and go to the trouble of bookmarking sites, but it does have in inport option (including RSS feeds) (yeah!) to decrease the burden. I imported my personal delicious page RSS feed and it seemed to work reasonably well.

There’s a ton thats been written about this (see links below), so our recommendation is try read the reviews and try it out for yourself. Thanks, Yahoo, for launching this experiment in Web 2.0.

Screen Shots:

The iPhone Revolution?

The iPhone Revolution?

The iPhone, released to the public last Friday, is one of the most hyped devices in memory. But is all the excitement justified?

John McCormick of Baseline suggests that the iPhone could blow the market for handheld rich Internet applications wide open, even though the iPhone was designed for the consumer rather than the enterprise market. Om Malik concurs, noting the significance of the built-in Safari browser that brings the full Web experience to mobile phones for the first time. Smart Mobs opines that mobile phones (not just the iPhone) represent a mass medium unto themselves that are revolutionizing the fundamental ways in which we communicate.

UPDATE: Read a contrarian view...

Next New Networks Acquires BarelyPolitical.com

Micro television network provider Next New Networks has acquired BarelyPolitical.com, the site behind the Obama Girl video.

This acquisition is Next New Networks’ first foray into politics, and BarelyPolitical will now be served along side Next New Network’s existing content including Channel Frederator. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Whilst the Obama Girl video series (there is more than one) is perhaps an acquired taste, its viral success is quite remarkable, with the original video having been seen over 100 million times.

Under the deal BarelyPolitical will launch multiple regularly scheduled shows, including frequent reports from its videobloggers and correspondents. The first project launched by BarelyPolitical with Next New Networks, “I Like a Boy“, a music video co-produced with the Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America, racked up more than 1.5 million online video views in its first week, and was featured on various media outlets including CNN American Morning, Fox News, and ABC’s Good Morning America.

See our previous coverage of Next New Networks here.