IceRocket Live Web Search Rolls Up Twitter, Blogs, News and More

IceRocket is a jewel of a site that has slowly been improving. I highlighted it recently in my post on the state of blog search. Today they unveiled a cool new feature that blends tweets, blog posts, news stories, videos and images. The feature is called Ice Rocket Big Buzz. Founder Blake Rhodes pinged me about it earlier today. (A larger view of the above image is here)

IceRocket Big Buzz fills a void that we desperately need - a real-time view of news events and memes. This feature gets us closer to such a utopia by pulling together live web sources into a single page. Take, for example a newsy search for plane crash. As I write this post it's filling up with lots of very current information all about today's top news story. This includes videos from YouTube and images from Flickr. Plus you can track all of it via RSS with a link at the top right. Sounds like a dream for journalists.

This is a great first start. I would love to see the page automatically refresh and have a mobile version. In addition, an open API would be helpful too. That way, should I wish, I can add a feed from Friendfeed for items that users are only sharing there. 

Still, I am glad to see that someone is out there trying to solve the live web search problem because, as Scoble shows today with the plane crash story, it's where the action is. Google is sleeping at the wheel here.

With Google Killing Products, Is Reader Next?

UPDATED 1/15/09: Google exec Jeff Huber says there are no plans to shut Google Reader. However, I think the monetization issue is still out there for fodder. 

In a move that's been rumored for awhile, Google tonight said they shutting down or ceasing further development on five products: Google Video, Catalog Search, Notebook, Jaiku (once a promising Twitter competitor) and Dodgeball. None of these products makes Google a dime and it has me wondering what the future is for Google Reader.

In tough times, even the most stable Internet business focus on their core products. I recall back in 2000 or 2001 that Yahoo in its heyday shut down a bunch of products that weren't performing. Now Google is doing the same. If the products don't drive the big G's core businesses -  search, apps and ads - then they're at risk. These five clearly are in that boat.

Enter Google Reader, one of my favorite products and by far the best RSS reader on the market. However, Google Reader is completely un-monetized. Further, RSS adoption aint exactly a robust growth market. It's still for geeks. So I wonder if the economic storm intensifies what Reader's future is. My bet is that they will either shut it down, cease development or start to monetize it the way they are doing with Google Finance. More likely it's the latter. Even Google Maps now has ads.

If Google chooses to run ads in Google Reader, that creates an issue. Lots of publishers run ads in their feeds. If Google is competing against these with its own contextual ads in in Reader then what? It might just be easier for them to shut it down. Thank God for OPML exporting. 

All I am saying is: don't bet that Google Reader will stay the same.

links for 2009-01-14

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  7 Reasons for Social Media Marketing Campaign Failures, and How to Fix Them
  (tags: socialmedia marketing bestpractices)
  
  
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  PR In A Jar: How to Blog - Part 1 - 'The Original Article' by Nathan Smith
  
  
  Looking forward to the rest of the series.
  
  
  (tags: Blogs tutorials)
  
  
• 
  
  The Printed Blog: Bringing Online Content Offline | PSFK
  
  
  The Printed Blog aims to bring hyper-localized blog content to newsstands
  
  
  (tags: Blogs PDF media startup)
  
  

Google Adds Time Stamps, Inches Closer to Real-Time Web Search

(UPDATE: Note comments from Google's Matt Cutts, which came in after I posted. It appears none of this is new but it is certainly worth watching and perhaps more noticeable to me than it was before.)

Google has quietly started posting a small time stamp next to news stories and blog posts that have been recently added to their main index. In the screen grab below note how one such search lists the hours that have transpired since my recent blog post and Robert Scoble's were first indexed. The same holds for news-related searches too, as you can see here.

As of right now you can't sort Google results by time. From the advanced search page, however, you can limit results just to those that have been indexed in the last 24-hours. You can't get more granular - at least yet. Date-filtered advanced queries are not a new feature but I believe the time stamps are.

 

As Louis Gray notes, the real-time web is going to be a critical trend to watch this year. As more content is generated from social networks, Google is going to feel heat from Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook as they beef up their algorithms. Already, lots of people go to search.twitter.com to search for breaking news just as we did first when Google News launched a few years ago.

Real-time Google search is something I have been predicting would come for almost four years now. I think we're finally just about there. This will have a major impact on PR as companies recognize that Google is the primary lens by which they are judged.

Pluck Launches On-Demand Content Service for Web Sites

Got a web site but wish it had more fresh content? You should since it will help you with SEO. Pluck has launched a new service that can solve this issue.

Using Pluck On Demand you can find relevant content from blogs and other sites that can easily be plugged into your own via a javascript widget.

The library includes content from their Blogburst network, which syndicates blog posts to major media sites. Pluck On Demand also spans to include videos and articles from properties like Encyclopedia Britannica. (Note: I am a member of the Blogburst network but I empower them to donate any earnings to charity.)

You can try the service on for size here by entering your URL or keywords.